FeedCity

What a difference a day makes. The treacherous mouth of the Columbia on a sunny less windy morning. Clear enough to see how far the jetty goes. 😮

This week's New Yorker Politics podcast is an interview with Jeopardy champion and host Ken Jennings. Great stuff if you, like me, are a longtime Jeopardy fan. We used to watch it in our Flushing kitchen in the 1960s when Art Fleming was host.

ChatGPT aggregates people the same way polls aggregate voters. Ignore individuality, unable to hear new ideas, allowing journalists to write the same horse race stories every year. It would be better if they found a way to report originality, they can set an example for AIs.

There are a bunch of useful demo apps in the reallysimple package, which also is itself fairly useful. I used all these tools in implementing FeedLand and WordLand, so I'm pretty sure they'd be useful to other users and developers. The feeder app, one of the demos, is used to generate the Links page on scripting.com, and provides utilities to the scripting language in Drummer.

For the Pacific Wave Appreciation Society: the massive waves at the mouth of the Columbia River, “one of the most treacherous waterways in the world,” as the sign says.

Happy belated Thanksgiving. I was so busy yesterday, didn't have the time to do my usual Thanksgiving gratitude post. And I do have a few things to be thankful for this year. First I want to thank all the non-technical peoople who read this blog every day. This has been one...

A masterpiece from Randall Munroe, perfect for Thanksgiving.

Oregon, October 2025.

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

This is a really good blog post, in response to a post I wrote here that said among other things that a WordPress instance is easier to set up on your own server than Mastodon. At the start of the piece he said it was like comparing apples and oranges, but by the end, he wa...

I love shows like Succession and Pluribus, but I hate their official podcasts because they’re mostly outlets for the actors to praise each other. I don’t know who the actors are! I know the characters they play. I want a podcast where Carol and Zosia speak about the crazy shit they did in the last episode. I don’t mind if the showrunner plays herself. She really is God, in this context. She could explain why she had this character do this crazy shit or done other crazy shit. i don’t know or care about the actors. If they’re any good they disappear. Whodat?

Sam Roberts, reporting for The New York Times:

David Lerner, a high school dropout and self-taught computer geek whose funky foothold in New York’s Flatiron district, Tekserve, was for decades a beloved discount mecca for Apple customers desperate to retrieve lost data and repair frozen hard drives, died on Nov. 12 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 72. [...]

Tekserve specialized in finding the cures for sick computers — including insect infestations — and recovering first novels and other priceless data, which the company said it was able to do about 85 percent of the time.

“We only charged for success,” Mr. Lerner said.

There were many great independent Apple resellers from the pre-Apple-Store era. There was only one that was legendary: Tekserve.

Regarding my earlier post on similarities between the 2010 App Store Guidelines and today’s: Notably absent from the current guidelines (I think for a very long time) is the specious but very Jobsian claim that “If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.” Getting the press on your side is one of the best ways for a developer to get an unjust App Store review decision overturned. Apple loathes negative publicity.

Here’s the updated full guideline for section 4.1: 4.1 Copycats (a) Come up with your own ideas. We know you have them, so make yours come to life. Don’t simply copy the latest popular app on the App Store, or make some minor changes to another app’s name or...

Oregon, November 2025.

From the video I wasn't ready to leave.

I saw a post from my friend Matt Mullenweg where he said they're working on WordPress for the next generation. I like that idea. I'm doing the same, myself -- only I'm one generation ahead of Matt. So the improvements I'm working on will likely end up benefiting people his a...

RSS 2.0, the antidote to enshitification.

...

I'm starting to work on my new discourse system. I've been waiting to do this for a while, until all the pieces I needed were there, and they have been for a couple of months. I'll tell you about it as it starts to come into view. The first thing to know is that all comment...

The web is open the same way water is wet.

One of my recent posts is getting a lot of traffic. Basic idea is that the new AI-enhanced Alexa spooked me so much I went back to the old one. It's in every room of the house. The more it acts like a human the more offended I am.