FeedCity

Sorry for the title, but since the trend of clickbaity titles is spreading from YouTube and traditional media to the blogosphere, I felt left out and wanted to join the party. Anyway, a post about quitting social media is what I wrote. Not very original, I know, and somethin...

There's a fresh release of the docs for the WordPress API we use in WordLand. I actually liked that the docs were old and kind of dusty. It says that the engineering culture is to not mess around with things that developers have already built on. A lot of platforms break developers without much thought. I learned a long time ago that when you do that, you lose the interest of developers, understandably.

I've been exchanging emails and voicemails with Dan Knauss, a longtime WordPress developer and one of the hosts of WordCamp Canada which I am speaking at in October. Learning a lot about the community and culture. I wonder, have I ever been part of a community that's over 20 ...

I've been following Mark Cuban's recent posts on Bluesky, coming up with constructive things successful entrepreneurs can do to help. I had a different idea. Apply for a fellowship at a university, away from where you live, maybe in a place you've always wanted to try. In you...

What kind of license do ABC, NBC and CBS have? Given how the questions Trump raises colors their journalistic integrity, perhaps the correct response is to tear up the license and send it to Trump with their best wishes.

"Sixteen of the 50 biggest news websites in the UK are now using a “consent or pay” model to allow users to pay to reject personalised advertising or even avoid ads altogether." It should be illegal.

I asked, yesterday, on various social media sites, for people's opinion on what the term "on the web" means. I'm going to compile the answers on a this.how page, and then ask some follow-up questions. If you have an opinion, post a comment on Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads or Twitter.

Mark I want to use my (comparatively small) fortune to develop a truly open platform for discourse on the web. Users and independent developers get to try out all the ideas for discourse and learning. We create the ideal system together to plan our future, not being owned by oligarchs.

Maybe we should all go to the Smithsonian next weekend.

When I have a hard time finding a title for an essay, I usually pick the most boring, least clickbait-y title possible. I ran a title by ChatGPT and it said my title was bad for SEO and discoverability… That’s when I knew I had found it. 🤪

I dug into a little bit of pulse oximeter history. That to me was the major breakthrough, decades ago, so I’m still skeptical there’s enough innovation in Masimo’s new patent. Maybe all the legal fallout is karma for Steve Jobs’s “and boy have we patented it” bragging during the iPhone introduction.

"Focus on flows and relationships, not products or services." An argument for systems thinking instead of design thinking or breakthrough innovation.

New version of FeedLand coming. It has features to support an Edit This Page function in WordLand and possibly elsewhere.

Show me a creature who does not enjoy a breath of fresh air, and I will show you a stinky fish, yes?

Great profile of R. F. Kuang in The New Yorker:

I actually am afraid of being totally happy with my work, because, if you are perfectly satisfied with your abilities, there’s nowhere else to go.

Finished reading: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz. Cozy sci-fi! Several robots (and a human) open a noodle restaurant. 📚

"Obviously, any campaign that used only that AI-generated data would miss the mark — instead of looking at the views of real respondents, it would be looking at a funhouse mirror reflection of a demographic cooked up by a language model with no access to actual data."

It is common on Mastodon to append a bunch of hashtags to the end of a post. I’ve added a new feature in Micro.blog to help wrangle these. Here’s a screenshot from the Account page:

This doesn’t affect inline hashtags, only hashtags at the end if they’re in their own paragraph.

Just posted on a Facebook thread I unintentionally started.

• I don't like public conversations where people judge other people and they feel compelled to explain themselves. I wasn't in any way intending on provoking a conversation like that here. So I'm going to delete the comments that have gone off in that direction, and please don't post any more. I don't mind you having that conversation, but do it somewhere else where I don't have to read it. Thanks.

Everywhere that's the only structure for discourse we've created.

We can do better. I have to create my own system to prove it, so much work, but worth it, I expect.