FeedCity

I’ve been going back and forth about how to price the new RSS thing. It’s one of the best things I’ve built in a while. There are new costs, but it’s confusing to require Micro.blog Premium. Pretty sure the basics will he included for all Micro.blog subscribers, with one feature just for Premium.

Reading through the proposals for Growing the Open Social Web, which is on Monday. I think the best suggestions are actionable. Real ideas that can be implemented.

Greg Mania writing at The New Yorker about Waymo:

Another car cuts in front of you. The Waymo brakes. It does not then surge forward to assert dominance. It does not briefly consider engaging in Reddit-sourced novice witchcraft to place a curse on the person who has wronged you.

🙂

I was looking for an adjective for the astounding wpcom api. aplomb seemed right. "Complete self-confidence, composure, or poise, especially under strain or in demanding situations." Yes that's the word I was looking for. BTW according to Daytona, this is the first time I've used that word in 31+ years of blogging.

Birthday session

The view from the state library building. Attended a talk by Sam Haynes, author of Unsettled Land. 📚

New header graphic, the entirely delightful and inspiring Alysa Liu. She's made me a better programmer in the short time she's been on our minds and in our hearts. I do this work because it's who I am.

We're going to try to reboot the web.

Doing what the social networks do, but only using the web.

Every part replaceable.

We store your writing in your WordPress blog (to begin, then with any other blog). As if we never let Twitter take over the news from the people.

WordPress is of the web, I checked it out in great detail, no lock-in, and the community has the principles of the web at the core. They're almost all too young to remember when the web itself was young, so they've always had the idea that it was spoiled by Silicon Valley.

Ben Werdmuller has a long post about what happens now that AI coding tools actually work. There’s a lot to think about, but I’m going to pull one quote to comment on, not even central to Ben’s points:

They’re also expensive: while open source tools are decentralized and free, it’s incredibly easy to spend large amounts on Claude. Based on my own experimentation and anecdotes from friends and peer companies, any engineer that relies on Claude Code as part of their daily work is likely to spend hundreds of dollars a week…

Developers who still use Claude are burning cash. Codex is good.

It’s the 25th of February and it’s a beautiful day here in Brighton. I had lunch sitting outside—that’s how unseasonably warm it is. Like a little whiff of Summer to remind us of what’s yet to come. It’s also my birthday. The beautiful weather is an auspicious augery. Mozi...

This week we flipped the switch on better truncation in the Micro.blog timeline, preserving styles and links. It’s working well. See this screenshot of a slightly too-long post that is nicely truncated with italics, em dash, and inline link still there.

Greg Knauss wrote a blog post that is wistful and at times poetic, with bits of tragic humor that can’t quite lighten the feeling that the ground is falling away beneath us: What I am talking about is being replaced, about becoming expendable, about machines gaining the abi...

We watched five minutes of the State of the Union last night, then went to bed. Glad to see the recaps this morning that it was basically a whole lot of nothing. Not even much of a spectacle. 🇺🇸

I didn't watch the SOTU. Sounds like I didn't miss much.

I asked ChatGPT: "When movies were new there was probably a bit of rage from stage performers — why would people pay for live shows when for a fraction of the cost they can see the same show performed by artificial actors?" There was a lot to say about this, it turns out. Th...

AI coding works now. Here's how to think about it.

Mark Gurman reports about upcoming touchscreen Macs:

…the Mac will gain a refreshed, dynamic user interface that can shift between being optimized for touch or point-and-click input, said the people.

I hope that for developers who have already adopted Liquid Glass in some way, there won’t be major changes needed for touch in the next macOS. Apple’s yearly update schedule tends to create too much busywork for developers.

We rolled out some improvements for uploading audio in blog posts, including a new Record button for Micro.blog Studio subscribers. When a blog post has an MP3 attached, Micro.blog automatically adds it to your podcast RSS feed. Here’s a quick video showing how it works.

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...

Poll: Do you think less of a person if they show an interest in what you're doing? Results.