FeedCity

There’s a power imbalance at work here that’s hard to ignore. Large “AI” companies, the ones with billions in venture capital, send their bots to harvest free content. Not only from big publishers or Wikipedia, but from small, independent websites, too. But we, the people running these sites – often as passion projects, as ways to freely share what we’ve learned, as digital gardens we tend in our spare time – we’re the ones paying for the bandwidth and server resources to handle all those additional requests while those companies profit from the training data they extract. It’s an asymmetric battle: small systems absorbing the demands generated at an entirely different, industrial scale.

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From MacStories: Apple announced today that it is expanding its manufacturing operations in Houston, Texas where it will make Mac minis. The company also said it will expand its AI server production and training in Houston later this year. Sounds good to me. Also perfect t...

It took me a while to realize..

1. Agentics are server software.
2. The things you used to write in Node.js and before that PHP and Perl, and in my case Frontier.
3. I had been trying to get ChatGPT to do exactly that for months.

We're going to spend a while reimplementing all our server software.

It would be super helpful if the whole thing could be packaged up so we can write our servers in English or whatever our preferred Really Simple Language is, and have it compiled to whatever internal language it likes, and not have to learn too much new jargon.

The entire intellectual and creative output of a team that reinvented personal computing fits in a space that, today, we wouldn’t think twice about wasting on a single font file.

Somewhere in the years that followed we’ve lost the creative solutions, the art of optimization, that being constrained in that way produces.

The best engineers I’ve worked with carry this instinct even when others might think it crazy. They impose their own constraints. They ask what this would look like if it had to be half the size, or run twice as fast, or use a tenth of the memory. Not because anyone demanded it, but because just by thinking there could be a better, more efficient solution, one often emerges.

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The principle of least power expressed nicely:

Smaller, dumber things have more applications, go more places, and require less maintenance.

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Last year I was introduced to the idea of “Dopplr colours” in the IndieWeb community. This refers to an accent colour assigned to cities on the now-defunct travel website Dopplr. You can see examples by clicking through different Dopplr city pages in the Internet Archive and ...

As rubber replacement is one of the necessary and sometimes more finnicky parts of typewriter restoration, I thought it would be useful to write up the details of a small recent repair for others as well as my future self. Late last May, I did a full clean, oil, and adjust (COA) on my 1951 … Continue reading Rubber Grommet Repair on Remington Super-Riters and Standards

When I was in high school, I used to keep a pencil or pen up my sleeve. I don’t remember anyone else doing it, or why I started. But if I had a pen up my sleeve, I would at least know I had one nearby for when I’d need one. (I may be mis-remembering whether having a pen up my...

Last year I was introduced to the idea of “Dopplr colours” in the IndieWeb community. This refers to an accent colour assigned to cities on the now-defunct travel website Dopplr. You can see examples by clicking through different Dopplr city pages in the Internet Archive and ...

As AI is used in more tools, I’m thinking about consent from bloggers who don’t want AI to process anything in their writing. I couldn’t find a convention for this outside of model training. Once text is out on the web, visitors are going to use web browsers and other tools ...

Falling down a mountain strapped to two slender skis feels like an analogy for life.

You might have seen the diagram before. The one Vincent Driessen put up on his website a few years ago to explain the concept of a Git branching model. ...

Tonight was one of my most surreal Claude Code Sundays. To make a long story short, I pointed Claude Code at my Sonos setup in Houston: “All 29 Sonos speakers were running on WiFi with SonosNet completely disabled. They had accumulated ~89 million dropped packets across the system. That packet loss is why groups kept … Continue reading Claude & Sonos →

📗 Want to read The Hidden Curriculum of Video Games by David I Waddington ISBN: 9780228027881

Big snow day in the east. I thought it was going to be heavy snow but it's actually really light. The shoveling is easy. I'm getting good at it. Right now I think this storm was a lot less than they said it would be, but I also think to some extent, dealing with big snow is getting somewhat routine?

If you want to read something good, go with yesterday's piece about the web and evolution. A lot of things came together for me there.

And if you want to listen to something good, pick up the latest podcast. It has two purposes. 1. To tell the story of how I lost my Twitter/X account, hoping it makes its way to someone at the company who can turn my account back on. 2. To illustrate how we could use AI to make customer service work much better than it does. It's a real killer app. As if you thought of Craig's List when Craig did. This is not anything I can do, but I would love to use it. Right now the tech industry reputation is getting worse all the time. Do something that visibly makes people's lives better now. People are pretty nervous about AI. And so far you have to be a scientist of some kind to really appreciate it. But the internet as a place of business, education and health care is a big global mess.

A new philosophy for travelers called digital silence, to avoid sharing exactly where you were, via Kottke:

We have stopped traveling to feel. We now travel to prove we were there.

Only wish this was a blog post and not a series of Instagram photos.