FeedCity

"Artificial-intelligence startup Perplexity offered to purchase Google’s Chrome browser for $34.5 billion as it works to challenge the tech giant’s web-search dominance."

Hey, I can’t be a terrifying symbol of doom, darkness, and despair 365 days a year, you know?

This week's CSA

Long-time users of Micro.blog won’t believe this… We are rolling out 24-hour time and more localized date formats today, many years after it was first requested. Visit the Micro.blog timeline on the web and it should detect your settings, then start applying them everywhere.

The first thing I would write in my notebook at the start of a class in school was the date, followed by a title. The date was among the only text that would occupy the margin. Dates helped me find information. Memories of writing dates in notebooks came to me this week when...

Nice reminder from @jim that Micro.blog t-shirts are available on Cotton Bureau. I think these look really good.

Working on a fix to the latest Micro.blog crashing on Sequoia. This is what I get for developing with the latest macOS beta… Apple changed something.

We shouldn’t rely on colour alone to indicate that something is interactive. Take links, for example. Sure, you can give them a different colour to the surrounding text, but you shouldn’t stop there. Make sure there’s something else that distinguishes them. You could make t...

If you're trying to read any of my code via GitHub, make sure to open source.opml in Drummer, there are a lot of notes that don't make it through to the .js and .css files. I don't think I've ever said that on the blog before. I write my code in an outliner, and take advanta...

The future very much includes WordPress. It'll be as central a service as Mastodon or Bluesky.

It is done. Done like the past. Tomorrow is here!

I always like reading Cal Newport’s essays. In his latest for The New Yorker, he pulls us back a little from the AI scaling hype.

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.