FeedCity

It was late into the evening. I wanted to take a break from everything digital. Relaxing by doodling in my notebook. Trying a new grind. Seeing how the metal tip felt on the billowy silky Tomoe River. Nothing dramatic. Somewhere in the middle of all that I let my subconscious take control of my mind, …

Tim Cook: At Apple, we’re more focused on building tomorrow than remembering yesterday. But we couldn’t let this milestone pass without thanking the millions of people who make Apple what it is today — our incredible teams around the world, our developer community, and e...

“There’s a lot of unevenness in how much attention internal drama and palace intrigue gets across different organizations. As far as I can tell, this is substantially a matter of path dependency: we know the characters in the sitcom of certain organizations but not at others, creating self-reinforcing lock-in effects. How much does one hear …

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Novelists who help us think theologically about this country’s racial history:

• for 1850-1900: William Faulkner
• for 1900-1950: Ralph Ellison
• for 1950-2025: Albert Murray

All of America’s most theologically rich and provocative thinkers are novelists — and this is true even when they don’t know they’re being theological.

• Marilynne Robinson: theologian of America’s past
• Thomas Pynchon: theologian of America’s present
• Philip K. Dick: theologian of America’s future

Eli Tan, reporting for The New York Times: Meta’s new foundational A.I. model, which the company has been working on for months, has fallen short of the performance of leading A.I. models from rivals like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic on internal tests for reasoning, codi...

Dade Hayes, reporting for Deadline:

While the rise of sports programming in recent years has been well-documented, new figures from Nielsen illustrate the extent of its dominance. The measurement firm said sports accounted for 29.2% of all advertising-supported TV viewing by people 25 to 54 years old during the fourth quarter. The stat, spanning broadcast, cable and streaming, was part of a report on viewership trends in the fourth quarter of 2025, released Thursday in the runup to upfronts.

Looking at the rest of the pie without sports, broadcast accounted for just 9.8%, with cable coming in at 18%. Streaming drew by far the largest tune-in, with 43% of all non-sports viewing, a reflection of the overall growth of advertising on streaming services like Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, HBO Max and others.

Business Insider, one year ago: Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI startup Anthropic, said on Monday that AI, and not software developers, could be writing all of the code in our software in a year. “I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% ...

Craig Mod, on creating his own custom accounting software with Claude Code: Simply put: It’s a big mess, and no off-the-shelf accounting software does what I need. So after years of pain, I finally sat down last week and started to build my own. It took me about five day...

Coder is derogatory term btw, as if our work was like a telegram coder, but it's understandable I guess because all the lay people see is us typing on a computer and being grouchy when they interrupt our train of thought. Coder is analogous to calling a chef a chopper. You have to understand the activity you're proposing that AI is replacing. And I find all the discussions about art very harmful -- because AI opens up graphic art to people who never thought they could do it. I bet you some absolutely fantastic artists are blossoming right now. Calling it slop is just as disrespectful as calling art expressed in software "code." BTW they said the same bullshit about bloggers and we know how that turned out.

I gotta say some days I start with a lot on my mind and am driven to write. This is one of those days. Maybe I'm inspired by the torrent of posts by my blogger friend ma.tt. Blogging can be a solitary thing or a relative thing. When you blog about something I have something to say about, I write on my blog and link back to yours, that's relative. The problem with comments in the old blogging world is that my comment resides on your blog. No more of that. I want equal stature for all writing, your comment should appear on your blog, yet still be easy to find from the other person's blog (and this is very important) with their support, it has to be something they want their readers to see. Otherwise the comment is still on your blog where your readers can see it.

24 years ago I had life-saving heart surgery. The treatment was not available to my grandmother who had the genes from which I inherited the condition. She died very young, but that was normal in her time, there was no treatment for this kind of disease beyond, don't exert yourself too much for the rest of your (short) life. Do you think heart surgeons are less useful now that we've had such amazing innovation in one freaking lifetime? Right now we're just beginning to discover new ways AI gives us the same kind of new power that bypass surgery gave to surgeons.

Les Orchard: I started programming in 1982. Every language I’ve learned since then has been a means to an end — a new way to make computers do things I wanted them to do. AI-assisted coding feels like the latest in that progression. Not a rupture, just another rung on th...

If we can get the web to come back, Scripting News could have new relevance. The age of the silo really hurt my rep. But I think people will ultimately appreciate that I never turned by back on the web. It was either the web or the highway as far as I was concerned. I've already lived under the thumb of a corporate platform vendor. I'd rather give up than try it again. And by the web coming back, I mean when products are expected to interop, the way podcast clients interop. I don't care if they're forced to do it, or do it willfully, with gusto -- but I know and so do people who tried to develop on owned platforms know, that it just doesn't work if there's a BigCo in charge of your destiny. There's always an acquisition or reorg just around the corner that sacrifices your future, often for no reason other than they don't care.

As you know Jake Savin is getting Frontier to run on current Linux and Mac OS systems. Today he posted a wonderful screen shot. It's how Frontier's built-in web server says "hello world."

We're still fixing problems created by the switch to https on the web. Reported a problem yesterday, was surprised to find an inconsistency in the way WordPress represents guids in its RSS feed for a post and in the API. This morning I posted an issue on the WordPress repo on GitHub. I don't think they can fix either approach without breakage, so they probably have to leave it as-is. I updated wpIdentity package to normalize guids it gets from the API to lowercase, so even if they change the implementation my software won't break. Another reason we're still paying for what Google decided we needed. What we don't need -- BigCo's f-ing with the f-ing web.

Happy Friday The 13th! ;-)

Silicon Valley spirituality:

[Richard Zhang] said the members of his group had many questions about how to deploy Al in their lives, such as: “Can I have an Al pastor? Should we have Al-generated worship music? Should I get an Al to read the Bible or pray with me, to judge my spirituality?”  

I’m gonna say

(a) Are you out of your mind?

(b) Lord have mercy, no

(c) Absolutely not

(d) Oh HELL no 

My suggestion to pastors who are tempted by this stuff: Read Brad East’s book on the screen-free church when it comes out, and read Matt Erickson’s book on The Pastor as Gardener now. 

Mahdi Bchatnia:

Accents is an app that lets you use the iMac/MacBook Neo accent colors on any Mac.

It’s a fun idea from Apple to have default accent colors that are, by default, exclusive to specific Mac hardware. But what exemplifies the Mac is that a clever developer like Bchatnia can make these accent colors available to any user on any Mac via a simple utility like Accents. (Via Michael Tsai.)