FeedCity

If you want to heal the country, watch out for ways you add division, and stop. It's probably the biggest power any of us has.

Decided we should do a beta for the new RSS thing, starting this weekend and running about a week. If you’re interested, sign up on this form. You’ll get an email tomorrow. So excited to share this.

Recommended: When ICE buys a warehouse in your town.

Also: New Yorker interview of Conan O'Brien. I love that both O'Brien and Remnick agree that podcasting liberated them as artists. That was the point! When you think about decentralization, the most successful protocol we have is podcasting. By design it was hard for silos to usurp. Now think about how you would repeat that pattern with text. I've been working on that for almost three years, and it works now. We'll be testing it soon on my blog, and then everyone's. This should be the grand slam home run of my career. That's how it feels to me now. And O'Brien tells some great stories including one about his father, who noted that Conan had found a way to get paid for his insanity.

You can tell from the OpenClaw meetups how much this thing has captured people’s attention. There are of course a lot of dude programmers out there using it, but maybe it’s reaching more people… On the How I AI podcast, an interview with Jesse Genet who has bots helping organize her homeschool.

Thanks Jatan Mehta for reviewing my book! His post includes some quotes and commentary.

“To send my rhymes out to all the nations
Like Ma Bell, I got the ill communication”

Especially in an age where generating words is cheap, when you come across truly great writing, it really stands out. I want to pull two quotes from The Economist’columnist Charlemagne’s article Luxury goods are Europe’s global tax on vanity. Flogging luxury goods is one of the few fields of business in which Europe excels (if … Continue reading Great Writing →

How many Jeffrey Epstein’s do you think there are?

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.