FeedCity

Humans love stories. Maybe that is because for thousands of years, stories were the way information was preserved and passed on to others, to the next generations. Maybe because they create community and collective culture. Maybe because they capture our imagination and spea...

My new WordPress News page is faster and looks better on phones. Also, lots of new sources thanks to suggestions from readers.

It’s very interesting to compare my Wikipedia article and my Grokipedia article. The Grokipedia version is much, much longer, and does a better job of listing my accomplishments versus some random recent controversy. (Will someone reading about me a hundred years from now care that WordPress briefly had a sustainability team as one of its … Continue reading Grokipedia →

Crossing over the Lamar bridge.

It’s really an over-asked question: What do you use your typewriter for?. (tl;dr: writing). To make things more interesting and entertaining in the middle of the week, let’s turn it on its ear and ask only for the wrong answers today. Whether it’s use in food preparation: Throw a slab of steak into the segment … Continue reading How do you use your typewriter? [Wrong Answers Only Edition]

I checked out Elon Musk's answer to Wikipedia by going to the pages on his site that Wikipedia mangles the most. It looks like they basically copied Wikipedia, so it's no better or worse. They'll probably be able to improve it, because ChatGPT tells a much closer to actual-events story. Getting the story right, is more important imho than keeping democracy open to trolls.

On the last day of UX London this year, I was sitting and chatting with Rachel Coldicutt who was going to be giving the closing keynote. Inevitably the topic of converstation worked its way ’round to “AI”. I remember Rachel having a good laugh when I summarised my overall fe...

I love the web, and this thing is bad for the web.

1. Atlas substitutes its own AI-generated content for the web, but it looks like it’s showing you the web
2. The user experience makes you guess what commands to type instead of clicking on links
3. You’re the agent for the browser, it’s not being an agent for you

It’s very clear that a lot of the new AI era is about dismantling the web’s original design.

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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.