Ron Bronson

Ron Bronson

@ronbronson.com

Society, tech & its discontents. Professor, radio host, 🎾 coach, game dev hobbyist. ronbronson.com

3.9K followers1.1K following5.2K posts

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

Hope those grounds crew folks get championship rings, they are earning it rebuilding a mound in front of 40k plus on national television in the middle of the game. neat showcase of human competence

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

Built a demo tool to deal with the two way problem of non-profit member orgs not knowing how to use volunteers & volunteers not staying activated. Next is finding orgs who want to demo a free tool (that'll stay free to use) It's ATProto native, too.

Ron Bronson@ronbronson.com

subscription tools are bankrupting small membership nonprofits. Having experienced this directly, tools that are made for companies don't always work for smaller organizations.

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

The biggest issue with keeping volunteers activated is having the ability to create surge teams when needed, while keeping the pool flush with the right shapes of folks when you need them. Managing all of this is a FT job for folks too. So I'm testing out a tool to make it easier

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

My latest hypothesis is can we attack solvable problems with tools? Not keep creating novel software no one is asking for, but looking at problems that were nebulous & expensive to coordinate and attack them with tools that can help save hours, FTEs and resources for orgs?

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

Built a demo tool to deal with the two way problem of non-profit member orgs not knowing how to use volunteers & volunteers not staying activated. Next is finding orgs who want to demo a free tool (that'll stay free to use) It's ATProto native, too.

Ron Bronson@ronbronson.com

subscription tools are bankrupting small membership nonprofits. Having experienced this directly, tools that are made for companies don't always work for smaller organizations.

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

I'll write a proper blog post but the idea that orgs are using siloed spreadsheets & docs to manage themselves, plight of not knowing how to generate right-sized scoped tasks for people qualified to help is why groups struggle to maintain valuable people. I've seen this first hand & its solvable

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

subscription tools are bankrupting small membership nonprofits. Having experienced this directly, tools that are made for companies don't always work for smaller organizations.

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

My brief stint on the Historic Landmarks Commission helped me realize how many of these people exist, I was truly naive to the lengths folks will go to block anyone else from enjoying anything they have from the commons

Kori 🌹@koriander.bsky.social

When I talk about “tall building derangement syndrome”, I’m thinking of this IG post celebrating a lawyer who got to keep his SFH (which no one lives in) at the expense of 15 floors of PSU dorms

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

Two new agent skills on npm: Make your LLM reply to you using plainlanguage.gov prose instead of unparsable English www.npmjs.com/package/plai... A full editorial system for teams that write with AI agents. www.npmjs.com/package/pros...

Ron Bronson@ronbronson.com

yesterday I released closedtab: a retro/documentation tool that works best for human-agent teams just mirrors my own workflow, where I like a whole folder of after-action reports (AARs) that outline what we did, what worked, failed, etc. very helpful for future agents www.npmjs.com/package/clos...

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

The widespread hate for AI "slop" shows the public had come to appreciate a certain basic standard of intelligible deployment & the minute we got rid of the designers no surprise everything stopped working as well including the inputs for how we develop things.

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

I've noticed more people posting their AI creations on various subreddits. Things like new baseball stats or text-based games but because they've never endured a design crit or shipped anything, they do not take it well when there isn't universal praise or someone shows up with critique

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

The usual response is an LLM generated longform response about why your critique is not right and they'll do this to every single person who replies if it's not universal praise. The other thing is, everybody wants to create their own Discord around their ideas immediately after launch.

Ron Bronson reposted

TSN
@tsnofficial.bsky.social

The Knicks have officially raised a banner for their 2025 NBA Cup championship 👀 They were previously the tournament's only winners to not feature a NBA Cup banner in the rafters.

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

weird thing happened last week where I sent a reply to a student via Gmail from my phone, but somehow what Gmail sent to the student was the auto-generated AI auto-reply instead of what I actually wrote. Need to turn that "feature" off stat.

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

wearing the devil rays alternates. also I think I like that you can catch a foul ball in baseball and have it count as an out. Underrated rule that's never gone away.

Timothy Burke@bubbaprog.xyz

As called by Andy Freed on Rays Radio:

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

I think that if nothing else, having a story to tell about how we can create a permissioned culture of agent(ic) decisions is a win regardless of whether I'm too early for this convo or not.

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

These only holds if you 1) think US public services should divert precious human capital to satisfy your agents 2) that this infra already exists or can be built swiftly 3) that somehow removing these frictions are a good thing at breakneck pace. The cited paper doesn't even say this.

Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social

A consequential choice will be made soon by government and companies as they are increasingly flooded with agentic AI inquiries that overcome the frictions that gated access (see the graphs - it has already started!) Two options: do you make services worse or better as a result?

