FeedCity

August is archived. Let's start September.

Bluesky has added 1 million users in the past few days, largely from the Twitter X in Brazil fallout. Congrats to the team. Really impressive to keep servers humming along.

Automatically cross-post your newsletter to Bluesky directly from Buttondown.

People love and forgive humans, not corporations. Expose your humanity to earn loyal, happy customers, even when you mess up.

Jesse Dufton was born with a condition in which the light-sensing cells of his retina gradually deteriorated. This did not stop him from climbing with his family – bouldering by age 2, securing his own ropes by 5. 

When Dufton went to public school and then university, he downplayed his vision problems as he became a better climber. Then he met Molly Thompson, who took note of his long hair that made him look like a mature student. 

The two grew closer and often climbed together. But even as the couple was falling in love, Dufton was losing all of his sight. Dufton and Thompson had to invent new ways of communicating to continue their love of climbing.  

This story was written and read by Kevin Sieff. Audio production and original music composition by Bishop Sand.

Ollie inspecting a new package, the SolarSaga 100 Prime. This is going to go on my car.

Just posted a new episode of Core Int: Reinventing the 90s. We use two new software releases (the Overcast rewrite and my own new Micro.blog text editor) to talk about how customers react to software changes and bugs. Also, is SwiftUI now the best way to start Mac apps? Spoiler: not sure.

Why does JD Vance have so many opinions about women?

It's worth reflecting that the press took its best shot at Kamala Harris, and it was a big puff of smoke, she just cruised right through it.

Ghost in their weekly update, joking about likes:

Descartes famously said “I think, therefore I am” — but it wasn’t until several years later when we started getting likes on Instagram that we collectively came to the realization that the meaning of life, in fact, revolves around a consistent stream of dopamine hits from the internet.

Micro.blog doesn’t have likes and for better or worse, I’m standing by that decision.

Ramping up the search for our next home. For old neighborhoods, love doing a little background research on who developed the neighborhood. Doesn’t actually matter, but it’s fun to discover where it came from… Sometimes land originally granted by the Republic of Texas to veterans and settlers.

Thread: Blogs and the social web will merge.

A feature I've wanted to add to the textcasting server app is a plug-in architecture so you can add a new platform driver without having to reconfigure or even reboot the server. There's a new folder at plugins/platforms. Each subfolder contains a driver for one platform. I...

Three of our favorite segments from the week, in case you missed them.

VP Harris's Policy on Israel and Gaza (First) | The Weaponization of Period Product Accessibility (Starts at 38:56) | 100 Years of 100 Things: The West Indian Diaspora in New York City (Starts at 1:09:36)

If you don't subscribe to the Brian Lehrer Show on iTunes, you can do that here.

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I love a good birthday blog post, and Stephen Wolfram has delivered the most epic for his 65th birthday. I’m so honored that WordPress is one of the tools in his toolkit.

This story and art from Christine Mi for The Washington Post makes me want to book a train trip again. I’ve done Austin to Los Angeles, Austin to Chicago… So much more to see.

Still a few months away, but the Wind and Truth cover reveal makes the book feel like it’s even closer. Michael Whelan has had an incredible career. Love this “semi-retired” bit about the artist:

Fifteen years ago, Whelan was semi-retired and considering a return to science fiction when he received the manuscript for The Way of Kings.

“Post Reports” co-host Elahe Izadi and senior political reporter Aaron Blake talk with White House reporter Yasmeen Abutaleb about Harris and Walz’s interview on CNN, new polling that shows continued Democratic enthusiasm, and an altercation between the Trump campaign and an employee at Arlington National Cemetery. 

Today’s show was produced by Laura Benshoff. It was edited by Lucy Perkins and Ariel Plotnick. It was mixed by Sean Carter. 

Subscribe to Aaron’s newsletter, The Campaign Moment, here. 

Subscribe to The Washington Post here.

Feature I really need: A way to search all of my conversations with ChatGPT. It's the one feature I'm most missing, and the most surprising. I'm sure there's a huge amount of utility locked up in that.

What if Trump had been killed in the assassination attempt. What would have happened next? Biden was still the Democratic candidate.