In my series on how venture capital has evolved into something unrecognizable and too-often toxic, I switch from the big-picture view to a practical question: How does this affect founders? Well surprise — it's not good! Here, I break down how the deck gets stacked against founders by the increasingly-centralized power of the Cancer Capital firms, how smaller VC firms factor into the market, and what founders can try to do to fight back. https://www.anildash.com/2026/09/09/cancer-capital-founders/
@delric@daringfireball@gruber fwiw I talk about AI on Bluesky approximately every day and don’t have much difficulty with it; I think people just have to be contextually fluent, like anywhere else.
@john@Aaronvegh yeah that was a bad edit, I’ve been pretty careful to explain how it’s not secure in thr same way. I’ll fix that, thanks for flagging it.
In my project page here, you can sort of get a feel for the web UI; the circular “sensor” at the top emulates what happens when your fingerprint swipes the hardware sensor device. You can also see the wiring diagram you’ll need to follow if you want to solder the thing together yourself. (It’s not too bad.) https://anildash.com/projects/dashboard-touch/
The project is a refactor of tinyTouch from Zimeng Xiong, which you should also definitely check out. He came up with the broad approach: https://tinytouch.dev/ I wanted to add a friendly web interface for configuring things, as well as a more opinionated approach to authentication, so that it’s more straightforward for less expert users. But both approaches work with commodity hardware that you can buy online for $30-40.
A new little project from me: Dashboard Touch, which lets you make a Touch ID-style sensor for your Mac using off-the-shelf parts, so you don’t need an Apple Keyboard. By emulating keyboarding typing in your password, it works anywhere that macOS asks for authentication. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zXN-JzjkgY
What do you even do when some stranger just writes batshit fanfic about you all the time? In this imagination, *Cory Doctorow* of all people doesn’t want folks to have agency over their tech?
People really will just say any old goddamn thing on the Internet and expect not to be called out on it.
So, I am writing a post about "why Bending Spoons picking up Airtable is everything bad in tech right now" — which questions do you want to make sure I answer in the piece?