FeedCity

Flipping through news channels over breakfast like I usually do, the Today Show actually had a pretty good segment on AI technology to help with air traffic control. Good balance of facts and humor. I think that’s largely going to be the mainstream response: “Interesting. And yet life goes on.”

I don’t know exactly how the trees are changing, the details being so minute and complex at once, but I know that they are. I can see the change in the colours. ⁂ ⁂ ⁂ Carrying the weight of summer, the trees shed with colour and become anew, carrying messages of the presen...

What if I don’t have to go anywhere to feel the world? What if the place of my dreams is already in front of me? Herein, a dispatch from Scotland in September. ⁂ ⁂ ⁂ As I look into the distance, I see a tree with a green core at the ends of whose branches the leaves are s...

Sometimes you wipe away words and their imprint – the place where you left them – remains inked in your mind. The feeling of writing. ⁂ ⁂ ⁂ After I wrote “The sound of writing”, I started to think about how writing feels. What does it feel like to write a piece of work? I...

I love how a conversation can flow from dishes to Ted Lasso 1 to stickers. This makes me think that even if I am not wandering outside – exploring the world – my mind can wander inside, or with others as part of a conversation. I digress. Of all these discussion points -- di...

The twentieth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out:

In Episode 20, I chat with Sara, the author of sarajoy.dev and whimsica11y.net, among other things, the importance of web accessibility, screen readers, and the joy of exploring and making things on the web.

I hope you enjoy the episode!

Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts.

AI tends to over-engineer more than I would. It’s kind of nice, because the code is often robust today, but it’s a lot to maintain tomorrow. I usually have to walk it back after a first pass, streamlining things, simplifying database changes. There’s a cost to doing too little and doing too much.

Reviewing the latest draft of the LOLA portability spec for ActivityPub. Micro.blog supports a bunch of import and export formats, as well as the “move” activity. Planning to add LOLA too.

How the JSK Fellowship is putting me in a more generative culture.

OpenAI blogs about a new advisory group for math and AI. On their new internal model:

In addition to resolving the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem⁠, this model has now resolved more than 100 long-standing open problems across most areas of mathematics. The pace of its progress⁠ in mathematics has surprised the mathematicians within OpenAI.

I think OpenAI realized they rushed out Navier–Stokes, creating controversy that overshadowed the achievement. This post sounds like a good reset.

Caleb Hailey responded to my comment about a MacBook Neo-class Mac:

When the redesigned Mac Mini was announced I had hoped for it to be USB-C powered. But a Mac Nano (or Mac Neo) would be an even better fit for a USB-C powered Mac that could be used in all the ways you can use a Raspberry Pi. I bet they could beat the old Mac Mini pricing for a device like this, and ship it at $299-399.

I wouldn’t expect Apple to go that low, but even $499 would be great. It could literally be the same components as the Neo except no screen, no keyboard, and no battery.

Monday session in Madrid.

I asked Claude to create a list of all the verbs in Atlantis. Some of them obviously don't do anything. We don't have the card funtionality, or the osa, rectangle, pict, rez or point verbs. What is pikeRenderer? I think we could have a use for quicktime verbs? There's a new scheduler, I wrote it in 2014 or so, but the old one is there, and we just found a reference to it. This could make a nice community project.

Reminder to self, Frontier must have websockets verbs. I love websockets, and it'll fit in perfectly with everything else Frontier it does. I don't think Websockets existed when Frontier went to sleep.

Brian Lehrer podcast has an esp good one hour episode with interviews about the end of the world as we know it with AI. He's so good at cutting through the hype and getting to reality as are his guests.

I can now publish a new part to the codecasting feed. It was one of the things that broke in the transition to current MacOS for Frontier.

Frances post Highlights of my week has inspired me to write a list of things I love and that bring me joy. I have done this before but I thought it would be fun to write another list. I encourage you to write one, as well. You can keep it private if you want – it’s the writi...

Yesterday when I was clicking around checking the social web — Micro.blog, Bluesky, Threads, and X — it was only on Threads that I saw the news about ICE in Austin. I don’t want to read too much into one example, but Meta often does seem the most likely to show divisive, outrage-amplifying topics.

From Jason Snell’s review of the new Mac mini:

… at $599, the Mac mini was about as close to an impulse buy as a Mac desktop could get. At $899, it’s crossed an invisible threshold. I can understand it, but I don’t have to like it.

Maybe there’s a missing product in Apple’s lineup: a Mac with the guts of the $699 MacBook Neo. Call it a Mac nano.

The release notes page for Micro.blog for Mac is now so long, going back 9 years, that I hit Discourse’s default 32k character limit today. Had to bump the setting.