FeedCity

AI 2027 is a good read. Both endings seem wildly unrealistic, but as a warning it did make me think. So it worked. Just seems greatly accelerated beyond a few years from now.

If we can't bring him home, then we are not the country we claim.

The automated voice said: Hi there. This voicemail is from Comcast Xfinity. We’ve received no response, and your 50% discount on monthly is now being removed from the system. This change is permanent and cannot be reversed. Call the number on your caller ID immediately before your billing returns to full price. Thank you.. The...

Thinking about the Tesla Superchargers that have been torched recently… Anyone who uses violence or property destruction to further their cause is actually undermining it. We’ve gotta be better than that.

Protests like the marches a couple weeks ago are the model. Peaceful, legal, effective.

[Tony Stubblebine on The Medium Blog] In the midst of some challenging cultural times, Tony Stubblebine and Medium are doing the right thing: "Over the past several months, I’ve gotten questions from the Medium community asking if we’re planning to change ou...

In today’s world, it is becoming more and more important to be embodied in the place we live in. To experience the changing of the season, the rhythms of nature. To feel the experience of place to our last nerve. And what is more indicative of nature as it exists in a certain...

Harvard could use this moment to bring some really new ideas back into the university.

Ran a few tests with the new GPT-4.1 family of models. I think I’ll go 4o → 4.1 for photo keywords and accessibility text, but maybe not immediately. The old pricing and capabilities are still really good. Currently using a mix of 4o, 4o-mini, and 4o-transcribe.

Monday session

Over the weekend I got to ride in a Waymo for the first time, in Phoenix. See @cheesemaker’s perspective in this video. It’s a surprisingly smooth, nice ride. It drives as good or better than an average human driver. I was expecting to be nervous but after about 30 seconds it feels normal.

I don’t have any expectations for the FTC vs. Meta trial starting today. It seems wild and unlikely that Meta would ever have to spin out Instagram a decade after acquisition. Feels too late, too closely tied up in the Meta empire.

Diffused (sunrise).

New Mac app for Micro.blog is out today with a couple improvements, including a little interface for editing the auto-generated accessibility text for uploaded photos. Here’s a screenshot:

I do still use Tumblr. I see great stuff there sometimes. I rarely import things from there to here. But for this, I am making an exception. And for you nerds, remember that every public Tumblr blog has an RSS feed but also culture on Tumblr means usernames may change which means urls change. But...

[Sean Tilley] Sean has been integrating We Distribute with the fediverse for years. It's been hard - particularly at the beginning, which is the plight of the very early adopter. This rundown is incredibly useful for anyone who wants to integrate their own p...

There’s a pretty significant difference between good AI models and great ones. I sometimes think about how I could integrate local models directly into the Micro.blog apps, but I wouldn’t want it to be worse than using (for example) OpenAI. How many of my users really have a Mac with 24+ GB of RAM?

[Simon Willison] Prompt injection attacks have been one of the bugbears for AI: it's an unsolved problem that has meant that it can be quite dangerous to expose LLMs to direct user input, among other things. A lot of people have worked on the problem, but pr...

A long time ago, based on my experience at Berkman in the 00s, I proposed the idea of a Developing Better Developers function at a university, as a pilot, to create a teaching hospital atmosphere around creating new communication systems out the web and (key point) not compromising the openness of the web. It would be as sacred at academic freedom is in the university, or the First Amendment of the Constitution. It seemed to me that a university is the perfect place to create something like this. It just occurred to me that if we had such a setup, anywhere, at this time -- we would be working in earnest on an open alternative to twitter, one that is truly billionaire-proof right now, as opposed to "would be nice to have sometime in the future."

[Andy Bounds in the Financial Times] The last few months have radically changed the risk assessment for people traveling to the US from abroad - as well as Americans who plan to cross the US border. In this case, it's European Commission staff: "The Europea...