FeedCity

I’m worried I’ve become cynical about technology as I’ve gotten older. But maybe technology really is worse. Someone asked me the other day: “what [in media and technology] are you excited about right now?” We both agreed that it was a surprisingly difficult question. And t...

Isn't it weird that businesses work hard to get better position on Google search, but fight the other way with AI to be excluded. At some point they will could realize that one of the approaches isn't correct.

Quick note about last night's Mets win over Philly. The series is over, the next game on Sunday will be against the winner in the west, either San Diego or Los Angeles. Last night's game was stressful, low scoring, until the Mets star shortstop hit a freaking grand slam home...

Thinking more about this blog post from Nick Radcliffe about effectively rebranding Micro.blog. I want to turn Micro.blog into a sort of bundle (think Apple One) because it does several things. But I don’t know if I can give up the “micro” name as much as redefine it. Small name. Big features. 🙂

It’s less than a month until election day. I believe Kamala Harris is going to win. Knock on wood, many things are breaking her way in the final weeks of the campaign, in a way that they did not for Hillary Clinton when she was also on her way to winning the presidency. Howe...

Making progress on enabling Threads cross-posting for everyone in Micro.blog. Meta approved the app this week, now waiting for them to approve the business account. It has been slow going because after each rejection I have to work on something else to clear my head.

They say they’re building the thing that will build the thing that will solve all of our problems, while they destroy the planet and run on data theft and labor exploitation, and they get Nobel prizes.

— Timnit Gebru

[Charlotte Tobitt at Press Gazette] "Paul Rowland wrote in an email to staff on 27 September that article volumes were being talked about “a lot in newsrooms at the moment” and blamed, in part, the volatility from previously huge traffic referrers like Goog...

Reading The Female Man by Joanna Russ.

This seems to be the attitude of many of my fellow nerds—designers and developers—when presented with tools based on large language models that produce dubious outputs based on the unethical harvesting of other people’s work and requiring staggering amounts of energy to run:

This is the future! I need to start using these tools now, even if they’re flawed, because otherwise I’ll be left behind. They’ll only get better. It’s inevitable.

Whereas this seems to be the attitude of those same designers and developers when faced with stable browser features that can be safely used today without frameworks or libraries:

I’m sceptical.

Going to visit Savannah Georgia next month. Anyone have any suggestions for things to do/see?

[Ben Kesslen at Quartz] "Waffle House, the iconic American restaurant chain with over 1,600 locations known for cooking up Southern breakfast food, has developed an advanced storm center FEMA consults with." Stores in the path of Milton were closed in advanc...

[Chris Person at Aftermath] "Over the years, forums did not really get smaller, so much as the rest of the internet just got bigger. Reddit, Discord and Facebook groups have filled a lot of that space, but there is just certain information that requires the ...

Thanks for all the good wishes re the 30th anniversary of the start of blogging here. It's not the same as it was at the beginning, but it's still pretty good. And to all the friends no longer with us, and there are plenty of them -- you are appreciated, respected and missed.

Summary of my posts about New Orleans in December 2005.

December 2005: Biloxi/Gulfport after Katrina.

After Katrina I went to New Orleans to see what was left, esp in the areas where there was a 15-25 foot storm surge in coastal Mississippi. If you went inland from the coast for a few miles there was nothing left. No trees, only a few skeletal all-concrete buildings where the beach used to be, otherwise everything destroyed. What you don't necessarily realize that it isn't just 15 feet of water, it's 15 feet of stormy ocean with cars and building debris being pushed around floating in the water. This video on Threads provides a visual illustration of what a 9 foot surge is like.

Wednesday session

I have put a lot of thought into deliberately shifting¹ metaphors², often in the context of the #indieweb³. One goal is to replace use of violent or divisive metaphors with actively constructive, cooperative, or joyful alternatives, like:* gardening/farming e.g. digital garde...

It will always be valuable to know a programming language inside and out, but AI is erasing old headaches of context switching between platforms. Code in your favorite language, have AI port it to another language, review and tweak the results. In the future, we may develop largely in pseudo code.