FeedCity

It’s surreal to see my name on this list:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DS7VZUqiImo/

This year's predictions from tech experts and decision-makers are notably pro-human.

Simon Willison breaks down what happened in the LLM space in 2025. Some of it has the potential to transform tech forever.

2026: The Year The Bubble Bursts

Athbhliain faoi mhaise daoibh, a cairde!

A note to Josh Marshall, David Frum, Jay Rosen and Heather Cox Richardson, just a few of the political pundits I read. Now you all have seen up close the "move fast and break things" philosophy of Silicon Valley. They do this with investors' money. This was a preview of how they will govern, after Trump, when Silicon Valley is fully running the world. We need to get some tech background in your writing. The history of tech is very much the history of politics as we go forward. We had a merger, and you can and should incorporate our history in your understanding of US history.

All the Scripting News OPML's for 2025 in one GitHub folder. That's an example of user-owned storage. It's going to be repo's like that tie the world together, if we ever manage to get it together. There's a bit of hope. Paul Frazee of Bluesky pushed a piece last night about user-owned storage. He bound it to his invention, AT Proto, which has very few instances. That's why we need an API above all of this, so he can have his AT Proto stores and I can use RSS and Markdown and someone else who may not even be born yet can use whatever they love. The protocol that connects our services won't know or care how we're storing stuff behind the API. A great prototype for such an API is imho the WordPress wpcom API.

I distinctly remember waking up early, on January 1st, 2017, going downstairs with my laptop, making myself some coffee, and coding what ended up being the first iteration of this blog. I wanted to write weekly updates to hold myself accountable. I failed spectacularly. Read...

Reading Daughters of Sparta by Claire Heywood.

More mandolins

Watching LotR: The Two Towers and started looking through old Hobbit history and revisions. I don’t think I had ever read the 1937 version. This website has the original and updated text for chapter 5.

This is a retro-post. Jump scare! I sure have read a lot of 2025-in-review posts recently! I am impressed by all that you have accomplished. Here's my 2025 wrapped (in yarn), in 20 photos about my machine knitting this year! Descriptions and links below. 1, 2, and 3: my ...

I'm enjoying the break between years, always get a lot of thinking and writing done in this period. Not much more to say but that's all for 2025. Bring on the next year.

Paul Frazee blogs about AT Protocol and building different kinds of apps on the same underlying architecture and storage:

Connected clouds solve a lot of problems. You still have the always-on convenience, but you can also store your own data and run your own programs.

Nice post from Allan Pike examining how AI-enabled web browsers attempt to route queries to web search or answers. I like Dia but still prefer using a dedicated chat app when I actually want AI.

Had to redo my 2025 reading post because there was a comically wrong cached book cover. Guess it’s a reminder that I need to figure out a better way to preview Hugo shortcodes.

Parker Ortolani blogs five takes on 2025. On OpenAI:

OpenAI does its best work when it focuses on the models and the core app, which I fear it is getting slightly distracted away from.

I agree they are distracted, but I think the products are just as important as the models. Pulse could be built with any model, but only OpenAI has done it.

Parker also has a defense of Alan Dye:

iOS 7, watchOS, tvOS, the iPhone X experience, the Big Sur redesign, the Dynamic Island, visionOS, Liquid Glass and so much more have all defined his time at the company.

I was short of my goal for the year, but still read a lot of books that I enjoyed. Hope to read more in 2026! Just started Ship of Magic and I got Will of the Many for Christmas to read after that.