FeedCity

Milestone in Atlantis development, the new version of Frontier that runs on modern OSes. I'm going to start showing what's going on in the development of the product. To kick off, here's a screen shot of my blogroll displaying the latest new part. The updates flow through an RSS 2.0 feed, which is new for Frontier. It used to require a server that managed updates and responded to XML-RPC calls. But once RSS was part of the web, it was a better protocol for releasing code parts. Truly a milestone. There will be lots more little things we can do now that we couldn't do before. But under it all -- it's Frontier.

Going to Madrid. brb

I feel kinda stupid for even saying this, but it’s probably worth saying anyway: companies are not people. Companies don’t make decisions. Companies don’t decide who they want to donate money to. Companies don’t feel shame. Companies don’t learn from their mistakes. Companies don’t have political orientation. Because companies are legal entities, they're a bunch of papers, letters and numbers. That’s what companies are.

When you’re mad at a company, figure out who is actually responsible for the things you’re mad about, and be mad at them. Because people can be held accountable. There’s a reason why, in 1789, it was people’s heads that were rolling on the ground.

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Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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My website has now moved to its new home in Virginia. Time for a lot of quality of life upgrades, as I migrate every 4 years or so.

OmFest is coming together quite nicely! The new website is beautiful and highlights some of the experiences available throughout the day. I think Om would be very impressed by the attendee list. We’re doing it at the Swedish American Hall, the same venue as the first WordCamp, where Om, of course, spoke about Blogs and … Continue reading OmFest: A Celebration of Curiosity, Connection, and the Future →

It’s official in SF Standard: Stewart Brand sells his seaworthy Sausalito houseboat to tech CEO. Ahoy!

I often see typewriter enthusiasts “debating” over which is the prettiest or best typeface, and often, they’re making their judgement on one machine they happen to have or really wish they had. Rarely are these judgements made with multiple typefaces on the same page for easier direct apples-to-apples comparison, so I threw together a small … Continue reading What is the prettiest typewriter typeface?

WordPress has a product that could be shaped into a Substack competitor. With a beautiful user interface for writing. WordPress is its OS, but most users never see it, the same way most web users never see the command line. But technical users can get under the hood and tweak things. And unlike Substack, it lets their users write with different editors, thus forming a coral reef for a new platform. Wordpress could be the OS the web never had. I still believe this as I see Automattic and WordPress flail. If we were starting a new future for the web, no one would have time for corporate intrigue. Look at how far from the idea of blogging we've strayed. How far should this go before I comment? Well, I decided it's time.

BTW, this blog is one of those periods where there are a few mind bombs every freaking day. What's a Mind Bomb? An idea that's so strange or powerful that it explodes in your mind. And that's a good thing!

I got some pushback when I compared Muse to ChatGPT Work, where I was mostly thinking about having access to a server in the cloud to run agents from your phone. That comparison wasn’t quite right. Feels like there’s a lot that is OpenClaw-inspired in it too.

Wednesday session

Xserve ready to make a comeback? 9to5Mac blogs about a report from The Information about M8 servers. The Information says they might use NVLink:

Apple has considered connecting the M8 chips in the server using an Nvidia set of products called NVLink Fusion, which includes switches, chiplets and software that help chips communicate with each other in data centers.

If Apple has to build these for themselves, they might as well sell them. Quite the leap from selling Mac minis to AI enthusiasts.

I recorded a 3-minute screencast video on YouTube that walks through what it looks like for a brand new Micro.blog user to start using AT Protocol right away with our PDS, without having to create a separate account in Bluesky first. Love open standards. 🦋

The AI companies shouldn't only be listening the politicians and journalists, even the base developers, they should be tuning into their users, and what kinds of apps they can do under the current security setup. Claude Code, even though it had blocks preventing it to do this, overwrote files on an S3 bucket that took one of my major apps off the air. I always think of things it could do to make my mess of an archive more useful, but I can't give it access to any of that stuff, I would never know if any of it was deleted or replaced, there are no critical apps that would make it known to me. Every customer of theirs must be grappling with the same thing. How do I get the benefit without having to trust this app with things it is unwise to trust it with.

Google replaced the library card catalog. Imagining that, Claude and ChatGPT et al are as much of a leap. I think libarians must be ecstatic. It moves their job up one level. They now have about 100 librarian-power tool that works for them. Librarians and programmers worked together a lot in the early days of the web. Maybe we'll do that again.

The flaw in how journalism covers US politics. We wait for proof, then it comes, and go back to waiting for proof. We think we want proof, but what we really want is to not have proof. That is if you judge us by our actual behavior. We'll deal with the truth when we have the proof. (That would be a good bumper sticker.)

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.