FeedCity

Raining finally. The new tree is getting a much-needed soak. I decided a few days ago to go camping tomorrow… Looks like it might clear up at least for a day. 🌧️

I wonder if this proposed Algorithm Accountability Act has the right idea. Instead of wiping away Section 230, we could chip away at very specific aspects of it. I feel like this could have broad support.

I'm working today in the internals of FeedLand, specifically the code that determines if an item has changed. When we check a feed, we check each item, if the item already exists, we look at each of the values stored for the item compared with their new values in the feed, a...

Some folks are addicted to refreshing social media all day. Not me, but I have noticed that I’m now sort of addicted to asking AI dumb questions and getting random ideas for how to implement things whenever I’m bored. If this was a human assistant, they would be annoyed with my endless questions.

A dusting of snow blankets hills in the distance, left over from the snowfall two evenings ago. There are thin light clouds above the hills through which the sky peeks. On the horizon, separating the snowy white hills from the light grey clouds, there is a hint of a pale red,...

The line-up for Web Day Out is now complete! The final speaker to be added to the line-up is the one and only Manuel Matuzovič. You may know Manuel from his superb Web Accessibility Cookbook (full disclosure: I had the honour of writing the foreword to that book). Or perhap...

The new Amazon Alexa with AI has the same basic problem of all AI bots, it acts as if it's human, with a level of intimacy that you really don't want to think about, because Alexa is in your house, with you, listening, all the time. Calling attention to an idea that there's a human there spying on you is bad -- Alexa depends on the opposite impression, that it's just a computer. I really think AI's should give up the pretense that they're human.

Experimenting with a new Movies tab in our mobile app Epilogue. Feels a little weird… The app is for books. But also, I think it works here better than in the main app. I’m going to finish implementing it and use it and then decide for sure.

In today’s Stratechery interview they talk about the potential revenue that OpenAI lost by not having any ads in ChatGPT for the last three years. But there would’ve been a cost to having ads too! The product would’ve been slightly worse.

Jensen Huang on the Nvidia earnings call:

There has been a lot of talk about an AI bubble. From our vantage point, we see something very different.

I guess he would know, but this growth doesn’t seem sustainable to me. We’re not going to keep building data centers at the current pace.

Two interesting AI updates this week: It’s nice to read Andrej Karpathy’s review of Tesla’s FSD v13, as someone who was involved with creating their first self-driving efforts. I’ve only experienced v12, so very excited to try out the latest generations soon. Ubiquitous self-driving will reshape cities and save countless lives. On the heels of … Continue reading Gemini & FSD →

Finally worked through some Epilogue for Android issues. Submitted to Google for review! 🤞

Wednesday session

Bluesky is expanding their moderation tools and the granularity of reporting. Sounds like good changes:

Not every violation leads to immediate account suspension - this approach prioritizes user education and gradual enforcement for lower-risk violations. But repeated violations escalate consequences, ensuring patterns of harmful behavior face appropriate accountability.

Congrats to Gus Mueller on Acorn’s recognition as a finalist in the App Store Awards! I use Acorn pretty much every day, sometimes for design or mockups, and sometimes just as a scratchpad of screenshots and other graphics that need a quick crop or edit before uploading to my blog.

Love the covers on these special TikTok editions of a few of Brandon Sanderson’s books. Might’ve ordered a set for gifts. And I’ll keep The Emperor’s Soul, which I don’t have in print. 📚

I swear, this site is alive. If you are reading this site using RSS you don’t get every update. If you follow me on BlueSky or Mastodon, you get some. Pages which have been updated lately: Slashes — I updated the list of standard slash pages I have Colophon — I had a colophon in...

Machine learning is amazing if … the value of a correct answer is much higher than the cost of an incorrect answer. Related to Laissez-faire Cognitive Debt: And that’s where I start to get really annoyed by a lot of the LLM hype. It’s pushing machine-learning appro...

This report from Matthew Prince about Cloudflare’s outage yesterday shows the mind-boggling scale of their network. The graph has 25 million HTTP 500 errors per second.

After a rocky bit early in the year, I feel that Micro.blog is in a really good place right now. New users are joining and the features are the best they’ve ever been. So now I’m nervous that something else is about to go wrong. 🤪