FeedCity

A couple months ago, some friends and I made plans to see the San Antonio Spurs when they were in town to play the Brooklyn Nets. Obviously, we weren't going for the opportunity to see the Nets' youths develop around the dubious veteran presence of Michael Porter Jr.; the dr...

In early December, Paramount seemed to have lost to Netflix in a bidding war to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), but 10 weeks and roughly $20 billion later, the conglomerate reportedly will get its way after all. On Thursday, as The Wrap reports, Netflix announced it w...

When I write a comment on someone else's blog I want it to automatically be on my blog. It should just appear to be on theirs, the original and only copy of the writing appears on mine. A truly distributed system.

I bet Jeopardy champions would make great software developers. Their intelligence, ability to stay calm and their incredible memory, all are needed to squeeze the last bits of performance from software.

It's nice having Facebook around to show you your old posts. This one just came up and I thought it would be good to remind you all that I was once a young nerd creating Unix apps at UW-Madison.

I’m currently reading The Power Broker. Are you impressed? You should be. I am big-boy writer who reads big-boy books. A thousand-page investigation into the life of a powerful bureaucrat is nothing to me. I’m gonna finish The Power Broker, and then you will regard me as one...

For this pledge drive, listeners try their hand at a quiz. Today's theme is broadcast media history.

 

Photo: Edward R. Murrow lived here (blue plaque), Westminster (Matt Brown, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

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Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer. “Hendrix’s mission was to reshape both the electric guitar’s envelope and its tone until it could feel like a human voice.”

Open letter from employees of Google and OpenAI in support of Anthropic:

They’re trying to divide each company with fear that the other will give in. That strategy only works if none of us know where the others stand. This letter serves to create shared understanding and solidarity in the face of this pressure from the Department of War.

The leadership of all the AI companies is fascinating to me. Dario Amodei perhaps the most so. I thought his essay Machines of Loving Grace was excellent, but I’ve watched many interviews with him and I sometimes come away kind of depressed about the future.

Historian Anne Applebaum, staff writer at The Atlantic,  host of their podcast "Autocracy in America" and author of Autocracy Inc. (Penguin, 2024) and offers her analysis of how President Trump and his administration are seeking to control elections, as well as science and culture, and why.

 

photo: "I Voted" sticker worn on lapel of fuzzy winter coat, shot during the November 2025 election in St. Paul, Minnesota.  (Funknendai, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)

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Avery Trufelman, host of the podcast Articles of Interest, talks about her work digging into the interesting historical and cultural questions about what we wear. Part of a short series about personal style.

Photo: Well-dressed in a camouflage jacket and a cream v-neck sweater, Milan Fashion Week Menswear Spring/Summer 2025, June 15, 2024 in Milan, Italy. (Photo by Edward Berthelot/Getty Images)

 

 

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We take a trip to Bikini Bottom and revisit our interview with Tom Kenny, who plays SpongeBob on the popular Nickelodeon cartoon series, and in the new ‘Spongebob SquarePants’ film. Kenny’s been voicing the character since the show began in 1999. In 2004 he talked about creating the voice, including experimenting with inhaling helium.

TV critic David Bianculli reviews ‘Man on the Run,’ the new documentary about Sir Paul McCartney in the decade after the Beatles split up, and Justin Chang reviews the new erotic drama ‘Dreams,’ starring Jessica Chastain. 

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WNYC's Public Song Project invites musicians to incorporate works of art that have entered the public domain into new compositions. All of It producer Simon Close shares more about the project and how they are hoping musicians will participate.

For more information, click here.
 

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Catching up on Paul Frazee’s post comparing AT Proto’s decentralization to ActivityPub’s federation and Nostr’s “magical mesh” approach:

Our near-miss similarity to the two common models of decentralization is at least partially why we catch heat from them. We’re really similar, but we introduced changes that remove the legible markers of each technology: multiple app instances in the case of federation, and an absence of servers in the case of magical meshes.

It’s a good read. Most of the confusion in the fediverse about AT Proto is because people judge it based on Mastodon’s architecture.

This week, we discuss wishes made for better privacy, god complexes, and the point of it all.

Marks found on 40,000-year-old artifacts might be a proto-language. “They found that these sign sequences displayed an information density very similar to the earliest examples of the cuneiform forerunner called proto-cuneiform.”

MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass:

Of course, Netflix could have absorbed such a cost. It’s a $400B company (well, before this deal, anyway) — double Disney! Paramount Skydance? They’re worth $11B. Yes, they’re paying almost exactly $100B more than they’re worth for WBD. Yes, it’s looney. But really, it’s leverage.

To be clear, Netflix was going to pay for the deal with debt too, but they have a clear path to repay such debts. They have a great, growing business. They don’t require the backstop of one of the world’s richest men, who just so happens to be the father of the CEO. How on Earth is Paramount going to pay down this debt? I’m tempted to turn to another bit of Paramount IP for the answer:

1. Step one
2. Step two
3. ????
4. PROFIT!!!

The NFL owners, like everyone else, show who they actually are and what they really care about through what they choose to get upset about. And those owners (and yes, this is going where you think it's going) fought hard to keep their top-secret training facility behaviors a...

On Thursday night, in the season finale of The Traitors, two former Love Island contestants locked eyes across the round table. In the face of Maura Higgins you could see a dangerous hope growing—as if, for the first time, she could imagine what winning would be like. Here s...

Love that feeling when a new feature sort of actually works. All downhill from here to the release.