FeedCity

So far we've only created reading portals. What I want for myself and for you, is a writing portal. Think about it.

I didn't read the WSJ story about the deflation of expertise, quoting Vinod Khosla, Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who I know from my time in California. He says AI leads to a deflation of expertise. I agree with him, AI absolutely deflates the value of expertise. It ag...

An important follow-up to yesterday’s item about Russia demanding Apple remove VPN apps from the Russian App Store: you can use a VPN on iOS without an app. It just requires some futzing in Settings and a VPN provider that supports it. Presumably, this technique remains avai...

Chili Palmer, reporting for HighSpeedInternet:

Starlink announced on Oct. 2 it will offer one month of free internet in Hurricane Helene disaster areas. The free service will be available to new customers who order through the Starlink website and to customers who activate a kit they already have, whether it was donated or purchased at a retail store. Existing customers may also be eligible.

The announcement comes after more than 500 Starlink kits were distributed throughout the disaster area by private relief organizations.

It’s hard to overstate how differently Elon Musk would be perceived if he weren’t a whackjob on political and cultural issues.

Ryan Christoffel, writing for 9to5Mac: Hurricane Helene has caused massive damage and taken over 100 lives across several US states. Many thousands of people are without power and/or cell service. But in the wake of the storm, reports have surfaced about a key iOS 18 fea...

I didn't like the code ChatGPT was writing for me, so I tried it in Claude, and the code is much closer to my style. I may try that again. I've heard it's better at supporting code than other chatbots.

Cool Hunting:

We love getting into the nerdy details of design innovations and the iPhone 16‘s new Camera Control button presented a perfect opportunity to dig in. For this first podcast of our new Design Tangents series aptly named Nerdy Details we sit down with Johnnie Manzari from the Apple Human Interface team and Rich Dinh, Senior Director of Product Design, to talk about cameras and photography through the lens of the new control on “the world’s most popular camera.”

You don’t often get to hear Apple employees speak about their work. When you do, it’s often largely about trying to get the feel right.

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

iPhone users are being notified about an excessive heat weather event through Apple’s Weather app on iPhone. While the weather event is happening in the Santa Clara Valley region of California, the alert says that the occurrence is happening in an area nearby regardless of where you live.

Hall had a good theory — that the warnings were being to delivered to people who live nowhere near Santa Clara Valley because Apple includes Cupertino as a default location for the Weather app — but in an update acknowledges that the warning notification is being received by users who don’t have any saved locations near the heat wave. (I’ve gotten the notification on multiple devices, and don’t have Cupertino saved as a Weather location.)

What a weird bug.

The United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia: Haotian Sun, 34, and Pengfei Xue, 34, both Chinese nationals, were sentenced today for participating in a sophisticated scheme to defraud Apple Inc. out of millions of dollars’ worth of iPhones. U.S. Distr...

Counting down to 30.

IT WOULD BE AMAZING IF IN THE LAST WEEKS OF THE CAMPAIGN JOURNAILSTS DECIDED THEY CARE ABOUT OUR COUNTRY AND THE REST OF THE WORLD AND START REPORTING THE TRUTH ABOUT THIS ELECTION AND HOPE FOR THE BEST IF TRUMP IS ELECTED. OTHERWISE THE ONLY HONORABLE CHOICE IS TO QUIT.

Novaya Gazeta Europe: Apple removed nearly 60 additional virtual private network (VPN) apps from its Russia App Store between July and September, significantly more than the 25 acknowledged by the Russian authorities, according to a report published on Tuesday by the App...

Christian Selig: For those not aware, a few months ago after reaching out to me, YouTube contacted the App Store stating that Juno does not adhere to YouTube guidelines and modifies the website in a way they don’t approve of, and alludes to their trademarks and iconograp...

I have been looking for this picture of John Palfrey, and just found it via digging through the archive for September 2004.

It has been pointed out that this blog will be 30 years old on October 7, not October 10, as I had previously reported. The clock at the bottom of story pages is correct. It currently reads: 29 years, 11 months, 25 days, 19 hours, 1 minute, 34 seconds.

Trade Secrets Radio: What is podcasting? This is the exact moment, 9/24/2004, that podcasting got its name and its definition. It's pretty short. We knew what we were doing. We loved what RSS did for news. Now we were doing the same for radio. Not just talking about it, but finally -- doing it. It worked, pretty freaking well. There's a podcast episode to go with it, coming out shortly.

I have a lot of podcast catching up to do today.

• A Trade Secrets podcast from Sept 28, 2004.
• An Morning Coffee Notes episode from the same day, about Bloglines, an early feed reader, the commons and fair compensation for centralized commons.

The AP:

Technology reporter Taylor Lorenz said Tuesday that she is leaving The Washington Post, less than two months after the newspaper launched an internal review following her social media post about President Joe Biden.

Lorenz, a well-regarded expert on internet culture, wrote a book “Extremely Online” last year and said she is launching a newsletter, “User Mag,” on Substack.

Well-regarded by whom? Lorenz is a hack — a self-proclaimed social media expert done in by her own “private” Instagram post describing President Joe Biden as a “war criminal” that she subsequently lied about having posted. She didn’t “exit” the Post. She was obviously and rightfully fired.

This video from “MTT” warmed my heart. And that takes a lot. I learned Pascal on this keyboard. I absolutely loved this keyboard when I first encountered it. But, today, man, what a weird keyboard it is. I mean the arrow-key layout is one thing (up, down, left, right — arranged horizontally). But how about putting the backslash (\) key on the right of the space bar and the backtick (`) key on the left? I mean that’s just crazy. I recall absolutely loving the feel of this keyboard as a teenager but I’ve never bothered chasing one down in my adult life because I know today I could never bear the weird layout. But MTT didn’t just do the lazy thing (buy an ADB-USB adapter), he went the whole nine yards and designed and soldered his own custom parts to turn this 1986 gem into a modern day Bluetooth keyboard. Masterful.

Cross-posting is here now. I am not surprised Croissant is getting such a positive reception.

That is where the fediverse will be defined imho, in the intersection between the competing social web services.

You'll know it's working when they feel they have to match each others' features because with cross-posting their difference in character limits, titles, styling, links etc will be much more visible.

Activitypub is too much. Cross-posting is exactly right and here now.