FeedCity

Reading Salt Slow by Julia Armfield.

I’ve come to the conclusion that my current mental state is fucked up in all sorts of ways for a variety of different reasons. The thing that sucks the most about mental health is that it’s usually not something like a broken leg where you immediately notice something is wro...

Another fantastic essay by Dario Amodei, this time about “interpretability” and the need to better understand AI:

People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own AI creations work. They are right to be concerned: this lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology. For several years, we (both Anthropic and the field at large) have been trying to solve this problem, to create the analogue of a highly precise and accurate MRI that would fully reveal the inner workings of an AI model.

Train bridge at Falling Waters, West Virginia. On the other side of the river, the Confederates were stranded for days after Gettysburg.

I've got Crazy Fingers in my brain. Can't stop humming it.

Thursday session

So with threads.net switching to .com, I was a little worried about how this might impact the fediverse support. Thankfully looks like they’re sticking with .net for handles.

Roanoke River overlook, along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

I'm rebuilding my nightly email-sending code from the bottom up. Something I never properly understood is that most mail clients don't include your CSS files, so people were seeing the writing and images with no style. What an embarassment. As often is the case in 2025, I have ChatGPT to guide me through getting this right. The secret is inline styles. And there's no simple way to do the conversion, except element by element. Seems like an OS could do this for us somewhere along the line. Now I have to think about how to test it without trying to just switch it over, trying to avoid breaking everyone at once. But the nightly email might start looking a lot better for some real soon, and for others, only slight almost no noticeable difference.

We should demand that the new owner of Chrome must respect the open web as something it does not have the power to change. Google never got this and we're losing the archive function of the web because of this. Please read and pass on -- now -- we're in a unique position to fix this.

[Toby Buckle at LiberalCurrents] This resonates for me too. About the Tea Party, the direction the Republican Party took during the Obama administration, and then of Trump first riding down the escalator to announce his candidacy: "If you saw in any of this ...

There's a company that I have an account with because they're the only ones who provide the service I need, so I have to stay with them. They have made my telephone unusable, they call me all the time from varying phone numbers, wanting me to do things, or with a "courtesy r...

One of the nice things about WordLand is that titles are optional because some posts are too short and simple to require a title. In a sense they are their own title. We know the benefits well, having used Twitter for a long time. There's no reason this simple idea shouldn't work in RSS feeds and blogging, in fact RSS doesn't require titles for items. And there's no requirement in WordPress either. So we support them, with gusto. I want this network to do what Twitter does, and everything Twitter doesn't do that writers want. #writersweb

Interesting proposal similar to robots.txt but for LLMs. When AI is your parser, you can have a single file that is readable by both humans and machines:

The llms.txt file is unusual in that it uses Markdown to structure the information rather than a classic structured format such as XML. The reason for this is that we expect many of these files to be read by language models and agents.

Had the Switch 2 pre-order in my cart but kept changing my mind, gonna skip it until there’s a game I really want. Hopefully won’t be too hard to get later. 🕹️

I know there’s been a lot of frustration directed at me specifically. Some of it, I believe, is misplaced—but I also understand where it’s coming from. The passing of Pope Francis has deeply impacted me. While I still disagree with the Church on many issues, he was the Pope who broke the mold in so … Continue reading Reflecting →

Start with the dark imagery of the Ridley Scott commercial for Apple in 1984. A woman athlete is running toward a screen carrying a big hammer, getting ready to hurl it at a huge screen with Big Brother's head, lecturing a huge hall filled with lifeless people listening. He has dead eyes. The runner represents life and freedom. The overall image is dreary and lifeless but she is a bright light of hope for the future. Inspire me with this image. I want to be inspired.

Good morning from Oaxaca in Mexico. We are here with my sad and depressed programmer friend, back from his European tour of glee club train compartments, receptions and cheese races with Europeans named Gouda, happy and carefree while my programmer friend, pictured here, thinks about returning to the good old United Snakes of Americans. As he sits on the beach, admiring the sunrise over the Pacific Ocean, he considers taking a job at a local Burger King. He enjoys their hamburgers even if he is not enjoying life at the moment. His eyes are tearing up as he remembers the tragedy that befell him and others in the Great Gouda Race of Luxembourg.

Yesterday I wrote a piece that summed up Twitter as an entrepreneurial project. "It would have been better if the founders had made less money, and opened the door for lots of competition right from the start. That's the philosophy of the web. Instead they captured the web, ...