FeedCity

Between killing third-party clients and now only allowing Google indexing, Reddit has withdrawn from the open web in a pretty significant way. Not sure what the impact of this will be. Feels almost Facebook-like, much more of a silo than before.

Ich hab mir über die letzten Wochen viele Gedanken zum Thema „Sharing im Fediverse“ gemacht. Das Thema kommt zwar immer wieder und scheitert dann auf die immer gleiche ähnliche Weise, trotzdem (oder vielleicht gerade deshalb) fasziniert es mich seit jeher. Als gestern dann auch noch @stefan mit seinem „Fediverse Sharing Button“ um die Ecke kam, […]

Here's a perfect illustration how ChatGPT can improve customer relations. I bought an iPhone that I now don't need, and it's arriving today via FedEx. I wanted to know whether I should just refuse delivery, or accept it and then return it. Obviously it's easier for me to refuse. I asked ChatGPT and it gave me a detailed reply. Apple's chatbot saw it as a "technical" question and wasn't prepared to help. Sales support is one of those applications where cost is totally justified. A human helper would cost a lot more I imagine than a LLM chat system. I tried calling 1-800-CALL-APPLE and talked to a human who was very nice, but couldn't find anything in her manual about refusing delivery.

Is there anyone here within earshot who is involved in doing the web stuff for the Harris campaign?

[Shiraz Shaikh on Global Network on Extremism & Technology] "Video games and their associated platforms are vastly becoming hubs of radicalisation, extremism and recruitment by far-right extremist organisations. The development of bespoke games and modif...

Finished reading: Blood on Their Hands by Mandy Matney. Wasn’t planning to read this but got into it when @traci started the audiobook. Interesting behind-the-scenes story of Mandy reporting on (and hosting a podcast about) the Murdaughs. 📚

I don't when technology moves backwards.

I'm always trying to push it the other way.

It's like being a ball player wanting to win a game.

Or a musician wanting to record a hit.

A VC wanting a 10x return.

A diplomat achieving growth and peace.

Back in Brighton in time for a Sunday evening session!

Before Twitter broke the API, it used to be a quick way for me to channel items from my blog to almost all the people who follow me on the social web. Now it isn't even one of the services I use that I can post to automatically (those are Bluesky, Masto, WordPress). None of them are anything like the aggregator of people that Twitter was, and I can't even reach it from my writing tool. I really want to solve this problem, but I absolutely can't do this on my own. No time, patience, and it's not my job to do all that coding. As observed the other day, my time should be spent on writing tools for the web and directly related products. This is the kind of project that should be handled as an open source thing.

Braintrust query: Every day a web page opens in Chrome from a plugin that asks me to buy a subscription. I don't know what the software is, I gather that it's related to a debugger I use for Node.js apps. I would like to block it from doing this, but I don't see an easy way to tell Chrome to not display pages from this site. Any suggestions?

Experimenting with WebP. I still have mixed feelings about it. The files are smaller, but even introduced 14 years ago (!) my instinct on new formats is they won’t be as universal as JPEG, MP3, and text, which will last forever.

This monolith command-line tool is neat, found via @eay. Downloads a web page and rewrites it to include all resources in a single file.

[Kate Conger at the New York Times] ""Time and again, Ms. Yaccarino has faced similar situations, as Mr. Musk is always one whim away from undoing her work. Ms. Yaccarino’s task of repairing and remaking X’s business over the past year has been complicated b...

There’s a new Core Int out today! Daniel and I talk about CrowdStrike, travel, and SearchGPT.

The couch jokes about JD Vance might be funny, but it’s misinformation and not even based on anything true. Sorry to be a buzzkill. We can win without making shit up. In the long run, it hurts credibility on the real arguments against the GOP ticket. 🇺🇸

I signed up for White Dudes for Harris, but I did it reluctantly. Would have enthusiastically joined a Men for Harris group. Tech for Harris. New York for Harris. How about Americans for Harris. Voters for Harris.

Session in the basement

Short walk to Somerville Lake right before it started to rain. So quiet this morning.

Patrick LaForge who just left the NYT after 27 years: "RSS news readers let me track breaking news and competition back in my blogging days and I still used them as a corrective to see beyond what social media algorithms were showing me. You see the stories long before home page play or tweets. Gave me an edge. To print-focused journalists who knew little about computers in a certain era it seemed like magic."

John Batelle had an interesting observation about this yesterday, that SearchGPT is a clever way to get news orgs to think about ChatGPT in a different, less threatening way. They want to be in a search engine index (that's called SEO) where they want to be paid to be part of a chatbot. There really isn't a line there, in fact. That's what SearchGPT makes obvious. I for one, want all my stuff in their index so I can find out wtf I've been writing about here for almost 30 freaking years! 😄