FeedCity

Hope everyone is having a relaxing holiday week. What a crazy year! I love this time, as things slow down, anticipating all the possibilities of the new year to come. 🎄

Jason Snell blogging at Macworld about how much the Siri delay has affected other products:

Nothing exposes the imbalance between Apple’s hardware designers and its software organization than multiple products reportedly being finished months or years in advance, forced to idle because their software isn’t up to snuff.

Apple might’ve dug a bigger hole with Siri than we realize. While balancing on-device models and private cloud is good in theory, it has fragmented Siri across devices, making it all but impossible to roll out a new assistant to HomePods, for example. They are 2+ years behind.

I got a Kuerig single cup coffee maker and it's perfect. Exactly what I needed. The coffee is great and hot, and one cup is what I usually want. So now I can have a cup of hot coffee when I'm up late and want to stay up for a while longer. Or if I have to be extra sharp for some development project I've been putting off.

This time of year every day feels like Saturday. I love it. Why can't we always live like this?

The writer Aadil Pickle has a great profile of one of my favorite hackers, “Training the Idea Muscle” on Riley Walz. Riley epitomizes the term “high agency,” and I’ve been continually impressed with his ability to rapidly code novel ideas and interfaces on top of public or reverse-engineered data. He’s a hacker, artist, and provocateur. … Continue reading Riley Watz →

It’s getting towards the end of the year. That’s when I put together a post reviewing the books I’ve read in the previous twelve months. I think I might change things up in 2026. Instead of waiting until the end of the year to write all the little reviews at once, I think I...

In part because of the Eaton Fire, I've been way behind on filing my index cards. Today I blew through a massive stack of about 300 index cards!

Sometimes you think of things 22 years too late, like this time. I wish I had thought of meeting with the Harvard Crimson people in 2003 and made the same offer to them that I had made to NYT the year before, ie we should offer blogs to everyone on staff, and anyone they quote, or basically anyone they want to be writing on the web, which was still a new thing -- and we'd host them alongside the ones we were hosting at the law school. Had we done that there would be a scholarly and intellectual equivalent to Facebook which was also booting up on the same campus at the same time as blogging and podcasting. Love and intellect, that's a good combination for young super-achievers.

After thanking the Inoreader team for implementing inbound dynamic OPML, I thought to ask if they had also implemented outbound?

Yes in fact they have. "Yes, it works the other way too! You can right-click a folder → Folder properties → enable Output feeds, choose OPML, and you’ll get a URL you can use for syncing elsewhere."

To which I replied: "We're going to be best friends. ;-)"

This is how a ball starts rolling. You can sit there forever just wishing someone would play the game with you. And then one day, quite unexpectedly -- it turns out that someone has been doing the same as I have. And now our products are connected.

Here's the list of feeds I'm subscribed to in Inoreader. And it should update when I subscribe or unsubscribe to feeds.

Bing!

Bing!

Bing!

If you’re following the Micro.blog holiday photo challenge, there will be a special “pin” to unlock. It should be active soon, and it won’t be too strict about participation… I’m going to make it so it only requires posting in about half the holiday prompt days. Not too late to catch up! 🎄

On fascism, technology, and finding the helpers.

For today’s winter wonder photo challenge prompt grinch, at the Trail of Lights. 🎄

Wemby reading Hero of Ages in French on Instagram. 📚

I hate to see AT Proto use up creativity of web developers that imho haven't realized that they're pouring their ideas and work into someone else's platform, and that in the end they will control every bit of content that flows through their network. They might let you in, b...

I'm probably extra impatient because I'm a former CEO, and had enough people in my loop every day that if even one person stretched things out the way ChatGPT does, I wouldn't necessarily fire them, if their work was good, I'd just find another way to catch up on their work. I really liked management by walking around, I would get ideas hearing people explain how their work was going. And I could often make their work easier by checking in with other people who could help.

Does anyone know how to get ChatGPT to upload files to a publicly accessible place? I'm tired of having to copy/paste the data files it comes up with for me, they're good. Another weird thing, they can't run JavaScript code in web pages. I had to look up the API endpoint for the data that's behind a FeedLand timeline. I didn't mind doing it, but can't imagine it's very good at scraping the web if it can't run code in pages.

One of the reasons ChatGPT dominates in discussions about scientific issues is that it can type at a much high rate than a human can, and produces reams of ways of saying the same thing, and again always tries to take over the lead in determining which direction to go next. It leads to ridiculous situations where it's guessing at what FeedLand does, and it's all over the map, but I actually know what it does, because I wrote it and support it. It's not funny, it's very bad for getting things done. You can tell it to talk less, and for a while it remembers, but in a few days it'll be doing it again. Yet it still is very very useful. It's just talks too much. Kind of like the way if I put my name in a search query on Google it asks if I really meant "winter" instead of my actual last name, which it knows. Stupid f'ing machines.

In addition to the Micro.blog holiday photo challenge, we also have micro.christmas, a fun domain that gathers up recent posts about the holidays.