FeedCity

Coder is derogatory term btw, as if our work was like a telegram coder, but it's understandable I guess because all the lay people see is us typing on a computer and being grouchy when they interrupt our train of thought. Coder is analogous to calling a chef a chopper. You have to understand the activity you're proposing that AI is replacing. And I find all the discussions about art very harmful -- because AI opens up graphic art to people who never thought they could do it. I bet you some absolutely fantastic artists are blossoming right now. Calling it slop is just as disrespectful as calling art expressed in software "code." BTW they said the same bullshit about bloggers and we know how that turned out.

I gotta say some days I start with a lot on my mind and am driven to write. This is one of those days. Maybe I'm inspired by the torrent of posts by my blogger friend ma.tt. Blogging can be a solitary thing or a relative thing. When you blog about something I have something to say about, I write on my blog and link back to yours, that's relative. The problem with comments in the old blogging world is that my comment resides on your blog. No more of that. I want equal stature for all writing, your comment should appear on your blog, yet still be easy to find from the other person's blog (and this is very important) with their support, it has to be something they want their readers to see. Otherwise the comment is still on your blog where your readers can see it.

24 years ago I had life-saving heart surgery. The treatment was not available to my grandmother who had the genes from which I inherited the condition. She died very young, but that was normal in her time, there was no treatment for this kind of disease beyond, don't exert yourself too much for the rest of your (short) life. Do you think heart surgeons are less useful now that we've had such amazing innovation in one freaking lifetime? Right now we're just beginning to discover new ways AI gives us the same kind of new power that bypass surgery gave to surgeons.

Bluesky's new CEO, Proton Mail de-anonymization, and promoting safety at work.

If we can get the web to come back, Scripting News could have new relevance. The age of the silo really hurt my rep. But I think people will ultimately appreciate that I never turned by back on the web. It was either the web or the highway as far as I was concerned. I've already lived under the thumb of a corporate platform vendor. I'd rather give up than try it again. And by the web coming back, I mean when products are expected to interop, the way podcast clients interop. I don't care if they're forced to do it, or do it willfully, with gusto -- but I know and so do people who tried to develop on owned platforms know, that it just doesn't work if there's a BigCo in charge of your destiny. There's always an acquisition or reorg just around the corner that sacrifices your future, often for no reason other than they don't care.

As you know Jake Savin is getting Frontier to run on current Linux and Mac OS systems. Today he posted a wonderful screen shot. It's how Frontier's built-in web server says "hello world."

We're still fixing problems created by the switch to https on the web. Reported a problem yesterday, was surprised to find an inconsistency in the way WordPress represents guids in its RSS feed for a post and in the API. This morning I posted an issue on the WordPress repo on GitHub. I don't think they can fix either approach without breakage, so they probably have to leave it as-is. I updated wpIdentity package to normalize guids it gets from the API to lowercase, so even if they change the implementation my software won't break. Another reason we're still paying for what Google decided we needed. What we don't need -- BigCo's f-ing with the f-ing web.

Happy Friday The 13th! ;-)

Bluesky must succeed. It just might.

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Patrick Rhone, whose blog can be found at patrickrhone.net. 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 membe...

Not doing a full What’s In My Bag yet, but I do want to highlight I’ve been really enjoying the Sennheiser HDB 630 Wireless Over-Ear Headphones. Hat tip: Philip Kaplan aka Pud.

I would like to offer some free business advice to people who are considering selling something they’ve created. First, if the buyer insists you don’t talk to any other bidders, you are being screwed. They only do this because they don’t want you to find the market-clearing price. Do you think when Microsoft called LinkedIn … Continue reading Selling Your Company →

For a brief period, Tumblr was unavailable to the 115M+ people in the Philippines because the government had blocked it. To their credit, the Philippines CICC quickly reviewed and corrected their block after mass public outrage from the Filipino Tumblr community. Let the people tumble!

With the rise of GLP-1 drugs, there’s a trend that magnums are being ordered at clubs to meet minimums but left unfinished. I think there’s a space for an ultra-high-end wellness drink at clubs. Imagine Erewhon meets Magic Mind meets Kin,  maybe with some effervescence. An elixir that comes out with sparklers but makes you … Continue reading Popping Bottles →

I worked downtown earlier today at Lazarus (☕️) and you can already start to feel the SXSW vibes. I’m going to miss all the events this year, but I wonder how AI will change it? Just checked the ClawCon page and there are 750 RSVPs! 🦞

Sun-kissed evenings in Porto never fail to impress.

Try entering this into Claude or ChatGPT: "debugging an app that uses wordpress rss feeds and noticed that guids are http but other addresses in the feed are https. this causes trouble." A while back Matt was giving me grief, in a friendly way, about how scripting.com still uses http addresses, the reason apparently is the same one that keeps them from using https in the guids in their feeds. It would break a lot of things that I don't want to break. I'm not suggesting they change it, but somewhere in my codebase somehow the http addresses are getting converted to https, and I haven't (yet) been able to track it down.

Here's a screen shot of the Claude response.

Atlassian lays off 10%, about 1600 people. They employee a lot of folks in Austin, hope friends here are not affected much.

What a fantastic bunch of speakers! Thank you all for making #WebDayOut so great!