FeedCity

Fiddletastic Friday afternoon session in Belfast

Witchy Friday morning session in Belfast

Spent a little time this evening adding another database backup location. My primary database server has been so reliable, but eventually I know my luck will run out.

Róis agus Huartán beo i mBèal Féirste!

Lost poem:
Looking for
lost owner.

Mark Gurman reports on OpenAI’s upcoming device:

The product — essentially a smart speaker without a display — will be shaped like a doughnut that’s roughly the size of a hockey puck […] The battery-powered item will be designed to work in different positions — in a user’s hand, say, or placed on a nightstand or kitchen counter.

Can’t wait to see this. 🍩

I’ve switched Micro.blog’s Standard.site content format to the Markpub.at lexicon. It includes just Markdown, not HTML, but should be compatible with other AT Proto apps now.

Alan Jacobs blogged about the Demis Hassabis quote I wrote about:

The Big Tech companies have been so indifferent, or even hostile, to human well-being for so many years now that their promises are worth absolutely zero.

I feel the same way about much of big tech — especially Meta, TikTok, and to an extent Google, Amazon — but I sort of compartmentalize Demis (and some others) as having their own principles. I do think that a lot of the distrust in AI is because big tech burned all the goodwill, though. See also: Meta glasses, privacy, etc.

This blog post from both Sundar Pichai and Demis Hassabis has the unfortunate title “The next chapter of our AI momentum”, but it does contain some interesting perspectives. Demis will be spending more time with Isomorphic: As you’ve heard me say many times, I’ve always bel...

Matt Mullenweg blogs about the division in WordPress between bloggers and site builders:

Many of the OG developers of WordPress, including myself, tend more towards the blogging side. Writers, photographers, podcasters, journalists, the people for whom a reverse chronological stream on the homepage is the most obvious thing in the world.

This is a disconnect I noticed years ago. So much effort was spent on competing with Squarespace and Wix, WordPress felt bloated for regular bloggers. I’m glad Matt is aware of it.

The Taoiseach just gatecrashed our session.

Just remembered I can use Micro.blog’s batch find-and-replace to update all of my previous x.com links to use xcancel.com instead. Easy.

Whether we like it or not, X seems to be growing again, after the first couple years with Elon Musk overseeing the social network’s implosion. I stopped posting in 2013 and will never post again. But I have been linking to posts there. Starting today, I’m switching all future X links to xcancel.com.

Simple hashtag proposal for dates: datetags for the #indiewebIn summary by example:* #2026_08_04 ISO8601 YYYY_MM_DD date of this post* #2026_216 ISO8601 YYYY_DDD ordinal date of this post* #2026_08 ISO8601 YYYY_MM month of this postMany of us posting on the indieweb often pos...

📀 watched “The Dark Knight” on Blu-ray, still holds up.I saw it in the Metreon IMAX theater when it came out in 2008. About 28 minutes of it was filmed in 70mm film using IMAX cameras. The movie switched aspect ratios when it switched from IMAX to normal film. The 2-Disc Special Edition Blu-ray also switched aspect ratios roughly at similar times. Nice to see that that was preserved.The movie has incredible pacing. No extra moments. I had forgotten how many quotes originated from The Dark Knight. https://enwp.org/The_Dark_Knight#BatMan #TheDarkKnight #Bluray #Blaugust #Blaugust2026

I read the PDF report from Mastodon about usability problems and feedback from the community. Imani Joy in the intro:

We were beginning to find our way in terms of creating a development roadmap, but beyond major projects and obvious requirements (based in security, compliance, and grant-based deliverables) it was often unclear which feedback to take action on first.

Imani has done great work on this. But Mastodon development has always felt like a slow-moving open source project to me. What they need is the same energy as a startup.

There's a new version of the FeedLand server.

If Claude Code were a human working for me as a human would, it would be fired several times every day. It forgets orders you gave it two minutes ago. It's always trying to take control. Again I'm backing out of the idea of it taking responsibility for doing simple persistent work on servers, the kind of thing that it would, in theory be perfect for. There are staggering moments of brilliance where it does something in an hour that took several devs a decade to do. But only if they have an exact authority on how it should work, ie when it was cloning software. It's getting better all the time, so there's hope that by 2027 it will be able to be trusted to remember the most basic rules.

Thursday morning session in Belfast

Like a lot of other people, I want to know where Bluesky is headed, and I learned a lot about that in this podcast interview with Bluesky's new CEO, Toni Schneider. We have crossed paths in tech, but this is the first time I've heard him speak at length. They have a business model in mind, sounds something like Substack, which is probably a good idea. Their value is in the many millions of users they have. Highly recommend this podcast if you want to hear the story direct from the CEO.