FeedCity

Excited that it’s The Fires of December release day for backers. I’ve loaded up the ePub to read later.

I stand under a warm autumn sun and look back and see a dark cloud, seemingly resting still in the sky. I know it is moving — getting slightly closer. But yet the day is still beautiful. There is light to appreciate.

After spots of rain, the cloud blew away and the blue in the sky where there was grey marked a new beginning.

I’ve mentioned the ritual that concludes the week at Clearleft: At the end of every Thursday afternoon at Clearleft, we wrap up the working week with an all-hands (video) meeting. Yes, I know that the week finishes on Friday, but Fridays have been declared the no-meeting...

The nineteenth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out:

In Episode 19, I chat with Daniel, the author of melonking.net and maintainer of the Melonland community forum about, among other things, longevity on the web, the 'web revival', the creative potential of the web, and more.

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.

Started reading Alchemised by SenLinYu and was surprised that it felt pretty dark, because for some reason I thought it was YA. Nope, just regular adult fantasy. I tend to read books that sound interesting while ignoring most of the back-cover blurb. 📚

Happy #8bitday!And happy Progammer’s Day! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmer%27s_Day) — one of the rare annual ordinal date observations, based on the day of the year, rather than day of a specific month of the year.Piano Day is another, celebrated on the 88th day of the year:* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Day* https://tantek.com/2024/088/t1/world-piano-day-ordinal-date-iso-8601Do you know of any other annual ordinal date observances?Besides New Year’s Day of course.Previously, previously:* https://tantek.com/2025/257/t1/happy-8bitday-255-bytes-max* https://tantek.com/2024/256/t1/happy-8bitday-binary-byte (more previous posts there)#ProgrammersDay #ordinalDate #dayOfTheYear #ordinalDateObservance #annualObservance #annualEvent

Monday session

For the last week in Codex, I’ve been using a single pinned thread for each app instead of deciding when to start new threads. Basically just let Codex compact its context whenever it needs to. Seems to work well.

The next milestone will be installing Atlantis on my new macbook, and hooking a monitor up to it, a really nice one, and move my work to that desk. then Berkeley, the name of the system I've been using for eight years, will be here as a backup and source of truth and prior art. That was the goal of the Atlantis project. I could probably do the switch right now. It's like moving out of an old house that you did good stuff in, into a replica, but built out of the latest bits. Honestly I never thought in a million years I'd get here.

Federico Viticci’s iOS 27 review is out, with a very good chapter on Siri AI. That is the perspective I’ve been most interested in reading about.

This quote from Craig Federighi fits the discussion Daniel Jalkut and I had on last week’s Core Int about the Duo replacing the need for both iPhone and iPad. Just makes sense unless you need a big iPad or shared iPad for the whole family.

Just discovered this IndieWeb starter pack on Bluesky and followed a few more people from it. It includes some accounts bridged to Mastodon too, so you can follow everyone in one place on Bluesky or Micro.blog.

I’m not sure I agree with all the implications in the closing of today’s Stratechery update, but like all good essays it is forcing me to really think about my own view:

… it’s worth noting that the very idea of a national or — worse! — global regulatory regime on intelligence is so deeply off-putting that I’d rather roll the dice and bet on humans figuring it out. Surviving isn’t everything; living freely counts for an awful lot as well.

Congrats to Lex Friedman on the release of a new version of Strategery, taking over development after the game was going to stop working. So cool to give an old app new life.

John Gruber blogged about XCancel shutting down yet again, adding this in a parenthetical:

…let’s admit it at this point, there’s not just a lot posted on X, it’s resurgent in popularity

It’s true. Just telling folks what we’re against has not been enough to rebalance the web to open platforms.

I’m an invited expert at the World Wide Web Consortium. That sounds impressive, but it isn’t. Anyone can become an invited expert. The fact that I am now one proves it. You apply to be an invited expert and once that application is approved, you’re in. So you too could and ...

A while ago, I noticed that my headings did not look consistent across Firefox and Safari. I learned that this was because the font file I was using on my website did not contain bold characters. This meant that browsers were trying to “synthesise” a bold font. This synthesi...

My longtime friend Jeff Jarvis says the press is covering the wrong story re AI. I agree, but I think Jeff is covering the wrong story too. This is really a discovery like electricity, or Newtonian physics, calculus, basically the technology of knowledge. I wish I were 22 years old now so I could plan out a long career working this way. I want people like Jeff to understand. They all stopped listening to me when my dreams of a web society were destroyed by the VCs. I'm even smarter and more experienced now than I was then, and I have better tools. Please, listen -- you're all missing the point. It should be a matter of great interest -- what can we do with this. All we hear about are fears, which aren't even informed by what the tech can do. Very typical of journalism. Let's do better this time.

It is probably the closest to First Contact with an intelligent alien life form that our species will ever have.