FeedCity

Acquired for a song and a dance on 2025-04-14; Seems to be in relatively solid shape; nothing huge out of place; need a full COA, but seems fully restorable; the case is a bit dirty and has a light smell, but should be cleanable; came with the original manual and warranty card stub. The dried … Continue reading

Bookshelves at Nexus Coffee & Creative in Little Rock. ☕️

Parked at The Root Cafe in Little Rock. Lunch and plotting a change to my route stops so I don’t drive directly into a storm and tornado watch. 🌪️

Here's a prototype of what a story page might look like on our baseline site for WordLand. I did this off on the side as input for the WordPress theme. I find it easier to work on style in a standalone page without much tech that can get in the way of fast iteration.

Last night at the hotel, in between basketball, I tuned into some of the Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella conversation at LlamaCon. At one point, Satya said “the web was born on Windows” and it struck me. Digging a little, apparently he has said this before. Hmm… What about NeXT?

I have little understanding for people using large language models to generate slop; words and images that nobody asked for. I have more understanding for people using large language models to generate code. Code isn’t the thing in the same way that words or images are; cod...

Scratch the skin of wild-eyed AI proponents, and a thick syrup oozes out, made up of the blendered remains of Roko’s Basilisk, barely sublimated Christian end-times thinking, and the mis-remembered plot of that one cool science-fiction story they read when they were twelve. This is the basis for the new order, just like the blockchain was a couple of years ago, and a dead-eyed, low-poly, pantsless rendering of Mark Zuckerberg was a couple of years before that.

“You’re going to be left behind” is only the latest version of “Have fun staying poor.” It’s got every ounce of the smug self-satisfaction that it shouldn’t need if the inevitability it promises were actually inevitable.

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Daniel Jalkut blogs about the Help Scout pricing changes. We use Help Scout for Micro.blog too and our costs will go up with this change. Like Daniel, I think the pricing is a mistake. I don’t like costs that are hard to predict.

I was hoping someone would write a post like this one from Andy Masley about AI energy and water use, via Simon Willison. From Andy’s post:

You can use ChatGPT as much as you like without worrying that you’re doing any harm to the planet. Worrying about your personal use of ChatGPT is wasted time that you could spend on the serious problems of climate change instead.

Models are also generally becoming more efficient and cheaper. We shouldn’t ignore the increase in demand for energy, though. It’s an opportunity to reevaluate nuclear and other clean sources of power.

City & State, morning in Memphis. Looks like there’s gonna be bad weather today heading west. ☕️

Dan Moren in his final article for Macworld:

Being a fan of Apple as a company means necessarily grappling with the reality of business itself. Apple is a moneymaking machine in a society built for and around moneymaking machines, and it is in some ways itself trapped in that system.

AI is really good for helping you if you’re bad at something, or at least below average. But it’s probably not the right tool if you’re great at something. So why would these CEOs be saying, almost all using the exact same phrasing, that everyone at their companies should be using these tools? Do the think their employees are all bad at their jobs?

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We're working on the "baseline" theme for WordLand, the default -- the one that shows the user's writing in a WordPress context. I did a survey of news sites and blogs to see how they show their titles: Gothamist puts the name in the upper left corner, leaving room for som...

The point of AI isn’t to make workers more productive, it’s to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses.

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Happy anniversary to “the patent that never was”:

https://cds.cern.ch/record/1164399/

Thanks, CERN!

Writing this one at the last second because I couldn’t let Jamie down. And the topic is quite fitting in a fun way. I started the year with the secret goal of posting on this blog daily. And I managed to do that in January only to discover that posting daily isn’t fun and wa...

An unofficial guide to the HTML cite element

[Joint Subreddit statement posted on r/AskHistorians] 30 or so Reddit communities have joined together to make a joint statement in defense of US research. This comes from people with real expertise: in addition to the depth of research talent involved in th...

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. 🚂