FeedCity

Spent the evening in my happy place, playing in a sublime session with the finest fiddlers and pipers! 😊🎶

Federico Viticci on how wired EarPods are still great:

I don’t have to worry about battery life, pairing, or latency. Sure, there’s a wire, and there’s no noise cancelling when using them – but these are my “downtime earbuds” anyway, so I don’t care.

I find myself using my AirPods Pro less and less, actually. For some reason I misplace them when I don’t misplace anything else. They’re amazing, but there’s always that brief moment when I question whether the wireless is actually working, and they still don’t feel as comfortable to me as EarPods.

Nice work from Apple on the web version of Maps. Native apps are great, but some apps really should be on the web, especially apps that you want to link into.

A great new theme for Micro.blog: Sumo by Matt Langford. There’s a lot in here that is really well thought out.

Playing around with the new dataset from Overture Maps, a project started a couple years go between Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and others. I can download and query the data, but doesn’t seem like it can really be used if you don’t bring a lot of cash with you.

How Harry McCracken discovered that ChatGPT is a deeply and broadly knowledgable, infinitely patient, always available, inexpensive, programming partner. I've been using it that way for a year, and it has enabled me to take on much more ambitious and complete projects. It could evolve into something much more powerful, but where it is now is already amazing. The criticisms for ChatGPT have mostly missed the point of what it's useful for.

Sessioning in Belfast

I’ve tinkered with smaller Llama models, on my Mac and Linux servers, so I thought I’d try Llama 3.1. No surprise the 405-billion parameter model is huge, a 200+ GB download. But even the 70b model seems too much for my M3 with 48 GB RAM. Going to stick with cloud models for the foreseeable future.

There are some wild numbers in this report at Bloomberg about Apple’s spending on TV+ content. Reaffirms my belief that Apple has lost their focus. Too much attention on services, sometimes to the detriment of core platforms, developers, and users.

[Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge] "Last week, the founders of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz declared their allegiance to Donald Trump in their customary fashion: talking about money on a podcast. “Sorry, Mom,” Ben Horowitz says in an episode of Th...

Mark Zuckerberg writes about Llama 3.1 in a Threads post using images of text instead of a blog. He makes a point that he’s mentioned in recent interviews too, about not wanting to be locked in by platform vendors like Apple: One of my formative experiences has been buildin...

[Anthony Robledo at USA Today] "Tesla CEO Elon Musk said his estranged transgender daughter was "killed" by the "woke mind virus" after he was tricked into agreeing to gender-affirming care procedures." The thing is, his daughter Vivian is perfectly happy wi...

Following politics sort of obsessively, senate races, the 2020 primaries, I thought I knew a few things about Kamala Harris, but I’m still learning. Just read this essay by her from Elle in 2019, on being a stepmom — “Momala”.

All the reporters know the Repubs refused to fund border stuff so they could use it to tag the Dems in the election. So the first thing the Repubs do is tag VP Harris with the border. The reporter asks a Dem what they have to say about that. But the reporter knows what the Repubs did. So why do they even ask the freaking question? They just play the script the Repubs wrote for them. They are so savvy, but we heard all that too, so we know how corrupt they are. They don't care if we know.

Show notes for today's Scripting podcast.

A 20-minute morning coffee notes rambler podcast, started with a narration of how we do linkblogging these days, mostly by hand, and how Bluesky is being hurt by not having a large-enough character limit. Another plea for textcasting, some standards for what we put on the wi...

I was able to follow kamalhq on twitter. This report says that Musk is rate-limiting followers on that account. Of course we warned what could happen if a Republican bought twitter, but I didn't honestly contemplate that a fascist would. These days our greatest fears aren't ...

I want future President Harris to stay happy no matter what the bastards do or say. We should have a crisis line for her to call to get some quick love. 1-800-LUV-KAMALA.