FeedCity

Decided to install the iOS 18.1 beta. AI summarization features mostly work as advertised. For the writing tools, I hesitate using it mostly because if I need help, why not jump straight to ChatGPT? Otherwise I’d wonder if I’m getting the best results, even if it seems fine.

This is what it looks like when UPS loses a package. It's a case for the new Google Pixel 9 Pro. It was shipped on Sept 6, at this point that's 17 days go. It was hell to just tell Google that the case was lost. I expected at that point they'd apologize and refund the money....

It’s wild to imagine that in the future, to be competitive with AI you might need your own nuclear power plant. I could also see a company like Apple buying half of Arizona for solar farms. On the one hand, yes, maybe we’ve lost our minds… But on the other, a massive investment in clean energy.

BTW, to be clear, I have no interest in working on twitter-like systems.

It's been like a prison to writers, we're stuck with this huge divide, with crap on both sides.

These things exist, they have a jumble of APIs and ways to integrate.

And we've been playing by the rules laid down by Twitter (ev, biz and jack) for 18 freaking years. That's enough.

This will never get sorted out until people realize it needs sorting out.

Not expecting much more to happen there.

Eating my own dog food, just imported 2800 notes into Micro.blog. Overall went really well. A couple things could be improved for large archives, like better search on the web.

Following up on Three Mile Island, good point from Ben Thompson today:

…nuclear energy and data centers are a perfect match for two reasons. The most obvious one is that data centers need power 24/7, which nuclear provides. The less obvious one is that nuclear power needs to be delivering power 24/7; it doesn’t scale down. Data centers, though, are a perfectly predictable consumer of power.

Earlier this year, I was captivated by this brightly coloured wall outside Düsseldorf Kunstsammlung K20. The artist? Sarah Morris. How beautifully circuitous.

How should September be abbreviated?

• Firefox: Sept
• Chrome: Sept
• Node.js: Sept
• Deno: Sept
• Safari: Sep 👀

This is for en-GB, en-IE, en-AU and en-NZ locales (maybe more); for other English locales, everyone agrees it should be Sep. Standards!

After reading Matt Mullenweg’s posts about WP Engine, I looked into pricing for WP Engine and a few other popular WordPress hosting services. Most are really scammy, with deceptive intro prices and lots of upsells. Haven’t found any that are as simple and transparent as Micro.blog: $5 or $10. Easy.

From Mark Gurman’s latest, the AI rollout still feels haphazard. ChatGPT may come as soon as 18.2:

Looking further ahead, Apple is already racing to complete a major iOS 18.2 upgrade, which will include features like Genmoji, ChatGPT integration and the Image Playground app. The company is looking to get that release down to zero-bug status in early November so it can ship it by December.

But the new Siri will apparently be later, maybe spread across 18.3 and 18.4 next year.

Late night indoor session

Night time outdoor session with Kíla

Instead of just fact-checking the candidates, and presenting "both sides," how about recording the number of times the candidate threatens specific races, genders, lifestyles, religions and of course individual people. Keep a page where you tally the groups he doesn't threaten with expulsion or worse. That would be very revealing, and in line with the true issue of this election. Time for you all to get in sync with the actual American history that's being made.

It's around this time of year that I start thinking about my BOTY. I should give out a plaque or a statue or something. Someday! Anyway almost immediately I had my answer. The announcement will wait till December of course, sometimes early January.

Social networks are criticized when they carry lies from race-haters and fascists, but the major news orgs do it all the time. It's ridiculous that there are two standards.

This story about Microsoft and nuclear power underscores how big a deal AI is:

If approved by regulators, Three Mile Island would provide Microsoft with the energy equivalent it takes to power 800,000 homes, or 835 megawatts. Never before has a U.S. nuclear plant come back into service after being decommissioned, and never before has all of a single commercial nuclear power plant’s output been allocated to a single customer.

Love it or hate it, AI is not just a new feature, like a revamped Clippy. It’s going to have a profound impact on computing.

Finished watching the WordCamp Q&A from Matt Mullenweg. Very unique this year, largely dedicated to calling out WP Engine as taking more from the WordPress community than they’re giving back, based on Matt’s blog post here. I don’t have strong opinions on this, but it’ll be something to follow.

To my programmer friends, how long would it have taken to answer this question using Google and StackExchange. There was a bug in this one line of code, a call to new Date () in JavaScript, that was behaving as if months were not 0-based, which they are known to be. The problem: I was specifying the day as 0 and month, correctly, but the day had to be 1 in order for it to work and without thinking I had specified it as 0.