FeedCity

Are the results of this disastrous for Apple’s App Store business? I don’t think so at all. Gonzales Rogers is demanding that Apple ... do what Phil Schiller recommended they do all along. But are the results of this disastrous for Apple’s reputation and credibility? It sure seems like it.

We could follow the clues in the TrumpLand with more gusto. They know their numbers are bad and likely to get worse, they did the things that made it the numbers bad. And at the same time they don't seem to care? If this were a mystery show, like Dallas or Succession or Severance, Lost perhaps, what would you think?

Craig Mod returns to the show to discuss his splendid new book, Things Become Other Things. Other topics include creating with AI tools (including programming), social media permanence vs. ephemerality, and more.

Sponsored by:

• Dekáf Coffee Roasters: You won’t believe it’s decaf. That’s the point. 30% off with code: DF.
• Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.
• Notion: Try the powerful, easy-to-use Notion AI today.
• WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS — free up to 1 million monthly active users.

Mark Wilson, writing for Fast Company:

Pope Francis’s tomb is simple by design. Francis — a modest man who opted to live in humble quarters alongside his peers rather than in the Vatican’s official housing for the leader of the church — requested nothing more than his name and a cross to adorn regional marble (“the stone of Liguria, the land of his grandparents”). Vatican News goes as far as to position this stone, not the most premium, as “the people’s stone.”

It really is quietly beautiful. But atop that marble is a tomb inscribed with the name “Franciscus.” Or what — due to terrible spacing between letters, known as kerning — reads something more like “F R A NCIS VS.”

Fast Company’s headline reads “The Kerning on the Pope’s Tomb Is a Travesty”, but travesty is not the right word. The right word is sin.

Here's a prototype of what a story page might look like on our baseline site for WordLand. I did this off on the side as input for the WordPress theme. I find it easier to work on style in a standalone page without much tech that can get in the way of fast iteration.

Three years ago, when I abandoned FogBugz after having used it for nearly 20 years, I landed on Help Scout, a fantastic support system offered by a company that seems to have a positive spirit and, cherry on top, is based locally to me in Boston. There are few companies I’ve been as happy to […]

We're working on the "baseline" theme for WordLand, the default -- the one that shows the user's writing in a WordPress context. I did a survey of news sites and blogs to see how they show their titles: Gothamist puts the name in the upper left corner, leaving room for som...

Jeff Horwitz, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link): To boost the popularity of these souped-up chatbots, Meta has cut deals for up to seven-figures with celebrities like actresses Kristen Bell and Judi Dench and wrestler-turned-actor John Cena for the right...

Fact-checking is a ChatGPT use-case for reporters. Feed a draft of your story into ChatGPT and ask if it spots any factual errors. There may be some false positives, so you can ask another AI chatbot, or investigate yourself elsewhere. And it may miss some. But it couldn't hurt and it might save your ass.

New podcast: Building a billionaire's network.

RSS defines a network of services and readers. Each one can go down, but the whole network stays up. That's all that Bluesky has promised, and that's why a layer of RSS on top of Bluesky would deliver a huge portion of the stability it would need to survive a disaster. It could be done in a matter of weeks, if they decided to do it. I would help.

Bluesky was down this morning. Usually I don't criticize a service when it's down, because I can relate. We like to help each other when there are outages. But Bluesky is special, because they claim to be decentralized. If it were, it wouldn't go down unless the internet its...

New howto: Editing subscription lists. I'm doing a project with a friend who hasn't used FeedLand. I want him to maintain a subscription list which will then be the source for a Bluesky account. Any time the OPML changes, of course, the channel adjusts, so they have full power to add and remove feeds. "Just enough FeedLand."

Turn articles into podcasts and listen on the go. Email any article, and our AI transforms it into human-like narration, delivered straight to your private podcast feed. Whether it’s a long read or a quick blog post, enjoy it hands-free on any podcast app. Perfect for commutes, workouts, or just unwinding.

Sign up for free and start listening today. New users get $2 in credits to try it out — no commitment.

Built by an indie developer passionate about great audio experiences. Try it at Listen Later.

It’s hard to come up with a buyer who could afford to pay a high price for Chrome and who would pass regulatory muster as its new owner. And if Chrome is not worth a high price, or simply isn’t sellable at one, then why is the DOJ trying to force Google to sell it? They might as well try to force Google to sell the two o’s from its name.

Om Malik: Some of us are old enough to remember that the reason Mark renamed the company is because the Facebook brand was becoming toxic, and associated with misinformation and global-scale crap. It was viewed as a tired, last-generation company. Meta allowed the compan...

Alex Heath, reporting for The Verge:

Meta has laid off an unspecified number of employees in its Reality Labs division, a company spokesperson confirmed. The cuts affected teams working in Oculus Studios, Meta’s in-house games division for Quest headsets, as well as some employees involved in the company’s hardware efforts, according to people familiar with the matter.

According to Bloomberg it was “more than 100”.

I’m so old I remember when Facebook renamed itself Meta because the “metaverse” was supposedly the future of the company and, so said Mark Zuckerberg, the future of computing itself. Now, when Zuck goes on Joe Rogan’s podcast and chats for three hours, the metaverse thing doesn’t come up once, not even once, even in passing.

It’s enough to make one suspect Zuck isn’t a straight shooter.

Paying for Kagi today feels a *lot* like paying for HBO back in the cable TV heyday.

Cory Doctorow coined a lovely word -- enshitified. In that spirit, I'd love to see a destodgified Harvard. See below.