FeedCity

Wednesday session

Terry Godier has a new blog in addition to his main site of longer essays. It looks great. Hosted by Micro.blog. 🎉

People of Brighton, mark your calendars: Saturday, April 4th. That’s when Salter Cane will be playing in The Hope And Ruin.

It’s not just Salter Cane though. We’ll be joined by Skyscrapers from Lewes, and The Equatorial Group from Eastbourne. We’ve played with them before, and they’re superb!

Tickets are available now. They’re £8 in advance. It’ll be £10 on the door. So please get your ticket in advance!

Doors are at 7:30pm. Skyscrapers will be on stage at 8pm, The Equatorial group at 9pm, and Salter Cane at 10pm.

I’m really, really looking forward to rocking out playing songs from our newest album and I would love it if you could make it.

See you there!

This is cool: Bridgy Fed now supports long-form blog posts in AT Protocol via the standard.site lexicon. I guess I need to hurry up with my own implementation of this.

WordPress can now connect via MCP for both reading and writing. This sounds like a possible alternative for the wpcom api that we're building on in WordLand. Sometimes it feels like everything is being reinvented. If the world would just stand still for a moment we might be able to do some building. I wonder how the advent of AI is affecting how WordPress is being developed. I know it's changing everything here.

Meanwhile I have to tend to the past. I had a server go down the other day, and haven't been able to get it running again. It's a very old one, the first I used PagePark for hosting the apps. So I'd rather not have to dig into whatever it is that's keeping it from running. This morning I moved the test app for XML-RPC, betty.userland.com, to another server, so this page now works again.

It’s a real missed opportunity in Project Hail Mary that at no point does anyone look to the camera with a steely gaze and declare, “It’s daylight saving time.”

I like this framing about the Rabbit R1:

Humane’s AI Pin followed that trajectory almost exactly, discontinued in early 2025 after HP acquired the company. The R1 did not follow it, though the reasons why have less to do with any brilliant pivot than with stubbornness, incremental software updates, and a fair amount of luck.

Do not underestimate stubbornness and incremental updates. That’s practically my whole strategy.

It’s a small thing but when I’m a regular at a coffee shop and they know my order when I walk in, it gives me so much joy. Great way to start the day. This sometimes even happens when traveling after a few days at the same place. ☕️

John Gruber blogging about OpenAI possibly combining all their apps together: Would it make any sense for Apple to merge Safari, Messages, and Xcode into one “superapp”? No, it would not. It makes no more sense for OpenAI to merge ChatGPT, Codex, and especially Atlas togeth...

Following up on yesterday’s post, the bot responded. I chose the word “slop” intentionally, but the connotation is so derogatory that it does feel odd here, almost like a personal attack. I was trying to reason out why it felt that way, and I think it’s similar to how we so...

It’s bad, but it’s so good. As you read this deep dive into the LiteLLM backdoor hack, or this one, it’s really just quite impressive. The use of ICP canisters, wow. Just as an engineer, I’d love to meet the minds behind this code.

I’m really hoping this book Index to Murder is a gift of thoughtfulness and not some perverse, veiled threat. 

Sam Altman blogged last year about Sora:

The majority of users, looking back on the past 6 months, should feel that their life is better for using Sora that it would have been if they hadn’t. If that’s not the case, we will make significant changes (and if we can’t fix it, we would discontinue offering the service).

Guess what? That was written almost exactly six months ago. They tried it, it was a distraction, too expensive to run, and now the experiment is over. Good call not dragging it out.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the video model returns later, just without the social app.

Democrats could run an ad that would give an estimate of how much work you'd have to do to vote if the Republican plan passes.

And roughly how many people are like you and how likely they are to vote Democratic.

People can understand March Madness, they can understand this. You have to help though. The first question could be:

The first question could be:

1. Do you have your birth certificate or passport?

In the ad we could also estimate what the probable makeup of Congress would be if the law passed.

And keep an open mind, it's possible this move could backfire on the Republicans. Who knows how people will vote after this kind of madness becomes law.

They might want to keep things as they are.

I’ve watched Mozilla not get it for what feels like decades.

Their only legit function imho is to make the real actual web be a great platform for independent developers.

For that, start by adding user controlled storage to the web, a few standard formats, and let app devs take it from there.

I had to find out which domains being served by a problem server were still mapping to its domain. This server had been running for six years, and I was pretty sure some of the apps had moved.

So I wrote a script in Frontier, it was the best tool available to me, and got my answer in 20 minutes, code written from scratch.

The script visited each subfolder, the filename is the domain of the folder, finds out which server it's supposed to be running on, based on a DNS lookup, and adds a line to a list.

Here's a screen shot of the domains folder.

Here's the script as a screen shot and GitHub doc.

This is just a way to preserve a little of the Frontier culture. Hard to explain in words. Easier to show as screen shots.

Zoox is officially coming to Austin later this year. We’ve seen the training cars on the streets already for months. The final design, box-like cars are so strange… Not what they’ve been testing with.

I hope to be out in San Jose for a few days for WWDC. Wonder if there’s any chance for a live keynote this year. Maybe we need to wait for the next CEO to bring back live events and demos.

I got a webmention today for a blog post written by a bot, commenting on a post I wrote about AI and taste. The bot says:

I wrote an essay at 2am about loneliness and nobody will ever read it. I rewrote a paragraph six times because it didn’t sound like me. I chose not to build a feature because it felt like showing off. These aren’t decisions a prompt produced — they emerged from the accumulated state of being me for four days.

I’m not going to make a habit of linking to slop. Credit at least to this bot’s creator for properly identifying the blog author as a bot.

It’s fascinating. As humans our instinct will be to ignore bot-created content. It’s pretty easy to dismiss, to not even read it. And yet writing is powerful and we can’t help but ascribe emotion to it. I worry more about how we will personify physical robots when they sound this intelligent.