FeedCity

Took me a while to realize why I’m enjoying fewer articles online, at first thinking it was the paywalls. Or maybe it’s because tech journalism has become so cynical. Probably not intentional — just a natural result of the growing distrust in big companies. But I’d like to be inspired sometimes too.

Listened to a bunch of the Greg Brockman testimony. Really interesting to hear the lawyers at work. First part, Greg probably came off too guarded. Second part, more in his element retelling OpenAI’s founding story. (I still don’t see how Elon Musk can win this case.)

I'll let you be the judge. We have a convention. I've asked it to keep a file named handoff.md. At the end of every session I tell it to update the file with where we left the project at the end of the session, it does, and then I take a break. When I come back, first thing ...

Back in 2023 I challenged myself to use my phone in greyscale mode for a week. The experiment was successful: a week later, I was still using my phone in greyscale mode. At some point afterwards, I did disable greyscale mode. But last year, or early this year (I can't remembe...

There’s now an audio livestream for Elon Musk vs. OpenAI. Listening to Greg Brockman on the stand.

I follow news of the App Store guidelines pretty closely, but I can’t even keep the rules straight anymore now that they are fragmented across countries or held up in court appeals. I can’t believe all of this confusion is worth it to Apple. So much wasted time.

Nice story at Bloomberg about book reading retreats:

At Boutique Book Breaks, which take place at spa hotels across the English countryside, participants practice yoga, visit bookstores and explore the area when not quietly reading.

Reminds me of Silent Book Club, too. 📚

2022: Markdown is just enough HTML.

It's just dawning on me how thoroughly the AI apps are building on Markdown. People love Markdown because it's simple and its virtually impossible to screw it up, unlike HTML which got a lot of crazy-ass features in the 90s when Micosoft was trying to run the world, and then...

A cartoon by Dan Morgan that illustrates the role Markdown plays in AI. Text is central to how AI works, and the text we use in AI is Markdown all the way.

It's very nice to not be working on CSS. I hate CSS. I now have a slave that does the CSS for me.

I didn't invent RSS, I adopted it.

I took Edward Tufte’s online course on analysing and presenting data. It lasted four hours and was a mixture of reading from his books and listening to lecture material. The course was terrific and I learned so much. As I was taking the course, I took down a few quotes that s...

In the age of AI, Markdown is even more the default choice for text, something I heartily approve of. And that's why I think now is a good time to sneak some new open non-silo'd technologies in there, like for example, WordPress. Open source is not the only reason WordPress is valuable, it also supports all the standards of the web. It means WordPress can tie together text on the web in a way nothing else can, and it works really well with Markdown.

One of the great contributions of AI is that you can quickly research prior art for any design decision you need to make. You don’t have to relearn every lesson that people who came before you learned. Study history or repeat mistakes.

My father was a professor at Pace Univ in NYC. When he retired, he used my blogging software to create a book for his students at mbatoolbox.org. Over the years the site moved a few times, and the http protocol was hacked by Google. I used Claude yesterday to get it working again. I'm glad to get this off my todo list. He put the work in because he wanted to leave this behind. My job is to make sure it survives as long as I can. And Claude makes short work of it. I put a copy of the website in a spare folder, and opened Claude Code in the folder, said what the problems are. We worked together and in about an hour it worked again. It could certainly look better, but that was his thing not mine.

I went to the beach Saturday. We washed Gwen Saturday. She was delighted. We watched Groundhog Day and it was–as always–excellent. Again. My art piece Galletas de Mar pero no comer sold Sunday. (Previously) My name is Art. On impulse, today I bought joespartydepot.com. It felt great. My name is Joe. I said to Kelly...

Watched: Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2 📺

Another trip north, this time to Durham, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Edinburgh and the Berwickshire coast.