FeedCity

Yikes, noticed especially high load on one of our servers. Think we might’ve had a few runaway Hugo processes chewing CPU. I’m monitoring it, shouldn’t be much visible lag.

load average: 42.60, 33.20, 22.64

I've been calling the next release Radio WordLand. If you know the history you'll understand why. I'll start posting screen shots soon.

Spotify’s daily mix is pulling in all sorts of songs I haven’t heard in years. Currently listening to Guns N’ Roses. 🎶

So never mind the darkness
We still can find a way
‘Cause nothin’ lasts forever
Even cold November rain

I watched the movie Seven last night, and I can't stop thinking about it. It got a shitty review in the NYT, which usually means I won't bother with something, but this time I decided to give it a try. The reviewer, Janet Maislin, didn't like the acting of Brad Pitt. I thought Pitt was an unlikeable jerk, but I also thought that was the role, but maybe I was wrong. I didn't care. I also couldn't figure out what city it was. It wasn't NY, but Maislin says it was. Usually in a movie set in NY, I recognize many of the locations. There are only a few places movies are shot in the city. But again, I didn't care. What keeps me thinking about it is the story. I'm not going to spoil it. Don't read any reviews before watching it, they pretty much all get in the way of the storytelling.

Screen shot of a post by Evan Prodromou on Masto yesterday. "You publish where you want to publish, Dave. We'll find a way to connect to you. That's the whole point." Indeed that is the whole point. I say it like this. "Interop is all that matters." If our products interop that's pure love. The rest of it is baloney. Maybe I'm not a nice guy. Not my job. We've being fucked over by "social media" for 19 years now, and the new ones who say they're open, and on the web, and decentralized, are not. The only way out of this mess is what Evan said. BTW, I sent Evan a pointer to the subscription list which is my outflow. I use OPML for the list and RSS for the feeds. That's where you will find my writing.

Really respect Anil Dash trying to have a nuanced conversation about AI on Bluesky, surrounded by many AI skeptics. This thread is one place to start, but there are many other posts:

At what point are folks going to try literally any other tactic than condescending rants?

Sadly, AI is so divisive, debate is counter-productive right now. Meanwhile, all the AI researchers are still on Twitter / X, and they’re not going to move to more open platforms where they would just be criticized. So we’re back to information bubbles.

Got a lot done over the weekend and today, heading into the distractions of iPhone event day tomorrow. Lots of little improvements in Micro.blog, plus a new Mac app update which I recorded a quick walk-through for.

How to be part of the rebooted blogosphere.

Love this post Irrational Dedication, via Duncan Davidson:

Every single thing we see, someone had to will it into existence against the entropy of the universe and the indifference of everyone else. That’s what the entire built world is.

Steve Troughton-Smith on Mastodon:

I know Apple has got used to making its share of Microsoft-scale screwups lately, but taking the two best UI frameworks ever made, UIKit and AppKit, and throwing them under the bus for something designed to build watch apps really does take the cake.

These frameworks were so good. Still are! I’ll never fully understand why there couldn’t have been a universal layer for iOS and macOS plus some existing AppKit and UIKit pieces for platform-specific features. Oh well, that ship sailed years ago now.

The Walking Typewriter It’s a very common complaint/worry/issue when people new to the typewriter world get their first machine and realize that as they’re typing, their typewriter slowly moves or “walks” across the work surface upon which they’re typing. It’s often easy enough to just move it back to center and continue on, but when … Continue reading Typewriter Walking and Singing: Improving Typewriter Performance with Mats, Pads, Rubber Feet, Felt, Recovered Platens, and More

Stumbled on Freaky Tales while browsing HBO and it’s wild. 1980s Oakland, basketball, punk rock, animation… It is surprisingly violent but also amazing. 🍿

My sister Charleen sent me this meme with the note “Someone needs to draw you in there with your arm up 🤣🤣🤣” It’s a nice ode to the Dries essay on Maker/Taker problems. Well, thanks to the magic of AI, I asked the Nano Banana AI Studio to “make it so on the bottom one … Continue reading Maker Taker →

Marco Arment on Mastodon:

As we head into iPhone-event week, let’s celebrate the hard work by all of the people who made these products happen.

And let’s not forget the shameless Trump-suckass CEO at the top, who constantly gives the middle finger to everyone in his own company…

🇺🇸

Another application for websockets. You could actually put a web server on your desktop without exposing your home network to the world. I can't wait till I have time to play around with this.

New demo app. FeedLand communicates back to the client app via websockets. This is absolutely the easiest way to get flow from feeds to apps running on servers or in a browser, or other desktop app. Websockets is a mature standard, and incredibly useful. I'm now working on a toolkit for it, along with all the other projects going on in parallel, so other developers can hook up to FeedLand to get the flow of new items. The demo shows you the JSON version of every news item as it appears on the wire. Impossible to read at times, but there's no limit to the kinds of apps you can build for this. My friend Chuck Shotton has a market-predicting LLM app that gets its news this way. Nothing to install on a server. FeedLand does all the work. I expect to have a toolkit out sometime in the next month.

Ryan Barrett blogging about how our symptom-based healthcare isn’t good enough:

…for lots of diseases, even critical ones like cancer, where catching them early can make all the difference, most of the time we’re still waiting until someone shows up in clinic, coughing up blood and complaining that their side hurts…

We’re taking an even worse step back right now in the United States, but it’s temporary, fixable in 2026 and 2028. I still feel good that our grandchildren will have much better care and healthier lives.

There’s a line in Clueless from the character Dan Hedaya plays: “You divorce wives, not children” Well, every situation is different and I’ve not been as good a step as Mel Horowitz was. But I am still filled with good feeling and every best wish for those kids. It was great to see Tony last...

Micro.blog 3.7 for Mac is out, and I recorded a quick 2-minute YouTube video to show a few things in the interface around books and notes.