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

part of the idea of building some of these primitives into actual tools is trying to shift us away from the "submit or be left behind" framing of every booster post we have to sift through anymore. There has to be a pro-civic life, pro-social trust way to engage with this tech

Ron Bronson reposted

Anthony Macuk
@anthonymacuk.bsky.social

love 2 enjoy a frictionless, stress-free life as I'm locked in an arms race of agentic haggling with every business entity I ever interact with

Damon Beres@damonberes.com

I really, strongly feel everybody needs to read this—because everybody is going to live in this emergent world, whether or not they believe themselves to be full participants in it. Pretty bleak. Great work @cwarzel.bsky.social and @matteowong.bsky.social

theatlantic.comImagine Every AI Agent on Earth Buying the Same Cheap Paper TowelsAI agents are doing our shopping for us, and wreaking havoc on the internet.
Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

(I don't...it weirds me out and no student has asked me to allow one. I don't teach remote that often though, it might be different if I were a full remote prof.)

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

Fun fact. The Milwaukee Brewers are blue & gold because they played their first season in MKE (1970 )in Seattle Pilots uniforms since it was too late by the time they were sold to order different color ones.

Milwaukee Brewers@brewersbot.bsky.social

YOUR MILWAUKEE BREWERS ARE HEADING TO THE WORLD SERIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

Introducing vloora.com, AI-native, human judgement to successful audit and clearing of backlog queues across sectors. Months of work finding repeatable work clearing backlogs (very quietly) helped bring this to life.

vloora.comVloora · Backlogs, clearedThe AI native platform for clearing backlogs of any kind, at 1% administration or less.
Ron Bronson@ronbronson.com

Found a conventional use for atproto (replacing high school state associations/athletic conference/school sports websites) the other day and built a spec because I couldn't help myself. it's live but I'll share a blog post about it before sharing

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

And I wrote about it on the personal blog, I didn't set out to start a company... but sometimes problems are too loud to ignore & I love solving problems. More soon, but email/call/DM if you hate backlogs too & want to talk. Still flying at 45,000 feet. blog.ronbronson.com/launching-a-...

blog.ronbronson.comLaunching a Startup to Eliminate Backlogs - Ron BronsonFor the past eight months or so, I’ve been working quietly on a project that arrived when someone asked after reading something I wrote, “I think
Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

Except it is true in the sense that level of control teaches you where the bottlenecks are, and without that "feel" you increasingly lose insights that don't cascade down when someone only ever trains on/uses tools that abstract away the nuance that you get further from what the work is about

conputer dipshit@davidcrespo.bsky.social

this is a good post and I don’t doubt that LLMs pose a problem for the author‘s preferred style of working, but I wonder if there’s a bit of self-deception in the conception of always wanting to work on the lowest level thing possible. this can’t really be true in practice

purplesyringa.moeGrieving the loss of detailsI’ve been thinking about where I stand in respect to the current state of the industry. This is more of a journal note than a post, apologies for that. I usually leave this stuff private, but I though...
Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

Working on a product that all about details amplifies this grief. Not every product can abstract away all the friction, there will always been necessary blockers, misunderstanding, math that doesn't math. This idea that everyone hates "doing the work" is going to cause incalculable harms

Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

The messiness of human affairs isn't a technical failure that we need to abstract away, it's understanding how to prove we care about people besides ourselves. It's why all this LLM have feelings stuff is so deeply offensive

Ron Bronson reposted

Justin Hendrix
@justinhendrix.bsky.social

“Hype is eating the future, and leaving us the bones.” Sun-ha Hong of UNC-Chapel Hill says the Silicon Valley hype machine systematically “borrows credibility from the future to purchase legitimacy in the present.” The cost, he argues, is a planetary-scale drain on our alternatives.

techpolicy.pressTech Hype is Cannibalizing the FutureEvery day, we are told that we live in the future—but hype is eating the future and leaving us the bones," writes Sun-ha Hong.
Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com

I built the 375th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron's at Scott AFB first website in Frontpage. What a time to be alive

WebDesignMuseum@webdesignmuseum.org

On October 7, 1996, Microsoft released the Microsoft FrontPage 97 WYSIWYG website editor. The program included new features such as import Web Wizard, the ability to edit raw HTML source code, and more.

Ron Bronson reposted

Joel G Goodman
@joelgoodman.co

I miss having fun with work. Last week I publicly relaunched SpeedyU. For 3 years I've been tracking speed and a11y performance of higher ed websites. This new v2 of speedyu.com includes way more data. For free. And soon I'll be offering paid deep dives and competitor insights.

speedyu.comSpeedyU — University website rankingsSpeedyU is a free, independent ranking of university and college websites on speed, accessibility, best practices, and SEO, measured weekly with Google Lighthouse across 4,690 institutions. The typica...