FeedCity

Mastodon will experiment with donation banners:

The initial campaign will appear via a banner to people that use our Android and iOS apps, if they are signed-in to an account on one of our instances, and only if their account has existed for four weeks or more. The banner will be easy to dismiss, of course, and we will not continually prompt users to donate.

Patron supporters have declined over the last couple of years, so they’ve had to rely on larger donations. Makes sense to rebalance to lots of smaller donations.

Meanwhile, sticking to paid subscriptions for Micro.blog. It’s more stable.

Back in 2016 I was using Twitter far more than I used this website, to my own detriment. Today while talking about politics, centrism, and Republicans with Thomas I thought of an old tweet of mine from 2016, which was a citation of a quote from Ronald Reagan: Civil Rights Concerning the President’s Views on...

I hate to add to the noise and news overload, but this article by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic is a good summary of Trump’s crazy rants over the weekend, posting dozens of times in just one day:

Rage, paranoia, pettiness, and desolating selfishness: Trump appears consumed more and more by an online world that offers him the chance to live out the fantasy of the unilateral power and adulation that he craves.

He’s obviously unwell. Eventually he’ll be gone and we can start to pick up the pieces left by failed, vengeful administration. 🇺🇸

Losing my mind again debugging HTTP signatures. So easy to have flakiness between implementations.

Hannah runs through the details of making a grid-aware website:

The design adjusts between “low”, “moderate”, and “high” based on the quantity of fossil fuels on your local energy grid.

I like this idea, but I really think it needs to be on by default, rather than being opt-in.

And I’m really intrigued by the idea of a grid-aware browser!

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A fantastic explanation of the building blocks of SVG, illustrated—as always—with Josh’s interactive examples.

adactio.com/links/22040

Today I’ve been playing with a page with my web toys. It’s pushing me to consider what other toys I might build, too. Particularly ones which allow people to play and create. Here’s my new Toys page.

Excellent discussion on the latest ATP about Cloudflare. Very much in line with my thoughts from earlier this month.

I hate it when journos say the Dems are in trouble, or hopeless or whatever, it shows how poisoned their point of view is.

When people are fed up with Trump, if that should happen, then whatever the Democratic Party is meant to become it will become exactly that at that moment.

The voters are where your attention should be, and think of them as people not as numbers.

That's my best advice for a Tuesday.

I think I figured out why the AI companies want to do web browsers. It’s so that they can create an application development platform for people who want to write apps that run inside a new environment where the OS is a LLM. Lots of interesting possibilities. Imagine how the OS API might work. You could restructure a database by explaining in English how you want it restructured. In the freaking code. Could we bury Algol-like languages the same way we buried assembly and machine languages? Do we have the courage to imagine such things?

Once again I’m alternating between reading three different books and can’t seem to make progress in any of them. Going to prioritize finishing Isles of the Emberdark since I’m starting to see video reviews pop up online. 📚

Walking around and noticing all the crepe myrtles today.

«Ceux qui peuvent vous faire croire à des absurdités, peuvent vous faire commettre des atrocités». Voltaire, 1765 “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

Following on from my earlier link about AI etiquette, what Trys experienced here is utterly deflating:

I spent a couple of hours working through my notes and writing up a review before sending it to my manager, awaiting their equivalent review for me.

However, the review I received back was, quite simply, quintessential AI slop.

When slopagandists talk about “AI” boosting productivity, this is the kind of shite they’re talking about.

adactio.com/links/22039

"You're an important caller," the machine lied as if it were human.

Lies do the most damage when there’s also a tiny bit of something real in them. Like 5% truth, 95% bullshit. It gives those spreading misinformation something to hold on to justify their actions. Maybe fanaticism is when we can no longer see anything except the 5%.

Didn’t notice until today that Kagi has a translation service. Simple, works well. This’ll be my new default instead of Google.

New WordLand release, v0.5.24, fixes a problem in previous release that kept the Markdown icon from appearing in some user's icon bars.