Notices by Anil Dash (anildash@me.dm)

@jonobie oh sweet! Would love to hear more about how it works for you over time

@sayrer i actually don’t get that much into grammar, but I guess I should

My original post describing how to make better documents from a few years ago: https://anildash.com/2024/03/10/make-better-documents/ I see this new tool as being like a more high-level version of a spell checker tool, aimed at improving how teams communicate.

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/

@alec you can dial it up or down

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.

@jwz all platforms will expand until they get a killfile 😭

@fahrni @lylo there’s definitely an aspect of tall poppy-ism to it sometimes.

@NatureMC @beep @michaelcoyote yeah a big part of the imbalance for me here is that it also lacks a lot of the stuff (uhhh… people of color, pop culture, immediacy) that enable me to have *fun* online. Nobody is riffing on the NBA finals and the NYC elections and Olivia Rodrigo’s album here in ways that are legible to me. So that lack of joy alongside an abundance of scolding is… tiring.

@tomhead you are right about this; I think it’s true most of the time. And in the abstract, I have empathy for it. But the net effect of being the target of it for a whole bunch of dudes is pretty dehumanizing. They aren’t actually responding to me as a person, I’m just a concept they’re using to launch into a performance they already had cued up. When that’s the most immediate and reliable reaction, a platform becomes unbearable.

@claudius @jackwilliambell yeah I think that’s the issue, I’m not *trying* to be an “influencer”. I _like_ talking to people and hanging out online. These kinds of behaviors I’m describing just make that impossible, because they won’t engage with me in a normal way. That’s the cause of the frustration.

@draNgNon yeah I think they mean well most of the time, it’s just… a pretty broken way of interacting with strangers. Some of what is so off-putting is that they’re clearly responding for the purpose of performing for others, not because they’re replying to *me*. That’s really dehumanizing.

@RobeeShepherd yeah it may well be a problem I’m privileged to have, which is why I’ve refrained from mentioning it for a long time. But I want things to get better because I want to invest more time and effort here! (And yeah, this new release has some great tracks!)

@lkanies yeah I think that’s a good way to put it, there’s a lot of nannying. Even when it’s about things I agree with (maybe *especially* then!) it’s exhausting.

@mhoye it was not the inspiration, alas.

@tsupasat I know how to do these things, I’m just talking about the weird cultural aspect.

(Friends, I’ve been on social media for 30 years; I’m well aware that I can block or mute. I’m reflecting more on a peculiarity of culture here that’s specific to this platform vs others. It’s worth pointing out because maybe it can be addressed, or is an artifact of some design choices or social norms.)

@ml I’m aware of the options, but if you have to do it all the time, it becomes fatiguing, and then you just don’t feel like using the platform. Which is what I was describing.

The biggest reason I don’t use Mastodon nearly as often as I’d like to is because, unlike other platforms, too many of the people who act like asses here are people who *follow me*. It’s really weird, because every platform has assholes or whatever, but usually it’s due to context collapse from strangers. Here, it’s usually a tiny minority that wants to scold or police over (often contrived!) objections, and it’s just… exhausting. Takes the fun out of hanging out online. Not sure how to fix it.

@ehler it’s mostly just a static Eleventy blog with Markdown files that I write locally, but I do use Sveltia to edit posts sometimes, and to put stuff live and commit to git https://sveltiacms.app/