FeedCity

ChatGPT makes a pretty fantastic feed validator.

For your weekend listening enjoyment: a new episode of America’s favorite 3-star podcast, with special guest Stephen Robles. Topics include indie media and YouTube, Shortcuts and automation, and the state of podcasting.

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The new FeedLand release is ready. It's installed on feedland.org, not on feedland.com yet.

Loving a series I just heard about -- it's on Netflix, entitled This Is Going To Hurt. I discovered it the usual tedious way, scrolling through newly available shows on one of the streaming services with my iPad handy and when I see one that looks interesting, I look it up ...

I've got a new version of FeedLand, going to release it in a few minutes. It has all the new stuff I've done to make recognizing updated posts more reliable. Thanks to Brent Simmons for his help from his experience with NetNewsWire. I love it when we work together to make our software work better together. That's the way we help to support the web. That's what the web is about. Making software connections that work, and last.

Luke Igel and Riley Walz made a phony Gmail interface that, rather than showing you your email, shows you Jeffrey Epstein’s emails:

You’re logged in as Jeffrey Epstein. We compiled these Epstein estate emails from the House Oversight release by converting the PDFs to structured text with an LLM.

Brilliant.

Apple Store: The Hikawa Phone Grip & Stand is a MagSafe compatible adaptive accessory for iPhone designed by Bailey Hikawa to celebrate the 40th anniversary of accessibility at Apple. Designed with direct input from individuals with disabilities affecting muscle stre...

Adi Robertson, The Verge:

As a number of people have pointed out on social media over the past day, Grok’s public-facing chatbot is currently prone to insisting on Musk’s prowess at absolutely anything, no matter how unlikely — or conversely, embarrassing — a given feat is.

Grok claims Musk is fitter than LeBron James, funnier than Jerry Seinfeld, and would likely figure out a way to resurrect himself from the dead faster than Jesus.

But it’s a trustworthy source to author an encyclopedia, sure.

Oregon, October 2025.

From the video I couldn't believe what I found.

“Carol Sturka”, actress Rhea Seehorn’s fictional protagonist of the new Apple TV series Pluribus, is on Reddit right now — at 12n ET / 9am PT — doing an AMA in character. Sturka is a fantasy novelist, and Apple Books has an 11-page excerpt of her “new” novel Bloodsong of Wycaro. Unclear whether it’s Seehorn writing the in-character responses, but it’s definitely Seehorn in the confirmation photo. Reminiscent of some of the promotional fun Apple has had for Severance.

Both my wife and I are loving Pluribus so far. I highly recommend watching the first episode without even knowing the premise, if you can.

OpenAI:

Early feedback from the pilot has been positive, so we’re expanding group chats to all logged-in users on ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus and Pro plans globally over the coming days. We will continue refining the experience as more people start using it.

That didn’t take long — the initial rollout limited to Japan, New Zealand, Korea, and Taiwan started just three days ago.

I'm continuing to work on the way FeedLand detects changes in feed items. This morning I did a careful study of the function that gets a guid for an item in conjunction with ChatGPT. It would be so much easier if RSS 2.0 required an item-level <guid> element, but it doesn't. That was the philosophy, all item-level values are optional except for a couple. My notes are here.

Good morning sports fans!

The Steve Jobs Archive: To mark Toy Story’s 30th anniversary, we’re sharing a never-before-seen interview with Steve from November 22, 1996 — exactly one year after the film debuted in theaters. Toy Story was the world’s first entirely computer-animated feature-length f...

Oregon, October 2025.

From the video I couldn't believe what I found.

I'm working today in the internals of FeedLand, specifically the code that determines if an item has changed. When we check a feed, we check each item, if the item already exists, we look at each of the values stored for the item compared with their new values in the feed, a...

The new Amazon Alexa with AI has the same basic problem of all AI bots, it acts as if it's human, with a level of intimacy that you really don't want to think about, because Alexa is in your house, with you, listening, all the time. Calling attention to an idea that there's a human there spying on you is bad -- Alexa depends on the opposite impression, that it's just a computer. I really think AI's should give up the pretense that they're human.

Anthony Castrovince, reporting for MLB.com on the new broadcast rights agreement that will cover the next three seasons of baseball: Sunday Night Baseball will shift from ESPN, where it aired since 1990, to NBCUniversal, which also secured the rights to Sunday Leadoff an...

Miguel Arroz, on Mastodon: Unpopular opinion, apparently: companies like Cloudflare and Amazon provide very high quality services people and enterprises actually need, with a level of uptime and security vastly superior to what most of their customers would achieve on th...

Oregon, October 2025.

From the video I couldn't believe what I found.