My job: Finding the best articles and amplifying them out. [Image via Gemini]

With Webnerd.ai bringing fast paced consumption and sharing back to my daily routine, the muscle of scanning, filtering and amplifying is back. This week is no different.

After a decade's effort in building out siloed social networks that aim to keep their content boxed in, independent blogging has endured and continues to push back. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out Paul Ford's post, The Web Is More Than Enough, where he showcased launching an entire browser-based office suite where all activity lives right in the URL, reminding us that the open web remains the most durable application platform on earth. Over at Techdirt, Mike Masnick called out Reddit bricking up login walls, saying its defensive posture runs against Aaron Swartz's open access roots.

What we all saw this week with the US midterm elections is that closed networks force closed thinking. Republicans learned that X is the echo chamber. It was an inevitable result after Elon's acquisition and government meddling chased away all the left-leaning free thinkers to new places.  As Andy Baio called out, we know closed social feeds confuse algorithmic echo chambers with real-world consensus.

(I told you already that X was toxic, but maybe the right wing has figured this out now too?)

We are all continuing to learn where AI fits in our workflow and how much we invest in it. This is true at the corporate level as well. Tomasz Tunguz ran the math on an 80-gigawatt AI ceiling for 2027, showing how doubling GPU rental rates are pushing inference bills to new heights, while cheap AI intrusion tools are straining security teams at unprecedented levels.

AI is doing incredible things in terms of resetting expectations for employees at all levels. It's reset expectations for middle managers and reset expectations for new hires. At Anthropic, Felix Rieseberg said he has retired traditional coding interviews because hunger beats whiteboard tenure in an agentic world. And John Battelle captured the emotional knot of modern tech workers in Baring It All To Claude, which can mean trusting a model with your life's work, and hoping for the best.

When platforms wall themselves off and algorithms chase outrage, sitting down with an RSS reader and sharing good writing by hand isn't nostalgia. It's how we keep the web human. I'll be doing my part over at Webnerd.ai, and sharing out to RSS or Bluesky or wherever you like. That's what standards are for.