FeedCity

For a minute I got really excited about this headline of a LoveFrom-designed electric bike from Rivian. But… a screen and it’s “bike-like”? I’ve been eyeing a new electric bike and always prefer something that looks like an actual, old-fashioned bike. No need to reinvent everything for this.

More jacaranda trees in bloom.

Reviewing my short post last night about the NYT vs. OpenAI data retention, maybe “wild” overreach was an unnecessary adjective. I also hadn’t seen OpenAI’s response:

As part of their baseless lawsuit, they’ve recently asked the court to force us to retain all user content indefinitely going forward, based on speculation that they might find something that supports their case.

There are very real fair-use questions for training, but I’m not sure they can be resolved by this lawsuit, and probably not without updating copyright law.

Joanne Jang who works at OpenAI has a blog post on human-AI relationships:

…many people say “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT not because they’re confused about how it works, but because being kind matters to them.

I read this last night and ever since I’ve been trying to figure out why I usually type to an AI chatbot with proper spelling and punctuation, even correcting my chat text when I make a typo. It doesn’t matter, the robots don’t care. But it’s almost like if I skip that step, if I’m careless, I’ve somehow compromised all of my writing.

I was an active software developer when the web came online in the early 90s. I knew what closed systems were like, and open systems. The web was open, and a miracle because of its radical simplicity. We were so lucky. We developed all kind of stuff that was only possible wh...

A new acronym for people of a certain age. "WWWCS" or What Would Walter Cronkite Say? Now answer that question about the back and forth between Musk and Trump. I think he would only be talking about the on-the-record public confessions we were hearing. We knew about the grift before, but we didn't have such clear evidence.

May 30 through June 6, 2025 Recent Events From events.indieweb.org/archive: Homebrew Website Club Europe/London Wednesday, June 4 at 7:00pm Front End Study Hall #029 Tuesday, June 3 at 6:00pm Online! Zoom! Front End Study Hall is an HTML + CSS focused group meeting, h...

A couple photos heading up the coast, from each side of the train. 🚂

Congrats to Brent Simmons on his retirement! This is an impressive list of apps to have been a part of. I’ve actively used all of them over the years, and a few I still do:

Along the way I worked on, among other apps, Userland Frontier, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, Glassboard, Vesper, OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, and Audible.

I did a little digging, looks like I first linked to Brent in 2002, not long after starting my blog. I met him later at WWDC, back when it felt like you could meet everyone, although which year escapes me.

I’m grateful that people stop by and read my posts. I think I’m really lucky. Thank you!I love writing here, but I’d love to know

While walking to Groundwork Coffee this morning in Los Angeles. A jacaranda tree, I think.

Maybe I’ve become a little bitter because a decade ago I was screaming about big centralized platforms and a return to indie microblogging, and now that everyone else is excited, my voice is still hoarse, and I have less to say. Onward.

This was an email I sent to one of the people I'm working with at Automattic, and realized I was actually writing a blog post. I was watching on the FediForum session yesterday, and heard all this stuff about Bluesky and Mastodon, but these are products that are poorly prep...

I am totally overwhelmed by the new capabilities of all the ChatGPT-likes out there. I can't imagine turning my whole workspace over to them, and I certainly couldn't do it to two. I think I might recognize some of the applications based on the scripting functionality we developed in apps on the Mac and Windows in the 90s. I might have one of the largest codebases written by one human that hasn't yet been touched by an AI. Maybe it could be some kind of artifact from ancient times? Like, last week?

📗 Want to read The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad ISBN: 9780593734636

Dave Winer blogs about what he’d say in a keynote about new web standards. Keep it simple and don’t reinvent the wheel:

Mastodon and Bluesky should support inbound and outbound RSS, and do it really well. Right now they do outbound only, and the implementations are incomplete at covering the functionality they have now, and there needs to be more

Inbound RSS means letting people’s accounts be configured so that their posts are automatically pulled from a location external to the platform. As far as I know, Micro.blog is the only platform that can do this.

A list of ten random country names

• Brazil
• Japan
• Kenya
• Norway
• Peru
• Thailand
• Morocco
• Chile
• Ireland
• Bangladesh