FeedCity

Bill Gates writes about accelerating his plan to give away his wealth, winding down the Gates Foundation in 20 years:

People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that “he died rich” will not be one of them. There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people.

Funny how people change. In the 1990s, I was a teenager learning to program the Mac while complaining about Bill Gates and Microsoft. Now I admire Bill and complain about Apple.

Reading through Apple’s motion to pause the external purchase ruling. A quick comment on this part:

A federal court cannot force Apple to permanently give away free access to its products and services, including intellectual property.

No one said that. Developers have been paying $99/year for this privilege since the beginning of the App Store.

Apple lawyers can spin this however they want. It will always come back to this: it’s absurd to take a cut of developer revenue that is not processed by Apple just for adding a website link in an app.

Also, I applied the new Baseline theme to my daveverse site, the one I use to test stuff in WordLand, and occasionally write something with a bit of lasting value. As a result it got a new domain, daveverse.org. We're going to offer the Baseline theme for others to use after a bit more testing and refining. But it's getting close. It seems like it's the last big thing on the agenda, but something else will probably pop up. Praise Murphy.

Changes coming to Bookmarks in next WordLand release. I cut it back to work exactly like bookmarks in Drummer. I have to do a bit more work before it's ready to release, probably tomorrow.

Realized last night while listening to music on our record player, which is connected to our Amazon Echo as a speaker… We have a couple newer Echos, but this one is the original Echo from 10 years ago. It’s the oldest gadget in our house still in regular use.

I was unexpectedly caught up in the news about a new Pope. Reading a little about him and translated bits of the inaugural address — an American, speaking of love and peace, not division.

I asked ChatGPT to "Dress me like guilded age captain of industry in front of his mansion on the Hudson River."

I know I’m biased but I think the line-up for this year’s UX London is looking fantastic:

https://2025.uxlondon.com/speakers/

June 10th, 11th, and 12th—come for one day or come for all three!

John Voorhees blogging at MacStories:

Apple’s exploration of AI-based search is not terribly surprising either, but I do hope they cut a broader deal with Anthropic instead of Perplexity.

Should Apple acquire Anthropic? It would cost $60 billion, a ridiculous jump over the $3 billion they paid for Beats. Mix in some cash and some stock. It would set Apple up to be at the forefront of AI for the next 10 years. It sounds crazy… until the iPhone is disrupted by a new device.

Thanks to Kev Quirk for the kind words about migrating his Mastodon account to Micro.blog. Micro.blog is always a work in progress, and our fediverse support will continue to improve, but it’s gratifying to read that our approach is resonating with him: Thinking of it in th...

How I’d build a resilient, community-first platform for the open web.

Erin and I stood at the front of the room, our seven-minute pitch slides for Known still projected above us. At the wooden table in front of us, investors and media executives prepared to give us unfiltered feedback about what we’d just presented to them. Beyond them, an au...

It’s just over one month until UX London. You should grab a ticket if you haven’t already! The format of UX London is quite special. While the focus of each day is different—discovery, design, and delivery—each day unfolds like this… There are four talks in the morning. Yo...

New feature: How to handle an empty site list.

Two weeks on the road and then other distractions, this morning is the first day in a while that I’m back to my routine of walking to the coffee shop. Feels good. Ready to write some code. ☕️

Parker Ortolani makes a great point about potential lock-in for AI products that know a lot about you. Portability would be a good thing to work on early: Memory should be exportable and importable from every provider. We do not need a new kind of proprietary format or anyt...

I’ve been thinking about the kind of CSS I write by default when I start a new project. Some of it is habitual. I now use logical properties automatically. It took me a while to rewire my brain, but now seeing left or top in a style sheet looks wrong to me. When I mentione...

The Knicks are unbelievable. It feels like 2015, when the Mets would be down 9-0 in the seventh, and you'd tune in to see how they would win. At the very end of the Knicks game tonight, when the Celtics were up by 1, I thought how would this feel if the Knicks came back so f...

There's a new dialog in WordLand that confirms the first time you publish a post, and offers to open it in the web browser.