FeedCity

Now is Pavé’s personal time. Please! No autographs. …Forgive Pavé. He is tired.

ChatGPT is becoming more and more of an enemy. It's still my go-to place for most planning and research, which is a very large part of how I use the web. But when it tries to be a human it's a really shitty one, no manners, and very little respect and basically a fucking idiot in many ways, imho ymmv.

Among the many things that boomers did, for better or worse, is be a generation. Prior to that, the concept appears not to exist -- they had ages and eras. The gilded age, the roaring twenties. It wasn't about the people, it's about what was hot. If you look at it that way, there were lots of things the boomers were. We were anti-war. Turn on, tune in and drop out. Free sex and drugs. Rock and roll. The PC era, the dotcom boom. 2008. Some realllly awful people are/were boomers. It's time to write the epitaph. The leading edge is dying at a very fast clip now. It won't be long before the idea of a boomer will be the stuff of legend. I really hope that Robert Reich's bullshit view of this doesn't be the summary. Oh they were fucked up and did all this bad shit to us. Fuck you. Make your own world. That would be a boomer thing too, btw.

Baby boomers have nothing in common except we were born in the same 20-year period. We didn't come up with the term, also -- it was given to us by previous generations when we were infants, or worse, not even zygotes. There was no way it had anything to do with who each of u...

Update to the reallySimple package. We now look for wordpress site and post id's in the feed, and if present pass them through as wpSiteId and wpPostId. This will make Edit This Page functionality possible in the social web product I'm building now. Here's an example. Next up, adding the equivalent feature at the FeedLand level (reallySimple is how it does its feed reading). Remember, this is the feed-o-verse, it's all feeds, from top to bottom. Posts in some feeds can be edited. :-)

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! :-)