There a class of tasks that drive me to distraction, and that’s when I am obliged to execute them myself, in the full knowledge that a computer could do them better and faster. These tasks are manual, require little mental or physical effort on my part, are dull and monotonous, and achingly time-consuming. Most frustrating […]| Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka
I work in an entirely (mostly) remote organization. Inside that organization, I interact with an extremely decentralized ecosystem. Some of the people I co-operate with the most are in other orgs, some are individual contractors volunteers, others are conglomerations of mononymed Internet-monickered mystery-types. A remarkable amount of my and my colleagues work is intended at […]| Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka
I didn’t have a great time when I started at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It was my first office job in the US (I think I’d got an SSN barely weeks beforehand) and there was a lot to culturally absorb. My predecessors as EFF’s sole activist were Cory and Ren Bucholz; big shoes to fill. […]| Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka
I’m not fond of Twitter as a communicative form — I still believe that the question “what if we put everyone on the same IRC channel?” was one that we didn’t need to run an experiment to answer. But I am enjoying having multiple reincarnations of Twitter, from the individual yurts of the Fediverse to […]| Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka
Continuing the Old Hippy mulling: instead of just trying to make old fires spontaneously light again using the same old ashes, my thought is — how do you find a role for the values, for the insight, and keep that in a place that preserves the best of it? I wrote about this a fair […]| Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka
Why do governments go after companies and executives of services of more weakly encrypted tools? It’s very hard, this early, to pierce through what’s going on with the French authorities’ arrest of Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram — but that doesn’t stop people from having pet theories. Was it retaliation from the US and […]| Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka
I didn’t write for a bit. The world doesn’t end; I still get paid; it’s all good. Also, I had no opinions to speak of.| Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka
2025-06-02»| www.oblomovka.com
I’m a big fan of explaining difficult and unintuitive concepts through analogy to even more unintuitive ideas — a technique known to the ancients (and my friend Seth, who first explained it to me), as obscurum per obscurius.| Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka
Thome Ptacek, with whom I alternate between disagreement and agreement at approximately 50hz, writes about AI, amicably titling his article “My AI skeptic friends are all nuts” (and that’s how you get to #1 on Hacker News, which is where I posted a version of this comment: | Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka
Around about 2000, I began to consider how it would be, when and if I became an Old Hippy.| Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka
2025-03-12»| www.oblomovka.com
Sad about the District Court decision in Hachette vs. Internet Archive; not just because of the ruling against the Archive, but because of many people’s reaction to it online. People have strange intuitions, not just about the status of the law, but also of how it progresses. There’s some tut-tutting that an august institution like the Archive should be wandering this close to the spirit of the law, instead of playing safe.| Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka