FeedCity

Finished reading: The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future by Keach Hagey. Listened to the last part as I was wandering around Lake Merritt in Oakland today. Some great details in this book, and perfect leading up to WWDC. 📚

The local newspaper covered our recent type-in at Vroman’s Bookstore.  I hear that we made the cover of the monthly print edition.

Wrote a few words about the upcoming end of Glitch project hosting and missed opportunities. Then wrote way more words about a few specific personal projects that got their start there.

https://martymcgui.re/2025/06/07/glitched-out/

Marty McGuire:

Days before WWDC, where Apple us rumored to open up their models to developers, I must be the only one hitting my head against the wall trying to get image analysis to work with an embedded Gemma 3 model inside my Mac app. I started down this path a month ago, keep chipping away at it, keep failing.

I ended up having to completely skip FediForum. With travel and coding, just too much going on. I’ve also retreated from the fediverse for a bit, so I can focus on my blog and the Micro.blog community. Hope there will be some blog post write-ups of the conference sessions I can read later.

Really enjoying everyone’s photos for this month’s Micro.blog photoblogging challenge. Thanks for sharing! I’ll post the next week of prompts later today. Any word suggestions?

Rest in peace, Bill Atkinson. From John Gruber:

One of the great heroes in not just Apple history, but computer history. If you want to cheer yourself up, go to Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore.org site and (re-)read all the entries about Atkinson. Here’s just one, with Steve Jobs inspiring Atkinson to invent the roundrect.

I was actually thinking of old QuickDraw a week ago while I was mowing the yard. No joke, my mind wandered into realizing that the most efficient mowing path is a roundrect.

I'm looking for bloggers who cover the community around the FediForum conference. I want to add them to my blogroll, which does a pretty good job of keeping me current with developments.

I was moved by this Scientific American piece on mathematicians studying the limits of ChatGPT-like systems doing mathematics and basically not finding any. Mathematical proofs creative things, not algorithmic. That has not been my experience with ChatGPT and creating software. I find that when I want to talk about software I'm working on, it understands what I'm saying, but I've never had it come up with an original idea on its own. A human who captivated my attention as it does, and who I spent as much time with as I do with ChatGPT would have stimulated some original ideas by now. If I talk with a friend for even a few minutes there will be at least one aha moment.

The other day as I was sitting on my meditation cushion after finishing my session, I started thinking about my non-negotiables: things I do that are—or at least should be—part of every day of my life that I am not willing to compromise on. It goes without saying that the o...

Glitch.com was, according to their homepage: […] the friendly place where everyone builds the web. Start a new blog, play with React, or build new worlds with WebXR. Others have said a lot more than I could about the history of Glitch. I’m here to deliver a eulog- Well, uh...

Progress update on the AV cart

Stuff I've written about Julia Child. Came up in a conversation about Jerry Garcia and bloggers before there was blogging.

Glitch.com was, according to their homepage: […] the friendly place where everyone builds the web. Start a new blog, play with React, or build new worlds with WebXR. Others have said a lot more than I could about the history of Glitch. I’m here to deliver a eulog- Well, uh...

Why I want a new feed validator. I am doing new things with feeds. If I do a validator, it will tell you if a feed will work with what I'm doing. I want to boot up a new layer, build on RSS, the way that not all TCP messages are HTTP (analogously), and not all XML is RSS. The differences will be minimal, and backward compatible. Scripting News will work very well with it, so there will be a solid example out there to crib from.

The last three trad sessions I played in were in three different countries—Sunday in Cork, Tuesday in Brighton, Wednesday in Amsterdam—lovely tunes each time!

💜