FeedCity

On the eve of OpenAI’s DevDay, an exclusive from the WSJ that GPT-6.1 Astra is delayed because of safety concerns: Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the m...

Rootfiles in Frontier, a new collection starts with docserver.root, the code and content for docserver.userland.com. Claude also wrote a Node app that extracts all the data from a root file.

Michael Tsai blogging about Grok Bot and agents generally:

I don’t trust xAI (or Meta) with my data, but it doesn’t seem like Siri AI can do all that much. So far, I’ve been too busy to do much with agents, even on a test Mac. But I don’t think agents are going away, so there’s a tension here that will need to be resolved eventually.

In the latest Connected Places fediverse news, this improvement in Mastodon 4.7 stood out to me:

Mastodon 4.7.0 can now recognise a remote account that changes its handle by using its underlying ActivityPub identifier. This does not mean Mastodon’s own users can change their handles yet, but it means that Mastodon can better work with software where that is already possible.

Quite a big deal. In practice, might rarely pay off because an id URL is probably going to be tied to the domain name, but still a welcome step forward.

By taking identity resolution to an independent organization, Bluesky is securing the future of its network, and of AT Protocol.

I was browsing around the WordPress blogs and found a new one in German that pointed to something new in blogrolls. It's Matthias Pfefferle, of course -- this time connecting up with the world Manton and I were working on a couple of years ago. Read about it here. He works at Automattic and has done pretty much all the work to connect WordPress to everything he can find, including ActivityPub and AT Proto. I have to swing back to FeedLand and RSS.chat asap, so we can start building together. Not going to miss his window on this stuff.

If the future is more agents and fewer traditional apps, it’s a threat to the App Store business, so Apple will resist it. The company that was willing to obsolete its own product (the iPod) to make a great phone… That company doesn’t exist anymore.

Ben Thompson writing about how the future will be on-demand UIs and agents that bypass needing an app at all:

…no one wants to use apps because they are apps, apps were just the vehicle for people to accomplish something or entertain themselves; once people realize they can get straight to the job to be done it will seem odd they did it any other way.

This is why Muse’s mission statement marks a pivotal moment. It might even be dangerous for the web, handing more centralized power to Meta.

The iPad update to Epilogue that I blogged about this weekend is now available. Apple review time: 22 hours. Not bad, except… Google review: 30 minutes.

Whichever way you cut it, you cannot be an AI artist.

Lex Friedman has a blog post about how broken the App Store review process is. He summarizes a few of the long-standing issues and a potential solution to at least whitelist trusted apps:

Apple’s “guilty until proven innocent” policy is offensive to the developers it claims to embrace.

Over the past few years, I spent way more time than I probably should have thinking about my life. And the way I usually look at it is by asking two fundamental questions. The first question is “do I want to have a life?”. You might think this is a silly question to even ask...

The radiant red leaves, the yellow and brown leaves, the feeling of the cold in my hands and in my cheeks.

Leaf-coated pavements. The world, painted with colour.

Music plays. Air breathes. Momentum dances.

Über @teezeh bin ich auf den großartigen @designthinkingcomic und seinen Webcomic gestoßen… und konnte nicht widerstehen, mir (auch) ein(en?) Avatar zeichnen zu lassen ☺️ Ich liebe es ♥️!

red, amber, green; leaves, lights.

When I opened the window this morning, I was greeted by a white and grey disk, the grey blending into the light blue of the surrounding skies. Clear as Day, and full, the morning moon made me feel a little bit of awe. Wow. When I went to bed last night, the moonlight cast be...

Thanks for your reply Ted. I’m putting some text here in the case that your site filters out img tags the way most WordPress comment sections do. Clicking through to my site will provide the photo of the typed response if this is the case. Tom has a snippet of code which may help this … Continue reading

John Gruber followed up about Alexandr Wang’s Muse post on X:

Wang wrote that Muse “Clears the way and solves all the problems it can until the human part, the wanting and the dreaming, is all that’s left.” That’s dystopic, not utopic. It’s the actual creation and doing of things that makes life worthwhile — not just wanting and dreaming about it.

I read Alexandr’s post as wanting to give people more time to do the work that matters, not the busywork. That vision for AI sounds good, but it doesn’t convince me to use Muse specifically. I’m worried about delegating so much power to Meta.