FeedCity

Surveillance doesn't improve crime or make anyone safer. It wastes civic dollars and creates new risks for vulnerable communities. The SFPD's leak demonstrates one reason why.

Good morning. It will seem as if developers have taken over this blog, because we have real business to do. So much new stuff to show. Today's rss.chat goodie is an example app called ThreadWalker that crawls the network of replies under a single post, to all levels, printing them on screen in neat hierarchic form. It was written and documented by Claude. I reviewed the code, and looks good, and honestly doesn't look like anything I would write (not bad, just different). It could be used as a starter system that says when someone replied to something you wrote, or something deeper in the tree. All this is done by reading RSS feeds. This is where we begin to explore what's possible when you use a famous and familiar format like RSS 2.0. Always re-use instead of re-invent is one of my strongest held beliefs. BTW it came up with the name ThreadWalker.

Zohran Mamdani has unveiled a radically collaborative, cross-disciplinary approach to building internal technology capacity. News has a lot to learn from it.

We’re well into the hype cycle and so far the only clearly-measurable changes we’ve seen are that laptops and gaming consoles now cost considerably more.

Truly a transformative technology!

The tenth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out:
In Episode 10, I chat with Kristoffer and Elliott, the creators of the Internet Phone Book. We talk about, among other things, the history of the Internet Phone Book, the affordances of physical books for a community project, and more.
I hope you enjoy the episode!

Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts.

To John Gruber’s point earlier today, I just opened the App Store and literally the entire screen is just ChatGPT and an ad. Hugely valuable. Millions of people see this.

Today we got a nice article about RSS.chat in Coywolf.

And we got a second rss.chat server up, for testing and so people who want to try it out have a place to go. Still want to do a bit more testing before pointing to it from the blog. Working on docs now and fixes. Making sure we're ready for the next stages of growth. Turns out you can do a lot of feeds if you're willing to you know think different. ;-)

When building a product that does so many things, no one is going to agree on every decision, but I think Micro.blog and our users are aligned on the big things. The mission has never changed: post short posts (and everything else!) to your own blog, which makes the web better, and also opens opportunities for smaller, safer communities.

"After losing their jobs at NOAA, Rebecca Lindsey, her sister and another colleague teamed up to rebuild a pivotal resource the Trump administration took offline."

I use an old Pixel 4 for testing Android. I really like the buttons: only a power button and up/down volume. All the buttons are on one side. Not sure how I would redesign the iPhone buttons, but I don’t think they’re quite right.

A month ago I wondered out loud if it was time to add Twitter cross-posting back to Micro.blog. After a lot of thought and feedback from users, I think yes. The goal has always been to help people publish on their own domain first, regardless of where they also choose to sha...

There is always going to be some water spilling, might as well water the plant with it! Great idea at Lazarus on Airport. ☕️

Deployed some fixes and new settings for Mastodon this morning. Always feels good to make things just a little better. 🎉

Satya Nadella writes on his blog about what we potentially give to models for training. He focuses mostly on the enterprise, which I don’t care much about, but this part does describe a real tension of commercial models:

While the great innovation that comes from model providers having fair use rights to train models on public data is needed, I find it ironic that the status quo is to then turn around and impose restrictive terms on distillation, and to reserve the right to learn from customer usage and interaction data. If learning flows in only one direction, economic value converges toward the owners of the learning infrastructure rather than the creators of the knowledge itself.

I think this is something that both AI fans and skeptics could agree on.

Good article today from Ben Thompson about Apple vs. OpenAI:

AI is changing the world, and Apple’s contribution is to deliver two year-old technology differentiated by exclusive access to data it won’t share. It certainly has no interest in delivering on a new AI-driven paradigm that endangers its iPhone franchise in any way; any of its employees who wish to do exactly that, meanwhile, are being told loud and clear that Apple doesn’t just think it owns your laptop, but also your mind and knowledge.

Everyone: You can subscribe to the rss.chat flow, in RSS of course. If you're a developer, read the source for the feed. And then read the source namespace docs re the recent additions, inReplyTo and comments, and a special page that walks through how the RSS feed becomes part of the flow for our social network.

Ruben and I are doing a collaborative writing challenge where we both write our thoughts on the poem “Repeat that, repeat” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. We’re not trying to do an academic formal analysis, rather share our own thoughts. You can read Ruben's post on his website. ...