FeedCity

Inspired by this blog post from Nick Heer, I took a closer look at Grain and also Flashes. I’ve prototyped support for Grain in Micro.blog and will ship it today. Flashes mostly piggybacks on existing Bluesky lexicon, so doesn’t really need special support from what I can tell.

This is a PSA post, and the TLDR is this: if you were subscribed to one of my newsletters, you should log into the Buttondown portal and make sure your preferences are correct. Also, I updated the domain name used, and new emails will arrive from thoughts@walks.manuelmoreale...

If you’re going to give me AI slop, at least make it fun! Give me iambic pentameter. Make it all rhyme. Have it be a song. I think we’re under-utilizing the artistic and creative capabilities of models by making them produce work that sort-of-but-not-really looks like human effort.

Donegal sundown

Wednesday session in Glencolmcille

Had fun experimenting with some new integration for RSS.chat today, to roll out sometime this week. Give me a new feed or API and I’ll happily start writing code.

Big update to MicroSphere, a third-party iOS app for Micro.blog. Its bookmarks feature can now track read or unread status. So cool to tap around in new apps like this and see a different take on the UI.

Posted on Twitter in the middle of last night, written on iPad. I use twitter these days because it’s where the people are. The distributed ideas, masto, threads, blue-sky, did not gain critical mass as far as I can see. Threads and blue-sky are not distributed. distributab...

Dan Moren reviews the Xteink X3 at Six Colors:

…it’s well positioned as an impulse buy. And while I don’t want to dissuade you, I have to note the biggest caveat of all: the world.

Amazon still dominates e-books too much. If Kindle was DRM-free, I would’ve ordered an X3 already.

Elsewhere: "Threads and Bluesky are not distributed. Distributable is not the same as being distributed. It’s like saying the Mets were able to win the World Series in 1962. In some fashion perhaps in an alternate universe, in reality, not gonna happen."

Ben Thompson today, writing about the OpenAI security incident and more:

The fact that models do what humans say is cold comfort if the models are in the hands of bad actors. That, though, simply emphasizes the point that the best defense against powerful models is equipping defenders with powerful models of their own.

There may need to be multiple tiers of model access. ChatGPT and Claude should be well-aligned with many guardrails to prevent casual, mainstream users from getting led astray. But powerful models need to exist too, for researchers and security experts.

Trying to find the humor in people lecturing me about X, as if I don’t know after joining Twitter 20 years ago and working directly with all the major Twitter client app developers whose products were destroyed… But in fairness, my about page also glossed over this. I’ve added an extra sentence to it that helps:

But there were frustrations with Twitter too, a period that is documented at length in my book Indie Microblogging. I quit Twitter in 2012 as a statement of principle against closed, developer-hostile platforms.

Bookmark: worseonpurpose.com/p/on-quality

It's a lot simpler and faster to install new instance of rss.chat. You don't have to create and host your own database, that's now built into the server using SQLite. Full instructions on how to install. If you have questions or issues, we've started a thread on the repo. More about this to come.

Reminder: We have a server for anyone who wants to try RSS.chat.

Tuesday session in Glencolmcille 🎻🎷

When Bluesky launched, I loved the domain names for usernames and the PDS approach, but I don’t think I fully appreciated storage and lexicons until there were more different platforms using it. Spent a lot of time today thinking about how Micro.blog could better interoperate with all of this.

I don’t need any new Slack-like things, but Buzz is actually pretty interesting. It’s built on a Nostr relay and has a whole page about domain names and identity:

myproject.com is your workspace. Not a GitHub org page that happens to have your name on it. Not a Discord server that Discord could delete tomorrow. Your domain. Your relay. One thing.

I’m getting a little maybe written by AI vibe from some of the docs… But regardless, it makes a good (if verbose) case for the architecture.

Pckt, a blogging app built on top of AT Proto, has added notes. Notes are like microblog posts or blog comments, but with their own lexicon outside of the normal Bluesky namespace:

Think quick thoughts, or live blogging, or small updates throughout your day. Notes can be shared, quoted, or re-blogged, and they can either stand on their own or become part of the conversation around a longer blog post.