FeedCity

Open letter from employees of Google and OpenAI in support of Anthropic:

They’re trying to divide each company with fear that the other will give in. That strategy only works if none of us know where the others stand. This letter serves to create shared understanding and solidarity in the face of this pressure from the Department of War.

The leadership of all the AI companies is fascinating to me. Dario Amodei perhaps the most so. I thought his essay Machines of Loving Grace was excellent, but I’ve watched many interviews with him and I sometimes come away kind of depressed about the future.

Catching up on Paul Frazee’s post comparing AT Proto’s decentralization to ActivityPub’s federation and Nostr’s “magical mesh” approach:

Our near-miss similarity to the two common models of decentralization is at least partially why we catch heat from them. We’re really similar, but we introduced changes that remove the legible markers of each technology: multiple app instances in the case of federation, and an absence of servers in the case of magical meshes.

It’s a good read. Most of the confusion in the fediverse about AT Proto is because people judge it based on Mastodon’s architecture.

Love that feeling when a new feature sort of actually works. All downhill from here to the release.

But the soul is a floor. It is there to bear us up and keep us standing, not merely to be clean.

— Patricia Lockwood, Will There Ever Be Another You

Maybe it's time to give awards for most our admired standards-makers. I would start with Jon Postel and Steve Wozniak.

Terry Godier posted on the aftermath of shipping Current:

To not let all of the feedback (both good and bad) alter your ability to think clearly and put one foot in front the other and make a thing that’s true to you again. There’s such a strong pull mentally/emotionally to do more of what people liked, or less of what people didn’t, on the next “thing”

The best products take feedback from everywhere but filter it through the original vision. Otherwise you’ll eventually get a watered down or bloated thing with no uniquely defining purpose.

One of the items in Rules for Standards-makers is don't design the format before you make the app. Instead, make an app, and when you're ready, make the file format public so people can interop (ie compete) so as not to lock users to in your software. If you do that you can say you are "of the web." If we all do that always, voila! -- no more silos. Another rule is that you must use an existing format if it exists, because then you will interop with apps that support that format. Gratuitous incompatibility is a sign of a silo-seeker. So, look first, if there are no usable formats, make your app and make your format public.

From my friend Zachary Kai: IndieWeb Carnival: Feb 2026 For this month’s carnival, write about where your interests intersect. That might be a single unexpected overlap, a whole ecosystem, or the thread that ties parts of your life together. I think my whole life has been unexpected overlaps. My parents met as an unexpected overlap:...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Dominik Schwind, whose blog can be found at lostfocus.de. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members...

It’s been a week and all my gear dried out. Rain and wet forced me out of the water. I broke out the sewing machine and fixed my wetsuit bag. Today I got back in. The berms are coming down and Spring is coming away. The inexorable march of time continues. My blog turned 25...

This year at Automattic has been intense. We kicked it off with two weeks of in-person AI enablement training, and there’s a great post about it now. I’ve been so impressed and inspired by my colleagues leaning in to learn and grow together in the most consequential time in software development in the past 40 … Continue reading Enablement →

Just got bitten by a dog, which kinda sums up this Thursday.

“Choice. The solution is choice.”*You should download Firefox 148 (released today!) and explicitly set the new "AI Controls" to your preferred choice.* https://www.firefox.com/Disclosure: I work for Mozilla, but this post, like all on this site, represents my personal thought...

Happy Twin Peaks day to those who celebrate!In Agent Cooper’s first appearance in the show, he’s driving a car, right hand on the steering wheel, left hand holding a small black box (a microcassette recorder), that, if you don’t look too closely, could easily be mistaken for ...

Play bad title pun games, win bad title pun prizes. The Chattie hat continues to tempt and taunt me. After my first test Chattie came out OK despite some major issues during construction, and my second Chattie didn’t work out. Producer Amy has ultimately adopted the “test” C...

This upcoming book about Steve Jobs during the NeXT years sounds really good, via John Gruber:

With unprecedented access to unbroadcast footage of Jobs in NeXT meetings, private company documents, and interviews with his closest colleagues, Cain offers the definitive account of how failure transformed a brash wunderkind into a true business genius.

I got my first Mac during those years. Steve was legendary, NeXT machines felt almost mythical, and I’m not sure I ever considered that he would return to Apple. What an extraordinary life.

Sometimes when I’m walking and look up at trees or buildings moving past me, I imagine the world in layers like an old multiplane camera, or as seen through Tarzan’s deep canvas. If this programming and AI thing doesn’t pan out, I need to find my pencils. My brain is still wired for animation.

Kiki’s Delivery Service back in theaters next month:

More than three decades after it first enchanted audiences, Kiki’s Delivery Service is returning to North American cinemas in a newly remastered 4K presentation, heading exclusively to IMAX theaters on March 13.

One of my favorites. 🍿