FeedCity

Good story by David Pierce at The Verge on the coming web browser wars. He talked to people at all the major browser and AI companies. Browser competition will be good, although I don’t see AI replacing the search and address bar the way some companies think it will. (I’m still using Dia.)

I had the ballast replaced to work with modern LED replacement bulbs and the switch upgraded to be able to control each of the two bulbs independently. I also cleaned of decades of grime and polished it up a bit.  Thrift purchase for $24.98 from Goodwill on 2025-10-02.

You know a typewriter is being used as flimsy filler decoration when it’s sitting on a shelf and simultaneously serving as a book support. A real writer’s typewriter is free and clear so that the carriage can move its full length.

Fidji Simo blogs about companies that use AI to do more, not to downsize:

Organizations that approach AI as a way to multiply what they create will be so much more successful than those that use it to subtract.

Layoffs make no sense to me for already-successful companies. Layoffs are the mindset of private equity, squeezing out more profit instead of improving the product. Companies that prioritize layoffs will find themselves lapped by the competition.

ChatGPT Pulse is my favorite product of the year. It’s expensive, but it’s the first new thing I’ve seen in software in years. Love reading about what it’s come up for me each day. Here’s a snapshot, because it knows I’m thinking about Spain. (And if I scroll, it has actual work / code topics too.)

Don't forget the new WordPress News.

Ben Thomson in a long article today about the AI bubble and its potential benefits, especially lasting power infrastructure:

It’s sobering to think about how many things have never been invented because power has never been considered a negligible input from a cost perspective; if AI does nothing more than spur the creation of massive amounts of new power generation it will have done tremendous good for humanity.

And it's undeniable, the voters said no to Schumer and the current theoretical Democratic leaders. They can't be in charge of the future, otherwise we're lost. So the voters figured it out. Let's make sure everyone hears this, they seem to be saying. You better be able to lead us or don't bother applying for the job.

Every FeedLand timeline has a link to its OPML subscription list under the traditional white on orange XML icon.

New release of FeedLand, v0.7.9. It's a Node.js server app, using MySQL, and I think it's stable enough that I can start linking to updates here. It's not for poets, though I do know one who got it running. Check out the feedlandInstall repo.

To people who do WordPress plug-ins -- have a look at the feedlandSocket repo. It sends notifications of news items to any subscriber, via websockets. News items are simple JSON, and contain information in the feed item, and system info like id and when it was received. This makes it easy to stream news to a plug-in running in a WordPress site, that can then do anything with the news they like. It's incredibly simple to use, and we provide all the JavaScript code you need to embed in a browser-based app. Here's a place where you can ask questions.

Democrats swept yesterday's election. A reminder that you should ignore pundits when they say what they've been saying about Democrats since Trump won last year's election. They assume people are stupid and aren't paying attention to the prices in the supermarket. And the price of health insurance. And the mask-wearing storm troopers occupying Los Angeles and Chicago. Heather Cox Richardson said at the end of last night's piece that "politics will be a whole different game." Republican incumbents now know that there better be big change, or they'll all be losing next November. They may find themselves more on the people's side than Trump's, now that they know for sure the two things are different.

Most interviews I watch at 1.5-2x speed, but among my friends, we joke that there are a few people for whom we really enjoy their thoughts at 1x (shoutout to JT). I’m an unabashed fanboy of Andrej Karpathy (blogged nanochat Oct 13), and his interview with Dwarkesh is excellent. It’s very dense; I marinated it … Continue reading Andrej on Dwarkesh →

Tim Sweeney on Twitter / X welcoming a Google proposal to fix exclusive app distribution and payments:

It genuinely doubles down on Android’s original vision as an open platform to streamline competing store installs globally, reduce service fees for developers on Google Play, and enable third-party in-app and web payments.

Epic’s lawsuits were derided by many, years ago, but there’s no question now on how consequential their approach has been. We’re finally seeing real progress.

Another excellent article about AI in The New Yorker: The case that AI is thinking. It captures both the fear that we aren’t that special and the inspiration for what might be possible. I continue to find AI clarifying — a signal to focus our work and lives on what are uniquely human strengths.

After many years away, I have returned to in-person IndieWeb events, for IndieWebCamp Berlin 2025! In past years, I have tried to capture my experience for each day and session in a long-form blog post, with thoughts on sessions, project ideas, progress made, ideas for the f...

In addition to technical debt problems, when using AI for coding we have to be careful of feature creep. If there’s hardly a cost to adding a feature, it’s too easy to add all the wrong features.

Voting desert. 🇺🇸

Now that we have more confirmation that Siri will be powered in part by Gemini, I think Apple should address the other weakness in their AI strategy: the yearly update schedule. Decouple the cloud improvements so that server changes can be rolled out any time, not only at WWDC or a major iOS update.