FeedCity

Model train at the Casey Jones Home & Railroad Museum. I visited the museum today, nearly perfectly timed. Tomorrow is the 125th anniversary of Casey’s death. Seeing the sign for the museum on the drive east last week, went down a deep rabbit hole of Dumbo, Disney, and Casey Jones history. 🚂

The New Yorker: The End of Children. This essay was from earlier in the year. There are some stories in it that are a little stunning to me. I knew about South Korea already, but I did not know that the average number of children in the United States had dropped recently. Not yet a crisis, maybe.

Fact-checking is a ChatGPT use-case for reporters. Feed a draft of your story into ChatGPT and ask if it spots any factual errors. There may be some false positives, so you can ask another AI chatbot, or investigate yourself elsewhere. And it may miss some. But it couldn't hurt and it might save your ass.

Remedy Coffee in Knoxville.

Upgrading another server today! Also a few little code optimizations.

New podcast: Building a billionaire's network.

This started out as an open podcast to my friend Jeff Jarvis. But it soon became a story about how in a few months we're going to be writing about how we gave up control of our last social network to the government. We could have made it decentralized, so users couldn't be ...

RSS defines a network of services and readers. Each one can go down, but the whole network stays up. That's all that Bluesky has promised, and that's why a layer of RSS on top of Bluesky would deliver a huge portion of the stability it would need to survive a disaster. It could be done in a matter of weeks, if they decided to do it. I would help.

Bluesky was down this morning. Usually I don't criticize a service when it's down, because I can relate. We like to help each other when there are outages. But Bluesky is special, because they claim to be decentralized. If it were, it wouldn't go down unless the internet its...

New howto: Editing subscription lists. I'm doing a project with a friend who hasn't used FeedLand. I want him to maintain a subscription list which will then be the source for a Bluesky account. Any time the OPML changes, of course, the channel adjusts, so they have full power to add and remove feeds. "Just enough FeedLand."

Technically, AI is a field of computer science that uses advanced methods of computing.

Socially, AI is a set of extractive tools used to concentrate power and wealth.

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Thoughtful analysis from Ben (as always).

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In exactly six weeks time, UX London is happening!

I am ridiculously excited about this year’s line-up—I can’t wait to see the talks and get hands-on in the workshops.

If you haven’t yet got your ticket, now is the time. There’s a flash sale this week: use the discount code FLASH20 to get a whopping 20% of any ticket. Do it before the end of Friday!

Whether you’re coming for all three days or choosing one focused day, you’re in for a treat.

• Day one on Tuesday, 10 June is discovery day.
• Day two on Wednesday, 11 June is design day.
• Day three on Thursday, 12 June is deliver day.

Head on over to the website to get all the details and then get your discounted ticket.

See you there!

Pigeon Forge, Tennessee is extremely strange. Should’ve done more research before stopping here. Feels like Vegas but more spread out and no gambling, I guess? Also the Great Smokey Mountains are nearby.

Monday session

In used to be that I avoided using Siri except in a few specific cases while driving: Read and respond to text messages. Map driving directions. Dictate a note. If I ventured outside these tasks, the experience was unreliable and frustrating. So I just haven’t bothered to ...

Listen to the contrarians. They’re sometimes wrong, but when they’re right, they’re right years before everyone else.

Dining al fresco (with Coco the cat for company).

Cory Doctorow coined a lovely word -- enshitified. In that spirit, I'd love to see a destodgified Harvard. See below.