FeedCity

I have been struggling with what Jonathan Lethem calls “The Gulp” in The Ecstasy of Influence: “For me, there’s a weird, unfathomable gulf—I almost wrote gulp—between the completion of a novel and its publication. Some days this duration feels interminable, as though the book has voyaged out like some spacecraft on a research mission, populated […]

Claude unlearns things that we had settled a long time ago. It fumbles around with a process, making it worse with every iteration, the same fumbling it did five days ago when it initially learned how to do what it can't do now. Usually when I regress in software, I am responsible for it, i did something to break it, but here's a tool that's capable of derailing us with me doing nothing new. In that way it behaves more like an imperfect human than a GIGO machine.

New version of XML-RPC package for JavaScript. It now handles POST messages that don't have a body.

A question I'd like to put out there. Maybe AI needs the massive data centers now, but they could definitely get more efficient over time. There might be another Moore's Law in there. And the work is going very fast, and maybe they're leaving other optimizations for later. T...

This week is being spent, among other things, teaching Claude how to write code that fits in with my library of apps. I like this. It's like a painter telling an assistant the rules for adding to the sculpture. Art has been practiced like that for a long time. Anyway, here's...

I’ve been trying to come up with a simple test that lets you know whether some software is on the web or if it just can be made to appear in the web browser. So here we go.

If you can hook up a piece of the app to the a piece of another app then it’s on the web.

This comes from the basic feature of linking, which is the unique feature of the web.

Every other feature that makes the web the web in my experience is allowing two things to be part of each other.

Comment here.

My thanks to Rec League for sponsoring last week at DF. Rec League is a new app/social network for sharing what you’re into. (Get it? The “rec” in “Rec League” is for recommendations. It’s a damn clever name, and sometimes a clever name is half the battle.) It’s really well ...

Weekly “sponsor the whole week at DF” spots are sold out until August 24. That’s a great sign that sponsorships here work. But it’s not so great if you have a product or service that you’d like to promote now, or soon, to the DF audience — savvy listeners and readers obsessed with high quality and good design.

The good news on that front is that the sponsorship schedule for The Talk Show has openings, including for the next few episodes, starting this week and into next month. The general rule of thumb is that sponsorship spots on The Talk Show cost one-third the rate for the weekly spots on DF. I’m happy to work out deals a little lower than that for first-time sponsors. If you’ve got a product or service you’d like to hear pitched on America’s favorite three-star podcast, get in touch.

This biographer of C. S. Lewis has no comment.

Busy day working on new RSS-based project. Will return later today or tomorrow. Still diggin!

David Pierce:

On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay are joined by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber to talk about their reactions to the news, the (mostly) smooth transition Apple seems to have pulled off, and what we should really make of Tim Cook’s legacy as a product person. Really, the question is: Do we blame Cook for the Touch Bar, or do we blame him for not trying hard enough to make the Touch Bar great?

I know that sounds like a joke but I really do think the biggest problem with the Touch Bar wasn’t that the first crack at it wasn’t good enough, but that they never took a second crack at it. Going back to dumb fiddly F-keys with functional icons printed on them was uncharacteristically lazy for Apple.

I have been writing about the growing need for uploads and how they are redefining the broadband landscape — first in We Are Now An Upload (Broadband) Nation and then in a quick follow-up. As a follow-up to those pieces, today I wanted to highlight research from Omdia, which predicts that residential households subscribing to …

Currently reading: A Company of Readers Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from The Readers’ Subscription and Mid-century Book Clubs. It’s odd to think that Auden and Barzun were born in the same year, two years after Trilling, and the Barzun lived until 2012. 📚 

Barton Swaim: I am reminded by the appearance of this delightful magazine that my own desultory education happened in large measure in the pages of periodicals. Many were the hours I sat at coffeeshops and bars, or in my little apartment over cheap dinners, reading the Time...

This announcement of Delays Ahead on Cosmos Malick — complete with an Albertina Walker shout-out — is relevant to readers of my other blogs also.

It is late April 2026. If you want to get a Mac you want, you cannot go into any Apple Store and pick the Mac you want. A Mac mini with 64GB of RAM, ordered today, ships in sixteen to eighteen weeks. A Mac Studio with 256GB of RAM ships in four to five months. …

Finished reading: Twilight of Authority by Robert Nisbet, from 1975. Nisbet has long been an important writer for me, but this, the only one of his major books I hadn’t read, is a disappointment, vague and full of moot assertions. There’a a provocative point in the Preface,...

One lawn down the street from us is filled this evening with fireflies! — or lightning bugs, as we called them in Alabama when I was growing up. It’s so wonderful to see them: they are rare now (I hadn’t seen any for years) but they filled the summer evenings of my childhood. Sitting cross-legged on the porch and watching the lightning bugs under the pecan trees was one of the defining experiences of my whole sensibility.

I just said this to Claude: "I want to show people that RSS isn't just for news. It can be for mindless social media rants too." ;-)

Software brain says *Go faster; do more; the only mistake you can’t fix is having gone too slow.* Hardware brain says *Slow down; do less; focus; strive for perfection and never settle for less than excellence; mistakes are forever.*