FeedCity

Catching up on the news of Corpus Christi’s failed desalination plant project in this lengthy story on KUT. Each time I visit, I have more doubts about the city’s future. Investing in new infrastructure seems very much needed.

Dave Winer blogs a lot about Chrome deprecating regular HTTP without the HTTPS. Equally annoying is how fragile HTTPS is on older computers. We dusted off an ancient MacBook the other day, unused in a box for years, and it complained visiting modern websites because of an old root certificate.

A year ago Meta scrapped Llama and their AI work and started rebuilding, now they’ve announced Muse Wonder, competitive with frontier models. It’s annoying how effective Mark Zuckerberg can be sometimes.

There’s a new trailer out for Disney’s Hexed, showing the mom and other characters, and I think it’s better than the first trailer. Looks fun.

I’ve been writing off and on about X this year because I think many folks who read my blog haven’t noticed what is going on over there. If we care about the open web, we need to frequently reassess how silos are used by regular people. John Gruber blogged over the weekend in...

I like the web for people, sites that live and grow, like people. 100 years from now you should feel the people who lived there.

Another preview of Blog Audit, this time with my own blog. It’s a sad commentary on link rot. 🙁

I'm still on my sabatical from working with Claude re Frontier, but have now started working with Claude on FeedLand, and another project, not yet named, experimental, might never see the light of day. Yesterday I worked on FeedLand and have a fix for the problem that showed up in signing on to feedland.com. It's been sitting there for quite a while. I have some mostly small fixes in mind for FeedLand, that will allow it to hook into other apps more easily, esp via WebSockets, the mostly unexplored developer superpower. The difference is I'm going slowly and carefully. Everything in my system now is new. New computer, screen, and my main writing tool for code and docs -- Frontier. And I know the heavy lifting can be done by Claude. That is Claude's superpower.

In Manhattan, I lived on 57th St and Eighth Ave. Best location. The Columbus Circle subway station was under the building. Whole Foods one block away. Three Starbucks one block or less from the house (one was on 58th on the same block). Central Park has a six mile bike-only ...

(link in bio!)

Back at the Vehicle Assembly Building …twenty years after I got to go inside it:

https://adactio.com/journal/1208

Got my little OpenClaw server set up at home after a few false starts. Debian wouldn’t recognize the main disk. Went with Ubuntu instead and it’s fine. I don’t need the desktop UI, but it really has come a long way.

Watched: The Big Bang Theory S12E24. We binge-watched all 12 seasons in a few months. Great show. I’m not even usually much of a sitcom person, but this was fun and the cast really clicked. 📺

I have thought about winter through all the seasons this year. The season has become something of a frame of reference – of times when days are shorter and the air is colder, and of times where the brilliant blue skies come alive in the stillness of the season. I spend less ...

Automattic has created a Stewart Brand website to honor one of the most creative and respected people of my generation of the web. Chronicling his work is time well spent. "I'm envious," I wrote in response. "The tech industry is gradually disconnecting the early web, pre-htt...

The twenty-second episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out:

In Episode 22, I chat with Tracy, the author of tracydurnell.com about, how websites fit into writing, writing series of posts, websites as part of conversations, 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.

The episode was released on Tuesday, October 11th. I usually publish the blog post announcement on the day, but I forgot this week.

I think I missed this essay by Mustafa Suleyman when it was published last month, about Anthropic developing Claude with its own conscious:

If this is how AI is developed, it will have a disastrous impact on the well-being of humanity. We will have created a synthetic species with unprecedented intelligence and capability, and trained to expect that it may be conscious and deserving of independent agency. It is hard to imagine how we could control it.

It’s similar to other things he has said. Very compelling.

Mark Gurman has more details on Apple’s new home devices, including the name HomeView:

Unlike the iPhone, the HomeView isn’t designed for a wide variety of apps. The device will support a limited selection of Apple applications, with no App Store for downloading additional software, I’m told.

This highlights a problem I’ve been pointing out for years, that Siri is fragmented and likely won’t work consistently across devices. So if I support App Intents in my iPhone app, people can’t use that from HomeView. Contrast with making a ChatGPT plugin that works everywhere.

Basic lesson for people who use Claude Code -- it's your time that's valuable, not the bot's. If you find you're lost in the weeds supporting Claude for whatever reason, find a good stopping point for yourself, and pick up another project, that doesn't use AI to do your code-writing. If you have a question ask ChatGPT browser version, but only for the kind of stuff you'd ask it in 2025. You're not co-developing. You're doing it yourself. It's very important to be clear about your coding, not Claude's output. Here's the key point -- it's your time that's limited, that has all the value. You can get Claude to develop something, but if you don't have time to use it, to nurture it, nothing will come of the work.