FeedCity

Here! Finally! I have my sample. The "Live laugh federate" enamel pin.

https://shop.joinmastodon.org/products/live-laugh-federate-soft-enamel-pin

#Merchtodon

Small follow-up point re: my post this week on iMessage’s delivery architecture being built atop the Apple Push Notification service: APNs can only relay messages up to 4 or 16 KB in size, depending on the iOS or iPadOS version. If the message text is too long or if an a...

In the world of WordLand and FeedLand I can create my own API for my own client. No more living with all the things the Twitter and Bluesky API designers left out or made fragile, or straight out broke. If there's a missing endpoint, I have a talk with the service devs (ie me), they listen and understand, and in an hour or so there's a new freaking endpoint. This is how we did it in the early days, I had all three components needed to move publishing forward: Manila, my.userland.com and Scripting News. Well folks we're back in business again. Enough for a rebooted writer's web. As they say, still diggin! :-)

Frank Gehry, whose steel and titanium curved structures seemed more like sculptures than buildings, died last week at age 96. His masterpiece was the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain. He spoke with Terry Gross in 2004 about finding his design voice. 

Also, we remember Raul Malo, the lead singer and songwriter of The Mavericks, the country band with rock and roll roots. 

Justin Chang reviews ‘Wake Up Dead Man,’ the newest ‘Knives Out’ mystery movie starring Daniel Craig.  

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Not sure yet how to read the Epic vs. Apple appeals court decision. Seems like a partial Apple win, but Tim Sweeney says on Twitter / X that it’s actually good progress. I think we’ll know for sure when the district court judge updates her ruling.

This week, we discuss conversational AI, a behind the scenes of the zine, and more.

Gilbert Cruz, editor at The New York Times Book Review shares the five fiction and five non-fiction books from this year that made it into The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2024. 

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A little-known Micro.blog feature is getting better visibility today: we store previous versions of private notes (and blog posts!) so you can restore them if you make an editing mistake or delete something. From @news:

Added note versions browsing to the web interface. When editing a note, you’ll now see a “5 versions” link in the corner. For Premium subscribers, we’re storing previous versions for a full year. (60 days for everyone else.)

The post Strangest State: Drones, Drugs, Deer, and a Dutiful Dog appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Fulu sets repair bounties on consumer products that employ sneaky features that limit user control. Just this week, it awarded more than $10,000 to the person who hacked the Molekule air purifier.

Jessica Grose, opinion writer at The New York Times, reflects on her family's interfaith holiday traditions, and listeners offer their own.

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There are only so many ways to surprise in the construction of a murder mystery, which is why the set-up of Wake Up Dead Man is understood from the start and goes so far as to cite its sources: Here is a locked room murder, a la John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man, and, as we...

Fears about AI data centers’ water use have exploded. Experts say the reality is far more complicated than people think.

The NYT should have started their own Twitter, with exclusive access by people who are quoted in the NYT, so there would have been a connection between the pub, its rep, more inclusive than the masthead, but still fairly exclusive, in the way of the NYT. I'm not being funny or sarcasting, I mean it. They already had a mechanism for deciding who matters. And the software they used could have been employed by all the other pubs, and anyone else. What I'm describing is the alternate reality where the Twitter founders followed the WordPress business model. They might not be worth billions, but they certainly would have far more money than one person can use. And I don't think they could be happier with the way it actually turned out.

You may not have heard of open source developer Tony Kovanen, but the 34-year-old has collaborated on projects you know

The post Why Next.js Co-Creator Tony Kovanen Prefers the Sidelines appeared first on The New Stack.

It seems that it is no longer a good time to be one of Bill Belichick's special guys. Following the old-timer's disastrous first season at North Carolina, changes are underway. According to multiple reports, Belichick is firing offensive coordinator Freddie Kitchens and special teams coordinator Mike "Nuke The Gays" Priefer.

Kitchens and Priefer were among the cadre of washouts and football sons for whom UNC became a work program under Belichick. Kitchens was the Tar Heels' offensive coordinator during Mack Brown's final season in charge, but survived Brown's firing and was allowed to keep his position under Belichick, no doubt due to their long-standing relationship. Priefer, on the other hand, was entering his third year of unemployment when Belichick came along and offered him a lifeline.

OpenAI:

In ChatGPT, GPT‑5.2 Instant, Thinking, and Pro will begin rolling out today, starting with paid plans. In the API, they are available now to all developers.

Overall, GPT‑5.2 brings significant improvements in general intelligence, long-context understanding, agentic tool-calling, and vision — making it better at executing complex, real-world tasks end-to-end than any previous model.

5.1 was released just one month ago, but 5.2 delivers a slew of measurable improvements across the board. Where 5.1 was seemingly more about the feel of responses, the personality, 5.2 was clearly focused on tangible and benchmarkable gains.

The natural follow-up from my last post: people want a place to belong. Friends, a community. So the challenge is building a community that minimizes the more negative effects of tribalism. I’m not sure how to do this, but I can usually spot when things have drifted into unhealthy territory.

Most data processing frameworks are built on a single execution engine. Not Apache Wayang. Last week, The Apache Software Foundation

The post Apache Wayang Makes Data Processing a Cross-Platform Job appeared first on The New Stack.

As more and more age tech hits the market, I’ve been testing the most innovative gadgets for older folks and caregivers.