FeedCity

Continuing to feel better today, so pushed out an email newsletter improvement for Micro.blog Premium folks. I had mostly coded this a couple days ago, was waiting to make sure I could be around to test and monitor it.

When I watch Local Hero, I am reminded of how much I love home. Indeed, the movie is a story of someone falling in love with Scotland. The beaches may be cold, but they are beautiful. The skies may be dull, but you can sometimes see the Northern Lights. The phone service in t...

After Arc's pivot to AI left power users behind, I found the browser I actually wanted.

I had an idea that Global Voices, at least in concept, could help us prepare in the US for what's coming. I wrote: I'd love to have is an idea-sharing network where i could drop this idea in a box named "helping the US stay free" and have it find it's way to the right people in Ukraine who are saying "if only I could talk to people in the US trying to figure this out, we know so much about this!" That's the thing. How to connect know-how with the place that needs to know. To make our resistance more effective use the lessons learned in Ukraine over the last decades.

The purpose of the National Guard occupation of American cities is to control who votes. It doesn’t take much disruption to turn a blue district red. They just allocated $170 billion to fund ICE. They don't need all that money for border enforcement. It's meant to fund the transformation of the US into a Russian-style oligarchy. That's fear-inducing, but Ukraine has been fighting against becoming a Russian-style oligarchy for decades, with ups and downs, but so far, considerable success.

I've been building around WordPress to create a social network based on RSS. I want to get out of being controlled by billionaire-owned sites. I have a feeling we may need a good backup given where we are now.

Monday session

If I were to photocopy this article, nobody would argue that my photocopier wrote it and therefore can think. But add enough convolutedness to the process, and it looks a lot like maybe it did and can.

In reality, all we’ve created is a bot which is almost perfect at mimicking human-like natural language use, and the rest is people just projecting other human qualities on to it. Quite simply, “LLMs are doing reasoning” is the “look, my dog is smiling” of technology. In exactly the same way that dogs don’t convey their emotions via human-like facial expressions, there’s no reason to believe that even if computer could think, it’d perfectly mirror what looks like human reasoning.

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Over the weekend, Automattic/Beeper had the pleasure of hosting and sponsoring the Build the Future MCP Hackathon in New York City organized by Adam Anzuoni, alongside Anthropic, Stainless, WorkOS, Smithery, and MongoDB. As someone deeply passionate about open-source technology and the potential of AI, I was thrilled to not only support this event but also … Continue reading MCP NYC Hackathon →

Does my hair look all right, maaan? I like to look good when I fly my freak flag, you know?

Spent most of the day resting, listening to the audiobook for The Grace of Kings, and trying to avoid working. My body was exhausted and Covid was the non-negotiable reminder to slow down. Feeling better. 😷

Liquid Glass has (deservedly) received plenty of criticism. But there are some areas that are clearly better, like these buttons in iOS alerts.

MSNBC → MS NOW. In fairness to the designers, any new logo is going to be worse than the peacock.

During the first Trump term, I thought MSNBC’s coverage was great. But this year they’ve seemed unmoored. I’ve mostly stopped watching. This rebrand was a chance for something new and they blew it.

I want to switch cell providers, so I used ChatGPT to figure out that Consumer Cellular is the best choice for me. I finally get around to filling in the form, and it complains about my zip code. "No service." Yes I know, there's no cell coverage where I live. I still need a freaking cell phone. Called them, the sales person says maybe it's a problem with your computer. Geez Louise. It's a problem with your computer. How many years have they had to fix this stupid bug. I could see if I was buying a landline. But this is a mobile device. That means it moves. To places with cell coverage.

"The 19th developed seven key initiatives to guide our priorities for the next three years." Doing this work in public is such a smart move.

In "Mashups", I explored the question "what is the blog equivalent of a mashup?" The post itself was a mashup of several other posts chosen to complement the ideas I was thinking about. (What better way to figure something out than to try it?) The topic of mashup pertains to ...

What if you made a social network out of RSS? Then your blogroll would be the list of people you follow. Their updates would show up in a reverse chronologic list of posts that would look like something from Bluesky or Twitter. You could view a list of the people you follow, and expand each person to see their most recent five posts, summarized, with a link to each to read the whole thing. Since there are no limits to the length of a post in RSS there would be no limit to the length of one of these posts.

I've been watching The Dropout on Hulu. It's hard to watch at times, because the main character of the show, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, is such a horrible person. She lies to everyone about everything, but she's cute and the VCs like her, so they pump hundreds of million...

Did a live server migration over the weekend, switching over DNS like…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gU35Tgtlmg