FeedCity

I subscribed to Wired because of their famous coverage of the Musk Coup, so I also added its feed to my blogroll so I could see what I bought, and was actually not surprised that they've been hit by the same disease all online publishing has, the need to bait the clicks, and of course not very much of it is hard-hitting.

I'm still fixing bugs in the new Bluesky feature I wrote about yesterday. If the URL of an image has search args, I wasn't getting the type correct and Bluesky rejected it. I used a post about Aaron Swartz's statue unveiled in San Francisco yesterday to test the fix. I knew Aaron of course, he was part of the group developing RSS in the early 00s. He went on to do other things, as did I, and I met up with him again in NYC in the early teens, and then a few months or a year or two (I don't have the exact date of the meetup) he commited suicide. It was a real shock. Now, many years later -- a statue. And the random snarky slogan my test script picked out was really appropriate to the event. It was a tragedy, because an older more confident Aaron would have made a big contribution. I often think about that.

Looks like more of an Eddy scene than a Tim scene, but everyone’s having fun. There’s a reason this is the 11th Super Bowl held in New Orleans. Should be a good football game, too. The Chiefs and Eagles are both very good teams (and both very well-run franchises). There’s a...

Zara Stone, reporting for The Standard: “There’s a renaissance happening now in Aaron Swartz-land,” said Lisa Rein, the co-founder of Creative Commons, a nonprofit devoted to expanding public access to information. She founded Aaron Swartz Day in 2013, an annual hackatho...

TikTok, on X: We’re enhancing ways for our community to continue using TikTok by making Android Package Kits available at http://TikTok.com/download so that our U.S. Android users can download our app and create, discover, and connect on TikTok. Tens of millions of use...

Jason Snell, in a column for Macworld back in November (same column at Six Colors, for members): This is an important moment. Apple has built two separate models for running software on our devices. In one, there’s a gradient of trustworthiness that strongly encourages u...

My feed readers on Bluesky now use the metadata in the pages we link to to show a title, picture and description for each post that offers the metadata.

Like this page, the one you're reading right now at this moment.

And here's a screen shot of what it looks like over in Bluesky.

Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica on new details from an authors group lawsuit alleging Meta trained its AI models on a trove of pirated books: Last month, Meta admitted to torrenting a controversial large dataset known as LibGen, which includes tens of million...

I still haven't decided what to do about my Tesla Model Y, which still is a wonderful car, and I still love driving it after 2.5 years, which is amazing. But the other day it updated, and gave me a pause, if they let Musk hack their computers the way he's hacking ours, should I trust what it installs on the vehicle I drive every day that theoretically has the ability to take control of my car and drive it off the road? I wonder if the people at Tesla would like to reassure people who drive their cars that the updates are safe from hacking by one of his associates? How is security on the Tesla network?

It's our social web. “We started off with a network of writers, and ended up with business models of oligarchs. It's time to start building webs like we mean it and damn all the wannabe-billionaires.”

I had three questions this morning for Elie Mystal.

When we get back control of the government, ie they're following the Constitution, the Democratic leader in the Senate should be as ruthless as this bastard. Chuck Schumer is a nice guy and that sucks.

I have to say, a judge ruling that Musk has to stop, and delete all the info he has stolen, has made me feel much better. I don't know why, but I'm actually laughing out loud. The tight knot in my stomach has relaxed.

While there are several areas where Apple maintained consistent excellence in 2024, I can’t think of a single area where Apple levelled up. Not one. That feels like a problem.

I'm republishing this for a friend who doesn't have a reliable place to publish this online.It's a letter she wrote and sent to a number of newspapers. Her family was a victim of the recent Franklin wildfire, and unlike other recent fires, the Franklin fire wasn't included...

Behind the scenes in the US government I imagine it's like a Vonnegut novel, or an episode of Pinky and the Brain.

I wish Bluesky had just used the Twitter API. That's how I would've done it. Continuity matters a lot. And think of all time wasted at re-doing something we had working a long time ago.

Joe Rossignol, reporting for MacRumors: Last year, we reported that Apple sued its former software engineer Andrew Aude for providing journalists with confidential information about the company’s future plans, including details about the Journal app, Vision Pro headset, ...

I've cracked the code for adding OpenGraph data to Bluesky posts. The key was I learned how to do the equivalent of a View Source on a Bluesky post so I could see how others did it. I tried Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, none of them even understood the question of how to get Bluesky to add the data. I was amazed to learn that each developer has to do it for themselves, that this isn't something they built into their server. Anyway, I'm halfway there.

Another thing to watch while you still can, The Lives of Others, about life in East Germany during the Cold War.