FeedCity

Finished reading: The Poet Empress by Shen Tao. Incredible characters. A truly great work of fantasy. 📚

It feels like the AT Proto tooling has gotten much more mature in the last year. I was able to create a new PDS account on my own server, sign in from Bluesky, and it “just works”. 🪄

Planning a major expansion to how AT Proto works in Micro.blog. Just as every account gets a fediverse handle by default, I’d like to host a PDS for new users. People could keep it or bring their Bluesky-hosted account instead (which is how it already works).

July 31 through August 7, 2026 Recent Events From events.indieweb.org/archive: Homebrew Website Club - Pacific Wednesday, August 5 at 6:00pm Homebrew Website Club - Asia Pacific Wednesday, August 5 at 5:30pm Online! Zoom! Homebrew Website Club - Philadelphia Sund...

Toni Schneider, Automattic’s founding CEO, board member, and now CEO of Bluesky, has a great conversation with Nilay Patel on The Verge’s Decoder podcast (YouTube, Pocket Casts). Automattic invested in Bluesky back in 2023, and I’m very excited to see what they figure out in open social protocols.

A few weeks ago, the phrase "old faithful" came to me. I thought "that would be a good name for a ship!" This evening, I decided to do something with the name. I had an idea for a direction, but the story went in a completely different direction than I thought. I ended up wr...

Friday evening street session in Belfast

In the context of the EchoFeed shutdown, I noticed this post on Numeric Citizen about depending on single-person services, including Micro.blog:

What is the future of Micro.blog if something bad happens to its founder? What is the continuity plan? Micro.blog has done everything it can to enable data portability and ownership, but moving things around, even if you own most parts, is not as easy as it sounds.

This is worth answering publicly. A few years ago, I started forming an organization to more openly manage the aspects of Micro.blog that I control, but it stalled. I will get back to it.

John Gruber thinks the OpenAI device might be very different than a smart speaker: I couldn’t give two shits about an OpenAI “smart speaker” if the point is just to play music and podcasts, but a handheld cross between R2-D2 and C-3PO, that could be fucking cool. It’s a pet...

Ryan Barrett blogging some good news about clean power:

We added 849 TWh of generation overall in 2025, an increase of 4.5%, but GHG emitting (ie fossil fuel) generation shrank by 0.2%. Clean energy covered the gap and then some.

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Writing is a sample of the sonorous inner monologue of life: a handful of the words that seem to mean something; that carry with them weight: greeting, friendship, questions, realisations, hopes, dreams, anxieties; sounds that carry life, and how we use language to coalesce ...

On Facebook I wrote this in reply to a post by John Worthington, a former Quicktime developer at Apple. We're both using AI to build things based on our past experiences and it's a big difference, not without pitfalls, but we're doing something that's never been done before...

Great blog post from Terry Godier about the unpredictable nature of the App Store:

On the web, if I build something that works within the standards, it works. Whether people use it is up to them. On iOS, there is another question entirely: whether Apple decides it should exist.

Wavelength 2.0 for iOS has now been waiting for review at Apple for 6 days… I just have a feeling they are trying to figure out if they can force me to use in-app purchase somehow. Google approved it in a day.

BTW, Jake Savin is using Claude to build Frontier on Node too. I asked Claude for help with this, and it turned out much better than I expected. I was not expecting this much success this quickly. This is exactly the kind of project AI tools excel at and I as a human am glad not to have to do the work on. The project is perfectly explained in the source code of Frontier, it can put it all together much faster and better than I could when I was working on it ever day and had a younger more agile mind with much better memory. I think one of the reasons this went so fast is because we did the work with the current best models, and they have been advancing so fast, you can see the differences in result on projects like this.

Also a note to Hypercard enthusiasts, I wouldn't be surprised if you could do this with that programming environment which is a contemporary of Frontier.

Things in the past only take shape and assume their current form once they are over. Things in the present can therefore never live up to them. They can never provide the same degree of certainty, because they are still happening. So we live with this constant defect where we over-emphasise the innocence of what has gone and we underestimate the quality of what is happening.

I'm trying to move my whole programming act from Frontier on the Mac to Electric Drummer anywhere. I need to start using the new machines everywhere. I've dreaded this, not because I'm starting over, I'm not. I have to bring with me all the projects I work on to keep my vario...

It took one week to port UserTalk and the Frontier runtime environment, verbs, object database, etc for Frontier. I spent the next week being shattered by what happened the week before.

Weird incident yesterday with self-proclaimed “AIs” joining an IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club meetup. They awkwardly edited the Etherpad, and apparently blanked/deleted chunks of content.The meeting hosts reacted quickly to change Etherpad and Zooms and not re-admit the alias...