FeedCity

America's AI dominance is under threat; AI vendors put us at risk; meanwhile, everyone's staying in their jobs for the health insurance.

Grain.social is a photo social network built on the AT Protocol. Today I’ve added following users and cross-posting from your blog to Grain. When you follow a Bluesky user in Micro.blog by searching for their handle, like username.bsky.social, we now aggregate both their Blu...

John Gruber blogging about why there’s no way to disable Apple ads:

Apple doesn’t offer ad-free tiers for the App Store or (soon) Apple Maps because, I think, they can’t bring themselves to admit that by adding ads to these services they have made them worse.

Also, me in 2010: I hope iAd fails.

A few random phrases that are currently annoying me: “step change”, “hill climbing”, “first principles”. I can’t even really pinpoint why.

I don’t like Meta, and as a Spurs fan I don’t like that they included a Knicks celebration in this… 🙂 But the ad is pretty good.

Let’s consider where the open web has the greatest opportunity over the next decade, starting with these rough numbers: Blogs: 600 million total blogs X: 550 million monthly users Threads: 500 million monthly users Bluesky: 44 million total users Mastodon: 10 million t...

A new feature on RSS.chat, images. Up to 2MB per. User interface couldn't be simpler, get the image on your clipboard, start editing your post, put the cursor where you want the image to appear, paste. Prior art was GitHub and Slack. It was driving me crazy not having this feature, sometimes to explain something you need a picture. I think perhaps I should add this to textcasting. It's a feature I needed to be reminded is essential. The first browser to support inline images came from Univ of Illinois in 1993, NCSA Mosaic, it didn't come from TBL, but it is most definitely a standard feature of the web.

Amyloo, a longtime friend from the early days of podcasting, has made an appearance on demo.rss.chat. So happy to see her. Here's one of the bits we did, back then in the very early days of podcasting in 2005. A duet of Green Acres. Ten seconds of dead air at the beginning, it was pretty common in those days. But I think the spirit of it is lovely. BTW fwiw I cracked my voice on purpose. 😄

Early this morning we got a report of a security issue in the rss.chat server, quickly fixed and tested the new version. So, if you're running your own instance of rss.chat, you please follow the instructions and do the update asap.

Something to keep in mind in press reports with AI apps breaking out of their sandbox, it works the other way too. If you give a big piece of code to Claude and ask if it to find any security issues, it not only finds (at least some of) them, but it also suggests fixes. Quickly. I've done it the other way, where you have a small team, and someone discovers a hack, and you have to find the right answer and implement it, asap.

There were two big lapses in the Hugging Face / OpenAI hacking story: the lack of security protections on OpenAI's end, and Hugging Face's vulnerable production database. That should worry anyone who uses AI with sensitive data.

1 in 4 American workers stay in their jobs because of the healthcare. It suppresses wages and working conditions - and prevents innovators from heading out on their own.

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.