FeedCity

This week is being spent, among other things, teaching Claude how to write code that fits in with my library of apps. I like this. It's like a painter telling an assistant the rules for adding to the sculpture. Art has been practiced like that for a long time. Anyway, here's...

From the courtroom in the Elon Musk vs. OpenAI trial, Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge says that the judge denied a request to throw out jurors who didn’t like Elon:

“The reality is that people don’t like him,” she said. “Many people don’t like him. but that doesn’t mean that Americans nevertheless can’t have integrity for the judicial process.”

Turns out if you’re an asshole in public, it might eventually come back to bite you.

I’ve been trying to come up with a simple test that lets you know whether some software is on the web or if it just can be made to appear in the web browser. So here we go.

If you can hook up a piece of the app to the a piece of another app then it’s on the web.

This comes from the basic feature of linking, which is the unique feature of the web.

Every other feature that makes the web the web in my experience is allowing two things to be part of each other.

Comment here.

It was a productive weekend. What on earth do I mean by that? I mean, I use that word: “productive”–it sounds like I worked. But I didn’t. It was a “good” weekend. But that doesn’t sound like anything. The adjective is useless. Good writing communicates better than platitudinal words. I did things! We went on...

Semafor reports that Tiny is looking for new owners for Letterboxd:

The Canadian holding company Tiny has spoken to potential buyers, from CNBC and MS NOW parent company Versant to the Hollywood startup The Ankler, about the platform…

I use the built-in movie blogging in Micro.blog and Epilogue, but we also integrate with Letterboxd posters and I know people like it. Hopefully the site ends up in good hands.

Apple is adding the “monthly but 12-month commitment” pricing to the App Store. People generally hate how Adobe handles this. Apple’s UI is fairly clear, but I still expect user confusion.

I don’t even like showing the monthly estimated price for a year subscription. Better to avoid those gimmicks.

This essay by Nilay Patel is getting a lot of attention. I’ve been saying for a while that there is going to be a serious rift in society over AI. That doesn’t mean that everyone hates it. Nearly a billion people use ChatGPT every week. Mac fans used to dream of the future t...

Monday session

Busy day working on new RSS-based project. Will return later today or tomorrow. Still diggin!

Snapped this picture of a flock of birds yesterday. Didn’t turn out well — badly cropped, too many power lines — but in real life it was mesmerizing.

Not having much luck with the gatekeepers. I resubmitted our request for YouTube upload access for Micro.blog Studio… Denied again by Google. Micro.blog is just hard to demo for people who have no idea what it’s about.

Ming-Chi Kuo in a tweet about potential OpenAI smartphone plans: OpenAI is working with MediaTek and Qualcomm to develop smartphone processors, with Luxshare as the exclusive system co-design and manufacturing partner. Mass production is expected in 2028. Makes sense to be...

A collection of Woody Guthrie covers

I just said this to Claude: "I want to show people that RSS isn't just for news. It can be for mindless social media rants too." ;-)

When Bluesky is down, you can bookmark my news page on feedland.com for news from feeds I follow, in various categories. If you think there are feeds I should have, please send me an email.

Frustrated with multiple rejections from Apple holding up Inkwell 1.0 for iOS, I’m switching gears to work on Epilogue. There are several little improvements that I can ship this week.

Imagine you were putting up a skyscraper in Manhattan. I lived in an area of the city, called Billionaire's Row, for nine years where I saw quite a few huge buildings go up from my living room window on the 50th floor. Now imagine you used a different plumbing system in every apartment, over 140 stories, with up to 15 residences per story. Different wiring. All the rooms are different shapes. How could you maintain such a building? I think ChatGPT might be able to do it but no human could. We need patterns to allow us to understand big things.