FeedCity

A cloud for the agent era. Use exe.dev to get a pool of VMs with SSH, root, and web auth by default. Secrets injected at the network edge stay out of the LLM’s hands. Persistent servers, internal tools, vibe coding, disposable devboxes, whatever. It’s just a computer.

I have always wanted to own a Montblanc Writers Edition dedicated to Carlo Collodi, the Italian author whose real name was Carlo Lorenzini. He took his pen name from the Tuscan village where his mother was born, and then spent his career writing under a false name about a character who could not sustain one. …

The last few weeks have been pretty miserable, honestly, but tonight I’ve made myself a Frisco and an listening to Ella singing Rodgers & Hart. So for the moment I have absolutely nothing to complain about.

Six years ago, I called for the Gandalf Option — and now I see that Pope Leo has endorsed my call. I admit that he didn’t mention me by name, but come on, the debt is obvious.

Here’s a fun one. Back in 2014 I linked to a post by Jay Haynes in which he projected that with a very reasonable level of annual growth, Apple ought to reach a $3 trillion market cap within 10 years. At the time of his writing, Apple’s market cap was “just” $450 billion, an...

Lizzie Dearden and Amelia Nierenberg, reporting for The New York Times (gift link): The crime Alex Pikula reported to the police was one they had heard before: An e-bike rider had zoomed past as Mr. Pikula left a theater in London’s West End, ripping his phone from his h...

Catie McLeod, The Guardian: Trump Mobile said in a statement that it was investigating the issue — “with the assistance of independent cybersecurity professionals” — in which the full names, addresses and phone numbers of people who filled out preorder forms appeared to ...

Galicia, May 2026.

From the video The only way I know how to make great photographs.

Merriam-Webster: The 1820s and 1830s shared another linguistic fad with today: an appreciation for deliberate misspellings. (Kewl, rite?) This trend, which had humorists adopting now-cringey bumpkin personas with ignorance manifested in uneducated spellings, turned no go...

I've worked with both these guys for a long time, and now we're in the same sphere again, and it's very useful to be able to tell them about what I'm doing. They understand. It's not over their heads. Refreshing. ;-) This is happening on Elon Musk's X, but that won't be fore...

My thanks to WorkOS for once again sponsoring DF last week. The context that actually matters isn’t in your database. It’s in the tools your users live in every day. Multi-stage agents stall the moment they hit a step they can’t see. And every missing integration is a different OAuth flow, a different token lifecycle, weeks of plumbing before the agent reads a single record.

WorkOS Pipes connects your agent to the tools your users live in. Pre-built connectors for GitHub, Slack, Salesforce, Google Drive, and more. Pipes handles OAuth, token refresh, and credential storage. You call the real provider API with a fresh token, every time. Your agent pulls context at every step, for as long as the task runs.

Give your agent context.

Good morning. Today is Memorial Day in the United States. We remember all the men and women who gave their lives to keep our country safe and a bastion of liberty for the world. Don't give up on us yet. We are still willing to sacrifice for a good cause.

Speaking of memorials, do you remember UserLand Frontier and all the cool stuff we developed with it? Like Manila, Radio, XML-RPC, RSS, OPML, adding so many cool open features to the web. When people asked how we did all that, I said great tools. That was Frontier. Jake Savin, one of the 1990s UserLanders, is continuing the project to get it running on today's hardware and for today's web. He's documenting it on his blog. I can't wait to use it. Watching him go through the process has been eye-opening. He's basically retracing all the steps it took to create it as done by four or five people over quite a few years, a long time ago. But when it's running and I don't doubt that he will get it running, it'll be fascinating to see if I remembered it correctly. If you remember Frontier fondly, I suggest you subscribe to his feed in your favorite RSS feed reader.

Disney was an early adopter of a then-struggling technology called Technicolor: you can see it in the landmark shorts “The Three Little Pigs” (1933) and “The Grasshopper and the Ants” (1935). But while the artwork and animation in those films are first-rate by the standards of the time, they haven’t aged very well. Contrast them to “The Old Mill” (1937) — which looks gorgeous even today. What happened? The animators were working on the first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and they were learning on the job at an astonishing rate. “The Old Mill” appeared just six weeks before Snow White; it was a harbinger. 

I wrote about Rowan Williams’s new book on solidarity.

Trains at Atocha station Madrid I spent the week in Ciudad Real in Spain, under an hour by high speed train (~200km) south of Madrid. I was there for a plenary meeting of CEN/CENELEC’s joint technical committee (JTC) 25 that works on European standards for data management, data spaces, and cloud & edge. The need […]

I do love a new version of BBEdit, but what I love even more is reading Bare Bones’s release notes.

Terrific, poignant profile of Warriors head coach Steve Kerr by Wright Thompson for ESPN: Kerr doesn’t want the Warriors to end up like the New England Patriots, marred by grudges and grievances. He watched Michael Jordan retire, then unretire, then retire, then unretire...