FeedCity

On a more serious note… My last post is such a cheap shot, I sat on it for 15 minutes and almost didn’t post it. Would’ve scrapped it if it was anyone else but Elon Musk. Which isn’t fair, but also he’s created a social presence that draws chaos. Easy to get pulled in.

You kind of get a sense when the platform vendor is going to compete with you instead of work with you, and I've had that feeling for Automattic for a while. That's how big companies work with independent devs. There is a bigger picture, developers who might build on WordPres...

There continue to be interesting quotes from The Verge’s liveblog of the OpenAI trial. Elon Musk:

We did talk about establishing a for-profit or Tesla providing some of the funding — there were a bunch of ideas that were brainstormed — I was not averse to a small for-profit that would provide funding to the nonprofit as long as the tail didn’t wag the dog.

I will be surprised if Elon convinces the jury. This story is almost like Walter White feeling bitter he was left out of the success of Grey Matter. Except Elon didn’t turn to selling an addictive, unhealthy product… Oh wait, X. 🤪

Finished reading: Luminous by Silvia Park. About robots, humanity, and memory…. A beautiful and sad view of the future. 📚

We just released the 2.2 update to Epilogue for iOS. Android to follow later. I’m happy with this update. One nice improvement to book search: if you search in e.g. “Want to read”, it will find book matches in the current bookshelf and show them at the top.

All bloggers eventually want to build their own blog software. All feed reader developers want their own sync platform. All blog hosts want a feed reader.

In 2026, I predict approximately thousands of niche open web apps, each with a small number of users who wouldn’t want to use anything else.

Tacos tacos tacos.

Reading through Codex’s MEMORY.md file. Fascinating. Includes a bunch of random things that Codex has learned about my projects and previous tasks.

Claude unlearns things that we had settled a long time ago. It fumbles around with a process, making it worse with every iteration, the same fumbling it did five days ago when it initially learned how to do what it can't do now. Usually when I regress in software, I am responsible for it, i did something to break it, but here's a tool that's capable of derailing us with me doing nothing new. In that way it behaves more like an imperfect human than a GIGO machine.

New version of XML-RPC package for JavaScript. It now handles POST messages that don't have a body.

Neat new service called Sourcefeed from Terry Godier to publish RSS feeds:

RSS-only. No website, no inbox, no algorithm. Subscribers read it where they choose, in whatever reader they already trust.

My first feature request: let the title field be blank for short posts. 🙂

There are some surprises in the NBA first round, but maybe no greater than the Pistons. ESPN answers a question I had:

The Pistons are the third team to win 60 games in the regular season but trail 3-1 in its opening series, according to ESPN Research. Each of the previous two teams – the 2011 San Antonio Spurs and 2007 Dallas Mavericks – extended its series but lost in six games.

🏀

A question I'd like to put out there. Maybe AI needs the massive data centers now, but they could definitely get more efficient over time. There might be another Moore's Law in there. And the work is going very fast, and maybe they're leaving other optimizations for later. T...

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.