FeedCity

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There’s a fun discussion on today’s Hard Fork about Moltbook. We live in an increasingly bizarre world. I don’t want slop to overwhelm human-centered social networks, but I’m also mostly fine with AI-only networks like Sora or Moltbot because it’s segregated.

In the spirit of the open web, I’m writing this post to disagree with something someone else has posted on their own site. Specifically, a post titled “Ad Blockers helped kill the open web” by Christian Heilmann. I 100% agree with Christian when he writes that: The experie...

I wrote an app that implements Inbound RSS for WordPress sites. Three months ago, a few little glitches but remarkably reliable. Open source. That's how I have scripting.com output hooked up to daveverse.org input. It stopped working this morning, not sure why. This is actually a test to see if this works. (Postscript: It did work. But I have two earlier posts today that did not get through.)

Brett Terpstra blogs about his upcoming app BlogBook:

This is a new app I’m publishing as a complement to Marked 3. It generates a “Book” from WordPress, Micro.blog, or Ghost blogs.

Sounds great. It will generate a table of contents and can export in various formats including PDF and ePub.

Automattic shipped a WordPress plugin that adds a source:markdown element to a WordPress feed. This is very cool. We're going to add this to the feed for daveverse site.

We need a short name for ChatGPT-like product. If I want to make a general statement about products in the category, there is, as far as I know, no word to use. Same with Twitter and tweet, so I call them twitter-like products and use tweet for posts to any twitter-like product. The whole idea of a different name (like toot, skeet) for each service is linguistic travesty. Anyway, ChatGPT-like is also an unacceptable term. If it had a fun name like OurMind -- then OurMind-like would work. If only William Safire were here.

This Anthropic post is pretty much what I would write too, as a reaction to ads coming in OpenAI. I actually do believe OpenAI when they say they won’t let ads influence answers, but people are going to think that anyway. People still think Instagram uses the phone’s microphone to listen randomly!

I am sitting in LeStat’s on Park in San Diego drinking an iced Vietnamese coffee. It’s delicious. At one time I ran a mailing list called WebSanDiego. It was a OneList list, then it was an eGroups list, then it was a Yahoo!Groups list. But it was always a mailing list. It was what passed...

for developers who don't use ai -- here's the kind of question i ask chatgpt. "i have a div that contains icons that are either svg's or font-awesome i's. if it were text, i'd use font-size to control the size of the icons, which won't work here. what's the right way to do it?"

apple is a company, very good at selling itself as a lifestyle. but there's only one person, who's been gone for 15 years, who could keep that reality distortion field inflated.

Doing the math on the Cosmere books, with Mistborn era 3 locked in for releases in 2028, 2029, and 2030, maybe we’ll see Stormlight book 10 around 2043. Joking / not joking with my daughter to read a few chapters at my graveside if I don’t make it. 🪦

Wiped off the worst of dust and grime on the exterior of my 1936 Royal KHM standard typewriter. Cleaned up the carriage a bit and did a light oiling. Cleaned out the paper tray and platen area. Spooled up some new ribbon. After a few quick tweaks, this typewriter is now at least minimally usable. … Continue reading

I love this train station photo in the snow.

Tuesday session

Forbes has a profile of Sam Altman with some interesting quotes from him and others:

Altman knows his history. His itch to release products quickly is informed by studying Xerox PARC, the legendary Silicon Valley research lab known for inventing the modern graphical user interface, laser printers and computer mouse, yet failing to commercialize any of them. “You have to have an economic engine in the cycle,” Altman says. “I think there’s probably a lot of great innovation that has never gotten out of the lab because someone didn’t do the work to just get it into people’s hands.”

Linking to a post about Apple from Matt Gemmell, Michael Tsai blogs:

At times, the company seems like a cargo cult, repeating mantras from a previous era without actually following them and applying the same strategies as before even though they no longer make sense.

Going through items in my mom’s house, took a picture of this old painting of mine. 8th grade, maybe. Reminds me of the previous icon for our app Sunlit.