FeedCity

Met up with brainbox Steven Pemberton for coffee and a chat.

9to5Mac has a summary of yet another response from OpenAI. They don’t believe any specific trade secrets are even alleged:

Apple all but admits that it has not yet identified the alleged trade secrets, promising an “iterative process” of discovery, after which it will tell Defendants and the Court what the alleged trade secrets are.

The hearing is October 1st. OpenAI’s DevDay is September 29th. Hopefully we’ll see the new device before the lawsuit goes much further.

I will be showing at WOCA again this weekend. Saturday. A selection of works made from found objects at the beach. I’ll post photos in the future. But come on down to WOCA and I’ll be there. I hope it’ll be fun. We may get food from The Hat afterwards. Art Spiegelman remains an influence...

I am juggling two Frontiers now, one the last release of the OPML editor from 2014, and the other the in-development version codenamed Atlantis that runs in Electron and thus is built on JavaScript and Chrome. Took me a while to get over the confusion, because Frontier is act...

It's our job to make the web a more attractive environment than AT Proto. We can deliver all the benefits they tout, without the huge transition involved in converting to their world. It would be like porting from Mac to Windows in the 90s, something we did at UserLand, and n...

Manton wants to know why Marc Benioff chose the name Claudeforce for his brand-merge of Salesforce and Claude. My two cents. Claude is a great name. I think that’s ultimately what he bought. His customers just want to be able to check the box – we’re using AI. Boss is happy. When I was coming up as a young dude in tech, the old saying was “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” Today, in 2026, it’s Claude in place of IBM. My father worked in marketing at IBM in Armonk, so I heard a lot about their strategies that meant the IBM brand would be kicking ass forever. All things must pass. But in the early days of the PC industry, IBM sure had the power. Kind of like the US going to war with Iran in 2026. In the end IBM wanted to get rid of Microsoft, but Billg had the last laugh.

If you’re a fan of the web, you probably want to know that voting is now open for that lovely initiative that is the Tiny Awards, running for the 4th consecutive year.

I got asked to be a judge this time around, and my votes helped shape the shortlist of candidate that is currently up on the site and I was pleased to see that two of the five sites I picked are part of the final group.

Picking five from the list of submissions was a lot of fun. There were so many interesting websites submitted, and it makes me happy to see that the quirky web is still thriving.

Go cast your vote! You have time till September 25th.

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I thought it was a dead pixel, but there’s actually a tiny chip in the glass of my MacBook Pro screen. Annoying in the nitpicky, small life problems kind of way. Really want to keep this machine another couple years.

Got notice from Linode that 8 of my servers need to rebooted in the next month. A couple of them have 2-year uptime! There won’t be downtime except for one of the servers, might be a short blip, which I’ll schedule ahead of time.

I’ve been randomly reading and listening to physics topics, not sure why, including lectures by Richard Feynman. Something finally clicked with understanding relativity and spacetime. I sort of got it before, but not really. 🤯

V.H. and I are doing a music exchange where we shared three songs with each other and we each chose one to write about. I chose “Lost in Yesterday” by Tame Impala. Due to a curious technical issue – ahem, Apple Music, please design your permalinks more clearly, and make it c...

herein, a few moments of joy from recent days.

The joy of:
Realising I have a phrase to use in a piece of writing that I need to write down.Jotting down an idea on the closest surface.Hearing a new mashup from my favourite singer for the first time.Exploring a book with pictures. I really felt like I was exploring.Noticing how much reading about an artwork helps me understand it.Working on pieces of writing with others.Arranging mementos into my new letter rack, and trying my best to stack my museum maps into layers so I can see as many as possible.Starting a new scrapbook, and placing the first stickers in – of making the book my own.Autumn rains, and how water nourishes the ground.Trying to learn a new song on the guitar.Tidying up.Seeing someone smile.Someone smiling back.Friendship.

I’m slowly closing in on a completist collection of Royal standard typewriters.  Here’s most of my collection so far. Only a few major must haves left, but also still a few to finish refurbishing. Seven are fully refurbished, though two still need some small tweaks; all type but two need some reasonable work, and the … Continue reading Royal Standard Typewriter Collection

Heard an interview with Bill Gates on an Atlantic podcast, he relies on a few years of programming he did when he was in his teens and twenties, yet he is the most prominent person who knows anything about programming. This is a societal mistake. We have to have public discourse about tech that's as informed as Krugman is on economics, and Heather Cox Richardson is on American history.

I don’t get the Claudeforce name. Why tie your product to a single model? That’s someone else’s brand. And whenever a competitor like OpenAI does something good, your own product will feel out of step too.

I wonder if Apple will ever merge App Store Connect into developer.apple.com. Pretty weird that things are still fragmented. (“Oh, you want to update an app ID? Better go somewhere else.”)

It’s a minor nitpick. Just the whole backend feels stagnant because they have a monopoly on app distribution.

Thursday session

Myke Hurley blogging about the upcoming campaign for St. Jude:

We are now within reaching distance of $5 million raised. What an incredible achievement in less than 10 years. I don’t think I could have imagined what we would all achieve together. But time and time again, the Relay community has stood by us and believed in this cause.