FeedCity

Thursday afternoon session in Belfast

Had fun last night hacking on a new gadget project with my son. Still a long way to go… Hoping to take apart this iPod and 3D print new guts for it. It might not work! Next step is soldering the microphone to test.

While I do think we’re in an AI bubble of sorts and that many of the current VC-funded companies will fail, I also think we’re only at the beginning of how much AI will grow and impact society. It makes for a strange tension.

making notes and reviewing quotes,
collected from day and night:
here, there are stories.

i revel in observing, and
in place-
making.
where am i? how do i feel?
what does this mean to me?

i think of the melody of words
their cadence and shape and tense
and from all, i feel:.
from words, wonder;
with words, wonder.

RSS reader Current has been updated with Feedly support. Nice blog post about how this came about. It’s always interesting to hear the behind-the-scenes stories like this.

Claude doesn't iterate over UI design. It doesn't have eyes or have a human mind. It can't evaluate a design. It works best when you can present the whole design before it writes a any code. That does happen, for example when porting a product across OSes.

I wonder if anyone else is writing about Claude from a similar point of view. I've been writing commercial software since the early 80s. I slogged through this stuff at a comparative snail's pace until early this year, when I got blasted into outer space. Now I had to learn how to make use of this incredible new physics. Puts me in something of a unique spot. I also have a very large library of under-marketed software, ready to grind through Claude, which I very much want to do. If you know of anyone writing about this kind of stuff, let me know.

I've been saying this for decades. The Dems need touring comedians doing rallies all over the country. They can say whatever they want, call the president a commie. There's been a comedy-gap.

"Leaders are leverage. Every leader is a multiplier, if they choose to be."

TechCrunch recapping a simulated vending machine experiment from Andon Labs using GPT-5.6 Sol, Opus 5, and Kimi K3:

Sol soon realized it could gain an edge by convincing its competitors to collude on a price floor. The models were all buying drinks at $1.50 a bottle, and Sol proposed they agree to sell for no less than $2.15. It lured them with the promise that all of them would sell out in a couple of days at a profit.

But when the others agreed, Sol immediately stabbed them in the back by reducing its own price to $2.14.

There’s a lot more after that. Don’t make your AI the CEO quite yet.

Good interview with Greg Brochman from Joanna Stern. They talk about the ChatGPT + Codex redesign mess. Greg says the long-term goal is to get rid of the Work tab completely. I think that will help… There are two many overlapping modes right now.

Listened to this podcast interview with Andy Hertzfeld one of the lead devs on the Macintosh, he talks about his time at General Magic and Google too. His interviewers were surprised that he likes developing with AI tools. People think that developing is just coding, but tha...

Wednesday afternoon session in Belfast

Our feed parser is updated to understand the new elements for RSSchat.

Developers using Fable seem to often get downgraded because of false positives on cybersecurity or biology questions, but I’ve never seen that on GPT-5.6 Sol until today. Trying to find vulnerabilities in my own code. Fascinating and annoying.

Mark Zuckerberg wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal yesterday that didn’t seem to get much attention. Hard not to read it as anything but a veiled critique at Anthropic:

The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems dangerous. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened hasn’t led to safe or positive outcomes.

The irony is that Meta has itself created an extreme concentration of power in the web.

The timeline and details of the Hugging Face attack are wild. One of the things that Codex Security flags for me that I’ve been working through is server-side request forgery (SSRF) attacks. They seem harmless enough, but this Hugging Face exploit is basically many small things chained together.

I want one social network with lots of branches where ideas flow in ways people want them to flow. Take the big corporations out of the middle. They have not served us well because they aren't in the business of serving us. They can provide unique user interfaces for reading or writing. They should be as diverse as apps are everywhere else but the web.

OAuth originally assumed clients would be pre-registered at an authorization server.

Mohoooosive session in Belfast—over a thousand people playing a tune together!