FeedCity

Last year I spoke at Open UK about my IndieWeb journey. I've posted the slides on Notist but I finally sat down to pick up the transcription and tidy it up on my blog. The base of this post was a transcript of my presentation but some editing is now present for added clar...

This is a picture of my dear departed Uncle Vava taken in the early 1970s in my parents' house in Flushing. It just showed up in my On This Day list on Facebook, thought it belongs on the blog too. .

I recorded a good podcast yesterday about how I develop new stuff like podcasting, and how it only works if there isn't a huge dominant platform vendor to FUD the project. That's why RSS worked, sort of -- we did get FUDded by the RDF folk, who had a few famous people on thei...

I wanted to put together a demo of a very simple but interesting Node.js app, so I hooked up with replit, and was surprised to find out that it's now an AI bot. But when I asked it to make a sandbox for this app, which is in a repo on GitHub, rather than take the direct route, and run the demo.js app (which is what I asked it to do), it concocted a pointless user interface, that hid all the interesting bits. This was a demo for programmers for crying out loud. I want to show them the machinery in motion. I'm going to try again today.

Perspective: I view WordPress as if it's my own product.

I added two new subscription lists to lists.opml.org and it's better organized and more concise.

A Brian Lehrer segment on specialized high schools in NYC. I went to one of them, signed up for the test mostly to get out of school for a day, and got in. Back in those days (the early 70s) no one studied for the test as far as I know. It has become very competitive and there's an issue of the racial makeup of the student body. As always Lehrer does a great podcast.

Not much time to blog today, might have a podcast later. In the meantime I did a search of Daytona for object database, a term that goes back to the early days and makes for an interesting browse, at least for me.

A few days ago, when decoding Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s memo to his company about layoffs and artificial intelligence, I said that “this is not just about Microsoft, but pretty much every software company will be hit hard by this wave of transformation.” The point I was making in the piece was that AI is coming, and the first domino to fall will be software. When watching …

Trento, Italy, November 2019.

OpenAI: We’re releasing gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b — two state-of-the-art open-weight language models that deliver strong real-world performance at low cost. Available under the flexible Apache 2.0 license, these models outperform similarly sized open models on reasoni...

Anthropic: GitHub notes that Claude Opus 4.1 improves across most capabilities relative to Opus 4, with particularly notable performance gains in multi-file code refactoring. Rakuten Group finds that Opus 4.1 excels at pinpointing exact corrections within large codebases...

Ashley Belanger, writing for Ars Technica: Porn sites may have blown up Meta’s key defense in a copyright fight with book authors who earlier this year said that Meta torrented “at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries” to train its AI models. [.....

Tom Warren:

In a new Pixel 10 ad, Google dunks on Apple’s failed promise of Siri AI improvements, with a narrator that suggests you could “just change your phone” if you bought “a new phone because of a feature that’s coming soon, but it’s been coming soon for a full year.”

The 30-second spot appeared on YouTube and X today, teasing the launch of Google’s new Pixel 10 devices on August 20th.

The whole Siri/Apple Intelligence thing has been an enormous self-inflicted embarrassment, but when it comes to Pixel phones, all I can think of is that Mad Men “I don’t think about you at all” GIF.

Ghost: When we announced Ghost 5.0 a few years ago, we were proud to share that Ghost’s revenue had hit $4M — while publisher earnings had surpassed $10M. It felt great to have such a clear sign that our goal to create a sustainable business model for independent creator...

MacRumors, on June 20: Apple executives have been discussing the possibility of the company making a bid to acquire Perplexity AI, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Perplexity is one of the leading AI startups that has proven popular as an AI-infused web search engin...

The Cloudflare blog: We are observing stealth crawling behavior from Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine. Although Perplexity initially crawls from their declared user agent, when they are presented with a network block, they appear to obscure their crawling identity...

A podcast I recorded this morning, prime time, while getting things done, and having ChatGPT getting in the way. It needs to become more invisible, there's no suspension of disbelief when you're working with it. I think we can do much better at finding a robot that can really augment human intelligence. This is awful stuff. We have to work on these dynamics.

Coming March 17, 2026:

In time for Apple’s 50th anniversary, “CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent David Pogue tells the iconic company’s entire life story: how it was born, nearly died, was born again under Steve Jobs, and became, under CEO Tim Cook, one of the most valuable companies in the world.

The 600-page book features 360 full-color photos, new facts that correct the record and illuminate Apple’s subversive culture, and 150 fresh interviews with the legendary figures who shaped Apple into what it is today.

Alexandra Steigrad, reporting for The New York Post:

The new publication will be headquartered in Los Angeles and feature a robust staff of editors, reporters and photographers dedicated to covering news, entertainment, politics, culture, sports and business — all with a distinctly California perspective.

The California Post will be supported by the team in New York providing national and international news. The content will appear in a daily print edition and will have its own dedicated homepage for Californians with stories being published across multiple other platforms, including video, audio and social media.

Who says print is dead?