FeedCity

It appears that the winner of a short story prize was generated with AI. But how was it selected?

Notes prepared by Claude.ai. In this episode, Dave returns to a theme he's been circling for years: the social web's central failure isn't a lack of features, it's the locked doors. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Spotify, and Amazon build genuinely useful tools, but they'...

Podcast: Wrapping AI in the web.

Just finished No Country for Old Men, the book by Cormac McCarthy. I have seen the movie many times, it's one of those movies that if you're looking for something to watch and you come across it, you might as well go for it because every scene in the movie is a performance. I didn't realize that they used most of McCarthy's dialog, literally -- in the movie. Near the end, Bell, the sheriff tells a story about old age. "There wasnt a whole lot good you could say about old age and he said he knew one thing and I said what is that. And he said it dont last long. I said well, that's pretty cold. And he said it was no colder than what the facts called for." I love truths that hit hard. He's such a great writer. And I love that I can write like all the characters if'n I get a mind to.

Thursday session

Om Malik with a little late-night reading of the SpaceX prospectus:

The SpaceX IPO is a masterpiece of financial engineering. The prospectus is a perfect blend of reality, sci-fi, and skullduggery.

Along with other improvements today, I updated the home page for Inkwell so it’s a little less plain. Now includes a screenshot and download links for all the platforms. For iOS, still linking to the TestFlight version while we wait for Apple.

I stumbled on this piece of code recently that made me laugh, cry, sigh in despair, and think of poor Sara doing her best to make the web a better place.

<div class="action-button button of-h mh-effect"
onclick=" window.open('https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&amp;fs=1&amp;to=redacted@email.com','_blank',)">

I guess people have forgot that mailto: is a thing that exists.

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Marc Andreessen said programmers aren't disoccupied, we haven't become obsolete, quite the opposite, we're all working around the clock. It's true. Everyone is doing it. We got a new brain that can do all kinds of amazing things. You don't get a new super powerful brain organ every day.

“No servitude is more disgraceful than that which is self-imposed.”

I enjoyed Kim Curran’s debut novel, The Morrigan, so when I saw a copy of her brand new book in the local library, I snapped it up. Like The Morrigan, Brigid is modern retelling of Irish mythology, but in a very different time period. Whereas The Morrigan was set in a mythi...

I'm going to release the Claude-generated code that enables it to work with me on projects that are written and managed in outlines.

Last night’s game 2, quick thoughts. I could blame all the blatant fouling with the Thunder holding Wemby every possession, which also contributed to the Thunder getting offensive rebounds, but really it’s the turnovers. Gotta clean that up, hopefully with De’Aaron Fox and Dylan Harper back soon. 🏀

Why an ephemeral model can't fund relationship-based work

Just asked Claude to save this in memory. "in general i create local variables with partial results because 1. i can step through the calculations in the debugger. 2. the order guides my mind when im reading this code, 3. it lets me put a name on a partial value. this is helpful when i want to piece together wtf the code is supposed to be doing. and 4. it makes no difference in the efficiency of the code for a variety of reasons. please save that somewhere." i'm getting a lot of these rules down. i have them memorized but have never written them up because i didn't have a system for saving it somewhere relevant. i always thought ai would be good for going back and reading all my blog posts and creating somethjing readable, but as often is the case, the way it works turned out to be quite different, accomplishes the same thing.

From the SpaceX filing, we learned that Anthropic will be paying xAI $1.25 billion per month to host Claude. And Tom Brown of Anthropic posted on X that they’ll also expand into Colossus 2:

Appreciate elonmusk and the team helping us find good homes for the Claudes.

Strange partnership. Only a couple months ago, Dario Amodei griped about Greg Brockman donating money to Trump, although to his credit he walked it back. Now Anthropic is putting Claude’s future into the hands of Elon Musk, with all of Elon’s political baggage.

As companies get bigger, maybe there are market forces that take over from stated principles. Or maybe we ascribe values to companies that were never really there. To be fair, though, I was also just considering giving X money to re-enable tweet cross-posting for my users. Micro.blog is so small, I can choose not to.

At Google I/O this week, the company announced the biggest change to Search in 25 years. The ten blue links? Gone. Instead, you get “generative UI” – custom interactive widgets, built on the fly by Gemini. You get “information agents” that monitor the web for you around the ...

Wednesday session

Big update to Inkwell for Mac today, version 1.4. It adds saving and editing draft blog posts, fixes glitches in the text editor, and improves a few other little things in the UI. Getting closer to a unified platform for reading and writing blog posts.

Saying Bluesky is part of the web is like saying Spotify or YouTube own podcasting. They say it, but that doesn't mean it's true.