FeedCity

Like cholesterol, there's "good weird" and "bad weird." I think we all know which kind of weird the Repubs are.

Miss the days when you could have a $199 iPod Touch around for testing betas and other things. Getting a device to test Apple Intelligence on iOS would set me back $600 (iPad Air) or $1000 (iPhone 15 Pro). Brand new iPad Mini, regular iPad, and non-pro iPhone 15 can’t run it.

Apple’s strategy with on-device models is going to take 2-3 years to play out. Meanwhile everyone just uses ChatGPT.

[Bron Maher at PressGazette] "Mail Online, The Independent and the websites of the Daily Mirror and Daily Express have begun requiring readers to pay for access if they do not consent to third-party cookies." I believe this would have been illegal were the U...

Thought about installing the iOS 18.1 beta today but caught myself, remembering AI won’t work on my iPhone 14 Pro. I keep forgetting because my phone still feels new.

I’ve been testing the beta of Tapestry and it’s really starting to show the promise of a unified timeline across multiple services. There’s even an Instagram connector from @sod to view Instagram profiles alongside Micro.blog feeds, Mastodon, and other blogs.

We’re working on a few tweaks to Epilogue this week. Just merged in a change that my son worked on. 🙂 If you’ve never heard of the app before, it’s a mashup of blogs and tracking books, like Goodreads… I recorded a video about it last year that still covers most of the major features.

Between killing third-party clients and now only allowing Google indexing, Reddit has withdrawn from the open web in a pretty significant way.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.