FeedCity

I like that Powell is telling Trump he won't go. I wish Obama had had the guts to say that to McConnell when he wouldn't hold hearings on Garland. "Well if you won't take a vote, we'll take that as consent," says the President. "And you can quote me on that." In a televised event Obama himself would walk Garland over to his office at the Supreme Court and administer the oath and let him take his seat. I don't know about you but I would have felt great about America then. We're finished being such pussycats.

Matt Mullenweg blogs about the WordPress 6.8 release, how WordPress might use AI in the future, and the experience of being deposed at the WP Engine trial:

I really appreciated the due process and decorum of the rule of law, and just like code, law has a million little quirks, global variables, loaded libraries, and esoteric terminology. But wow, after a full day of that, I’m mentally exhausted.

I like the way Tony Stubblebine is running Medium. On sticking with diversity, equity, and inclusion:

Medium was built by and is run by a diverse group of people. This diversity is a raise-the-bar strategy. As a CEO, I feel confident that embracing diversity as a strategy increases the business, cultural, and intellectual capabilities of our company.

Unfortunately the acronym DEI has been poisoned. I think it’s fine to abandon the letters, while keeping to the principles.

Some interesting data here in the MIT Technology Review about energy use for AI data centers:

Electricity demand is on the rise from a whole host of sources: Electric vehicles, air-conditioning, and appliances will each drive more electricity demand than data centers between now and the end of the decade. In total, data centers make up a little over 8% of electricity demand expected between now and 2030.

There is so much noise around AI that it’s increasingly difficult to tell what is misinformation or just outdated.

Matt’s beach thoughts are like a satisfying susurrus in my RSS reader.

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This piece echoes what I’ve been saying. Twitter was a fine start, in 2006, but today it’s clear a lot of its rules and limits were mistakes. 19 years later it’s ridiculous that Bluesky and Mastodon repeat those mistakes. I love the term he uses, the "shape" of Twitter. Each...

Dave Winer has more thoughts on the “Twitterlike is a bad shape” post:

Each decision we make in developing our means of discourse shapes the discourse. And with the character limit and the inability to edit, and the incentives are all wrong (I can tap into your follower flow without your permision just by posting a reply) and makes almost all discourse spam or abusive or both. I’m planning a different structure for discourse in the World of WordLand.

I’m not a Gmail user or Notion user, but gotta say the UI and interactions in Notion Mail look quite good. I’ve watched a few videos for inspiration.

This is a great post outlining many of the problems with Twitter-inspired social networks: Twitter and its imitators have adopted a structural design that is fundamentally bad for people. This isn’t just a matter of who’s in charge; it’s a problem with the thing itself. I’...

Watching debates on CNN it’s amazing how many arguments would be settled by saying “It’s nice you feel that way, but that’s not what the Constitution says.”

It’s an annoying cognitive task: detecting weird photo artifacts, bizarre movement in videos, impossible animals and body horror, and reading through reams of anodyne text to determine if the person who prompted the synthetic media machine cared enough to dedicate time and energy to the task of communicating to their audience.

I hate that this is the bleak future which venture capitalists and AI boosters have gleefully laid out for us, that they consider this to be a “democratizing” technology in any real sense of the word. Far from strengthening democracy, these are technologies more apt at propping up scam capitalism and multi-level marketing schemes. I would like my time and mental space back.

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WordPress 6.8 Cecil is out, and it’s a great release. It’s unbelievable that it’s already been downloaded over 6 million times as I write this. That feeling never gets old. It’s a funny time in WordPress because there are a lot of really interesting open questions: Some of these broad changes are mixed. At one … Continue reading 6.8 →

This is clever: putting CSS inside a noscript element to hide anything that requires JavaScript.

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Parker Ortolani blogging about whatever new device Jony Ive is working on and its potential as part of OpenAI:

OpenAI has been spitting out incredible new products at a ridiculously fast pace over the past several months and I do not see Sam Altman wasting anyone’s time. The fact that he wants to pull the project into OpenAI says as much. That suggests it might end up being close to a new kind of phone—perhaps familiar in shape, but powered by something so fundamentally different.

I realized I misspoke in today’s piece about Bluesky product strategy. In it, I said this:I’m generally not bullish about creator economy services.What I meant

WordLand is starting to flow really nicely, and I'm doing more writing there. I have to do this if it's going to be as good a product as it possibly can. The Timeline seems really solid btw, thinking about next steps. Lots of fun products coming soon!

Join a Parade Today. When people talk about What You Can Do on podcasts or on TV, they say lame things that don't work that well. One thing for sure is that when Bernie and Alexandria do a rally in your area, you can go and enjoy the energy. This is a good thing because it gives the TV cameras something to focus on. But here's what I think the best thing to do is. Don't start something, join something. Because two is way more powerful than one, and three is way more powerful than two. When people work together on something good, more people doing it is usually even better.

I’m following a few Bluesky custom feeds, but I hadn’t paid close attention to Graze until today. I wonder how users will react to seeing ads? It’s an interesting approach because the money here goes mostly to feed creators. Lots of new questions about who should monetize the network.