FeedCity

David Brooks in The Atlantic starts by echoing what I quoted of his last month, then moves on to history lesson and how we eventually rebuild after Trump. A long, good read:

Humility, prudence, and honesty are not just nice virtues to have—they are practical tools that produce good outcomes. When you replace them with greed, lust, hypocrisy, and dishonesty, terrible things happen.

And:

When the time comes to build a new paradigm, progressives talk about economic redistribution; conservatives talk about cultural and civic repair. History shows that you need both: Recovery from national crisis demands comprehensive reinvention at all levels of society.

Watched the first season of The Rehearsal and it blew my mind a little. Hilarious and insane. 📺

Rachel Maddow's show these days often begins with a hard-to-watch over-the-top endorsement of Bluesky. She shouldn't be doing that. It's a private company and someday she may criticize them as strongly as she did Facebook. I'd love to hear her explain exactly what's the difference between Bluesky and Facebook. A lot less than you might think.

There’s no reason RSS and social media have to be separate worlds. RSS is the easiest and fastest way to connect systems. When I see people endorse RSS over social sites I think we took a wrong turn somewhere because all these systems should be connected on the open web.

Great story about Bluesky and Jay Graber in The New Yorker. I love this bit:

Then, in December, 2019, she saw a tweet thread from Jack Dorsey about a decentralized social-media project he was launching—Bluesky. Graber told me that she felt a degree of so-called nominative determinism, pulled toward the project because it shared her name. “If fate doesn’t exist, then we must create it,” she said.

Happy 25th anniversy to A Dao Of Web Design by John Allsopp:

https://alistapart.com/article/dao/

Still relevant after all these years!

I don’t delete my blog posts… even when it would be easier for me if I did. For longer posts I might add a note at the end to correct something, but most of the time I let it stand, or hope that replies on the post are enough clarification. The blog as a whole is the work.

Went for a stroll around The Shire this afternoon.

[Zach Seward] I first met Zach Seward when he was running Quartz, the news startup with the quippy haiku notifications that had, at the time, captured a lot of the media world's attention. It was really good. This piece, by Zach, is written on the heels of t...

Of all the harm I was expecting from Trump’s second term, I did not expect a market crash this soon. We basically put everything we had into the house down payment when we moved this year. I’m sure there are people who had savings and investments ready for a similar move who are now facing disaster.

Ah, Shopify! Where would Breitbart be without you?

Now the CEO of Shopify demands that every developer there uses “AI” to enable swastika merchants to make even more moolah.

(Hi to my “friends” who work there!)

Tobias Lütke, in a memo to employees at Shopify, re-posted on Twitter / X: Using Al effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance. Frankly, I don’t think it’s feasible to opt out of lea...

Hillary Clinton makes a very important point. "Republicans in Congress can put a stop to this at any time." By this, she means the crashing US economy. And even if you believe they'll "never do it" -- it's still the right thing to repeat this over and over -- people should know they could. This should be repeated until enough people get it, this is being done on purpose by the Repubs. This isn't about winning elections, it's about understanding who's doing this to you and how deliberate it is.

[Lisa Rein, Hannah Natanson and Elizabeth Dwoskin at The Washington Post] More "efficiency" from DOGE: "Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accou...

[Eve Upton-Clark at Fast Company] I love this. Tumblr is so back: "Thanks to Gen Z, the site has found new life. As of 2025, Gen Z makes up 50% of Tumblr’s active monthly users and accounts for 60% of new sign-ups, according to data shared with Business Ins...

It's been over a year since the previous update. Last year was a difficult one here, but the site kept ticking over and I'm now getting back on top of things. As a result, here's the first new little feature for some time.

[Kate Conger in The New York Times] Here's one way Elon Musk is gaining from his involvement in the current administration: "The positioning of X as a powerful government mouthpiece has helped bolster the platform, even as the company continues to struggle."...

A question on GitHub: Is OPML the native file format for Drummer? It's better to first use the product or read the docs or search on web or use an AI chatbot before getting humans involved. Anyway, the answer is yes, OPML is the native file format of Drummer. It's the reason...

Welcome back, Jason!

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The Wikimedia Foundation, stewards of the finest projects on the web, have written about the hammering their servers are taking from the scraping bots that feed large language models. Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high-in...