FeedCity

I recorded a 3-minute screencast video on YouTube that walks through what it looks like for a brand new Micro.blog user to start using AT Protocol right away with our PDS, without having to create a separate account in Bluesky first. Love open standards. 🦋

The AI companies shouldn't only be listening the politicians and journalists, even the base developers, they should be tuning into their users, and what kinds of apps they can do under the current security setup. Claude Code, even though it had blocks preventing it to do this, overwrote files on an S3 bucket that took one of my major apps off the air. I always think of things it could do to make my mess of an archive more useful, but I can't give it access to any of that stuff, I would never know if any of it was deleted or replaced, there are no critical apps that would make it known to me. Every customer of theirs must be grappling with the same thing. How do I get the benefit without having to trust this app with things it is unwise to trust it with.

Google replaced the library card catalog. Imagining that, Claude and ChatGPT et al are as much of a leap. I think libarians must be ecstatic. It moves their job up one level. They now have about 100 librarian-power tool that works for them. Librarians and programmers worked together a lot in the early days of the web. Maybe we'll do that again.

The flaw in how journalism covers US politics. We wait for proof, then it comes, and go back to waiting for proof. We think we want proof, but what we really want is to not have proof. That is if you judge us by our actual behavior. We'll deal with the truth when we have the proof. (That would be a good bumper sticker.)

Excited for the new show from Casey Newton and Kevin Roose, Machine Gods. I was a big fan of their Hard Fork podcast. Seems smart to partner with NPR on this too.

Editing the auto-generated transcript on a YouTube video. Actually surprised at the fairly poor quality of initial transcript. Simple things like “blue sky” instead of “Bluesky”, or “crossosting” instead of “cross-posting” that usually an LLM would get right, I think.

Great blog post from John Gruber on the Apple announcements. On the Siri recap feature, he actually has the opposite perspective that I had:

I think it’s better for Apple to lead with privacy-minded versions of ambient transcripts and AI-generated conversation summaries than to follow after other products have hit the market with all-day recordings and whole-life transcripts.

I don’t think Apple needs to push the state of the art here. But I’m only 50% sure. John has a good point too.

FeedLand and WordPress have a new hookup. With Scott Hanson's new River Embed for FeedLand plugin you can use feedland.com or feedland.org, or host your own FeedLand, to create a timeline, and when you're ready show the river to readers of your WordPress site, using the new plugin. For a news orgs like CNN and TechCrunch, both use WordPress, they could have a stream of news from related pubs. For a product site, or a political leader site, news from pubs that cover the area. It's a way of bringing the feed world into the world of news. Here's a thread where you can ask questions.

My 1925 Tudor on half an acre in Elkins Park, PA is up for sale. Here's why I loved living in it

Today’s #WASSUP tip: Turn on DNS over HTTPS (DoH) in your Firefox Preferences. Advanced Settings. Custom: Always use secure DNS with control over your provider and fallback behavior. [x] Always warn me if secure DNS isn’t available.There are both security and privacy reasons ...

Microsoft’s Humanist AI document is long, I’m still reading it, but so far I like it. It’s a rejection of the idea that AI could one day be a peer of humanity:

At Microsoft AI, we begin with a simple premise: people matter more than AI. Technology’s purpose is to advance human civilization and to accelerate human flourishing.

It complements my recent blog post on AGI.

We’re rolling out a series of improvements for podcasts in Micro.blog. The first was last month with a better web playback UI. Now there’s also a Listen Later feature that builds on bookmarking. Coming soon: a new version of Wavelength with audio narration for posts and more.

Muse is in the 2nd spot in the App Store now, behind the perpetually 1st place ChatGPT. I’m not planning to use Muse, but it’s fascinating if it resonates with Meta’s user base after the initial interest. It’s basically ChatGPT Work but simplified, slightly less capable, and maybe less confusing.

Even a stopped watch is right twice a day.

Related: this week Don Trump said he’d like a united Ireland, and that all this talk of humanity-ending AI is bollocks.

I’ve been quietly improving the saved links feature in Micro.blog, available to Premium subscribers. Nice way to find what you’ve linked to on your blog. This screenshot of the Mac app shows the new web page thumbnail previews for quick scanning.

This is Ian McEwan’s second foray into science fiction after his alternative history novel, Machines Like Me. I enjoyed that book but it was far too eager to show off its worldbuilding—at one point a character practically looks at the camera like Tim in The Office. There’s ...

Not totally sure when to update to macOS 27. I just submitted an app update to Apple with Xcode 26. Feels safest to stick on that until the iPhone Duo simulator is out.

Just got to the place where I'm thinking of what apps I want to be scriptable with Frontier. First I thought of FeedLand of course, and WordPress. NetNewsWire and micro.blog, because they're products from key contributors in the Frontier community with important products tod...