FeedCity

FediForum has regrouped and is coming back, June 5-7. I might be traveling those days but I’ll be joining as internet connectivity allows. They’ve also got an impressive new advisory board.

Raining at Lazarus. ☕️

Preamble In Summer 2014 I installed it and started playing Clash of Clans. To keep in touch with my godson, which kind of worked. In January 2024 I quit. At the time I said: I stopped playing regularly a few months ago. I look periodically but I’ve lost the habit. Probably I’ve replaced it with...

A wild story in Rolling Stone: People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies. I use ChatGPT throughout the day and it’s hard to imagine it going off the rails this badly: …anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supe...

Manton says he runs his posts through ChatGPT before publishing.

I do it the other way, I use it for background info on the things I'm writing about as I write, more and more. I used to use Wikipedia that way. I would love to include links to some of my conversations, but I find their shared links are unreliable, I keep hearing from people who couldn't read them.

Here's an experiment, two such backgrounders I had Claude.ai write for me for a pice I was writing (not published).

Claude.ai on the future of Chrome re antitrust case Google lost.

Claude.ai on claims Bluesky makes about being billionaire-proof.

I wonder if people can read those.

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I increasingly throw my blog post drafts into ChatGPT as a check for major problems. When it comes back with nitpicky changes that I have to admit would make my writing better, I sort of get defensive. “Hey, leave me alone, it’s my writing! Who asked you?” 🤪

Mike Rockwell with more thoughts on the Epic v. Apple ruling:

If they want to have more control over the situation, they should just let us install apps from elsewhere. Even if it’s disabled by default and annoying to enable like it is on the Mac. At least then they’d have something to point to when the government comes knocking.

Yep. I’ve been saying this for 14 years now. The end is almost in sight.

Also: Dan Moren tests the new “Get Book” button in the Kindle app.

Seeing and listening to the wind blowing though the fields, creating “waves”, is easily one of my favorite things to experience. It’s always so peaceful and relaxing.

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Seth Godin blogging about how it used to be only a relatively few people who could publish music and make movies, and now everyone can. Which leads to:

The number of people writing software tools and games is on the very same curve. We’re going to go from hundreds of software companies to millions, in just a few years.

I wonder how this will affect competition for current software companies. Possibly not much, because there are always a thousand ideas that no one currently has time to build.

Great segment about Epic v. Apple on the latest Upgrade. In summary: the judge gave Apple a chance to allow competition with external payments and instead Apple concocted a scheme (27% fee, scare sheets) to make it impossible to use, so now Apple has forfeited all control over external payments.

Three questions came up in overnight posts re WordLand. Where did the Bookmarks menu go? It's mentioned in the docs under Feature List, but the feature doesn't appear to be in the product. It is there, you just have to go to the Settings page to turn it on. It's in the Syst...

Crashed to bed early last night after the 3rd quarter of Nuggets / Thunder, just watched the final couple minutes. Wow. Nuggets stole that one, down 7 when I started watching again. Thunder with strange fouling late only helped the Nuggets. 🏀

Sometimes I wake up thinking of the old friends who passed away long before their time. People who I knew when I was much younger and lost touch with over the years and decades. Life is short and precious.

Gregg Popovich addresses the media after officially stepping down, with Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili standing with him. There will never be another coach like him. Go Spurs Go. 🏀

OpenAI is keeping the non-profit, transitioning the for-profit side to a public benefit corporation (PBC). Sam Altman writing on the OpenAI site: We want to be able to operate and get resources in such a way that we can make our services broadly available to all of humanity...

Looking forward to reading through Evan Prodromou’s story on the Protocol Oral History Project. The whole site looks great. There are probably lots of bits of history that aren’t well-documented elsewhere.

4o hallucinated for me today and it struck me that I haven’t seen ChatGPT make anything up in weeks, even though new models are supposed to be worse. Must be because most of my queries now use o3 or o4-mini with web search. If AI can do a web search, it seems to drastically improve the results.

Good timing, it started pouring rain a few minutes after I got home. Listening to the rain now as I settle back into work. 🌧️