FeedCity

Had a dream last night that I went to Best Buy to buy an extra Jaz disk. They didn’t have any, but I was able to get one from Amazon that arrived to the store within minutes. Not sure what it means… Maybe I’m worried about backups.

Thinking about the OpenAI industry’s PR problem, I’m reminded of Anthropic’s ad during the Super Bowl. People said it was clever, but it reinforced the idea that AI companies are just like other big tech: tracking you and selling your data. For next year’s ads, we will see a more optimistic vision.

You can use the web to share your poetry, or photography, or essays, or drawings, or sketches, or music, and everything in between. On a website, you have control over design, layout, and distribution 1. You own your domain, so you own your links. It feels like so many more...

Relocated to work at the Laura Bush library. The view is just as beautiful as I remember when I was visiting 30 libraries in Austin. Can’t believe that was 10 years ago.

I was confused for a minute why the coffee shop / bar got so crowded as the morning went on, then noticed that everyone was wearing burnt orange shirts. Hook ’em. 🏈

Developers of popular open source projects are inundated with pull requests. What about a solution somewhere in between a user feature request and a code diff? User writes a feature request, AI checks the project code and turns the idea into a summary that highlights pros/cons based on the codebase.

A couple times over the last year, I’ve turned off fediverse posting from my blog. This is another one of those times. I may keep fediverse posting disabled until Trump is out of office, when I hope it’ll be easier to lower the temperature in online discourse.

I launched ChatGPT for the first time in a long time because I now have access to the new version. One new thing I see is that they are popping up suggestions about things you can do in realtime, like smart queries in a feed reader, which as far as I know is still uncharted ...

Marco Arment blogs about his old neighbors and the divisive nature of our current political environment:

If I learn today that my neighbors have political views that my “side” considers unacceptable and unforgivable, should I be able to have dinner at their house, shovel their snow, or even greet them outside?

Really good post.

rabbits leaping, birds tweeting,
the sun rising, hills welcoming,
breeze blowing, paths winding,
potential painting, colours calming:
skies awakening, day breaking.

The #Blaugust 2026 blogging challenge had a nice set of awards this year based on reaching a certain number of posts published:* 1* — Newbie Blogger. *if it was your first time doing Blaugust * 5+ — Bronze* 15+ — Silver* 25+ — Gold* 31+ — Rainbow DiamondFrom https://nerdgirlt...

How to add MapQuest with a search shortcut to your Firefox:1. open Firefox Preferences ("Firefox" menu, "Preferences" item)2. select "🔍 Search" from the left column3. click the [ + Add search engine ] button4. enter "MapQuest" into the Search engine name field (without quotes...

If you find a wiki page seemingly from a MediaWiki, but without a "View History" link, here’s a tip for how to find it.Example: the old HTML Working Group (WG) wiki at W3C* https://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/Main_PageNote the warning at the top: “This wiki has been archived and ...

August 28 through September 4, 2026 Recent Events From events.indieweb.org/archive: Front End Study Hall #057 Thursday, September 3 at 10:00am Online! Zoom! Front End Study Hall is an HTML + CSS focused group meeting, held on Zoom to experiment and learn with the basic bui...

I’ve got access to Astra now and have no idea what to build, as if I suddenly have writer’s block. Anyone have a feature request or bug that we’ve overlooked?

I think my best essays have short titles that really undersell the scope of the blog post. No clickbait, no tl;dr headers to skim through. I hope people read them, but I’m not going to jump through hoops to make that happen.

In a call with reporters announcing GPT-6 Astra, Greg Brockman talked about whether Astra qualifies as AGI: I do leave it up to the reader to decide for themselves if this qualifies for them. For me personally, I do think we’re there. As we reach AGI, whether it’s with Ast...

If you want others to follow you, you have to offer them your users. And a format alone has no users.

And you have to trust your users to choose the best product, and you have to have a great product, that they appreciate, even though they have choice.

Just coming out with something better in a format will get you zero uptake. Unless you have users they can switch to their product, they simply won’t hear you.

That’s why Atom never replaced RSS, which already did everything people needed and was already supported by the NYT and the news industry.

That’s why AT Proto will never overcome the huge lead Twitter already has.

For more tips on what does and doesn't matter in open formats and protocols, check out my Rules for Standards-makers.

PS: This started as an early morning rant on Twitter.

The GPT-6 Astra announcement yesterday was a bit anticlimactic because most people don’t have access to it yet. That’s fine, plenty of things to work on with the old-and-busted GPT-5.7 Sol.

Also listening to the interview with Greg Brockman on Stratechery this morning.