FeedCity

As I approached the top of one of the many long staircases from Cockburn Street to the Royal Mile, I felt an electricity in the air. The street was full; shows happening everywhere as part of the Edinburgh Fringe festival. People were handing out fliers to fill crowds. I alwa...

Exactly one of these ridiculously deep holes in the Earth is dug by hand.

It’s about 2 miles from my house.

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I’ve started rolling out an AT Protocol PDS — personal data server — for new Micro.blog users. In the Bluesky world, a PDS is what stores your posts, follows, photos, and other data from apps. In the same way that creating an account on Micro.blog automatically gives yo...

I don’t like the Claude watermark announcement. For images, yes, watermarks are important. “A picture is worth a thousand words” and there’s too much of a chance for misinformation. For text, it’s more complicated, as essays will often be 95% human, with AI-assisted edits.

Great episode of Dithering this morning. I’ve been wondering about the Apple / Google partnership too, with Google falling behind. I think Siri AI will be a good release, but it’s not really in the same ballpark as the frontier models. Try GPT-Live sometime.

Apparently the nightly email didn't go out last night. The problem was an error when it tried to read the Linkblog entries for the day. I've seen reports that these errors happen when you try to read the Links tab on scripting.com. The error shouldn't kill the email sending, it should just omit the linkblog entries, and publish the rest. These kinds of problems always pop up at the worst time. Luckily yesterday wasn't a big news day, and you can read about it on the blog.

I was looking for a codename for a new scripting environment Claude and I are making attempting in every way to do exactly what Frontier does. But until it does that I need a nice name, memorable, maybe a bit magical and positive. Frontier has been gone, thought to be lost, but with the advent of Claude Code we were able to get it running again in current OSes on current hardware. I shouldn't call it Frontier because who knows if the end result will be compatible enough to claim that. But I want a codename that reflects hidden, forgotten and overlooked wealth. Like a civilzation that rose from the ashes," or as it turns out, the bottom of the ocean.

Yesterday I was emailing with the always lovely Robin Harford, who has a wonderful website over at eatweeds.co.uk. We were discussing the sad state of the web, and wondering what can be done to prevent Google and the others from abusing our content. And within that discussio...

The fourteenth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out: In Episode 14, I chat with Robb, the author of rknight.me about, among other things, metaphors for websites, the importance of sharing things you like on the web, running an indie service (Echo Feed), and more. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you to everyone who expressed interest in shaping OmFest. We’re still working out some details, but we’ve got a Luma registration page for the event up. Please join on September 29, 2026, Om’s 60th birth anniversary, for an eclectic conference curated by his different communities to celebrate the many facets of Om. If you’re … Continue reading OmFest Registration →

I’ve now read more of OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the Apple lawsuit. This part sums it up:

Instead of pleading facts showing misappropriation, Apple recasts the benign, lawful conduct of former employees—who in many of the cited instances were in fact trying to help Apple, at Apple’s request, by making sure their former colleagues’ work could continue without them—as theft of so-called trade secrets. The proffered “trade secrets” are not specific, protectable information at all; they are generic categories of the product-development process…

It supports my original hot take.

People worry about AI bots overloading servers, but in my experience the dumb requests for potential security holes are much worse. Bots trying to get into non-existent files like htpasswd, wp-admin.php, etc. Servers getting hammered today.

Another section from Mark Zuckerberg’s essay:

For example, in Richland Parish, Louisiana, where Meta is building a large data center, teachers received a $50,000 bonus this year because of the increased tax revenue from our investment. The superintendent told us that teachers are now moving there from across the country and he believes it will become one of the nation’s best school districts.

This sounds like Ben Thompson’s argument to just give people money. If you think of data centers as intelligence factories, paying teachers more is actually perfect.

I spent the last three weeks in the north of Ireland. Myself and Jessica flew to Belfast where we spent the first night. We managed to get to a session that evening where we were warmly welcomed. The next day we travelled to Donegal. A train from Belfast to Derry. A bus fr...

Mark Zuckerberg has a long essay today, basically an expansion of the op-ed he wrote recently. On personal agents:

It will have strong privacy and security options so you can trust it to handle all of your personal content knowing that no one else can access your information, similar to how encryption works on WhatsApp. You’ll be able to interact with your agent through any device, including your glasses to keep you present in the moment with the people you care about.

Practically in the same breath: privacy and AI glasses! People just don’t trust Meta with this.

I would use OpenClaw more if the chat interface was built directly into Codex. My little bot mostly goes unused because it’s so disconnected from other workflows. I’ve thought about hacking around this… No elegant solutions.

Manton: "The way I think about RSS.chat is that it’s a bootstrap for getting lots of RSS feeds to play well together, for both posts and replies. Can the web be the social network? Yes. And Micro.blog should be part of anything working toward that goal."

I reviewed some of my posts about AI from 6 months ago, thinking about what I got right and wrong. The theme is focus. When writing apps or essays requires no effort, everyone will drown in content. Figuring out what to build and how to pitch it in a human way is more important than lines of code.

Marco Arment posting on Mastodon about App Store review delays and uncertainty:

Apple would NEVER tolerate another gatekeeper preventing them from running their business the way they prevent every iOS developer from running ours.

Thanks @dave for the kind words:

It’s not my place to say what micro.blog is – but the other day I called it: “the swiss army knife of interop in the web of the 2020’s.” And in that it is unique and imho irreplaceable.

The way I think about RSS.chat is that it’s a bootstrap for getting lots of RSS feeds to play well together, for both posts and replies. Can the web be the social network? Yes. And Micro.blog should be part of anything working toward that goal.