FeedCity

Pulling out of a conference I was supposed to speak at because, now that the schedule is live, I see that 90% of the line-up is white dudes like me.

(They also don’t pay their speakers. These two things are not unrelated.)

Adventures in IndieWeb / ActivityPub (AP) bridging:While in general my posts are being successfully federated by https://fed.brid.gy/ #BridgyFed, most of my recent posts, and two more earlier this year, were delivered successfully to multiple #Mastodon instances AP inboxes (r...

And the show notes for the podcast from Sept 2, 2004, and now we are fully caught up.

Nice web utility from @mary.my.id that archives your Bluesky posts as HTML. Always a good idea to have multiple formats of everything.

Sometimes you just need a little color. Stairwell at Central Market.

There is a place for the WordPress block editor, or Medium, or Squarespace, or any number of very nice editors. But if you want to write natively for the web, those will never be quite right.

As I improve my own web text editor, I’m reflecting on what it felt like when the first WYSIWYG editors hit the market. PageMill launched and we said, “Amazing, this is what web editing should be.” But it turns out rich text just gets in the way. Markdown + limited HTML when needed is the way to go.

WordPress and GitHub fit into similar niches, but one is for writers and the other for developers.

The problem with Mastodon is its protocol is underspecified, therefore interop is really hard, and ultimately the standard, if any emerges, will be decided by the big tech companies and will be ridiculously complex. I think Bluesky has a better chance of being a solid stand...

Its proponents can be weird, it takes itself far too seriously, and its documentation is interminable. These are some ways that some people have described Christianity. This video is about React.js.

adactio.com/links/21387

I’ve been on a sabbatical from work for the past six weeks. At Clearleft, you’re eligible for a sabbatical after five years. For some reason I haven’t taken one until now, 19 years into my tenure at the agency. I am an idiot. My six-week sabbatical has been lovely, alterna...

Random thought. In hindsight Medium chose the wrong business model. They could have done what Automattic has done with WordPress. It's a private company so I don't know how much it's growing or how profitable it is, but from outside it's growing, and generates lots of cash. Basically, charge writers for the service. I think they would have done well. And open source the Medium editor, and offer it to Google to bundle with Chrome, and upgrade the whole web while you're at it. With billions of windfall from the success of Twitter, why argue over nickels and dimes. Ev had the ability to change the course of the industry, and make the same kind of money Google and Microsoft make. And yes, I did urge him to do this at the time, publicly (didn't have access to him privately, if you can believe that).

Here's the show notes page for the podcast from Sept 1, 2004.

September 2004 was the month when podcasting became a real community thing. Twenty years ago. I did eight podcasts that month. The mail list, which Adam started, was going strong. This is the month where podcasting got its name, thanks to some brilliant creativity from Dannie Gregoire. Until then we were calling them "audio blog posts" or some variant thereof. You can see it in this Google Trends graph. I started a special feed to echo my programs from 2004, I even got it registered in Apple's podcast database. There will be two podcasts in the feed today because I missed the one from yesterday. Still diggin!

So the human web, the people net, the your-net. Whatever it is called, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that it is yours, if you want it. If you’re tired of the conglomerate-net, disgusted by the commercialised web, sick of being the product, allergic to The Algorithm, then you can have something else. Something of your own.

You want to upload your artwork? Write fanfic? World build? Document your developing Sistrum-playing skills? Discuss your experiences slice-of-life style? Experiment with poetry?

Do it.

Use wordpress if you want. Use Blogger. Hell, use Frontpage 98 if you want. Or learn some HTML And CSS and type it all up in notepad.exe. Or just HTML, don’t even bother with the CSS. Just make it yours.

adactio.com/links/21385

Here’s a picture from Belfast Trad Fest of me in my happy place (playing in a fantastic session led by piper Mick O’Brien and fiddler Sean Smyth).

Our ethical struggle with generative models derives in part from the fact that we…sort of can’t have them ethically, right now, to be honest. We have known how to build models like this for a long time, but we did not have the necessary volume of parseable data available ...

Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way. Another great piece by Ted Chiang! The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativit...

If you have a pet parrot, it’s fun to get it to say “Help, I’m trapped in the body of a parrot!”

If you have a photocopier, it’s fun to copy a piece of paper that says “I am a sentient photocopier!”

#LargeLanguageModels

I often only finally get into a book at the end of a loan in Libby, hopelessly nowhere near finished with it. Wish there was a “just give me one extra day” button. For Kindle, turning off wifi works, but no good option for audiobooks.