FeedCity

People talk about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of large language models as though all tasks are comparable. But it strikes me that there are three broad categories of work that large language models are applied to: Compression. Transformation. Expansion. Compressi...

Updating version strings today, so here’s my official guide to acceptable version numbers:

❌ 0.1
❌ 1
❌ 1.0.0
✅ 1.0b1
✅ 1.0
✅ 1.0.1
❌ 2
✅ 2.0
✅ 2.0.1
✅ 2.1
✅ 2.1.1
❌ 2.1.10
❌ 2.123
❌ 2026.1.2
❌ 2026.123456789

I’ve been versioning apps like this for 30 years. It’s just how it is. 🙂

"Google had already disclosed my data without telling me. There was no opportunity to contest it."

"A mantra to clarify ownership while reinforcing shared responsibility." I agree with every word.

Inkwell beta for Android is now in review over at Google. Feeling good about 1.0 on both mobile platforms, will ship fairly soon. All the client apps are open source too — web, mobile, Mac.

WordPress has remained mostly constant for its whole life, at least from the point of view of this outsider. But now the world its embedded in is turning upside down and WordPress must change, but no one really knows how that change will manifest.

I've been designing and developing software like WordPress for over thirty years. I have stong opinions about where the product should have gone, but mostly I've not been talking about that, because I don't want to interfere with what Matt is doing. I've known him since he ...

Time for a home screen update. A few recent changes: Inkwell beta, Duolingo, Orion. Dock row is Hey plus our Micro.blog suite of apps: Epilogue, Strata, and Micro.blog.

The opmlProjectEditor explainer needed a light edit. It should make a lot more sense now if you're a newcomer. Perhaps the most important thing is that it now includes an example that you can open in Drummer to see how it works in an outline editor. OPML has become a really important format for apps that use RSS, but it's far more broadly adaptable. It's a good package for a whole app, and you can teach your tools to use the common structure to make it easier to share it with others, including Claude, to keep a repo current, and to deploy the resulting code.

I realised that the thing that bothered me the most about that stupid tabs discussion was the shallowness. Vertical vs horizontal tabs in a browser is not a deep philosophical topic worth of major explorations, that goes without saying, but you can still approach it with som...

#TIL Smith-Corona Marchant (aka SCM) not only made typewriters, but they also manufactured index cards! They apparently had an office supplies group in Marion, Indiana. I can’t wait to take some of these for a spin in my Sears Cutlass.

From a gmail address. Emphasis in original. I am pretty sure this would be violating the law and violating contractual agreements which might get made should an actual “job” get booked. Subject: To Joe Crawford Hi Joe, This is %REDACTED%, and I’ve found your contact from LinkedIn. I’ve been managing an outsourcing team for the...

Wednesday session

Today the work with Claude is much better, though when we got started it was even worse than yesterday. The key to getting on track was to figure out why it worked so well in previous projects and fell apart with this one. In each of the others, I passed off an existing proj...

An innocuous iPhone notifications setting could put your Signal contacts at risk.

Yesterday the dog got zoomies. Zoomies are what Americans (others too?) call it when a dog runs around in circles in what looks either manic or fun or maybe both. Kelly had gone to work. And Gwen came back in from the walk, looked for her, and lacking Kelly in the apartment, the zoomies commenced....

Flock is building a national surveillance network. A protest movement is forming to tear it down.