FeedCity

Octavia Butlerian Jihad

Prompt: Draw me the cover of a fictitious magazine called RSS Land. On the cover a picture of a news room, and in small type along the right edge titles of stories. Make it interesting.

I turn off CNN when they start a segment on Jake Tapper’s book. The level of hypocrisy is intense. Who covered up what? Please. I remember Hillary's Emails. And weapons of mass destruction. And Trump may not be good for America but he's sure good for CBS. And on and on. They think we don't think. But their influence is getting close to nil. American news is one story at a time, debates between boring people saying the same bullshit over and over. Democrats who stumble over their words. An occasional glypse of Bernie or AOC. Something to get your bile up, and the next one and the one after that, but it doesn't work anymore. What Biden did or didn't do is no more relevant on CNN than it is on Fox.

Finished watching Andor. Loved it. Now watching Rogue One. As expected, flows perfectly together with the series.

MySQL, which I'm using for Daytona, has the idea of relevance in searches. Previously I had been showing results in reverse chronologic order. So now, a search for Matt Mullenweg gets the same results but prioritized by what MySQL thinks are the most relevant results.

Big update out for Tapestry today, adding bookmarking for Micro.blog accounts among other features.

This is a lengthy post from Ben Werdmuller, but everyone who cares about a sustainable, vibrant ecosystem of both free and commercial products for the social web should queue it up to read. He goes over different types of funding and a lot more. Really good.

Anil Dash on the growing popularity of MCP and adopting standards:

It’s cool that other platforms adopted the same spec that Anthropic made for their system. There’s a generosity of spirit to a technology platform choosing to be the second to adopt a protocol, if they do it in a faithful fashion.

This was echoed in the interview with Microsoft’s Kevin Scott this week. Some people at Microsoft would’ve designed MCP differently, but that doesn’t matter. Just roll with it, and the compatibility across platforms makes up for any shortcomings.

John Voorhees blogging about Apple’s AI predicament:

Hardware plays to Apple’s design and supply chain strengths. In contrast, the rapid iteration of AI models and apps is the antithesis of Apple’s annual OS cycle.

I agree. A year is a lifetime right now.

A pro-social approach to building better platforms

If the open social web is going to grow and thrive, people need to be able to build new platforms and services sustainably. But that’s not what the email I was reading was telling me. The message in my inbox captured a persistent and problematic idea in open tech circles. I...

I've been looking up all kinds of things now that my new Daytona search engine has access to my blogging going back to 1994. I just did a search for Mullenweg, and came up with this blog post by Matt in 2006 about the Feed Validator. The clarity is remarkable, and he's of course right. The people running the validator were actually promoting Atom over RSS, and were trying to tilt the table towards Atom. The goal was interop, not to give Google or IBM control of the syndication format of the open web. When you keep changing your mind about what to flag and what to pass you end up with a standard that's as murky as the tariff policy of the US in 2025. I think you have to assume that was the goal. They didn't like that RSS didn't fall apart when Atom came out. If there's no benefit in changing, people don't change.

An unofficial guide to the HTML caption element

How to understand Trump talking about tariffs. Remember how he talked about Covid. Same thing.

When I announced Chris Lydon's podcast in 2003, I called it a weblog for the ears. We didn't have the name podcasting yet.

Andrew Hickey whose podcast I support, also appears to be strongly against people using ChatGPT. I am a programmer, so you might think I'd see it the same way because what I do is similar to what musicians and prose writers do in that I create "intellectual property" which ...

[Kate Knibbs at WIRED] This is an insightful interview with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. The headline here overreaches quite a bit, and needlessly describes what Bluesky is doing in monopolistic terms; I left excited about what's next for the open social web, whi...

Some of the news out of Microsoft Build is what developers hope Apple will do: access to AI models in the cloud, on devices, or even from web apps inside Edge. There’s also MCP everywhere. I’m reading through NLWeb, created by RV Guha, whose semantic web work for decades seems a nice fit AI search.