FeedCity

There should be a connection between DC residents and Kiev residents. They could teach us how to do this. They have decades of experience.

Alexandra Alper, reporting for Reuters: Donald Trump’s Navy and Air Force are poised to cancel two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined to develop, work initially aimed at overhauling antiquated human resources systems....

The Information (paywalled, alas): In December, Perplexity discussed possibly buying the six-year-old The Browser Co. with that company’s leaders, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. Talks with the company, which operates an AI-powered web browser,...

It’s like an otherwise delightful cocktail with one distinctive unpleasant ingredient, which ingredient was added, deliberately, to imbue the libation with an aftertaste of spite.

...

Eric Migicovsky: First off, for those who didn’t catch the news from a few weeks ago — we’ve been able to recover the Pebble trademark! Our new watches will change from being called Core 2 Duo → Pebble 2 Duo, and Core Time 2 → Pebble Time 2. The big news today is that w...

If you're trying to read any of my code via GitHub, make sure to open source.opml in Drummer, there are a lot of notes that don't make it through to the .js and .css files. I don't think I've ever said that on the blog before. I write my code in an outliner, and take advanta...

The future very much includes WordPress. It'll be as central a service as Mastodon or Bluesky.

New app from Devin Davies, developer of the ADA-winning Crouton: Cassette is an app for iPhone and iPad that helps you enjoy your home videos like the good old days. With a retro interface Cassette auto plays through videos from your devices’ Photo Library. Mirror your d...

Haleluya Hadero and Christopher Rugaber, reporting for the AP back on January 26, six days into Trump 2.0:

Perplexity AI has presented a new proposal to TikTok’s parent company that would allow the U.S. government to own up to 50% of a new entity that merges Perplexity with TikTok’s U.S. business, according to a person familiar with the matter. The proposal, submitted last week, is a revision of a prior plan the artificial intelligence startup had presented to TikTok’s parent ByteDance on Jan. 18, a day before the law that bans TikTok went into effect.

They should have added a similar provision to their Chrome offer sheet today. Give 25% to the US Treasury and another 25% to Trump’s future presidential “library”.

You're going to think this is crazy, but maybe we should do what the hippie kids did in the 60s and 70s, giving flowers to the new cops in DC. Start off saying we don't blame you, we'll give you the benefit of the doubt, let's all be Americans and remember what that means.

Katherine Blunt, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a paywall-puncturing gift link; also on News+): Artificial-intelligence startup Perplexity on Tuesday offered to purchase Google’s Chrome browser for $34.5 billion as it works to challenge the tech gian...

Paul Boutin who I know from early Wired days offers some hope that it can be gotten to work, with a bit more guesswork, trial and error and head scratching. I probably will keep coming back to this until I break through. Or maybe hook up with another developer who can back into the websocket hose coming out of FeedLand. It's a natural thing to hook up to AI systems.

I had an hour to spare this morning so I decided for a third time to try to coax ChatGPT to play a role in a little drama I have in mind. I still want to use AI to power an RSS feed of news, customized to the interests of one person (me). My query is this: "Create a summary of the news, top 20 stories with an emphasis on these topics: how people are using AI, especially in education, blogging, US politics, science news, the NBA and MLB, with a slight emphasis on the Knicks and Mets. The results should be in JSON format, with each item including: A brief one sentence summary, publication date and a link to a source where the reader can get more info. My software will then create an RSS feed with this information.." The response was basically: "I'm sorry Dave." Groan. Here are the details.

Demetri Sevastopulo and Michael Acton, reporting for the Financial Times: Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the US government 15 per cent of the revenues from chip sales in China, as part of an unusual arrangement with the Trump administration to obtain export licences ...

Amrith Ramkumar and Robbie Whelan, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices have agreed to give the Trump administration a portion of the sales from their artificial-intelligence chips to China, unusual agreements that deepen t...

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CNBC:

President Donald Trump on Monday delayed high U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods from snapping back into place for another 90 days, a White House official told CNBC. [...]

Monday’s extension is the latest example of how Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs have shifted with little prior notice, a dynamic that has made U.S. trade policy unpredictable for many businesses.

TACO Tuesday, but on a Monday. What a country! America really is great again.

Bonus question for the CNBC copy desk: how much water is the word many carrying in that closing sentence?

The president of the United States, on his blog three days ago:

The CEO of INTEL is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately. There is no other solution to this problem. Thank you for your attention to this problem!

The president of the United States, on his blog today:

I met with Mr. Lip-Bu Tan, of Intel, along with Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, and Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent. The meeting was a very interesting one. His success and rise is an amazing story. Mr. Tan and my Cabinet members are going to spend time together, and bring suggestions to me during the next week. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Sane, steady, predictable leadership.

It’s reasonable — especially for paying customers — to expect at least some advance notice of older models going away. But it’s unreasonable to think that older models are going to remain available in perpetuity — especially in the current LLM climate, where model age is measured in months, or even weeks.