FeedCity

I prefer more open systems, so of course I lean toward supporting the EU’s DMA. Third-party marketplaces on iOS represent real progress that wouldn’t have happened without regulation. But what about Siri AI? It is not coming to the EU because Apple doesn’t trust other develo...

Content warning: This poem is about the ongoing heat in Europe. I strike an optimistic tone toward the end, but if you would prefer not to read about the heat, I offer you one of the Scottish poems I have written in stead. Nature’s weary tears fill the air; invisible, warming. Relentlessly, days proceed. Hours pass; Celsius rises. Midnights: warm like day. We stay inside. Blinds closed, water glasses full, cookers off. Flowers bloom early. Eyelids weigh; we yearn for rest that does not come. Heat ravages the continent. London is Rome. Roads reduce to liquid, power lines sag: infrastructure is under stress. Headlines depress. Hope: We come together, reaching with open eyes. Her resiliency: Our future?

Claude is a brain, very different from ours and when we work together we humans have access to capabilities that work really well with building large software products. And that's a huge understatement. Most remarkable thing. I am a programmer with 50+ years experience. Most of the discussion between people who use the AI tools and those that condemn them are not productive because the opponents of AI don't have understand how these things actually work, or if they do that understanding is not reflected in their arguments. I recommend starting an academic dialog, among people who don't have conflicts of interest, to accurately record this discussion based on facts, for the record, so when people ask how we did this transition, there will actually be some footprints to follow.

Good morning sports fans!

The Bear season 5, the show's last season, premieres on Hulu at 9PM EST today.

Last week I took some days off for a family event. It was a lovely trip. It’s commonplace to dread flying in the United States these days, and so it was terrific that it was uneventful. In addition to family time which I won’t share, Kelly and I got to tool around D.C. and Virginia...

Love that this bookstore (Sundog Books) had too many books to fit properly on the shelves. 📚

Maestros of Irish mandolin: Macdara, Marla, and Sean.

Wednesday session in Cork

It took a week and a half on the waitlist, but I’ve now got new Siri AI enabled on my phone. Seems to work so far. Not totally sure what to use it for yet.

When writing code with Claude you really have to be skeptical when it says it just found the problem, but you have no idea what it's saying, chances are pretty good it's just a word salad excuse for not reading all the code necessary to have an opinion that matters. Actually debugging software isn't about opinions, it's about proof. When you start clutching at straws until one works you just added another level of bug that will eventually bit you in the butt and you'll still have to solve the original one. Uncorrected I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want to trust the code it writes, but I guess that's why people have two or more instances playing different roles? For now I'm the one that questions its sanity, more politely though. ;-)

"In philosophy, we have a term for this: a logical fallacy. And right now, journalism is full of them."

A throwback from 2007: a local Bay Area a cappella group called The Richter Scales made a Webby Award-winning viral video about how that bubble felt. Hat tip: Toni.

Yesterday was the hottest Broken Arrow Skyrace 23k of the four I have run. And the hardest. Sometimes you give it your all and your all is not quite enough. Made it much farther than last year, under worse (hotter, dryer, dustier) conditions.It was already in the mid-70s Fahr...

The Spring issue of Etcetera: Journal of the Typewriter Collectors’ Association arrived in the mail today! Just in time to celebrate National Typewriter Day tomorrow on June 23, 2026. 

The unusually long sentences criminalize being an anti-fascist activist, reading the wrong zines, and using the wrong communication apps. They're incredibly dangerous.

I took a screen shot of this post, gave it to Claude, asked it to write a short paragraph summary. Then I asked it to rewrite with using no more than 300 chars, the limit on Bluesky. Now I can post the summary there, but I won't, at the moment of truth I had to disclose this wasn't written by me, and it was 290 chars and there wasn't enough room for that. And here's a screen shot of the conversation with Claude.

There was a long discussion last night on Bluesky about whether twitter-like apps should show blog posts in addition to tweet-size things. Should it have a character limit, allow titles, links, bold, italic, editing, enclosures, markdown, etc? This is a permathread, it's bee...

Updated the Inkwell app for Mac this morning. If you haven’t tried it yet, I think it’s a very nice version of our Inkwell feed reader. Includes subscribing to blogs, of course, but also making text highlights, viewing conversations, and replying to Micro.blog posts.

I am continuing to experiment with writing some fiction on this blog. Here is a story I wrote today. Where were words when you needed them the most? Lena had been searching for the answer to that question for her whole life. For Lena, telling a story to light coming from a ...