FeedCity

I’ve been watching some of the CNN live coverage from Minneapolis. Looks precarious. Sad and worried for a city that has already gone through so much.

Stay safe everyone.

Two co-founders of Thinking Machines are going back to OpenAI. Last July, a co-founder of Safe Superintelligence left for Meta.

Building a business is hard, even with funding. The near implosion of OpenAI and the board shakeup that led to these companies’ founding now feels like ancient history.

Reading this post on Daring Fireball today about the explosive growth of the iPhone made me curious what I had blogged about the launch. We tend to slightly reframe history when looking back, so older posts are a snapshot of how things really felt. My post in 2007 also collected some tweets.

Really unique design for Honda’s prototype camper trailer. I like it. There’s some video and commentary here on YouTube.

Demo: rssCloud makes feeds as fast as the internet.

David Pierce writes that all the AI pieces are falling into place for Google:

Three years after being caught off guard by ChatGPT, Gemini appears to have everything it needs to take down OpenAI and everyone else.

And:

It announced an opt-in feature called “Personal Intelligence,” which connects Gemini to the vast ocean of information Google has about you in order to give you better responses.

I don’t think Gemini will ever reach the level of market share that Google search had. There’s still a lot of room for a few successful companies.

📗 Want to read Even Though I Knew the End by C. L. Polk ISBN: 9781250375100

📗 Want to read Gregor the Overlander by Suzanne Collins ISBN: 9780439678131

📗 Want to read The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar ISBN: 9780593952313

📗 Want to read Mind Games by Victor Appleton, Bruce Holland Rogers ISBN: 9780671756543

In 2025 the folks at machineknit.community did a 12 Months of Hats knitalong. I only joined at the end of the year, and am still getting my practice in with a lot of basics, so I was a bit too intimidated to jump into any of these in the actual year of 2025. Ba...

There’s a major Verizon outage, still impacting us here in Austin. My phone is currently on SOS. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something on this scale before… Despite how much we gripe about cellular service, it’s actually very reliable.

The Information report on Gemini + Siri answers most of my questions, including deployment:

To maintain Apple’s privacy pledge, the Gemini-based AI will run directly on Apple devices or its private cloud system, which is powered by Apple’s own server chips, rather than running on Google’s servers. Google put significant engineering effort into getting a version of Gemini working on Apple’s servers, according to a person familiar with the partnership talks.

No small thing for Apple to scale this up on their own. We’ll see small improvements in iOS 26.4, with the biggest changes in the fall.

John Gruber commenting on Meta’s plans to sell more glasses:

20 million units is a real number. But building the capacity for 20 million units isn’t the same as selling 20 million units, and, to my knowledge, actual sales of Meta Glasses are only Bezos Numbers.

In NYC last week, I walked by the Meta Lab store. There was a 30-minute wait to try Ray-Ban Display glasses. I don’t want to actually buy them, so I didn’t waste everyone’s time by taking up a slot. The store had real people in it, though. (Not Apple Store level crowdedness, of course.)

A bit has been flipped on Google Search. Previously, the Googlebot would index any web page it came across, unless a robots.txt file said otherwise. Now, a robots.txt file is required in order for the Googlebot to index a website. This puzzles me. Until now, Google was al...

Caught myself writing a blog post to complain about someone else’s blog platform and API. Deleted the draft. There is plenty of complaining to go around already. “Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.”

Running database migrations! 🤞 Deploying a bunch of new things this week.

It has been forever, but we’ve finally released a new version of Sunlit for iOS! It’s simpler, faster. It’s the app for when you just want to browse and reply to photo posts. Still more we want to do with it. Needed to get this update out first as a reset.

It's always been difficult to compete with a platform vendor, that's why the web works so well -- no platform vendor. But I wonder if ChatGPT et al aren't destined to be the ultimate platform vendor. Are we the last generation of software developers, teaching it all of our thought processes?