I've been working on this one for a while. The multi-trillion-dollar AI industry? Their *most advanced platforms* are controlled by a plain text format that John Gruber made up for his blog, and then bounced off of a 17-year-old Aaron Swartz, before sharing it with the world for free. *That* is the internet. Here's the amazing (true!) story of how Markdown took over the world.
How Markdown took over the world - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
Since ChatGPT came out in late 2022, over *half a million* tech workers have been laid off. That fact, and their voices, aren't really shaping the conversation about AI, and what "AI" really means in culture. So I started to get into it:
500,000 tech workers have been laid off since ChatGPT was released - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
The number one thing I've been hearing from people in tech lately is, basically, "How the hell am I supposed to work in this industry anymore?" Though most folks are kind of afraid to say it out loud. So I wrote about how to think about it:
How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026? - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
One amazing thing about 2025 is that, if you start up an Apple product, it forces you to choose between _three different_ window mangers, but if you start up a clean install of a current version of Linux, it just chooses good defaults for you. image
lol it’s so genuinely fun seeing Cory take decades of fluency in how these systems are broken and serve it up for a mainstream audiences. Even if you know “enshittification” well, this is worth the watch. And love to @Electronic Frontier Foundation! ?
Bleh. Just saw a friend who found out they couldn’t be followed by one of their friends because (unbeknownst to both parties) the moderators of their friend’s instance had defederated from their own instance. All of this, for people who barely know what any of these terms mean. What they experience is, “Two people you’ve never met have a beef you’ve never heard about over an issue you don’t know about, so your friend can’t see you. And there’s no fix.” It’s just terrible all around.
How many different people's work do you think you've seen since you've been on social media? Like how many different individuals have created the photos, videos, and words that you've looked at since you started scrolling timelines on your phone?
So much of what's wrong with tech started from one simple phenomenon: focusing on the money-movers instead of people who actually *make* shit. Real technology matters. Inventors over investors, every time. Founders over funders. Writing code > writing checks.
Founders Over Funders. Inventors Over Investors. - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
Imagine a browser where you type in “Taylor Swift” and it doesn’t even admit that her website exists. I write about Atlas, ChatGPT’s new anti-web browser that should come with a warning label.
ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Web - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
By popular request: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful take on LLMs that (in my experience) the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense.
The Majority AI View - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
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