FeedCity

I disagree with Ben Thompson’s update today that Apple might have a legal right to charge for their “intellectual property” by using external link payments. They already do charge developers with the developer program! The judge is saying you can’t take a cut for simple links. I think this’ll hold.

This is the 88th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino and her blog, designswarm.com To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will l...

In October, in the comments to my post Going To Concerts, my good friend Erin, recounting concerts we’ve been to, reminded me that “we saw Joe Jackson & Jill Sobule at SDSU Open Air” Amphitheater. That was on August 8, 1991. I read a quote from Michael Stipe when I was still young saying “lyrics...

My friend Krisztianna has recently shared a post: My Patreon is 18+, And Staying As Such. Go read it, it goes into the limits one is obliged to accept when we use services with corporate rules which end up hiding content, deleting content, or even banning users. It brought to mind two of Paul Watson’s...

By “polish” I don’t mean the design, necessarily. I mean all the little details that differentiate a good app from a great one. Extra things that busy or lazy developers (like me!) don’t always make time for. Here’s an example from this week. I’m experimenting with a new fea...

Two updated iOS apps this week: Micro.blog 3.4.6 and Epilogue 1.8.3. Android versions are lagging a little behind but hope to get those updated soon.

Old train bridge viewed from the Bill Clinton presidential library. It’s a pedestrian bridge now, but it lines up perfectly with the former Choctaw Route Station on the park grounds, even if the rails are long gone. 🚂

Rewrite of WebSockets functionality in the server side of WordLand.

Has anyone thought to give ChatGPT a Turing test? According to ChatGPT, yes.

Thursday session

[Andy Piper at Mastodon] It’s really exciting to see these new movements from Mastodon - not least because they’re very intentionally marching to their own rhythm. Mastodon wouldn’t be a good fit for being a standard tech company, and it won’t be one. “Mast...

One consistent bit of feedback on the new email format, which appears to be working for just about everyone, is that the text is too small. And while it is a rewrite, for a lot of people it looks exactly the same. That's because of differences in how email clients deal with HTML.

Jason Snell blogging about the new App Store linking judgement:

Not only did Apple attempt to find ways to circumvent the injunction, but it fatally hid their discussions from the judge. While Phil Schiller gets credit from Gonzalez Rogers for sitting through the trial and reading the final decision, the judge suggests that his colleagues at Apple did not. Most troubling is the behavior of Apple’s Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, who the judge says “outright lied under oath” multiple times.

Apple will not win on appeal. They flaunted their power instead of complying. This is settled.

[Adam Wierman and Shaolei Ren in IEEE Spectrum] An interesting finding on the energy use implicit in training and offering AI services. I do think some of these principles could apply to all of cloud computing - it’s out of sight and out of mind, but certain...

Fidel & Co. A little more time in Little Rock before hitting the road again. ☕️

Simon Willison on the continual misuse of the term vibe coding:

It means “generating code with AI without caring about the code that is produced”. See Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding for my previous writing on this subject. This is a hill I am willing to die on. I fear it will be the death of me.

Fighting the good fight. Words matter.

Good morning and welcome to May 2025.

It's nice to start with a simple almost-empty outline.

Archived the OPML for April in the usual place.

I turned yesterday's Baseline Playground into a GitHub repo. I never made one of these before and thought it was worth sharing, or just writing about. I'm struggling to find the most readable font, size, line-height. I'm looking at the screen where I do most of my online writ...

Phil Donahue interview with Bernie Sanders from 1981, then-mayor of Burlington, Vermont. He was a novelty then, an American politician who was a socialist. He was asked if capitalism was the normal way for humans to relate, he said no. I wonder if he still agrees, because I ...

Marc Andreessen doesn’t think AI will take his job. But venture capital is barely a real job. All money, all talk. 🤪 I would rather actually create something even with the risk that AI might obsolete part of what I do.