FeedCity

Another application for websockets. You could actually put a web server on your desktop without exposing your home network to the world. I can't wait till I have time to play around with this.

New demo app. FeedLand communicates back to the client app via websockets. This is absolutely the easiest way to get flow from feeds to apps running on servers or in a browser, or other desktop app. Websockets is a mature standard, and incredibly useful. I'm now working on a toolkit for it, along with all the other projects going on in parallel, so other developers can hook up to FeedLand to get the flow of new items. The demo shows you the JSON version of every news item as it appears on the wire. Impossible to read at times, but there's no limit to the kinds of apps you can build for this. My friend Chuck Shotton has a market-predicting LLM app that gets its news this way. Nothing to install on a server. FeedLand does all the work. I expect to have a toolkit out sometime in the next month.

Two videos every US resident should watch to prepare for what might be coming. 1. The Lives of Others. A drama set in the eastern part of post-war Germany before the wall came down. People lived their lives, but their relationship with the government and the military would s...

MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass: And so you can’t help but wonder if part of the equation in this settlement wasn’t decidedly more cynical. Fresh off a new massive fundraise — one in which they raised far more than they were initially targeting, I might add — Anthropic h...

There's a new version of FeedLand, v0.7.0.

Here's the thread where we discussed the testing of the new release. It worked everywhere we installed it, so it seems fair to open it up to people running their own FeedLand instances.

You don't have to do this yet, the only features it has are ones that are needed to use it with the new version of WordLand, coming soon now. But if you have the time, it requires an update to the database, so it's not the usual thing. It explains at the beginning of the thread what the change is to the database.

Here are the instructions for doing the upgrade.

If you're installing a new instance, the instructions are the same as always.

If you have trouble, post a note on the thread.

Thanks to Scott Hanson for validating the new version. It's always important to have someone to check my work.

Yesterday's note on scripting.com about feedland.org was not the whole story. In the end I thought it made more sense to start the database over from the start. There were a lot of users who subscribed to feeds that were constantly updating, and they never came back to use...

Hayden Field, reporting for The Verge:

In what’s potentially the first major payout to creatives whose work was used to train AI systems, Anthropic has reached an agreement to pay “at least” a staggering $1.5 billion, plus interest, to authors to settle its class-action lawsuit. The amount breaks down to smaller payouts expected to be approximately $3,000 per book or work. Lawyers for the plaintiffs said it’s “believed to be the largest publicly reported recovery in the history of US copyright litigation.”

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I upgraded feedland.org to a new version of the system software, still being tested. In the process I started a fresh items table. This means for the next day or so your timeline may have a lot of items for a few feeds, as it catches up with every feed it keeps track of. Also, the server was down for a couple of hours while we did the upgrade. Still diggin! ;-)

David Pierce, writing for The Verge: Mike Cannon-Brookes, the CEO of enterprise software giant Atlassian, was one of the first users of the Arc browser. Over the last several years, he has been a prolific bug reporter and feature requester. Now he’ll own the thing: Atlas...

Dave Michaels and Katherine Blunt, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): “There are strong reasons not to jolt the system and to allow market forces to do the work,” Mehta wrote. Wall Street analysts scored the ruling a huge win for Google and Apple since i...

There are finallys, and there are finallys. Apple shipped the original iPad in April 2010. Instagram shipped in October 2010 — and was iPhone-exclusive until 2012. That Instagram didn’t ship a native iPad version of its app until now is really one of the strangest things in tech. But here it is.

One significant difference from Instagram on phones is that on iPad, it defaults to the Reels view, and you have to tap below Reels in the sidebar to get to your following timeline. Adam Mosseri explains their thinking behind this in this Reel (natch).

David McCabe, reporting for The New York Times: Google must hand over its search results and some data to rival companies but does not need to break itself up by selling its Chrome web browser, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday. The decision, by Judge Amit P. Mehta of the...

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AI is as good at writing software as it is in creating competent visual art. It's only amazing in terms of how much more a novice can do. It doesn't mean what they create is interesting in more than a gee-wiz way, and the novelty fades pretty quickly I've found.

ChatGPT might not give you the best answer. Yesterday I hit a problem with the MySQL hosting service, and as we worked it out, ChatGPT and me, I ended up contacting the ISP's support asking them to restart the server, something I cannot do through the control panel. They don'...

Another thing I should have mentioned, about the title of the podcast, is that I think this is the last chance for the open web. It may already be too late. Look at what's happening politically in the US now and ask how tolerant the government is going to be for an open web. We always had to deal with the possibility that they would shut down free speech here. It has been tried, and didn't work in the 90s. But the guardrails that existed then possibly don't exist now. The same things that are forcing CBS for example to become a controlled press, will affect the web too, but you won't read about it in the NYT or hear about it on Maddow because they have very low regard for the amateur writing on the web. They only respect commercial writing.

BTW, one of the things I should have mentioned in yesterday's podcast is that the product isn't just WordLand, it's also FeedLand. The two are connected by a well-developed WebSocket interface, which I will provide code for, as well as docs for what goes over the wire. I think a lot of feed aficionados will find this really interesting (and also really simple).

San Francisco, August 2025.

From the video A hidden gem in San Francisco.

Podcast: Last chance for the open web.