FeedCity

John Gruber blogging about the Perplexity stunt to buy Chrome:

I think what’s happening is that the LLM chatbot field is maturing (exemplified by OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT 5 last week), and Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas is getting increasingly desperate.

Unless Apple does somehow acquire Perplexity, I doubt Perplexity is going to succeed in the long run. Some people think the AI bubble will pop, bringing down all of these companies. But OpenAI and Anthropic are here to stay. The thing about bubbles… Webvan didn’t make it out of the dot-com bubble, but we all order groceries online now.

You're going to think this is crazy, but maybe we should do what the hippie kids did in the 60s and 70s, giving flowers to the new cops in DC. Start off saying we don't blame you, we'll give you the benefit of the doubt, let's all be Americans and remember what that means.

Paul Boutin who I know from early Wired days offers some hope that it can be gotten to work, with a bit more guesswork, trial and error and head scratching. I probably will keep coming back to this until I break through. Or maybe hook up with another developer who can back into the websocket hose coming out of FeedLand. It's a natural thing to hook up to AI systems.

Elon Must complaining about Apple not featuring his apps. But as Stephen Hackett points out, if anything Apple should be demoting Grok even more:

Currently, the Grok app has a 12+ age rating. Given the sexual content that is so easily accessible through the chatbot, that sure seems low to me.

Really happy with this change we rolled out today for the Micro.blog Family subscription plan:

Micro.blog Family now allows you to transfer “ownership” of a blog to someone else in your family (or small team). So you can manage payment for up to 5 blogs, but another member can post to their own blog and control the blog’s settings.

Micro.blog News https://news.micro.blog/2025/08/12/microblog-family-now-allows-you.html

Under the “People” section, there’s a new “Make Owner” button for each member of the blog. This makes the Family plan more flexible for a variety of setups.

Cards theme now updated with support for the new category intro text we introduced in Micro.blog this week.

I just found out that Stephanie “Steve” Shirley passed away.

She was an absolute hero to me.

I had an hour to spare this morning so I decided for a third time to try to coax ChatGPT to play a role in a little drama I have in mind. I still want to use AI to power an RSS feed of news, customized to the interests of one person (me). My query is this: "Create a summary of the news, top 20 stories with an emphasis on these topics: how people are using AI, especially in education, blogging, US politics, science news, the NBA and MLB, with a slight emphasis on the Knicks and Mets. The results should be in JSON format, with each item including: A brief one sentence summary, publication date and a link to a source where the reader can get more info. My software will then create an RSS feed with this information.." The response was basically: "I'm sorry Dave." Groan. Here are the details.

When I woke up, the hills outside were mostly invisible through the fog. A thick haze – an autumn fog – enveloped the landscape. In these moments, my mind turns to what is immediately in front of me – the trees. The trees are starting to change colour, I thought to myself. Wi...

Installed the iOS 26 beta. Liquid Glass is much weirder and more bubbly on iOS than on macOS. Don’t feel too strongly about it except that old and new apps now feel like they are from different operating systems.

Flowers.

When the Internet Phone Book was released, it came up in several calls I was in. I had a copy of the book on the table next to me so that I could bring it out. Knowing that some people may not have seen the book – or heard of the project – showing the physical copy had signif...

At last week’s Homebrew Website Club, we had a discussion about making websites collaboratively. The discussion made me think back to the time when several participants all edited the same web page at the same time. The setup was an Etherpad – a web-based collaborative text d...

Interface design is intertwined with real-world metaphors. Computers save information to files. Files are stored in folders. We can open one or more windows to view different applications. We put files we no longer want into the rubbish bin (trash can). While looking for more...

Monday session

Maurice Parker blogs that his outliner Zavala will always be free. I also think there’s a good parallel in here to what people might do if they didn’t have to work as much. They would still do something! Creating or helping people will always be rewarding.

Reddit blocking the Internet Archive is another step back for the open web, but maybe not too surprising after they shut down API access last year.

…we’re limiting some of their access to Reddit data to protect redditors.

Protect users, or protect Reddit monetizing user data by selling it to AI companies?

Thanks @jim for the quick update to the mnml theme for Micro.blog, adding support for the category intro text feature. I’ve updated a couple more plug-ins (like Marfa and Alpine) and others will be updated later.