FeedCity

I went to a special high school in NYC, it was a public school you had to take a test to get into. One day our social studies teacher got some gumption, maybe he had a few drinks, or smoked some weed, but he had courage most teachers never had. He told us who we were.

Most of us were going to MIT or some other university that sent workers into the establishment to become cogs in the big wheel that kept the world running. He was right. Although my own path wasn’t that direct, I did get there. I rose to the top in Silicon Valley, then a big famous university. Everything Mr Goldman told us that day was true. But what he probably also saw was that he too was a cog, a tool, a piece of the machine.

I asked ChatGPT to draw a realistic picture of that day in that 1970 classroom.

I've been working on an all-new feature for WordLand. Expect something in the next few days, Murphy-willing.

To really nail it down, supporting inbound and outbound RSS would justify them saying they are part of the "social web." Today's Bluesky has no business claiming to be part of the web, the system they're hyping is centralized and most definitely not of the web.

BTW, it's totally possible for me to say and know that Bluesky is leading us off the same cliff as Twitter did, and at the same time applaud their deepening their support for RSS in their product. I don't think they, or anyone else, realizes how much more this move gives us a...

If we had a better communication system we would not be so vulnerable. We might even be able to defend ourselves. So it's doubly ridiculous that journalism is leading us to Bluesky, when it is just more of the same with a better story, that is not true. They're asking us to ...

Reuters:

China’s Anker, one of Amazon’s largest sellers offering products from power banks to phone cases, has raised prices on a fifth of its products on the U.S. platform since Thursday, in a sign that tariffs on Chinese goods are being passed on to U.S. shoppers.

Some 127 Anker products have seen an average increase of 18% since Thursday last week, with the majority of those occurring after Monday, April 7, when U.S. President Donald Trump added an extra 50% import duty on Chinese goods, according to data from e-commerce services provider SmartScout.

Tariffs driving up consumer prices is as sure a thing as rain making you wet. But it’s worth pointing to the evidence as it comes in, because unlike rain’s wetness, the “emperor sure does have clothes” MAGA contingent is trying to argue that tariffs don’t have this obvious effect.

The difference between the 2008 crash and now is that we had a functioning government in 2008.

Did you know there's a chain of beating hearts going from your heart all the way back to the first animal on earth with a heart.

Financial Times reporter John Burn-Murdoch has a summary on Bluesky of his co-bylined report for the Financial Times: Visitors from western Europe who stayed at least one night in the US fell by 17 per cent in March from a year ago, according to the International Trade A...

I added another issue, about the channel-level title. It should be the user's name, not the address of the feed.

Bluesky has added enclosure support to their outbound RSS feeds. The great thing about it is that people can use Bluesky to create flows that go to lots of other places and now we can do that with images and videos. That a huge door that's opening. And I like it also because they're leading. This is a feature that Mastodon's outbound feeds don't have, yet.

Why we all have to be working together on creating a modern easily distributed communication system that's truly decentralized. The key is to only implement features that have super-simple implementations, so it will be easy to product new versions quickly in all environments. Which means starting with formats and protocols that are already widely supported.

Reuters: “The U.S. side’s imposition of excessively high tariffs on China seriously violates international economic and trade rules, runs counter to basic economic principles and common sense, and is simply an act of unilateral bullying and coercion,” China’s Finance Min...

This morning ChatGPT told me it knows more about me, and will learn better. Promises promises. I would like to begin with teaching it my coding conventions. Will make it much easier for me to work with it. Their idea of how JavaScript works is disorganized bordering on chaos....

When young people come out of university in a technical subject, they think they know more than people already doing the jobs. They quickly learn that in school they were doing "student projects" which are not the real thing. Ooops, maybe we didn't know as much as we thought.

Blockbuster report by Wayne Ma for The Information (paywalled and pricey, alas): But an equally important factor was the conflicting personalities within Apple, according to multiple people who worked in the AI and software engineering groups. More than half a dozen form...

Two issues in Bluesky outbound RSS feeds.

If I were a sassy Democratic Party leader I'd cop to being woke. "Why yes I am woke. Aren't you?" The Repubs have never explained why it's bad to be awake. Dems have to learn how to engage to win. Another one -- "read, fire, aim" is how Trump leads, just look at the tariffs, and it's been a huge disaster for hard-working American wage-earners of all generations. The "all generations" part opens an interesting conversation, how it isn't just old people or young people, it's also people who are working today whose earnings are being stolen, and those of us who have been working for 50 years who were paying into a fund so we could benefit when we retire. That money is coming out of your paycheck with no intention of ever paying it back. That's the Republican-run America. Not so great.

As long as the Chinese company BYD is making such interesting and inexpensive EVs, and Tesla is a shithole company, if I were in charge, I'd give BYD a negative tariff to encourage them to flood the US market with nice cheap EVs so we can get rid of the shitstain Tesla once and for all. I'd give them an even better price if they agreed to recycle Teslas as trade-ins so we don't have to feel ecologically irresponsible. And yes, dear MAGAs, I am woke. You all can go back to sleep now. Zzzz.

Ben Thompson: The problem with these tariffs is that their scale and indiscriminate nature will have the effect of destroying demand and destroying the capability to develop alternative supply. I suppose if the only goal is to hurt China then shooting yourself in the foo...