FeedCity

Whenever you have to get something done with a company, get ready for lots of phone tag, waiting on hold, talking to bots, getting screened, trying to convince a computer that you have legitimate business, and no, what you're looking for isn't on their website (believe me I looked). The stupid thing about it is that ChatGPT is becoming more like those things every day. Companies have built awful systems for getting anything done that might eat into their profits. Google is the absolute worst. Even for services that cost real money, they absolutely will not help. You better hope everything goes perfectly if you buy their service.

Tuesday session

I have this list of ideas, but would you believe I am insecure about not having enough ideas? I said to a friend recently. As soon as I said it, I realised how direct I had been about a persistent, deep anxiety I have had about coming up with ideas. Another part of my mind re...

Today I have been thinking about how wonderful links are. With a link, I can send a resource to someone that they can immediately open and read. I can share a blog post I wrote, a blog post I read that is relevant, a Wikipedia article, a news story, a collaborative document, ...

Having a website encourages me to document, and share, my ideas, especially in prose. Whereas some ideas exist as notes in my notepads, having the medium of a blog post available as a means of expression encourages me to develop some ideas. Through this process, I consider my...

Sam Altman posting about the release in a Twitter / X post: We believe in individual empowerment. Although we believe most people will want to use a convenient service like ChatGPT, people should be able to directly control and modify their own AI when they need to, and the...

Shipped a couple new things this morning: Micro.blog for iOS bug fixes, and a slight redesign to how the automatic accessibility description works when adding a photo on the web. Much smoother workflow.

Learned on Hard Fork’s interview with Matthew Prince that Cloudflare may take a 20-30% cut when creating their marketplace between websites and AI crawlers. This supports the concerns I raised in a blog post last month.

I’m almost certainly preaching to the choir here because I bet you’re reading these very words in a feed reader, but what Molly White has written here is too good not to share:

RSS offers readers and writers a path away from unreliable, manipulative, and hostile platforms and intermediaries. In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.

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Dave Rupert blogs about the difference between Alamo Drafthouse and all other movie theaters:

The best place to see movies in Austin is at the Alamo Drafthouse. If you’ve never been to an Alamo, I’m sorry. It’s a movie theater for people who love movies by people who love movies.

I think the last time we went to a non-Alamo was for Oppenheimer in IMAX. Great screen, great movie. Not a good theater experience.

When you vibe code, you are incurring tech debt as fast as the LLM can spit it out. Which is why vibe coding is perfect for prototypes and throwaway projects: It’s only legacy code if you have to maintain it!

The worst possible situation is to have a non-programmer vibe code a large project that they intend to maintain. This would be the equivalent of giving a credit card to a child without first explaining the concept of debt.

If you don’t understand the code, your only recourse is to ask AI to fix it for you, which is like paying off credit card debt with another credit card.

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• Building HTML pages is easy
• Pure HTML is evergreen
• Bloated web pages are too slow
• I can host it anywhere, often for free
• Accessibility and SEO benefits are automatic
• It won’t need security patches
• There are no build steps

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news.scripting.com is still going strong. Open to the public, no login.

When I am using Notion – a notes tool – on my phone, sometimes I accidentally press a button and my text ends up formatted in a way I did not expect. Notion offers an undo button, except I didn’t know it was there until recently. There is an icon tray of several buttons, bu...

For the last year or so, I have used my static create page to prepare posts for publishing on my blog. The tool generates a file that I can then add to the Git repository from which my site is generated. This workflow works well for posts that are mainly words, but falls shor...

1. Install Stuff Indiscriminately From npm
2. Pick a Framework Before You Know You Need One
3. Always, Always Require a Compilation Step

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SPAs were a clever solution to a temporary limitation. But that limitation no longer exists.

Use modern server rendering. Use actual pages. Animate with CSS. Preload with intent. Ship less JavaScript.

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Neat story about Patrick Schlott, an engineer who repurposed old pay phones for people to make calls where cell coverage is poor:

Schlott has taken old pay phones, modified them to make free calls, and set them up in three different towns across the county. He buys the phones secondhand from sites like eBay and Craigslist and restores them in his home workshop.

I’d love to hear more about the technical bits behind this.

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