FeedCity

[Update: The store is now closed. Thanks to everyone who ordered — you should start getting shipping notices very soon.] It’s really just a coincidence, but it was 20 years ago this week that I went full-time writing Daring Fireball (after writing the site in my spare time ...

Ben Schoon, 9to5Google: In March, a report revealed some of the internal cuts Samsung has been making for its mobile division, with the company initially concerned it could post an operating loss for the first time ever. It’s a big deal, as Samsung’s mobile (MX) division...

When Bluesky is down, you can bookmark my news page on feedland.com for news from feeds I follow, in various categories. If you think there are feeds I should have, please send me an email.

Imagine you were putting up a skyscraper in Manhattan. I lived in an area of the city, called Billionaire's Row, for nine years where I saw quite a few huge buildings go up from my living room window on the 50th floor. Now imagine you used a different plumbing system in every apartment, over 140 stories, with up to 15 residences per story. Different wiring. All the rooms are different shapes. How could you maintain such a building? I think ChatGPT might be able to do it but no human could. We need patterns to allow us to understand big things.

What you don't hear about AI is that it doesn't know how human minds work, what our limits are, what we can do that they can't. It has no memory. This was hard to believe, but you have to tell it to keep things in some kind of memory, usually a Markdown file, then tell it to...

Washington, October 2025.

From the video Pushing it a bit too far at the Olympic Peninsula coast.

What you don't hear about AI is that it doesn't know how human minds work, what our limits are, what we can do that they can't. It has no memory. This was hard to believe, but you have to tell it to keep things in some kind of memory, and then remember to tell it to read it. ...

Bluesky is having trouble keeping their network running. As a developer I empathize. As a user, it's beginning to be a problem. I am using it the way I used to use Twitter, taking notes for future blog posts, sharing a few linkblog feeds, DMing with people I work with, and want/need to keep going. I know about its lock-in problems, but at this time there's no open alternative that has the same collection of users who are easy enough to find. So if it stays unreliable I have to think about what to do about that. Every time I get a 403 Forbidden, I stop and think if this is the time to write a post? This was the time.

In reply to Stop and think by Paolo Valdemarin This made me stop and think. My company contains a well above average number of actual philosophers, 50% of our team. Some with PhDs. Usually combined with practical technical knowledge. Not sure if it gives us a better handle at the future though. Yet, ‘holding questions’ […]

Knicks won in a blowout. As disturbing as Thursday's game was, today we are feeling no pain. Go Knicks! ;-)

I wrote about Jeopardy, Firefox, Matt, Silicon Valley and the writer's web in a long comment on Doc's blog. Here's a quote. "What we really need is interop. If the source is free that’s great. But right now we have silos everywhere and I want WordPress, perhaps along with Firefox to help us boot up the writer's web."

Gianni Benvenuti, illustration from Winny-Puh (the Italian translation of Winnie-the-Pooh). 

Gianni Benvenuti

Tower 15: This update introduces Automatic Branch Management, making it easier than ever to keep your repository tidy and clutter-free. We’ve also added significant improvements to the “History” view for better visualization of your work 😎 Tower 16: Tower 16 for Mac is now in beta, and it introduces AI Commits, allowing you to generate […]

Nick Heer (Mac Power Users Talk): Apple’s next iCloud tier is a generous 6 TB, but it costs another $324 per year. I could buy a new 6 TB hard disk annually for that kind of money. […] A better solution is to recognize I do not need instant access to all 95,000 photos in […]

Doug Brown (Slashdot): I was recently poking around inside the original Power Macintosh G3’s ROM and accidentally discovered an easter egg that nobody has documented until now. […] The “secret ROM image” text in particular seemed like it could be related to the picture shown above. I decided to dive deeper to see if I […]

Max Seelemann: There are only three ways to create a concurrently running operation from the standard library, Task being the first. The other two are async let and TaskGroups — which happen to be the structured ones. […] In my words, it’s a direct, inescapable dependency relationship. You can always start a task and forget […]

Glenn Fleishman: Note that this remains an iPhone-only feature, even though an iPad could be exploited the same way. I have to infer either that Apple has had almost no reports of exploitation via iPad passcode theft, or that they are balancing the needs of the average iPad user who is out and about with […]

Brent Simmons: The big new changes are to iCloud syncing: there’s a new setting to not sync the content of unread articles, since that’s the biggest part of your iCloud database and what takes the longest to sync. NetNewsWire: We’ve added a new weekly background iCloud storage cleanup. This happens automatically, but there’s also a […]

Every single word of the November 2025 Financial Times report, which Mark Gurman derided as “simply false”, was, in fact, exactly correct.