FeedCity

If the US were a company, what would its market capitalization be?

If you’re getting bummed about the news, remember tonight there’s another new episode of Severance to kvell about.

Re-did the social media links at the bottom of each story page. Screen shot. Used to be just RSS and Linkedin. I got rid of Linkedin because I never use it. Added Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads. Debated whether to remove Twitter, but it is still a way to follow my posts, the ones that go out through the linkblog. A lot of people still use Twitter. Had to include the latest version of Font-Awesome, but since my story pages don't otherwise use FA, I figured nothing could break. Haha. ;-)

[Jennifer Gerson at The 19th] Musk has been seen with his child, X Æ A-Xii (or "Lil X" for short), at press conferences. But, as Jennifer Gerson notes here, it's not just a photo op. "Musk, a father of 12, is an avowed pronatalist, or someone who believes de...

The power of prototyping:

Most of my work is a set of disposables rather than deliverables, and I celebrate this.

I like the three questions that Chris asks himself:

1. What’s the quickest, cheapest thing I can create to help make the next design decision?
2. What can I create to best demonstrate the essence of the concept?
3. How can I most effectively share the thinking behind the design with decision-makers?

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Strong Deb Chachra vibes in this ongoing series by Charles C. Mann:

he great European cathedrals were built over generations by thousands of people and sustained entire communities. Similarly, the electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-distribution network, and the public-health system took the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. They are high among the great accomplishments of our civilization. But they don’t inspire bestselling novels or blockbuster films. No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery. Like almost everyone else, they rarely note the existence of the systems around them, let alone understand how they work.

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It took me a while to decide to add official support for blog post summaries, but now that I’m committed I’m finding all sorts of little things that should make things better for long-form posts. Hugo already has nice support with .summary, just need to finish a new editing UI and timeline tweaks.

“You didn’t just come up with a cool hash table,” he remembers telling Krapivin. “You’ve actually completely wiped out a 40-year-old conjecture!” There’s a delightful article on an undergraduate discovering an optimization in a very basic computer science principle.

We added ActivityPub support to Micro.blog in 2018. In the years since, we’ve improved it a lot. And we’ve seen how people actually use it. Mastodon and other popular fediverse software have had a huge impact on the open web. There is a lot to like. By focusing on tens of th...

Playing with Kagi again. The first result on my blog when searching the web for just “manton” is this post I wrote back in 2013 about the multiplane camera and iOS 7. Miss the days when I wrote posts like that.

Jason Snell writing at Macworld about Apple’s AI missteps being more about rushed UI design than even the technical underpinnings:

It’s clear that when Apple began its crash program to add Apple Intelligence to its operating systems, the goal was not to solve user problems but to insert AI features anywhere it could. This is the antithesis of Apple’s usual philosophy of solving problems rather than adopting the latest technology, and it has burned the company in some high-profile ways.

AI has the same problem that I saw ten year ago at IBM. And remember that IBM has been at this AI game for a very long time. Much longer than OpenAI or any of the new kids on the block. All of the shit we’re seeing today? Anyone who worked on or near Watson saw or experienced the same problems long ago.

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Micro.blog is getting clobbered today with thousands of dumb requests for phpinfo and .env. Hello hackers, this does not work! Sigh.

There are several principles that led to Micro.blog, but everything is built on the premise that if social networks are based on blogs it will encourage more people to blog, some people even writing longer posts, and so the web will be better. Social is a roller coaster today but this fact remains.

Trust is built by consistently doing the same thing, hopefully the right thing, over years. There’s no shortcut. And to destroy trust requires either that same kind of repetition, in the opposite direction, or for people to have missed everything that came before. Misinforma...

Excited to see a new iOS app for Micro.blog released: Micro Social. From developer Greg Morris:

Micro.blog is an incredible platform, but I wanted a cleaner, more intuitive way to engage with my timeline, conversations, and the things I care about most—books, photos, and blogging.

I've had an experience few people have had, and it's relevant to the way all of us feel right now. The experience: Being part of a Silicon Valley company that was acquired by another Silicon Valley company. I was the CEO. It's not a very comfortable place. I recognize the f...

That loud groaning noise you can hear is the sound of a 1000 employees at Williams Racing being told they’ve now got to use Jira.

Reading The Heart In Winter by Kevin Barry.

Heydon’s latest video is particularly good:

All of my videos are black and white, but especially this one.

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