FeedCity

“Orion makes every other VR or AR device I have tried feel like a mistake — including the Apple Vision Pro.” — Ben Thompson, who interviews Meta’s CTO

While one of the reasons oft declared for using POSSE is the ability to own your content, I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context. Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work. As I played with setting this up, I could immediately feel how that would change the kinds of things I would say, and it felt good. Really good. Like putting on a favorite t-shirt, or coming home to my solid, quiet house after a long time away.

Mandy’s writing positively soars and sings in this beautiful piece!

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I’ve been writing and talking about WP Engine a lot in the last week, but I want to be crystal clear about the core issue at play. In short, WP Engine is violating WordPress’ trademarks. Moreover, they have been doing so for years. We at Automattic have been attempting to make a licensing deal with … Continue reading WPE & Trademarks →

Let’s start with this: Meta Connect was more interesting and fun than Apple’s iPhone event or WWDC keynote. Live demos are better. Even when Mark Zuckerberg was kind of goofy, or when he said “hell yes” and “live demos sometimes work”… Maybe it it wasn’t as polished, with de...

Mira Murati is leaving OpenAI. If things had gone differently after the board shakeup, she would’ve been the CEO and Sam Altman would be at Microsoft. But it didn’t appear that she had been sidelined either. She led the live OpenAI announcements for GPT-4o instead of Sam just a few months ago.

I knew going to war with Silver Lake, a $102B private equity firm, they would pull out every dirty trick to try to smear my name, do oppo research, imply I’m a mafia boss trying to extort them, etc. I have kept my personal philanthropy private until now. I would like to offer up one … Continue reading Charitable Contributions →

Wednesday session

Just uploaded a new TestFlight beta with support for iOS 18 dark and tinted icons. Looks way better now for folks who’ve customized their home screen icons.

Automattic vs. WP Engine will have a chilling effect on WordPress hosting. When I decided to use Hugo in Micro.blog, I considered using WordPress under the hood instead. It would’ve brought significant benefits, but at the cost of bloat and web hosting monoculture. Glad to have avoided this drama.

Effectively no one knows how good Micro.blog is for blogging. I alternate between being bummed out by this and optimistic that there is so much room for growth. Might take a few more years for overnight success to hit.

Interesting situation in Atlanta with the Mets. They have two more games to play with the Braves, but there's a hurricane headed toward Atlanta. It's going to start raining at 1PM and won't stop until Friday afternoon. It's the end of the season and both the Braves and Mets are in the same wildcard battle. Do the Mets stay in Atlanta to ride out the storm, or head back to NY? It's far more weird than I have time to explain right now.

Sarah Perez reporting on the financial backing of the new Social Web Foundation. This is an impressive start:

The Ford Foundation has also offered the organization a large grant to get the project started. In total, SWF is closing in on $1 million in financial support.

[Laura Hazard Owen at NiemanLab] There are some interesting referral statistics embedded in this piece. Facebook referral traffic has fallen more than 40% over the last year; referrals from Reddit have increased by 88%. But the focus is this: "Search traffic...

I keep thinking of this cartoon, which explains it so well.

[Paul Bradley Carr] "I’ve worked at (and founded!) my fair share of billionaire-funded publications and I’ve always had a firm rule: You have to be more critical of the people writing the checks (and their cronies) than you are of anyone else. It’s the only ...

[Dan Kennedy at Media Nation] Dan Kennedy picks up on a detail in Brian Stelter's Atlantic article about troubles at the Washington Post: "The Post’s content-management system, Arc, which was supposed to be a money-maker, had instead turned out to be a drag ...

This is a terrific presentation from Paul. He gives a history lesson and then focuses on what makes the indie web such a powerful idea (hint: it’s not about specific technologies).

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In an earlier era, startups could build on the web and, if one browser didn’t provide the features they needed, they could just recommend that their users try a better one. But that’s not possible on iOS.

I’m extremly concerned about the newest bug in iOS 18:

On-screen keyboard does not show up for installed web apps (PWAs) when focusing a text input of any kind

Whaa? That’s just shockingly dreadful!

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This is a very handy piece of work by Rich:

The idea is to set sensible typographic defaults for use on prose (a column of text), making particular use of the font features provided by OpenType. The main principle is that it can be used as starting point for all projects, so doesn’t include design-specific aspects such as font choice, type scale or layout (including how you might like to set the line-length).

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Finished watching the first season of Shōgun. Fantastic. 📺