FeedCity

Yesterday, regarding the “Magic Cursor” feature Google teased for its upcoming Googlebook/Aluminium OS platform, I wrote: Shaking your cursor over something is an interesting gesture. The only feature I’m aware of that uses that gesture is MacOS’s feature that makes your...

Many people have already written about the chatbot-generated phishing scams directed at writers: We love your writing and can’t wait to promote your book etc. But what surprises me is how many of them there are. I get them almost every day now. Fortunately, it didn’t take long for spam filters to figure them out … which is interesting in itself. Such messages are unlike typical spam in most respects, so what gives them away?

Update: I originally posted this item thinking the aluminium-os.com website was official. It’s not. And the fact that it’s not is only mentioned in small print in the page footer. My bad, and my apologies for not noticing. No wonder I thought the descriptions were so un-Goog...

After I published AI is the New Netflix, Surj Patel, a former colleague, intellectual sparring partner, and long-time reader, asked a sharp question. Given my argument that AI will drive the next wave of upstream traffic, are we headed toward more of a superscaled peer-to-peer model, away from the hub-and-spoke, client-server architecture that underlies the …

I wish they had an outliner in Claude. I would use it. ;-)

BTW, here's the JSONL version of Scripting News. It has the same data as the RSS file, but in the format that AI apps are looking for, so I am told. I thought I'd try to kick this off by pushing an RSS flow through the pipe. It's like using the Grateful Dead to boot up podcasting. I needed something to put out on the wire and I had this feed handy.

Thinking about adding <source:inReplyTo> to the source namespace. Its value is a URL, by default, and has an optional isPermaLink attribute, a boolean, to indicate if it's not a permalink. Works just like the guid element in RSS 2.0. I will also add support for that in the FeedLand database, and flow it out through the socket interface. Actually that's pretty close to a full spec, at least in rss.land where we take simplicity seriously. ;-)

I reached a point in my Claude work where now I can do vibe coding, in a world that I used to just be a programmer in. This means if I want to do a heavy lift, I can tell Claude what I want and it can do really big corner turns, which is something I am (as a human) terrible at, and thus resist. Today I redesigned the basic user interface of the app, and didn't read any code, I was just giving orders, and it was doing what I asked, even if every little thing it did would have been a full day's work. It's remarkable how it can do very complex things in a few seconds.

And the web framework i'm working on can do almost all the things I want to do for now, but I want to suck everything into it, and turn the whole thing into a vibe coding amusement park. So many projects I want to do, and so many I want to do with you.

Frank Hughes, A Somerset Farm (c. 1930)

Elizabeth Lopatto, reporting for The Verge (gift link): Today was closing arguments in the Musk v. Altman trial, and I almost feel bad writing about the unbelievable demolition derby I just witnessed. Steven Molo, Musk’s lawyer, stumbled over his words. He at one point c...

After posting the previous item referencing dickpanels, a term I’ve been using since 2022, it occurred to me that they could also be called dickovers (like popovers, but dickheaded). The latter sounds more clever, but I worry it’s less clear. I’m seldom so indecisive, so I’m running a Mastodon poll.

Una Hajdari, reporting for Euronews: A new independent institute dedicated to making artificial intelligence safer for children will beformally [sic] presented at the Danish Parliament on Tuesday, with former European Commission executive vice-president Margrethe Vestage...

Currently listening: The Danish String Quartet, Keel Road. Healing music. ♫ 

Calif, a security research team, on their blog: Many security experts consider Apple devices to be the most secure consumer platform. The latest flagship example is MIE (Memory Integrity Enforcement), Apple’s hardware-assisted memory safety system built around ARM’s MTE ...

Speaking of being ahead of the curve: there’s a new book on what’s wrong with the whole “cultural Marxism” discourse, but I showed what’s wrong with it in this 2018 blog post. 

in Breaking Bread with the Dead I have a riff on R. A. Lafferty’s 1965 story “Slow Tuesday Night” — which, in light of this report by Charlie Warzel puts me ahead of the curve and puts Lafferty waaaaaay ahead of the curve.

Paresh Dave, Lauren Goode, Steven Levy, and Zoë Schiffer, reporting for Wired (News+ link): As Meta employees brace for layoffs next Wednesday, May 20, many say the vibes are horrifically, historically low. “Everyone is unhappy; the only people who are not unhappy are, l...

I have Claude Code hooked up to Chrome. It's crawling around inside the DOM of the running system, like humans do in a debugger. It's a bit like Fantastic Voyage if you've ever seen it. I've been waiting for this moment. Now we can do some really nice UI work.

Geoffrey Fowler, on his blog, which, alas, he calls “a Substack”: I’m joining the Youth AI Safety Institute as its first new employee. It’s a research and testing organization launching today under the umbrella of children’s nonprofit Common Sense Media. Backed by a $20 ...

Galicia, May 2026.