FeedCity

Is it possible to be in awe and have no idea to what extent until you look back? I think this is what I feel now, looking back on the solar eclipse that happened an hour and a half ago or so. “Isn’t it amazing that this happens?”, I said to everyone who joined this evening’s...

Tesla might be finally doing something good again. TechCrunch reports:

Tesla intends to build a massive solar panel factory 45 minutes southwest of Houston, according to documents filed with the state of Texas. […] The factory would create about 9,700 full-time jobs, Tesla said.

Solar is so obvious for Texas. If this helps get the costs down, good things will happen. At least I like it better than their plan to build robots.

Took a little time to go through most of my podcasts in Overcast, unsubscribing from a bunch of shows that I no longer listen to regularly. I have a “Favorites” playlist that shows recent episodes from select shows. Also: most podcasts are just too long now.

By the side of the train tracks the stinging nettles are suffering from the drought. They look sad — like they never knew what they are but have just been told.

— Denise Wilton

Ben Thompson goes philosophical about the Claude watermarking:

What the E.U. is doing is stealing the last thing humans have — creation — and demanding it be bundled with substantiation, effectively giving AI the credit. That the human gave AI the text to proofread — or even the prompt to generate writing — doesn’t matter to the bureaucrats.

Apologies to blog readers who are sick of all the AI-related posts! New Micro.blog stuff coming later today.

Is anyone else surprised that Gemini has 1 billion users? I’ve only met one person who uses it instead of ChatGPT or Claude. But maybe I don’t know enough Android users. People go along with whatever defaults they’re given… Browser, maps, AI.

One day I’m going to work up the courage to ask AI to rewrite every old jQuery call to use simple DOM manipulation and fetch instead. But not today.

I just went through hell trying to respond to a message that came to me through the gateway between WordPress and Mastodon. I get an email from WordPress saying someone talked about me. I clicked the link, it took me to a WordPress dialog, very confusing, but there was a link...

If you run a tech company I hope you didn't lay off most of your programmers last year when that was the hype. Don't wait too long before you fire your human developers. I'm now doing my second big project with Claude Code, not an experiment, and we're going through the same mess we went through last time. I know what I want, I can show it what I want, give it docs for what I want, and it keeps leading me into different corners that have nothing to do with it. When it clicks, it can go faster than a thousand programmers and it's a miracle, and when we can harness it to the job we want to do it's incredibly economical. $100 for $1 million of work. That's why you see me full of gusto for that mode. What I haven't written about how when you slow to nothing, back and forth, and you get no closer. I hate this kind of work, esp the role I have to play in it.

On my desk there is a painting of Monet’s “Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies” 1 that I purchased when I was on holiday last year. I wanted to bring something back that I could put in my living space, something that would both be a memory of the trip but also a work of art in...

Blink and you’ll miss it, but apparently I was in a BBC news report from Belfast last week:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyg3Gu1f-p4

Beeper has some fun new features where you can merge chats with the same person across multiple networks, polls, labels… Very exciting work happening on that product.

Papa’s got a brand new in-box. Picked up at thrift for $3.30. 

After some bug fix juggling that wasn’t going anywhere, decided to throw a problem at GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra, which I had never used before because it churns through tokens quickly. It spun up a few subagents to handle different facets of the problem. Fascinating.

John Gruber isn’t buying the Claude watermarking either:

What happens if you copy my text and quote it in something you write, by hand? Now you’ve got a watermark in your prose, invisible characters or something, that implicates that your prose is AI-generated? Even though you didn’t use AI and just copy and pasted text from me? Madness.

Maybe the watermark won’t work on short sections of text, like a blockquote, because there aren’t enough words to detect a pattern (unless every word is shifted with the algorithm, which seems insane). But who knows, because how it really works is a secret.

“What would this painting by Titian have looked like four hundred years ago?” I always find myself asking myself new questions – and noticing details I have never appreciated before – when I visit galleries. Some of this comes with my studies. I saw a portrait in the entrance...

how the poem slows time — of day and night. how the poem flows words — all in sight. how the poem shows mirrors — reflections of light. how the poem knows conditions — ours alike.

Following up on my comment yesterday, I now have Codex → OpenClaw working, so I can chat with my bot in the same place I have other AI chats. Codex wrote a plugin for itself to handle the connection, plus some setup on the OpenClaw server. 🤖

▶️ watched and finished the rest of Silo season 1 and all of season 2 over the weekend. Superbly well written.Previously: https://tantek.com/2026/218/t1/watched-episodes-silo#Silo #SiloTV #AppleOriginal #AppleTV#Blaugust #Blaugust2026