FeedCity

this post is obviously against all new things.

I have a new piece at the Dispatch on the best writer about the Second World War, A. J. Liebling. I am told that if you use the promo code JACOBS at checkout, you’ll get 15% off a Dispatch membership.

Regarding my earlier post about the cleverness of Tim Cook’s solution to Apple’s dilemma regarding how to apply for, and accept, a potential tariff refund check without drawing the ire of Donald “Tariff Is My Favorite Word” Trump, at least one reader asked why Tim Cook comm...

Remember the appalling but utterly-unsurprising story two months ago where a team of investigative reporters in Sweden uncovered a company in Kenya contracted by Meta to review video content captured by Meta’s “smart” glasses? They spoke to some of the workers, who told tale...

One more from Jason Snell, from his analysis of Apple’s quarterly results: During a complicated question from J.P. Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee about product margins, Parekh unusually half-answered the question and then stopped and “turned it over to Tim” so that Cook...

Montana, March 2026.

From the video Great photography in Montana... until everything went wrong.

Apparently Substack does not implement MCP, which is basically the XML-RPC of AI. According to ChatGPT they have a limited API that some independent developers have bridged to MCP. But as you would expect from a tight silo like Substack, the API lets you read but not write. They want you to use their editor, what they don't want is to be one of 20 distributors of your writing. They want an exclusive and they get it.

BTW, I pointed to the Wikipedia page for XML-RPC, and noticed that they point to an archive.org copy of a very old version of the website, instead of the updated site which has new reference code written in JavaScript. The old version of the site used Frontier, which is where XML-RPC was developed, but it's not in wide use these days, JavaScript is. Could someone update the Wikipedia page to change the link to the current XML-RPC site? I'm reluctant to do it myself because that's somewhat against the rules.

Welcome to May, the fairest month of all in the NYC area. Almost every day in May is delicious. And today is esp fair, the Knicks moved on to the next round of the playoffs with a record-setting decisive victory over the Hawks of Atlanta. The next opponent is either the Celt...

On this day in 2016 I wrote a screed on Facebook saying how I wanted to turn it into a blogging platform including the how and why. The arguments are roughly the same ones about how I want Bluesky to stop paying homage to the limits of Twitter and cozy up to the web and let's...

The backup of this blog for April in OPML format.

Rowan Williams: 

We’ve tried over Christian history, in all sorts of ways and contexts, to imitate other kinds of militancy. And my feeling about that is: well that worked, didn’t it! I want to ask: how does Christ change things? One thing I think you can be fairly sure about in the New Testament is that he doesn’t use the techniques of available power systems. ‘This is how the kings of the gentiles work.’ What we do in our militancy for the faith, that is our committed and courageous attempt to witness to what we’ve been given and make it available to others, we do by lives of holiness — which means an awful lot of hard work for the vast majority of us who are nowhere near that level and who resort to shortcuts all the time. 

My endorsement of this — and of his comments on the demonic in political life — is absolute. 

I have Thoughts about the Battle of Arnhem.

Oh, how I wish I could be in France tomorrow for Lyon’s Algorave. Just look at this poster by Adel Faure! And most of the artists have their own cute websites. Pure joy! The open web has really been on a roll lately.

Even if the music isn’t for you, go explore these lovely artist sites.

Buried on page nine of Microsoft’s 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026 is a paragraph worthy of attention. Why? What does it reveal? A lot. For starters, Microsoft now holds approximately 27 percent of OpenAI on an as-converted basis, accounted for under the equity method. The total funding commitment is $13 billion, of …

MG Siegler returns to the show to discuss Apple’s announcement that Tim Cook is stepping aside (into the role of executive chairman) and John Ternus will become CEO.

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Uwa Ede-Osifo, reporting for The Guardian: On any given day, Los Angeles’s Hollywood Boulevard teems with tourists and street performers clustered near the area’s many landmarks. But in recent months, the strip has been set abuzz for a new reason. Throngs of mostly adol...

This Knicks fan is happy! ❤️