Anil Dash

This has been on my mind for *weeks*. I've been saying for a long time that it's possible to have an AI that only uses consensually-gathered content, is open source + open weights, runs on your own machine, and is designed to empower creators instead of exploit them. Well, we've finally got one. https://www.anildash.com/2026/04/28/one-good-ai-is-here/

Most documents we encounter in the course of doing our work are somewhere between middling to terrible. A few years ago, I wrote "Make Better Documents", a simple set of guidelines for making presentations, reports, etc.

Now, I've turned that set of suggestions into a Better Documents skills.md file, an agent skill for those who use LLMs to help review documents. Naturally, it’s 100% free & open source, so I'd love for you to give it a try & let me know what you think.

https://anildash.com/2026/07/24/make-better-documents-skill/

You must picture Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berner-Lee's throat. We are in a truly existential level of danger when it comes to the survival of the open web, across every front. This year is when it all comes to a head. https://anildash.com/2026/03/27/endgame-open-web/

If you’re a nerd & considering running the Apple beta for iOS, I can say that the developer betas have been the most stable and performant betas in *years* and the new AI features in Siri are very obviously animated by Apple understanding that the stakes could not be higher. It’s pretty good stuff.

Thanks to the extremist agenda of the richest tycoons supporting the authoritarians agenda, American tech companies are going to see a collapse in revenues and growth in these markets. Was it worth it just to support a bunch of child sexual predators? https://techpolicy.press/almost-two-thirds-of-europeans-back-replacing-us-tech-poll-finds

Tomorrow marks 10 years since Prince passed. For the first time, I gathered nearly two decades of my writing, podcasts, talks & more into one curated resource, including playlists, rarities, a review of every video he ever made, and collaborations I did with his estate. I close it out with a talk I gave in Minneapolis on Prince’s birthday just after he passed – one of my most personal ever, and one I’m most proud of. I hope you’ll check it out. https://anildash.com/2026/04/20/prince-ten-years/

One of the things that's most frustrating about the hype cycle around OpenClaw is that so much of what people are excited about is just... software? You can automate doing lots of cool stuff with your inbox with deterministic software that's been around for decades, and it won't delete your inbox! And much of it is easier to install than OpenClaw is!

Yesterday, I got an incredible opportunity to watch Cindy Cohn bring @eff@mastodon.social's story to one of its biggest audiences yet, as she did an extraordinary job on the Daily Show, pulling off the unlikely task of making the topic of digital privacy and civil liberties seem fun, engaging and witty. I took the chance to share some reflections — and a couple of behind-the-scenes photos. https://www.anildash.com/2026/03/31/defending-privacy-daily/

Okay, so I've been talking about the ways that Big AI directly harms kids. But what can we *do* about it? Here are some things you can do, at work and and your kid's school, to take action today, complete with scripts to follow: https://www.anildash.com/2026/02/23/taking-action-ai-harms/

RE: @kimcrawley@zeroes.ca

Kudos for the incredible parody of Mastodon culture here, well done! Seemed almost plausible on first read.

Nine years ago, predicting the rise of “self-driving news”. Now, major publishers are seeing 90+% drop-offs in traffic from search engines as LLMs generate synthesized versions of news stories instead of sending readers to read original media articles. https://anildash.com/2017/03/01/tech-and-the-fake-market-tactic/

Something amazing seeing Reggie Hudlin's original 1983 student film version of House Party ("House Party!"), which just popped up on YouTube. There's no Bilal bumping the turntable, or *that* dance scene, but the energy of pre-Run DMC-era hip hop is fierce. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huIekzBVD6k

Really happy with this conversation — I got a chance to drop in on The Vergecast, which is one of my favorite tech podcasts because they go deep into the systems that affect how and why we're able to innovate, and what shapes the markets we all operate in. David Pierce let me nerd out about how important it is that technologies like podcasts stay open for everyone to be able to participate without any gatekeepers. I think you're going to like this one! https://youtu.be/JLNShOwOaig?t=2618 (Starts at 43:38.)

A lot of folks got very excited about the MacBook Neo — but Apple's been selling a machine with almost these exact specs for *years*. So what did the bright colors and rounded fonts really try to solve? Maybe Apple's embarrassment about serving Walmart customers. https://www.anildash.com/2026/03/08/neo-apple-embarassment/

What is the maximum amount of value destruction that could be wrought on the big centralized commercial AI vendors, and the maximum amount of acceleration of the ecosystem of open source and community-led
alternatives, using the knowledge gained from the leak of the Claude Code source code?

The thing I would most like to see come from the Claude Code leak is not (just) that all the LLM-focused tools incorporate the features that were exposed, but that *bash itself* build in the things that Claude is trying to do with scripting, and make them part of the shell.

@lzg@mastodon.social my issue is, even if you feel that way… what’s the plan? This is the stance that failed with social media, failed with ride sharing apps, failed with crypto. Even if critics were morally right to say “nobody should ever use this”, they didn’t succeed in harm reduction. And that has to matter more than smugly being “right” when the stakes are this high.

"Mozilla's PR team told me they want to be both the best browser for people who hate AI and the safest browser for people who love AI. " In an article where the plan to win over users is: build a better browser. Well! https://www.pcmag.com/news/firefox-ajit-varma-mozilla-browser-plan

RE: @freedomofpress@social.freedom.press

Tonight! Come join us! Will be a great conversation.