FeedCity

This is a picture of my dear departed Uncle Vava taken in the early 1970s in my parents' house in Flushing. It just showed up in my On This Day list on Facebook, thought it belongs on the blog too. .

I recorded a good podcast yesterday about how I develop new stuff like podcasting, and how it only works if there isn't a huge dominant platform vendor to FUD the project. That's why RSS worked, sort of -- we did get FUDded by the RDF folk, who had a few famous people on thei...

I wanted to put together a demo of a very simple but interesting Node.js app, so I hooked up with replit, and was surprised to find out that it's now an AI bot. But when I asked it to make a sandbox for this app, which is in a repo on GitHub, rather than take the direct route, and run the demo.js app (which is what I asked it to do), it concocted a pointless user interface, that hid all the interesting bits. This was a demo for programmers for crying out loud. I want to show them the machinery in motion. I'm going to try again today.

Feels important to mark today’s gift from Apple to Trump. Tim Cook continues to hurt his legacy, in almost an Elon Musk-like way, between the direction of the App Store and dealing with Trump. Just sad. He was the right person to lead Apple for a time. I still think peak Apple was a year or two ago.

Every time I take a Lyft from the San Francisco airport to downtown going up 101, I notice the billboards. The billboards on 101 are always such a good snapshot in time of the current peak of the Silicon Valley hype cycle. I've decided to capture photos of the billboards every time I am there, to see how this changes over time. 

Good post from A New Social about the difference between bridging and cross-posting. The illustrations really help too.

Perspective: I view WordPress as if it's my own product.

The plumber came to work on the final plumbing for the water room!

I added two new subscription lists to lists.opml.org and it's better organized and more concise.

A Brian Lehrer segment on specialized high schools in NYC. I went to one of them, signed up for the test mostly to get out of school for a day, and got in. Back in those days (the early 70s) no one studied for the test as far as I know. It has become very competitive and there's an issue of the racial makeup of the student body. As always Lehrer does a great podcast.

Not much time to blog today, might have a podcast later. In the meantime I did a search of Daytona for object database, a term that goes back to the early days and makes for an interesting browse, at least for me.

bookmarked Bridging vs cross-posting

Wednesday session

This is how I think about the UK’s Online Safety Act, and similar laws in Texas that introduce new rules for checking a website visitor’s age before showing adult content. Most people agree that it’s reasonable for someone working behind the counter at an old-fashioned adult...

Speaking of age-gating, I filled out Apple’s new age questionnaire for apps last week. Micro.blog’s apps are 16+. I think by design our platform is better protected than many in exposing harmful content, but to be safe for kids requires much more work with automated tools and a staff of curators.

Ghost 6.0 shipped this week with ActivityPub support, a major advancement for the popular blogging and email newsletter app. You can now follow Ghost blogs from the fediverse, bringing Ghost more in line with ActivityPub-based functionality in Micro.blog, WordPress, and Writ...

Japan, the EU, and the UK all now require Apple to support third-party browser engines. That's great news for the open web.

It was a war crime. And my relationship to it is complicated.

I was featured in Dense Discovery’s Worthy Five series, in which participants are invited to share five things that are worth seeing/doing/watching/asking, et cetera. Dense Discovery is among my favourite weekly newsletters. I recommend subscribing! When I write for other s...