FeedCity

I would like to get on the record.

1. The only billionaire-proof social network will be based on RSS.
2. The shortest path to being billionaire-proof for Bluesky is well thought-out inbound and outbound RSS.

We're going to have some interop based on RSS not too far down the road. A network that will only require an RSS feed for entry. It's what we should've built in 2006 and didn't.

The new header graphic is gift from Stan Krute at Fresh Art Daily.

My thanks to Dekáf Coffee Roasters for sponsoring last week at DF. Dekáf believes that people who drink coffee for its flavor are the true connoisseurs. While other roasters treat decaf as a side project, they’ve made it their entire mission. They’re dedicated to creating ex...

We're in the doldrums of summer. It's hot and muggy, but I am where you want to be this time of year, in the Catskill Mountains, where there's lots to do outdoors, the peaches are fantastic right now, apples coming soon. I'm working a few hours a day on the integration of writing and timelines built around feeds. Instead of using Bluesky or Mastodon, with their limits, we use WordPress for storing posts. It has none of their limits, has a high performance open source server back-end, not without problems, but far ahead of where the competition is in terms are reliablity and ease of implementation. To be part of this network, all you need to do is a way of producing an RSS feed. Seems pretty openly billionaire-proof wouldn't you say.

I want a new ChatGPT mode where I drive the work, not the bot. I don't want it giving me answers to questions I didn't ask, because it's trying to navigate in my mind, and it has no information about that, so it's basically always wrong. I keep looking back on problems that took hours to solve because it drove the process and I went along with it. I want to tell it in advance to not make suggestions, to just answer questions. I call this "behave like a computer, not a human." Because it's a fanstastic computer, but not a good partner.

I am currently regretting the posts I didn't make. Yes, as someone who bangs on and on about posting things on your blog first and then elsewhere, I too fail many times. And, it's been like that when it comes to Jessie. Since we adopted Jessie in 2017, I've been celebrating ...

Jason Lalljee, reporting for Axios Tuesday: President Trump’s nomination of Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Monday drew criticism from economists across the political spectrum. Why it matters: The growing negative conse...

Emma Roth, reporting for The Verge back on July 1 (emphasis added): Threads’ DMs are currently available to users aged 18 and over on Android, iOS, and the web, but you can only have one-on-one conversations right now. Moving forward, Threads plans to roll out the abilit...

From a press release from the UK’s National Drought Group this week, quoting group chair Helen Wakeham (emphasis added): “We are grateful to the public for following the restrictions, where in place, to conserve water in these dry conditions. Simple, everyday choices — s...

San Francisco, August 2025.

From the video A hidden gem in San Francisco.

The big corner-turn is working. Here's a screen shot.

Steve Wozniak turned 75 (!) and was profiled by John Blackstone for CBS News (also posted to YouTube). Slashdot linked to it, and in the comments, someone gently jabbed at Woz for having sold, rather than hoarded, his stock in Apple. Woz himself chimed in, with this comment ...

I like documentaries about climbing Mt Everest, but I absolutely hate watching people climb El Capitan. Then I realized that sometimes in software I'm climbing a cliff that's too tall to climb in one session, so I have to carry a tent and backpack with food and water. I hate this kind of programming more than anything, because it comes from not having a high-level enough runtime to support me in big corner turns. Or not having invested enough time in creating a layer I can build on. Anyway I'm in the middle of one of those corner-turns now. Hell has not broken loose although at times it looks like it might have. I'm being sure not to create another mess that needs to be cleaned up in the future. Not stressful, but I'd rather be doing anything but this. :-)

Bloomberg: The Trump administration is in talks with Intel Corp. to have the US government take a stake in the beleaguered chipmaker, according to people familiar with the plan, in the latest sign of the White House’s willingness to blur the lines between state and indus...

Greg Ip, chief economics commentator for The Wall Street Journal, under the euphemistic headline “The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics”: A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resem...

Dieter Bohn left The Verge to work for Google on their “Platforms & Ecosystems” team. He hasn’t had much of a visible presence since, or least not one that I’ve noticed. But this 90-second video he made showing off the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 is nice. It’s a better pitch for the device than anything I’ve seen from Samsung itself, and it’s a good pitch for Google Gemini too.

What today’s workaround does is process and display the blood oxygen sensor data on your watch’s paired iPhone, rather than on the Apple Watch itself. That, apparently, is what the new US Customs ruling holds does not violate Masimo’s patent.

San Francisco, August 2025.

From the video A hidden gem in San Francisco.

I'm back in the city for just a few days, and in this video, I want to show you one of my favorite spots. One that is lesser-known and not crowded, but a spot that I love visiting.