FeedCity

It's weird that JD Vance goes out with the insults before most people have any idea who he is. Instead of childless cat ladies sticking to Kamala, it's sticking to him, which I'm pretty sure wasn't his intent.

Pretty remarkable how the bots on Twitter have become so abusive. Makes the idea of discourse there pretty silly. Might as well turn it into a one-way medium, for all practical purposes that's what it is.

Evan Prodromou in a post on Mastodon:

If you make a Fediverse explainer, try to show some real communities as the nodes in the network, rather than using software packages and their logos. Companies, local governments, universities, families, friend groups, individuals.

I think this is a good approach. Talking about platforms is also effective, though. If Threads could talk to TikTok, people would get that, even if it’s not as distributed as showing communities. Ideally large platforms would be broken down, e.g. not just TikTok but BookTok.

Today we’ve released a new version of Micro.blog for macOS. This update adds two new features: import from Glass and better support for showing auto-generated summaries of bookmarked web pages. Most of the advanced bookmark features in Micro.blog — like summaries, highlights...

Another afternoon session

Set the presidential address to record while out tonight so we could watch it fully, without all the noise of news and social media. He hit it just right. Moving. “…one day sit behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office as president of the United States. But here I am.” Thank you, Joe Biden. 🇺🇸

Is Reddit now only available on Google search?

Fantastic speech by President Biden. It's good we'll have both a president and a campaign and that they'll be separate thing. I look forward to reading it slowly. And he put a cap on the awful communication of the last month, he took control of the story from the snobs and shit throwers in the press.

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...