FeedCity

Sunday session

Proud to finally have a new version of Omnibear available that improves login security and allows replying to mastodon and bluesky posts! Posted via Omnibear v2.2.0

Knitting is the future of coding. Nobody knits because they want a quick or cheap jumper, they knit because they love the craft. This is the future of writing code by hand.

— Alice Bartlett

Shoutout to Tower version 2.6.7 which is still solid even though it hasn’t been updated in years. I decided not to update to the newer subscription-based versions, even when they sponsored @coreint, because “if it ain’t broke”… So rare to have an app that just works nearly forever.

Switzerland rejected Palantir on security grounds after independent journalism shed light on fundamental issues. Now the company is suing to tell its side of the story.

When Manton or Doc show up in my blogroll, and they do update fairly regularly, I always click the wedge to see what they say. I can see the first 300 chars of each post in a popup. If it's interesting I click the link to read the full post and any comments. Now I want it coming back to me. My linkblog is cross-posted to Manton's site -- micro.blog, which has thousands of users. I have no way of knowing if anyone has commented on them, but if there were a feed I'd add it to my blogroll. So it would be great to have a feed of all the comments on my posts on micro.blog. Would fit into my flow perfectly. This goes all the way back to the beginnings of RSS, where we called it "automated web surfing." I don't know where people are talking about my stuff, but a well-placed feed can make up for that.

News must be better defended, decentralized, unownable, all parts replaceable. The current situation was preventable. Same problem the social web has.

Braintrust query. Every once in a while I get reports from people who looked something up on my blog's Daytona search engine saying that where they expected dates they see things like this: NaN. The reason you see that is that the archive has a mistake in it, where there was...

BTW: NaN stands for Not A Number.

We’ve been taught that technological change must be chaotic, uncontrolled, and socially destructive — that anything less isn’t real innovation.

The conflation of progress with disruption serves specific interests. It benefits those who profit from rapid, uncontrolled deployment. “You can’t stop progress” is a very convenient argument when you’re the one profiting from the chaos, when your business model depends on moving fast and breaking things before anyone can evaluate whether those things should be broken.

We’ve internalized technological determinism so completely that choosing not to adopt something — or choosing to adopt it slowly, carefully, with conditions — feels like naive resistance to inevitable progress. But “inevitable” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Inevitable for whom? Inevitable according to whom?

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First weekly recap for this fun life experiment. To remind you what this is all about: in order to help Kevin get back to a more sane use of his time in front of his phone, we decided to publicly share 4 weeks of screen time statistics from our phones and write roundups ever...

Watched the 3-point contest and dunk contest. Carter Bryant had the best dunk of the night, just couldn’t quite finish the last dunk. Can’t wait for the season to resume! 🏀

Hope folks are having a nice Valentine’s Day. A big thank-you to everyone who hosts their blog on Micro.blog or participates in the community. ❤️

Dave Winer blogs about not hiding RSS feeds from users:

I always objected to browsers trying to hide the feeds. I come from NYC and rode the subway to school every day in high school. The things you see! It’s all out there for the looking and breathing.

When you click on an RSS feed, your browser should preview it and offer a list of apps and services to subscribe to the feed in. I don’t think we’ve made much progress on this in 20 years.

I always objected to browsers trying to hide the feeds. I come from NYC and rode the subway to school every day in high school. The things you see! It's all out there for the looking and breathing. Lift the hood on a car. Look at all those wires and hoses, what do they do. I hope they don't kill me. Whoever made the decision at Microsoft or Firefox or wherever that feeds needed to be obfuscated, some advice -- be more respectful of your users. The web is the medium that had a View Source command. You're supposed to take a look. Don't forget the Back button if you don't like what you see. Something funny, if only life had a Back button.

Speaking of the Back button, that's the problem with tiny-little-text-box social networks. No links. So guess what the Back button one of the best inventions ever, isn't part of your reading and writing world. I guess this is like the street cars in LA conspiracy, that the car companies bought and shut down?

To my WordPress developer friends. How about making the RSS feed prettier and easier to read. Properly indenting it would make a big diff. I prefer encoding individual characters to CDATA. Those two things to start. It really does matter how readable this stuff is. Comparison, the RSS feed that Old School generates, the software that renders my blog.

It's all-star weekend in the NBA which I've never seen the point of. As if sport is anything but a simulation of what we were born to do -- compete and cooperate. My team is great, your team sucks. It's fun the same way slapstick for some weird reason is funny. All it takes to get a laugh is trip and fall on your face. It's funny just thinking about it. Doesn't seem very nice but there it is.

One more thing and then I gotta go. I think it's time for the AI's to compete with Wikipedia. It's filled with hallucinations. Make it a community thing, let the people be involved, but do a better job of presentation, and validate what's written, don't let these things become so territorial. We want the facts, not who has the best PR.