FeedCity

I abhor body shaming even if it's of someone whose ideas I find unacceptable.

Disclaimer: I own zero stock in AI companies, except for mutual funds and some Apple stock I've held for decades for sentimental and tax reasons.

Galicia, July 2025.

From the video Mountains, fog and rain: a beautiful day of photography.

Tea remains a chart-topping app in the App Store, but isn’t listed at all in Play Store top lists.

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

YouTube on Tuesday announced it’s beginning to roll out age-estimation technology in the U.S. to identify teen users in order to provide a more age-appropriate experience. The company says it will use a variety of signals to determine the users’ possible age, regardless of what the user entered as their birthday when they signed up for an account.

Well-intentioned though I think this is, it still feels more than a little dystopian.

This is the rendering of my linkblog in WordPress. This is a major milestone. We have in WordPress, what you see on the Links page on scripting.com, implemented entirely in WordPress.

BTW, I say ChatGPT instead of "AI" because I'm not comfortable characterizing it as intelligence. Deeper you get into it you learn that these beings whatever they are have serious character flaws that are counter-intelligent.

Another benefit of ChatGPT. It forces you to think and express yourself in tight logical language. Garbage in garbage out. All of a sudden rigorous thinking is required to get a result. This is very different from social media, where garbage is rewarded.

Last night's podcast about how AI is a revolution. I had just listened to a New Yorker podcast interview with the EIC at Wired, saying the hype was bullshit. You hear this from journalists a lot. The only way you can conclude this, imho, is if you aren't actually paying attention. It's as if you were a journalist in the 60s and said the story of the Beatles is that their hair must be fake, no one actually wears their hair like that. OK, whatever you say, but have you listened to the freaking music??

Reuters:

Sony released the first game in the Horizon series, Horizon: Zero Dawn, on its PlayStation 4 in 2017. The games follow a red-headed woman named Aloy as she navigates a post-apocalyptic world populated by human tribes and robotic animals.

Sony said in its complaint that it declined an offer from Tencent to collaborate on a new Horizon game last year. Tencent later announced Light of Motiram, which Sony said features identical gameplay, story themes and artistic elements to Horizon as well as many other similarities.

Sony said that video game journalists have characterized Light of Motiram as a “knock-off” of Horizon, including one who called the game Horizon Zero Originality.

Tencent is the Chinese software giant behind, amongst many other things, WeChat, China’s “everything app”.

Kevin Kelly writes: "When a customer of yours complains, always apologize first and ask, 'What can we do to resolve this?' even if it is not your fault. Acting as if the customer is right is a small tax to pay to grow a business." Amen. Google sent an email saying my Google ...

Back in March I linked to and recommended Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, a cogent collection of 20 short essays. I was never a big e-book reader, both because I love printed books so much and because I welcome any respite from reading on screens of any sort. But if e-books are your thing, note that Apple Books currently has it for just $2. Amazon’s Kindle edition is also $2 — and the paperback edition, which is the lovely little thing I own, is an oddly but low-priced $7.31.

...

These prices — which I presume are a back-to-school season promotion — are even lower than those during the weeklong “Prime Day” earlier this month, and you don’t need to be a Prime subscriber to get them:

• The pretty-good base configuration (16 GB RAM, 256 GB storage) is just $800.
• The configuration with 16 GB RAM and 512 GB is $1,000, the normal price for the base model.
• You can splurge and get 24 GB RAM with 512 GB storage for just $1,200.

These are make-me-rich affiliate links, as is this link for AirPods Pro 2 for just $200, $50 off.

Sean Lyndersay, general manager of Edge at Microsoft: For decades, the way we’ve used browsers has remained linear: open a tab (or 20), search for something, read a page, repeat. It’s a model that’s worked well, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed. Until now. As AI begin...

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch: Google on Monday announced an update to its Chrome web browser that will introduce AI-generated store reviews to U.S. shoppers with the aim of helping to determine the best places to make a purchase. The feature, which will be availab...

Last year: "There could be a developer community writing apps that all join up in the middle in WordPress's database. Pretty powerful idea!"

But what about Substack and Ghost? A lot of people do their writing there too? What about those people. Here's the cool part for all people who write on the web. The API we use in WordLand to hook up to WordPress is open and documented. They don't break their APIs in WordPressLand. At least so far. You could say that API is a standard. And I bet it would be a lot easier for Ghost, for example, to support a limited subset of that API than it has been to get ActivityPub support implemented. Because the WordPress API is what I would call "really simple," and that's the thing I value most about a good API.

Now here's the real reason I need WordLand and if you write for WordPress sites, I think you'll want it too. It's because WordPress is like the Microsoft Word of web writing. If you ask someone how they do their site, in 2025, it's probably going to be WordPress. So if someone invites you to write a guest post on their blog, chances are pretty good I can write it in WordLand, and it'll be archived in my collection of writing, and easy for me to find, because that's what WordLand does for writers. So I was able to create the new post on the WordCamp site in less than a minute, and it was completely painless. And that's the point. Here's the screen shot: