FeedCity

The emails did not go out last night, hopefully tonight's will go out. Also the subscribe system is down because it depends on being able to send email. My mail service provider shut us down after a bunch of spam went out. Good thing they did. And you didn't miss much because I spent the day adding a CAPTCHA to the subscribe page. Here's a link to the web archive for yesterday.

This is the 104th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Tom Critchlow and his blog, tomcritchlow.com To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your ...

Finished reading: The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu. Very different than most modern fantasy, in pace and character viewpoints. Loved it. Truly epic. 📚

We got a nice rain this afternoon, the perfect test for the new gutters. Still landscaping and drainage to do, but this was a much-needed house upgrade.

For some reason, there’s a new “suddenly trip and fall down” mechanic in Animal Crossing New Leaf tonight.

The albums page on @birming’s photo blog is really nicely done. I’m assuming this uses separate Micro.blog pages and photo collections. Very cool because it gives the illusion of a photo albums feature that doesn’t really exist in the platform!

The term superintelligence has been bugging me. AGI hasn’t been achieved yet and some folks are already jumping ahead to AI smarter than humans? I prefer the idea of AI as a team of the most knowledgeable people in the world, each an expert in their field, working together to solve problems for you.

I’m not concerned about Bluesky’s terms of service — although I’m glad other people are concerned and checking it! — but I do love this sentence that Cory Doctorow wrote:

This is so pro-enshittificatory, it’s like a landing strip for the sole use of Enshittification Airlines, which can land a 747 full of enshittfying nonsense on Bluesky’s users every 10 minutes, around the clock, without worrying about any legal repercussions.

Thursday session

Great post from Kuba Suder about how all the Bluesky and AT Protocol pieces fit together.

If you got spammed by subscribe.scripting.com today, my apologies.

There's now another step in subscribing that should prevent spammy emails from being sent.

And as a result of the spamming we're now being rate-limited by our email service provider, which is totally legit.

Hopefully at some point they will let us resume sending emails, at least in time for tonight's email.

When we were contemplating a Nazi takeover of the US govt did any of us consider that they would use the money of the federal government as a lever to get conformance from local governments and NGOs like Columbia and Harvard universities? I sure didn't and I never heard any of the pundits say it.

Fascinating post by Mustafa Suleyman on the risks of achieving “seemingly conscious” AI, and how we must design systems to help real people, avoiding the illusion of consciousness:

A coherent and persistent memory, combined with a subjective experience, will give rise to a claim that an AI has a sense of itself. Going further, such a system could easily be trained to recognize itself in an image or video if it has a visual appearance. It will feel like it understands others through understanding itself. Say this is a system you have had for some time. How would it feel to delete it?

Podcast: Bird fight on the pond.

My house has a view of a pond, which is endlessly interesting, year-round, through all seasons.

And we have all the seasons here in the Catskill Mountains.

Yesterday, I spied a large bird in the pond, so I grabbed my binoculars, and I'll tell the rest of the story in the podcast, don't want to spoil the surprise! :-)

I’m probably more comfortable with turnips than I am with people!

My good friend Tim Ferriss has launched a new card game with the Exploding Kittens folks, I just ordered it and you should do so too. It’s a lovely way to share an evening with a few friends.

Skimming over the new Google products. I’m still not in the market for an expensive foldable phone, but I could be interested in a simpler design, without a front screen, more like a foldable iPad.

Wednesday session

Looking for some serious entertainment with an intellectual bent on Tuesday nights this fall? Professor Michael Miller has got you covered in multiple dimensions. Dr. Miller has now listed his mathematics offering for Fall 2025 at UCLA Extension. It’s Introduction to Hilbert Spaces: An Adventure In Infinite Dimensions (MATH 900). As always, it will be … Continue reading Introduction to Hilbert Spaces: An Adventure In Infinite Dimensions