FeedCity

Software internally is mostly pipes connected to other pipes, each adding a specific quality to whatever passes through it. If you have nice standards for what you send through the pipes, you can do more of what you imagine. This is called orthogonality. Factoring is when you notice a repeating pattern, and give it a name, and a set of things you can do to it, those would be names of pipes. I have to ask ChatGPT what it thinks about this, but I am also asking my human friends. BTW I expect this seems so natural because our minds probably work that way too, internally, below our conscious awareness.

"The looming rapid expansion of federal surveillance may signal a step change on a trajectory set in motion after September 11, 2001, with broad implications for the rights and privacy of all Americans."

I’m considering some improvements to our Bluesky and AT Protocol implementation in Micro.blog. Currently we can cross-post blog posts to Bluesky, either manually or automatically whenever you post to your blog. You can also follow Bluesky users directly in Micro.blog. You ca...

Artemis, the calm web reader I maintain, has a few new features. Below is a summary. You can now use break mode, holiday mode, and night mode to pause your feed. Catch-up mode lets you review posts published in a specified number of days grouped by author. You can show up to...

Patrick Rhone:

There are many possible paths. Our path was our path paved with our opportunities and our choices. Your path is and always will be your path paved by your choices.

I refer to Artemis as a “calm web reader”. I have designed the software to avoid common triggers that cause people to periodically check a piece of software. There are no notifications. All post titles are on one page; there are no folders. There is a “read” state, but this s...

It’s the 2nd of July and this post is going to be about many random things. Over the weekend I was doing some work on this blog—a slightly updated version will go live at some point—and thinking where to put all the various bit of information about the different things I hav...

Joanna Stern’s latest video about AI energy use is informative and fun. Folks on either side of the AI debate will probably enjoy it.

More feedback on the design of Bluesky's API.

Negroni paired with a Royal HHE for tonight’s writing. 

Tuesday session

Maybe you’re a fantasy book fan and need some good news? Brandon Sanderson’s Isles of the Emberdark shipped to Kickstarter backers today, everyone else in about a week. I’m planning to start it tonight. I thought it was going to be a novella… Excited to see it’s a full novel. 📚

Just sad and deflated about the senate passing Trump’s bill. It’s going to hurt a lot of people, including many people who voted for Trump. Today was mostly inevitable after the election, but there are still some positive, more narrowly targeted things we can focus on, while we wait for 2026.

Amazon’s scale is mind-boggling to me. They now have a million robots for their fulfillment warehouses.

Bullshit. Lisa Murkowski goes on a press tour and sounds like she could be the one that breaks away from Trump in the Republican Senate. As with all of them, always, it was an act. She has a role to play, she's one of an agonizer. We have to stop believing these people. They've all been vetted thoroughly, they play their parts. They are amazing in terms of how organized and orchestrated their campaign is and how cold and heartless they are.

Another lovely day in Donegal!

Matthew Prince announcing a major new effort at Cloudflare to block AI crawlers: Cloudflare, along with a majority of the world’s leading publishers and AI companies, is changing the default to block AI crawlers unless they pay creators for their content. I’m concerned tha...

"Some schools have asked staff to use secure messaging systems like Signal instead of text and email to keep sensitive conversations from public reach." They, like many others, need more private, self-hosted software.

"Grammarly has signed a deal to acquire email efficiency tool Superhuman as part of the company's push to build an artificial intelligence-powered productivity suite." I did not see this coming.

Fascinating post from Allen Pike about spending $1000 as a trial with AI coding agents. I can’t justify nearly that much money. (See: bootstrapped, no investors.) But when working with CSS changes a few days ago, I dropped about $5 using Codex CLI. For me, in small bursts like that it’s worth it.