FeedCity

Predictions for journalism; paperbacks are dead; feeling the fear.

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Kathleen Fisher, whose blog can be found at aspeckledtrout.com. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. The People and Blogs series is supported by Emmanuel Odon...

I hope this message finds you well. I’m a senior full-stack freelance developer with 10+ years of experience building and scaling production-grade software for businesses. I specialize in LAMP, MEAN, MERN, Python-based frameworks, and AI-first solutions. I have successfully delivered many projects across different industries, focusing on performance, clean architecture, and user experience. I’m currently...

It’s exciting to announce that Stephen Wolfram has joined as a special advisor to Automattic. I promise this is not just because he is such an incredible blogger, using WordPress, natch. If you don’t know about Stephen Wolfram, his about page is not a bad place to start, but far more interesting is his 2019 … Continue reading Wolfram Automattica →

Casey Newton has predictions for 2026: the bubble will continue even as some AI companies fail, OpenAI will retire Sora, social media will increasingly be 16+, and other mostly AI-related predictions. On politics:

I predict AI concerns will take a backseat to the economy and a backlash to Trump’s authoritarianism. That said, I do think we’ll see the beginnings of an anti-AI movement — and perhaps a bipartisan one.

2026 might be too early for a substantial, mainstream backlash. But I do think as AI improves, both proponents and detractors will become more extreme.

Evergreen. Got our tree so early this year, it’s losing more and more needles every day. Just needs to last another week. 🎄

Stocking stuffers anyone? Santa brought 6,000 index cards down the proverbial chimney today. Should have enough now to index all the books in the house? 

This is an amazing follow-up video from Joanna Stern on the Anthropic vending machine. I’m not super concerned about the outcome… Might be a good thing if our future robot overlords can be persuaded to trust humans. 🤪

If you use Day One and haven’t tried the cross-posting from Micro.blog to Day One, it is kind of magical. This is what one of my blog posts today looks like after it has been automatically synced to Day One.

It can be used directly for your main journal, or in a separate journal as an extra backup.

Listening to Jay Graber on the latest Revolution.Social. Rabble continues to do a great job of interviewing folks from across the social web. I think we’re all better off when we’re aware of what other platforms are doing, and so we can come from a point of potential collaboration, not competition.

Seeing videos of the new Samsung trifold phone has convinced me that foldables are good enough now. I don’t want a trifold, but I’m looking forward to Apple’s take on this. I’d prefer super thin at all costs, no outside screen, minimal battery and camera.

Thursday session

Tim Sweeney in a tweet about the new App Store rules for Japan:

Apple was required to open up iOS to competing stores today, and instead of doing so honestly, they have launched another travesty of obstruction and lawbreaking in gross disrespect to the government and people of Japan.

I’ve already spent half an hour reviewing the terms and comparing them to the EU. It’s such a waste of time for everyone, including Apple.

Apple is opening up third-party marketplaces to Japan, similar to the expansion in the EU. Slow and good progress for the App Store, but on first reading looks like there are still junk fees.

Sigh. This probably isn’t great:

load average: 69.13, 58.89, 48.27

I have a free account at Inoreader. They sent an email asking me to upgrade, so I went to the site and was reminded that they support OPML Subscriptions, a simple idea, which I have been evangelizing for a long time. You can subscribe to an OPML subscription list. Exactly t...

"Feeling fear goes hand-in-hand with being ambitious. Imposter syndrome is real and normal. In fact, if you aren't feeling fear in what you do, I'd argue that you aren't being ambitious enough." Here's a way to build in the fear and do it anyway.

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.

I love the small web, the clean web. I hate tech bloat.

And LLMs are the ultimate bloat.

So much truth in one story:

They built a machine to gentrify the English language.

They have built a machine that weaponizes mediocrity and sells it as perfection.

They are strip-mining your confidence to sell you back a synthetic version of it.

adactio.com/links/22310

If you haven’t seen it, The Thinking Game documentary is excellent, and available for free on YouTube. You have to buy it, but the Kanye documentary In Whose Name is also pretty fascinating. (I first blogged about Kanye in 2007, discussing PHP’s botched version 4 to 5 upgrade.)