FeedCity

Oregon, October 2025.

From the video Life on the road: moments from the PNW.

I wrote a bit about Philippe Kahn the other day, and just remembered -- I forgot to write about Turbo Pascal. I had been using program compilers for C and Pascal for almost a decade when it came out, and it was shockingly different in a good way. Somehow it could compile a wh...

October blog posts in OPML. BTW, well-kept secret, I have a Node app that takes one of these outlines and publishes it to the web, in the format you see on Scripting News. If you can get your text to flow through OPML this way, you can have a replica of this site, with most ...

The unique thing about neighbors is you can try to divorce them, but no matter what you do they will still be neighbors. There are few relationships as permanent as neighbor. They don't have to listen to you. But you should listen anyway, and try to figure out how they look at the neighborhood. Probably very differently from the way you view it.

Wonder if you noticed that the main difference between social media and chat is which way the new messages flow and where the tiny little text box is, at the top or the bottom.

I've never participated in a book club so I don't know if I am doing this right. I don't know how the conversation would go in a group setting and I normally lean to sharing my experiences as a way to connect. I've recently learned it isn't something people are keen on. But ...

Special guest Brian Mueller, developer of Carrot Weather, joins the show to commemorate the 10th anniversary of his utterly ridiculous but totally serious weather app.

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Tim Bray: Last night I had a very strange experience: About two thirds of the way through reading a Web page about myself, Tim Bray, I succumbed to boredom and killed the tab. Thus my introduction to Grokipedia. Here are early impressions. My Grokipedia entry has over s...

Jason Koebler, writing at 404 Media: Wednesday, as part of his ongoing war against Wikipedia because he does not like his page, Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, a fully AI-generated “encyclopedia” that serves no one and nothing other than the ego of the world’s richest man...

Apple Support:

This update includes enhancements to the Shortcuts app across all platforms, including new intelligent actions and an improved editing experience. Shortcuts on macOS now supports personal automations that can be triggered based on events such as time of day or when you take actions like saving a file to a folder, as well as new integrations with Control Center and Spotlight.

Via Matthew Cassinelli.

Claudie Moreau, reporting for Euractiv:

Earlier in their presidency, Denmark had revived a controversial provision in the draft law that would mean online platforms — such as messaging apps — could be served with mandatory CSAM detection orders, including services protected by end-to-end encryption. However opposition from several other EU countries derailed any agreement in the Council.

Today, Danish Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard told local press that the Council presidency would move away from mandatory detection orders — and instead support CSAM detections remaining voluntary.

Sanity prevails.

Washington, October 2025.

From the video Life on the road: moments from the PNW.

TechRadar, summarizing this German-language report from Handelsblatt: The International Criminal Court (ICC) is looking to replace its internal work environments to move away from US-made software in fear of retaliation from the US administration. The Microsoft software...

Travis M. Andrews, Jeremy B. Merrill, and Shelly Tan, reporting for The Washington Post (News+ link:) “We had spent way too much on programming that doesn’t bring in any revenue,” Richard Grenell, a Trump ally and former ambassador to Germany, told the Washington Reporte...

Kif Leswing at CNBC interviewed Tim Cook ahead of yesterday’s Apple earnings report: Cook said that the company still plans to release an updated version of Siri next year, and said that there were more forthcoming partnerships like the company’s agreement to integrate O...

Speaking of vaporware, Dominic Preston at The Verge on the T1 Trump phone, which was announced back in June:

In fairness, for months now, the store page has only promised an arrival “later this year,” a change made at the same time Trump Mobile stopped claiming the T1 would be made in America. That gives the company two more months to release it and still pretend it’s on time.

Trump Mobile never responded to my request last month for an update on the phone’s release date, and it hasn’t replied to my latest email either. People of lesser faith might worry that this phone is no more than vaporware, but I refuse to give up. Place your bets now on whether I’ll be back here in another month’s time, still asking: where is the Trump phone?

Joanna Stern, writing for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): It was wild to watch. Sure, Neo nearly toppled over while closing the dishwasher, took two minutes to fold the shirt and twisted its arm attempting to dance the Macarena. But shhh. Remember the rule. Oh, did ...

Good morning everyone. We're getting feedland.com back in shape. About a week ago we sorted out a long-standing performance issue. Once that was fixed, another problem cropped up, we weren't able to sign off and back on. We got that one too, this morning, and now it looks like feedland.com is finally performing well across the board. It's always been pretty stable, just churning away on feeds, reading lists, and pumping news over websockets, and all the other 3.0 type feed stuff. It feels like it's time to depend on it, even so we'll be careful, praise Murphy. The cool thing about feedland.com compared to all the other servers I've run stuff on over the years is that it scales automatically. It's on the VIP network run by Automattic.

Matt Rosoff, writing for The Register: If Microsoft owns 27 percent of OpenAI, it stands to reason under equity accounting that it bears 27 percent of OpenAI’s losses. Microsoft’s admission that it shaved $3.1 billion off its net income to account for its share of OpenAI...

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors: In the post-results call with financial analysts, Wamsi Mohan of Bank of America asked Cook for a little more detail about Apple’s search revenue, given its lucrative deal with Google, and whether that revenue growth might decelerate i...