FeedCity

Every day for 25 years, Stephen Downes has written about edtech, informing an entire industry.

I documented the optional source:inReplyTo element for RSS 2.0.

Working on server upgrades. Hosting costs have ballooned out of control again, good opportunity to rethink the right balance of memory and storage. Some servers have really high uptime and can be replaced.

What happens after the feed? And how can publishers remain independent?

The New Yorker on the border wall in Texas around Big Bend:

The construction strikes many locals as both unreasonable and unstoppable. “You’ve got desert and high mountains and rugged, rough country and no water and no roads,” Bill Ivey, the president of the Brewster County Tourism Council, told me. “The easiest part of getting to the United States would be scaling the wall. We just don’t see people cross the border out here.”

If you have not yet fired up Junior Senior’s “MOVE YOUR FEET” today this is your signal to do so. (YT) Sydney Sweeney was apparent giantized in the show Euphoria and it hit my transom and so I updated my Giant Women page. I am too old to watch the show Euphoria. I won’t think...

May 8-15, 2026 Recent Events From events.indieweb.org/archive: Homebrew Website Club - Pacific Wednesday, May 13 at 6:00pm Fist of FLOSS (episode 1) Wednesday, May 13 at 6:00pm Cancelling this for now. FreeBSD chat Wednesday, May 13 at 6:00pm Homebrew Website ...

OpenClaw is run like the bleeding-edge project you’d expect it to be. An excerpt from of a longer post by Peter Steinberger on X:

Part of what excites me so much about working on OpenClaw is that I’m trying to answer the question:

How would we build software in the future if tokens don’t matter?

We constant run ~100 codex in the cloud, reviewing every PR, every issue. If a fix on main lands, clawsweeper will eventually find that 6 month old issue and close it with an exact reference.

Spurs vs. Timberwolves game 6 tonight is going to be big. Nice article at ESPN on the organization’s culture and longevity:

On any given day at the facility, a current Spur can walk into a room filled with championship players from the past. It’s not uncommon to go to lunch and find Ginobili dining with three-time champion Bruce Bowen, whose No. 12 jersey is retired in San Antonio. Duncan, who once had a space in the coaches’ locker room at the old facility, is a fixture at the new spot, too, along with two-time champ and 10-time All-Star David Robinson and Sean Elliott…

I remain skeptical of Tesla robotaxis and this report doesn’t make me feel better:

Tesla Robotaxis have crashed at least twice since July 2025 while a teleoperator was remotely driving the vehicles…

Waymo has the right approach. When stuck, cars can be given hints on what to do by remote staff, but the cars still drive based on their training, they can’t be controlled like a video game.

Andrew Sharp has one of the best blog posts I’ve read recently about not just the OpenAI trial, but stepping back to see the big picture of OpenAI’s founding and where things are now. On the evidence:

Musk is wrong here and he should lose. […] Across a two-week trial where Musk and his lawyers have worked every single day to put Altman’s dishonesty at the forefront of the jury’s mind, Elon is the most dishonest character in that courtroom, at least with respect to the facts at hand.

It’s a medium-long post and goes through the text messages and other surrounding details.

I work every day on a lot of different things. This requires being able to flow between projects without hitting walls. App review is a wall. It’s a momentum killer. It’s like wading through mud when you want to run.

ChatGPT personal finance is going to be popular, eventually, but initially I expect people to be cautious about giving AI access to their bank accounts. It’s read-only, which I assume is enforced by Plaid:

When you connect your accounts, ChatGPT can access your balances, transactions, investments, and liabilities to help visualize your finances or answer your questions. It cannot see full account numbers or make any changes to your accounts.

This year I had planned to download all my bank statements and feed them to Codex to help organize things for taxes. Feels more transparent that way.

Now four days since I appealed the Inkwell rejection. I’ve drafted a full blog post explaining all the problems I’ve run into with app review. Going to hold the post until Monday, just to give Apple a little more time.

I wish they had an outliner in Claude. I would use it. ;-)

BTW, here's the JSONL version of Scripting News. It has the same data as the RSS file, but in the format that AI apps are looking for, so I am told. I thought I'd try to kick this off by pushing an RSS flow through the pipe. It's like using the Grateful Dead to boot up podcasting. I needed something to put out on the wire and I had this feed handy.

Thinking about adding <source:inReplyTo> to the source namespace. Its value is a URL, by default, and has an optional isPermaLink attribute, a boolean, to indicate if it's not a permalink. Works just like the guid element in RSS 2.0. I will also add support for that in the FeedLand database, and flow it out through the socket interface. Actually that's pretty close to a full spec, at least in rss.land where we take simplicity seriously. ;-)

Is breá leat é a fheiceáil.

Last year Jeremy Keith blogged about completing Duolingo Irish, and I’ve added that as a goal for myself. I found myself in London with him in February at State of the Browser. It’s probably the last place you’d expect to hear Irish spoken, yet we had an earnest conversation over lunch, using as much as we could.

Having a proper conversation as Gaeilge with Paul was an absolute highlight for me!

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