FeedCity

We’ve rolled out a big update to listening to audio in the Micro.blog timeline. If you start listening to a podcast episode, it can now keep playing it in the corner as you scroll the timeline or browse other parts of Micro.blog. Thanks @vincent for all the work on this! It just looks way better.

first breaths,
outdoors:
in, out.
calm.

I wrote something candid on Twitter last week and felt it was worth repeating here. It is a bit judgmental, and for that I apologize. But I couldn't keep the meaning without all the words. Shaking my head thinking can't the people of WordPress see that what it needs is a s...

ShieldFont is very clever, using a custom font to visually change what humans see vs. what bots see. But I strongly feel we shouldn’t make the web worse to combat AI. This font will break accessibility, search, and all sorts of other things.

Ever since I published “Blogs, websites, and identity”, I have been thinking about and discussing some of the questions I raised in the blog post: why do we take photos, what does it mean to write on the web. The essay feels like a starting point: a framing from which to wor...

Heads-up for Micro.blog folks: I’m been thinking about feedback on the poorly-named “Sources” section of Micro.blog. It used to be called “Sources & Cross-posting”, which was slightly better. Leaning toward a rename to “Connections” with sub-pages for inbound RSS and cross-posting.

The press is freaking out about Democratic Socialist candidates winning elections all over the country. They can relax, because the government of the United States thrives on different points of view, and thus -- compromise. The Democrats can have any combination of points ...

Wavelength 2.0 was rejected for a second time. I don’t even know what to do with Apple anymore. Do I need to switch to Android and Linux? App review is so deflating.

Meanwhile the Epic case has dragged on nearly five years. Apple got another 24-hour delay today.

Both the web and Mac versions of Micro.blog were updated today with auto-saving drafts. If you start writing a longer post, Micro.blog will quietly save a draft to the server. This makes it less likely to lose any text if something goes wrong. For manually saved drafts, Micro.blog will still keep track of each version if you need to roll back.

I’ve tried to design it so that it gets out of your way:

I also fixed a few bugs in the Mac version. See the full release notes or download the latest version on the help page.

Linking to a post from Daniel Jalkut about fixing things, Caleb Hailey blogged:

Will more people than ever before write software, or make websites, or even make an app? Yes!

Will a significant portion of these new developers go back to paying for the very same apps they hoped to replace after they realize how much time they are spending fixing things? Also yes.

Found at The Predecessors while typewriter hunting in Anacortes, WA. It was paired with another similar green Olympia SM3, but I immediately picked this one up because of its beautiful and uncommon typeface.  It’ll need several new parts including rubber, but this portends to be a fantastic typewriter.

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’...

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.