FeedCity

Catching up on news from D23. Cartoon Brew has a rundown of some of the theme park changes coming up. The first Lion King ride will be in Disneyland Paris… A little surprised they never built that in Animal Kingdom.

My post earlier about X didn’t resonate exactly as I had intended. Let me zoom out. Let’s think of proponents of the social web as a coalition. People actively choose to be on the fediverse, atmosphere, and (though it’s a dated term) blogosphere. There are people who: Disli...

Tuesday session for Liam’s birthday

I'm thinking about writing my blog over in RSS.chat. It has most of the features I like, titles are optional, no character limit, links are supported, because it's the web. It supports discourse the way I like it, where every comment is a post, no difference, and you can anchor threads in different places, not just the place it was born. It's got a simple structure, without being complex. Small parts loosely joined, every part replaceable. Much more than open source. And naturally distributed.

Why do people care if Claude puts watermarks on text it wrote. It's screwing with its writing, not yours. As a person who publishes their own writing, and carefully labels it when it's written by an AI bot (docs, change notes, podcast show notes, quotable things it said), I want people to be able to tell that I wrote it, this is what I thought, I'm not just shoveling random written sludge to people, sloshing around, devaluing every bit of real writing in its midst. I bet teachers love the idea. Why does everyone have to have an opinion about every damned thing? And of course I have even more to say on the subject.

Pretty significant design changes coming to Mastodon for version 5.0. I don’t use Mastodon often (my blog posts get to the fediverse from Micro.blog) but these seem like good changes.

Meanwhile Claude wrote test files in many of our S3 buckets last night, one of which knocked FeedLand off the air. It did a scan to see what other damage it had done, and there was a lot. It went through specific orders that said it can't do those things. So I have no idea how useful these things could be if it destroys stuff in deployed projects with real users. FeedLand was down for over an hour, and stressed me out no end. Really fucked up.

Got let in to Bluesky’s Attie. I’m impressed with it so far. I wonder if this will end up being a paid product. Can’t be cheap to run.

I went to plenty of great sessions when I was in Belfast. One of the best was during Belfast Tradfest, out at The Hatfield with Bríd Harper, Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, and Michael Rooney. I ended up sitting next a lovely local fiddler named John. I saw him again the next d...

I had missed that Automattic’s renewed push into education comes with a free .blog or .art domain name. It’s just for one year, but still great to get students thinking about owning their writing. I wish I could offer that.

As I've been writing test scripts for the Frontier project, I was finding omissions or mistakes one at a time. Finally I asked Claude to research this. Where are the holes you didn't fill as we were going along? The list is surprisingly long. Then I asked it to look at other...

When I blogged a couple weeks ago that X seems to be growing again, I think some people didn’t believe me. Yesterday, Federico Viticci returned to X:

Over the last two years, I’ve fundamentally changed as a creator. I’m still a writer and podcaster, but I guess I’m also a new kind of “builder”. Today, I need to find new readers, listeners, and developers, wherever they may be.

I have a lot of respect for Federico. If he feels he needs to connect with folks on X, that’s his call. I’m sure he’s going to keep blogging and podcasting too!

Let me be clear: I’m not going to post on X. But I’m not blind either. Part of running Micro.blog is paying attention when things change.

All the items in this room were once out of reach; some not yet invented, others too rare or costly for the vast majority of people. Today, most of us lucky enough to live with them walk past without a second thought.

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Looks like we’re getting the camera AirPods soon. I’m curious how Apple is going to frame the privacy for these considering all the Meta glasses backlash. Even if the image never leaves your phone, will people trust it?

Sarah Perez at TechCrunch writes: WordPress.com targets the next generation of web creators with a free student plan. $24/yr, starting with “6 GB of storage, backups, staging sites, and other tools, as well as support for plug-ins, SFTP/SSH, phpMyAdmin, and Studio Sync“

V.H. and I are doing a painting exchange challenge where we each choose a painting for the other person to write about. We gave each other three options. From the options given to me, I chose The Hay Wain by John Constable. V.H. wrote about Corot’s “Entrance to the Wood”. W...

John Gruber follows up on a number of issues around watermarking. On what to even do with detection tools:

There cannot exist a single detector for all LLMs. And even if you find out that it says it’s a match, that an email or blog post or Slack message was very likely generated by, say, Claude, what are you going to do? March into your colleague’s office and tell them you caught them?

Watermarking critiques are compelling because there are multiple points against it. Worse quality (maybe), false positives with quoted or lightly edited text (likely), centralized control of keys (yes).

It’s hard in the moment to know when to stand up to bullies and when to let it go. Glad to see Disney pushing back against Trump’s FCC.

When I was looking for a painting to share with someone to do an art writing exchange – where we each write about a painting we choose for each other – there was one painting that stood out to me that I wanted to analyse: Picasso’s The Poet (Le Poète). The painting, in Cubis...