FeedCity

Excited for the new show from Casey Newton and Kevin Roose, Machine Gods. I was a big fan of their Hard Fork podcast. Seems smart to partner with NPR on this too.

Editing the auto-generated transcript on a YouTube video. Actually surprised at the fairly poor quality of initial transcript. Simple things like “blue sky” instead of “Bluesky”, or “crossosting” instead of “cross-posting” that usually an LLM would get right, I think.

Great blog post from John Gruber on the Apple announcements. On the Siri recap feature, he actually has the opposite perspective that I had:

I think it’s better for Apple to lead with privacy-minded versions of ambient transcripts and AI-generated conversation summaries than to follow after other products have hit the market with all-day recordings and whole-life transcripts.

I don’t think Apple needs to push the state of the art here. But I’m only 50% sure. John has a good point too.

FeedLand and WordPress have a new hookup. With Scott Hanson's new River Embed for FeedLand plugin you can use feedland.com or feedland.org, or host your own FeedLand, to create a timeline, and when you're ready show the river to readers of your WordPress site, using the new plugin. For a news orgs like CNN and TechCrunch, both use WordPress, they could have a stream of news from related pubs. For a product site, or a political leader site, news from pubs that cover the area. It's a way of bringing the feed world into the world of news. Here's a thread where you can ask questions.

My 1925 Tudor on half an acre in Elkins Park, PA is up for sale. Here's why I loved living in it

Today’s #WASSUP tip: Turn on DNS over HTTPS (DoH) in your Firefox Preferences. Advanced Settings. Custom: Always use secure DNS with control over your provider and fallback behavior. [x] Always warn me if secure DNS isn’t available.There are both security and privacy reasons ...

Microsoft’s Humanist AI document is long, I’m still reading it, but so far I like it. It’s a rejection of the idea that AI could one day be a peer of humanity:

At Microsoft AI, we begin with a simple premise: people matter more than AI. Technology’s purpose is to advance human civilization and to accelerate human flourishing.

It complements my recent blog post on AGI.

We’re rolling out a series of improvements for podcasts in Micro.blog. The first was last month with a better web playback UI. Now there’s also a Listen Later feature that builds on bookmarking. Coming soon: a new version of Wavelength with audio narration for posts and more.

Muse is in the 2nd spot in the App Store now, behind the perpetually 1st place ChatGPT. I’m not planning to use Muse, but it’s fascinating if it resonates with Meta’s user base after the initial interest. It’s basically ChatGPT Work but simplified, slightly less capable, and maybe less confusing.

Even a stopped watch is right twice a day.

Related: this week Don Trump said he’d like a united Ireland, and that all this talk of humanity-ending AI is bollocks.

I’ve been quietly improving the saved links feature in Micro.blog, available to Premium subscribers. Nice way to find what you’ve linked to on your blog. This screenshot of the Mac app shows the new web page thumbnail previews for quick scanning.

This is Ian McEwan’s second foray into science fiction after his alternative history novel, Machines Like Me. I enjoyed that book but it was far too eager to show off its worldbuilding—at one point a character practically looks at the camera like Tim in The Office. There’s ...

Not totally sure when to update to macOS 27. I just submitted an app update to Apple with Xcode 26. Feels safest to stick on that until the iPhone Duo simulator is out.

Just got to the place where I'm thinking of what apps I want to be scriptable with Frontier. First I thought of FeedLand of course, and WordPress. NetNewsWire and micro.blog, because they're products from key contributors in the Frontier community with important products tod...

Screen shot of my current system.verbs.apps table. You can tell from reading it that it's been a long time since I've thought much about scriptable apps.

BTW, the rootupdates process is working now, you can follow changes via an RSS 2.0 feed, of course. In this version, the feed is the way updates are transmitted. The enclosure on each item is a fat page. And because it's a feed, I can follow it in FeedLand, and the blogroll on scripting.com picks it up too. Screen shot.

Today’s Dithering podcast is fun. Ben Thompson leaning in to the “liberty or death” take from his Monday post. For me, AI pacing is good, but also he and John Gruber have a good point that we don’t need to accept the narrative of possible human extinction.

Another interesting acquisition by OpenAI of former Apple folks:

Glass Imaging was founded by Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop, a pair of former Apple engineers who previously led the team that developed Apple’s Portrait Mode. This background directly informs the work they now do at Glass Imaging, where they use AI to overcome the physical size constraints of smartphone cameras.

OpenAI clearing thinking beyond the first device they will reveal this year.