FeedCity

I use my blog in the earliest part of the day to warm up and procrastinate.

Tantek Çelik blogged about IndieWebCamp Portland:

We wrapped up with our usual Create Day Demos session, live streamed for remote attendees to see as well. Lots of great demos of things people built, designed, removed, cleaned-up, documented, and blogged! Everyone still at the camp showed something on their personal site!

I miss IndieWebCamp. Don’t think I’ve attended one since we hosted in Austin a couple weeks before COVID hit.

Setting up some more customer support email filters. It’s gotten to where I have so much spam waiting for me, I hate to check support email, which is really bad for everyone. 🙁

[Robin Rendle] Robin Rendle on Sarah Jeong's article about the implications of the Pixel 9's magic photo editor in The Verge: "But this stuff right here—adding things that never happened to a picture—that’s immoral because confusion and deception is the poin...

[Brett Wilkins at Common Dreams] "After years of working with Iraqis whose relatives were killed by U.S. Marines in the 2005 Haditha massacre, American journalists finally obtained and released photos showing the grisly aftermath of the bloody rampage—whose ...

Had a great time at IndieWebCamp Portland 2024 this past Sunday — our 10th IndieWebCamp in Portland!https://events.indieweb.org/2024/08/indiewebcamp-portland-2024-8bucXDlLqR0kBeing a one day #IndieWebCamp, we focused more on making, hacking, and creating, than on formal discu...

Had a great time at IndieWebCamp Portland 2024 this past Sunday — our 10th IndieWebCamp in Portland!https://events.indieweb.org/2024/08/indiewebcamp-portland-2024-8bucXDlLqR0kBeing a one day #IndieWebCamp, we focused more on making, hacking, and creating, than on formal discu...

This is my 9th Burning Man; I started coming in 2013. It’s incredible how much it has changed and evolved in that time. I love seeing all the technology and engineering advances every year. In my time it has gone from more fire and flashlights to LEDs with rainbow and color everywhere. I drove in … Continue reading Burning Man So Far →

I have a few upcoming camping reservations, part of my quest to visit all 88 state parks in Texas. Got this email the other day about one of the reservations:

Select sites at Abilene State Park are closed due to hazardous trees.

Hazardous trees! Luckily the park changed their mind and will allow camping anyway. I’m more amused by the notice than worried, but still gonna try to avoid camping underneath any branches that look ready to fall.

From The Wall Street Journal: Apple, Nvidia Are in Talks to Invest in OpenAI. This makes sense to me. Apple is obviously developing their own AI models, but I don’t think they care about AI as much as OpenAI, Anthropic, and others who live and breathe it. See more commentary from M.G. Siegler.

There are some interesting things going on with the new Patreon-like Sub Club for the fediverse. Presumably it can send members-only posts via ActivityPub because it knows which followers are paid subscribers. I’m puzzled by the payment inside third-party apps, though… I wonder how that works.

I like this post from Marty McGuire about the IndieWeb and how the indieweb.org wiki can sometimes be overwhelming for new users:

That’s because indieweb.org is not a presciption or a cookbook or an exercise plan. It doesn’t tell you how to “be IndieWeb”. It’s a collective memory of experiments, some successful and some not, from a group of experimenters that has changed greatly over time.

Also some nice words for Micro.blog in there. The wiki is an incredible resource, but just start with your own web site and don’t worry about the rest unless you want to dig deeper.

I joked yesterday that enabling the AI features in Micro.blog for everyone might bankrupt me. I didn’t seriously think that it would be out of control, but API usage is sometimes hard to predict, and bills usually only trend in one direction: up. Now with 24 hours usage, seems totally fine.

Thursday session

I can't read most of the stories I want to read. I have the money and am willing to spend it. But there is no system. On the other hand the distribution of video entertainment is somewhat functional, I spend an ungodly amount of mostly wasted money to get access to that. I...

In elections we get to say who we are, ie who comes closest to who we are. It's all made of imagery. Bernie Sanders is someone you either love or don't. He reminds me of people in my own family, who I would never want to be president of anything. But this ad, the best ever imho, says wait a minute, please reconsider. A campaign is a series of messages from candidate to electorate: "Is this who we are?" The great ads tap our optimism, imho. The Sanders ad says we're nice happy people who have jobs and help each other.

So my observation is that 80% of the subject of accessibility consists of fairly simple basics that can probably be learnt in 20% of the time available. The remaining 20% are the difficult situations, edge cases, assistive technology support gaps and corners of specialised knowledge, but these are extrapolated to 100% of the subject, giving it a bad, anxiety-inducing and difficult reputation overall.

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I love my feed reader:

Feed readers are an example of user agents: they act on behalf of you when they interact with publishers, representing your interests and preserving your privacy and security. The most well-known user agents these days are Web browsers, but in many ways feed readers do it better – they don’t give nearly as much control to sites about presentation and they don’t allow privacy-invasive technologies like cookies or JavaScript.

Also:

Feed support should be built into browsers, and the user experience should be excellent.

Agreed!

However, convincing the browser vendors that this is in their interest is going to be challenging – especially when some of them have vested interests in keeping users on the non-feed Web.

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