FeedCity

I recorded a short video of the next version of Epilogue, featuring a new book calendar you can put on your blog. Submitting this to Apple and Google today or tomorrow.

I keep thinking of cheesy ways I could switch over to https for new posts on Scripting News, esp now that Google is getting more militant in trying to sweep all the history of the web into the trash. I know people think it would be a snap to do the conversion, honestly, so...

The problem with regulating AI is that no one knows where to begin. Yes it can do things that make you question your sanity for letting it have write access to your online work and private info. But if it is behaving itself you can do things you otherwise couldn't come close...

When designing your RSS feeds, the top level title should be the title of the user's account. So if Bluesky had a feed for each user, the channel-level <title> element of the feed would be

• <title>Bluesky: Mark Cuban</title>

Why? Well because readers need context. And it's easy.

And feeds are showing up in places where there isn't much room for the titles, so you have to make your characters count.

Bluesky shows the user's address, imho it should be the string the user chooses for their presence on the site, usually simply their name.

IMAP and CalDAV have been standards forever, yet most apps are hardcoded to work with Gmail and Google Calendar. Disappointing for those of us who don’t like to live exclusively in Google’s world. This would be fairly easy to fix, even accepting some auth peculiarities across platforms.

Thursday session

Jimmy Kimmel highlighted the ridiculous “Unites States” spelling mistake on the White House AI signature page. But I’m more obsessed with the signatures from the AI company execs.

I can’t talk, because my signature is rough, but Greg Brockman, what…?! Amazing. Love Jensen Huang’s too, very nice.

As I remarked during DevDay, live demos fail sometimes. That’s what makes them real. OpenAI’s Holly Li recorded a do-over video on X, a single 9-minute take of using Dots. Good way to bounce back.

September in OPML. First monthly rollover in the new system.

David Smith is bringing back his Developing Perspective podcast:

I don’t have fixed plans yet for the format or frequency, but I feel like I have something to say, and I want a venue to explore what it is now like to be an indie app developer.

Looking forward to this. Short, solo podcasts can be really nice. I need to dust off my own little podcast too.

We may end up with a full “hidden economy”: People working on their own passion projects, building things for their own sake, and for recognition from their peers. Work done without real compensation, to express personal ideas, moods, and visions, with personal lines drawn on when AI usage is acceptable, and when it isn’t.

This bifurcation would affect everyone. For every single hobby activity in your life you’ll have to make a decision: Do you care about the “outcome”, or do you care about doing it yourself, about going through the steps, learning, and doing it badly?

Say, do you just want to eat something, or do you want to know how to cook?

Do you just want a drawing, or do you want to learn how to express yourself in art, in a way that’s impossible to articulate or explain through a chat interface?

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A thoughtful comparison of “AI” and electricity:

The work is in two places. Regulation, which first requires the political will to want it, and which nobody gets to skip by hoping the technology will mature into fairness on its own. And efficiency — continued ground gained on open models small enough to run on ordinary machines. The future I want is local — off-grid AI. A model on a laptop that belongs to the person using it, the way a lamp belongs to the person who switches it on.

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The new Kindle looks very nice. Tempted to get one because my current Kindle Paperwhite got dented. But now there’s the choice of plastic or aluminum! I feel like lighter is better.

Kev Quirk thinking about moving to a solo fediverse instance since he’s not actively checking Mastodon:

The majority of my timeline is fun, but the outraged minority have ruined for me. To the point where I don’t want to be there, and I’m much happier having not checked the timeline for the last month or so.

Listening to the Vergecast podcast’s wrap-up of DevDay… I think it’s a big deal that Dots is powered by Astra. It’s just not going to make the same kind of mistakes as Muse has so far.

I guess not shocking that a product that’s $100/month is better than one that’s $0/month.

I went searching at Star Typewriters yesterday for a nice mid-century Adler Universal. As if he knew I was coming, Helmut had this lovely Royal/Triumph-Adler R 700 sitting right up front on the counter. It’s essentially a Royal-badged version of the Adler Universal 200 which was manufactured under the Litton regime. It’s a solid standard with some … Continue reading

In 2024 I started writing monostiches, which are poems that span a single line. Over the last few weeks I have been writing more, and now I have a category page devoted to monostiches. I have been thinking about why I like the monostich form so much. I think there are a few...

Wednesday session

Sarah Perez has an update at TechCrunch on the story of whether Muse can read Messages.app’s database: Meta is refuting a journalist’s claim that its AI agent Muse read the user’s private messages without permission. Following an earlier report from Inc. columnist Jason Ate...

In Distance there is the sight of everything; here there is the presence of something.