FeedCity

Last weekend, my mom passed away. I had blogged once or twice that in recent months I found myself at the hospital often, as she declined in health and was in and out of the hospital and rehab. It was what inspired me to make Micro.blog free for nurses and teachers. My mom w...

A clear explanation of how image dithering works, illustrated along the way.

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A different world is possible. Here, for example, is an open-source large language model from Europe, designed to support the 24 official languages of the European Union.

I have no idea why their top level domain is for the British Indian Ocean Territory, soon to be no more. That doesn’t instil confidence.

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I have to confess that I am not reading that many books these days. Most of the time, I resort to listening to them in audio form. But every once in a while, a book comes along that is just too interesting not to at least give it a try. Reading Kai Brach’s excellent newslett...

On November 5th at our Noho office the legendary John Borthwick (investor in Twitter, Tumblr, Buzzfeed, Digg, Venmo…) and I will have a conversation on the future of the Open Web and human-centered AI. Please join us!

I purchased this 1946 Royal KMM standard typewriter on October 4th via Goodwill for $22.00. It’s equipped with an extra-wide 18 inch platen and carriage with “support wings” and a 10 key decimal tabulator which means in its day it would have been used for some heavy-duty accounting. The logos could be in better shape, … Continue reading

In a post about safety improvements, OpenAI reveals that a stunning number of people (0.15% out of hundreds of millions of active users) discuss suicide with the chatbot. This is obviously an urgent issue and the company needs to redouble their efforts. Some people will not seek out real counselors.

The trip to Canada really changed my perspective. Spending more time thinking than developing new stuff. One thing is for sure, we're going to depend on FeedLand more as we go two-way in WordLand. I've been here before. Have to let my mind mull things over before the movement resumes.

Made good progress on a FeedLand performance issue. The new version is running on feedland.org. We're getting ready to try it on other systems. On the way I hit a problem with the wpcom package that implements the WordPress API in Node.js. Apparently the new version depends on babel/runtime, but it isn't listed as a dependency in their package.json file. I worked around the problem by adding that dependency in wpidentity's package.json file, and that fixed the problem. Had trouble getting this report in their issues section.

It’s creepy to tell people they’ll lose their jobs if they don’t use AI. It’s weird to assume AI critics hate progress and are resisting some inevitable future.

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A recording of Alors on danse, news of a new exhibition of Michelangelo’s work, an event on creative writing, and information about art history courses all exist side-by-side in the ever-changing landscape that is my browser tabs. Every one is a train of thought: the tabs on ...

Every so often, I open up a blank HTML document and work on a concept design for my website. Sometimes I have a theme, like my blueprint-inspired design, whereas other times I play around and see what I can make. Today I thought: what would my blog look like if it were pink? I came up with this concept design: A two-column layout for my website that has a light pink background colour and darker pink text. The typeface is a serif font. I use the "Transitional" font stack from Modern Font Stacks, and a combination of pink and purple colours that I made through trial-and-error with an RGB colour wheel. The background is light pink. The text colours are a darker pink that is somewhat close to red. I am unsure whether I will use this design on my blog, but I had fun playing around and exploring this direction for a bit.

If you like rabbit holes, a wonderful way to spend your Sunday is in the writing of Zach Holman, an early engineer at Github and Gitlab. All are good, but a particular favorite of mine is UTC is enough for everyone …right? You don’t need to code to appreciate that time is a construct, that … Continue reading Time Zones →

Needed to get away today. Last-minute decision to drive down to San Antonio with my daughter. 🏀

I absolutely bloody love Haim, and they didn’t disappoint this evening.

In 1977, NASA launched two spaceships carrying two golden records into the void of interstellar space. The Voyager Golden Records contained instructions for playing its contents, finding Earth in the cosmos (oh my …), as well as images, a variety of natural sounds, musical s...

So instead of asking yourself, “How can I write code that does what I want?” Consider asking yourself, “Can I write code that ties together things the browser already does to accomplish what I want (or close enough to it)?”

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Ego is one of those words that’s difficult to parse. I find language to be an imperfect tool in the quest to describe the inner workings of the mind, because in there, things tend to be fuzzy, while words are often sharp, pointing to distinct concepts that are seldom found i...

I had a very pleasant experience last week while I was reading through the RSS feeds I’m subscribed to. I came across two blog posts that were responding to blog posts of my own. Robin Sloan wrote a post clarifying his position after I linked to him in my post about the sli...