FeedCity

Until today I had never tried the “best of N” feature in AI tools like Codex, where it generates multiple versions of the same feature. Fascinating shift in development. You would never ask a human assistant to code the same thing twice and pick the best one.

Good morning everyone. We're getting feedland.com back in shape. About a week ago we sorted out a long-standing performance issue. Once that was fixed, another problem cropped up, we weren't able to sign off and back on. We got that one too, this morning, and now it looks like feedland.com is finally performing well across the board. It's always been pretty stable, just churning away on feeds, reading lists, and pumping news over websockets, and all the other 3.0 type feed stuff. It feels like it's time to depend on it, even so we'll be careful, praise Murphy. The cool thing about feedland.com compared to all the other servers I've run stuff on over the years is that it scales automatically. It's on the VIP network run by Automattic.

Why organizations must evaluate values, not just features

Everywhere we look — people walking on the sidewalk, people stuck in traffic, people shopping at the grocery store. Everyone is going through something, worried about something, seeing joy in something, feeling heartbreak from something. Remembering this can help ground us in discussions online too.

This morning, I ended up on chsmc.org’s “Applying Pixar’s rules of storytelling to writing” post. At the bottom, he quotes: No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later. I knew I had to come back to this point. No...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Frank Chimero, whose blog can be found at frankchimero.com. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. The People and Blogs series is supported by Jeremy Bassetti a...

The blood red of the boulevardier works well on the night before Samhain. I’m pairing it with the 1950 Royal KMG (pica) to write about the ghosts of the year past.

If there is one thing that I’ve learned in my roughly 30 years of working with design tools, it is that they come and go and that you should always stay curious and be open and ready to learn something new. As a teenager, I made my first clip-arty design attempts in CorelDRA...

Another great Spurs game. Starting the season 5-0 for the first time. 🏀

Every OS should have a Help system that you can ask "How do I do this" and it understands what you're saying. The Mac OS tries to take you to a manual with a freaking table of contents! What do I look like, a robot? Come on it's 2025. Get with it. Maybe OpenAI should buy Apple.

I guess this was bound to happen. Daring Fireball:

Services now generates more revenue ($28.8 billion) than Mac, iPad, and Wearables/Home combined ($24.7 billion).

If iPhone revenue is essentially maxed out and flat, Apple will eventually become mostly a services revenue company. Very weird. 💰

Thursday session

I thought of a few questions about Micro.blog usage that will help us prioritize features over the coming weeks. If you have a minute, fill out this form. It’s very short.

At the same time I heard from people at Automattic that they had successfully installed the new version of the FeedLand software on feedland.com which runs on their VIP system, so theoretically should scale as well as anything on the net. There was a serious performance problem, that, with the help of Ryan Neudorf who I met in Ottawa, and Scott Hanson, longtime contributor here, was fixed. It was a daring move, it meant that all the timeline-generating code in FeedLand had to be rewritten. It was worth it. If you've ever felt that FeedLand was too slow at displaying news, please try again, I think you'll be pleased.

Just heard from Brent that the next version of NetNewsWire will support the Markdown in RSS. I wrote it up on my daveverse site, which I edit with WordLand, which means it has a special feed that contains source:markdown elements. You can be one of the first people with markdown-support in your feed, and in doing so, help the bootstrap. I'm pretty sure it's going to work at this point. If you have questions about this, you can post a comment here.

Since many of us now program with AI chatbot assistance, it seems it's time to think about higher level languages we can use to specify what we're doing, new kinds of computers because we now have bigger more capable minds at work.

An excellent example of an HTML web component from Eric:

Extend HTML to do things automatically!

He layers on the functionality and styling, considering potential gotchas at every stage. This is resilient web design in action.

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For smart, enterprising hackers Beeper is offering bounties of up to $50,000 for people who create open source bridges.

Almost two months ago, I put out the call for speaker suggestions for Web Day Out. I got some good responses—thank you to everyone who took the time to get in touch.

The response that really piqued my interest was from Aleth Gueguen. She proposed a talk on progressive web apps, backed up with plenty of experience. The more I thought about it, the more I realised how perfect it would be for Web Day Out.

So I’m very pleased to announce that Aleth will be speaking at Web Day Out about progressive web apps from the trenches:

Find out about the most important capabilities in progressive web apps and how to put them to work.

I’m really excited about this line-up! This is going to be a day out that you won’t want to miss. Get your ticket for a mere £225+VAT if you haven’t already!

See you in Brighton on 12 March, 2026!

There’s not necessarily any new info in this article in The New Yorker about AI data centers, but it does illustrate the scale. Also enjoyed the anecdote about a farmer using Claude.

Behind a fence, and past several vehicle checkpoints, the campus was a spacious expanse of nothing, except for one corner, which was populated by a row of numbered sheds. The sheds were white, narrow, tall, and several football fields in length; they reminded me of the livestock barns I visited as a child at the Minnesota State Fair.