FeedCity

Now that I’ve been living with the new RSS reader for a while, I’m itching to post a screenshot or video preview. Still thinking through the best way to roll it out. I had considered making it independent of Micro.blog, but it relies on too much of the plumbing we already have set up.

I got the most remarkable headphones. Read a review in Wired, and was sold. On sale for $109. Open ear buds from Anker. When I first put them on and played something I had a jolt. The sound appeared to be blasting from the speaker on my laptop. I rushed to try to turn it down and realized it was in my head. Never been so impressed. They don't go inside your ear, the speaker is poised above the ear. Later when I got out of my car and the headphones automatically connected via Bluetooth -- it was a podcast -- I thought the person was talking to me on the street in the middle of nowhere. I laughed at now I had been tricked so thoroughly, twice. It keeps happening. Music is incredible. The best sound I've ever heard from headphones. So totally worth the money.

Stunning quote in this report from The New York Times about Meta’s plans to add facial recognition to their Ray-Bans:

We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.

Spark is indeed fast. I don’t think I’ll use it often. I’m not usually in a hurry. I’d rather AI be more thorough.

I talked to a couple friends last night at Clawstin about the frenetic pace of AI-assisted development. We should probably slow down. It’s harder to be thoughtful at this pace.

News still needs to make a big transition, to become a distributed unownable thing, with every part replaceable, much like what needs to happen with the social web. This transition has been possible and necessary for about 30 years. The reporters and editors will say we're naive, but we understand what's happening. The news orgs have always been large centralized businesses, silos, and increasingly has come in conflict with the interests of their users. Who trusts what you read in the NYT, Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal, and these were at one time the best of journalism. I know the reporters also won't like this, but the quality assurance of decentralized systems will be done by AI, and overseen by a non-profit organization, staffed by retired journalists. And there will be lots of competition. All parts are replaceable.

This stuffed animal is my favorite thing to come out of the Mastodon project. Adorable. I want to order one but we already have too much stuff.

I wondered if it would snow again this season. The weather has been persistently cloudy, but there has been little snow. Today, the weather changed. Just as I was about to go out for a walk, it started snowing heavily. It has been months since I have seen the snow like I did ...

Thinking about how narratives build and collapse this morning. Not sure I can articulate it well, but roughly: Someone has an idea and shares it; no one notices. A few news stories pop up around that idea; it becomes the narrative. Future news that is even remotely related ...

I maintain a web page that lists notes from IndieWeb events. Entries are added to the page when notes from meet-ups are archived to the community wiki. This web page contains several h-feeds. h-feed is the microformats markup that says that the tagged area represents a feed....

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with David Cain, whose blog can be found at raptitude.com. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. The People and Blogs series is supported by Neil Gorman and the oth...

Ava and I are trading blog post titles. The topic Ava chose for me to write about was “What I associate with my name”. When I was young, I remember distinctly looking through a kids’ encyclopaedia and finding “James” written in there a few times [1]. I don’t know why that me...

Om Malik:

Some of us are hopeful. Some of us are terrified. Most of us are both, often in the same hour. And into that vacuum of uncertainty there is a torrent of speculation dressed up as prophecy.

Austin sunset behind buildings, from 26 floors up, at Clawstin. 🦞

Anthropic has another funding round and highlights their growing revenue for Claude Code. Not surprised. Claude Code was first, people like it, and Opus 4.6 is really expensive. I think Codex 5.3 will continue to slowly peel developers away.

This was such a nice read. I especially resonated with "posting versus publishing" and that a blog can be an "archive and long memory".

Claude just said this: "And going forward, whatever post the user lands on first, that's what you seed it with. The stack just starts wherever they start." The thing that caught my eye was the user lands on first. UserLand was the name of my last company, the one that did Frontier, blogging, podcasting, RSS, XML-RPC, OPML, etc. And here we are again in the land of lands. The User Lands. ;-)

I understood the web because I understood Unix and missed it.