FeedCity

Monday session

Not sure I have a favorite iOS 18 feature yet, but tapbacks with emoji are near the top of the list. Only problem is the fallback experience for iOS 17 and earlier users is bad enough that I don’t want to actually send any emoji reactions for a while.

I don’t really understand how OpenAI’s o1 works, but I found today’s Stratechery update helpful, contrasting the approach of o1 compared to other LLMs which can sometimes blindly follow the wrong path:

In summary, there are two important things happening: first, o1 is explicitly trained on how to solve problems, and second, o1 is designed to generate multiple problem-solving streams at inference time, choose the best one, and iterate through each step in the process when it realizes it made a mistake.

Jason Snell reflects on 10 years since starting Six Colors:

Ten years ago I took a leap into working for myself, not working in corporate media. For most days since, I’ve worked in my garage, writing articles for my site, recording podcasts, and writing the occasional piece for other places (including my former employer, which I couldn’t ever have predicted).

Debating complexity is pointless because it’s a subjective metric. Every developer has a different gut feeling about simplicity, complexity and the appropriate amount of complexity for a given task. When people try to find an objective definition, they come to wildly different results. And that’s okay.

Instead, we should focus on hard metrics from a user perspective. Performance, efficiency, compatibility, accessibility and fault-tolerance can be measured, tested and evaluated, automatically and manually.

Any amount of complexity is fine as long as these goals are met.

adactio.com/links/21414

Federico Viticci reviews iOS 18 and also writes about how to balance his love of Apple tech and dislike of generative AI:

Technology without people behind it is just an empty chat box. I want to write about the fun, flexible, frequently flawed things humans do with tech, and I want to be remembered for having left something useful behind me.

I love the illustrations by Scout Wilkinson for the review. For me, I don’t think AI has to be an all-or-nothing choice. It’s a useful tool, but we can also embrace what humans are uniquely good at. This was the thinking behind M.b’s audio narration too.

I have a linkblogging tool crossposts to Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Twitter, WordPress and RSS.

Every time I publish a link it goes to all those places,

The RSS feed is doing a lot of the work.

• Links from the RSS feed show up on my Links page and in the nightly emails.
• The RSS feed is also used to connect to Threads, going through micro.blog. I am able to give it the URL of the linkblogging feed, and then click on Add Threads -- and that's it. When I post something to the feed it shows up on Threads.

This feature is tucked away in a corner of micro.blog and I suspect most people don't know it's there. It's sort of a Grand Central station for moving stuff around among the twitter-like systems. If you're a micro.blog user, its Feeds page is where you set it up. Screen shot.

We’ve got a new episode of Core Intuition out today, longer than usual to talk about which iPhones we pre-ordered, thoughts on new features like the camera button, and a discussion of whether the AirPods 4 with noice cancellation are effectively a software unlock.

Shownotes page for the first Trade Secrets podcast, on this day in 2004. I was in Seattle, Adam was coming from Belgium. Haven't written any notes about it yet. If others are interested in listening and commenting on these podcasts, this is when it was all coming together, let me know and perhaps we can start a thread on Mastodon.

Happy for Hacks finally winning. Love that show. It has been tough competition going up against hilarious comedy show The Bear. 🤪

[Simon Willison] "Whether or not you enjoy MrBeast’s format of YouTube videos, this leaked onboarding document for new members of his production company is a compelling read." It really is fascinating. It's also really badly written, which says a lot about t...

Watching the Emmy’s. It shouldn’t bother me so much but folks The Bear still isn’t a comedy. 📺

As a quick follow-up to my post today about posting APIs, I should have linked to the latest Micropub specification. There is also a long list of clients on the IndieWeb wiki. I just added Epilogue there, which also uses Micropub to blog about books you’re reading.

We’ve visited Dallas a lot recently. It sort of amazes me that Dallas has been able to develop extensive new light rail, and repurpose old rail corridors into great walking trails. Comparatively it feels like Austin has done almost nothing. Looking at the old Missouri-Kansas-Texas line, unused.

I was recruited to speak at a Ria Novosti conference in Moscow in June 2011, but decided not to go. This was back when we thought naively that Russia was a democracy, and working with Russian journalists, when American journalists wouldn't, seemed like a fair deal. Something about it didn't smell right though, so I stayed home.

I used to think of Twitter as a coral reef, but its role as a world wide notification system is fading, and we haven't replaced it with anything. I wrote this in 2007 when the utility of Twitter was just becoming apparent.

Dave Winer blogs about interoperability for Twitter-like systems: We had that for the blogging layer of this onion, something called the MetaWeblog API. All the popular blogging software supported it. And that meant you could write once and publish to many places. I’ve bee...

Sunday session

Something has changed in the twitterverse, it's grown new centers, for me, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Twitter is still here, but I use it a lot less than I used to. Each of them acts as if they are alone, except for ActivityPub but that's more complicated than it may seem. As often is the case, the tech industry is depending on confusion. This may be a strategic mistake. I could cite a few examples where this didn't work, when an open ecosystem whose benefits were by then obvious to users, completely erased the ecosystem that came before, often with remarkable speed. Each of them is playing for all of it, wanting to control their users, make it so they only post to one system. And some people do. I think it's better if we, as users, remain diversified.

You'll never see an article in the NYT saying how wrong polls have been in every presidential election because then they'd have to fire half their political reporters.

If you want a better idea of how it's going, look at where the ad dollars are going, and where the candidates are campaigning.

And make sure all your friends know that you're voting and who you're voting for. I think that makes a difference.

I'm voting straight Democratic party line.