FeedCity

Nate Anderson:

I don’t think this Pope operates according to categories like “throwing shade.” As we saw when Leo tangled with Donald Trump over his war of choice in Iran, Leo sees his job as preaching and proclaiming.

His Gandalf quote may well be targeted at Thiel, or perhaps more broadly at those who think in similar ways. But it is not confrontational or insulting. It is a way of speaking across differences using a line drawn from a shared cultural resource between the two camps. It offers up a different interpretation of Tolkien’s tremendous work to those who see in it a license for warfare, technological disruption, tremendous battles, and global action. Those things exist in the story, and they are exciting, but they are also terrifying and ultimately endured only for the purpose of defending community, hearth, and home.

From the same article, The Eadwine Psalter (c.1155-60)

The Winchester Bible

At the A.I. Epicenter, Technologists Dismiss Pope Leo’s Warnings About the New Technology: Well, of course! Did anyone expect thoughtful response? The people who run the big A.I. companies believe that they are so rich and powerful that they can do anything they want, and don’t require public support to do it. Time will tell if they are correct. 

I know I have to write about the Knicks. It just hasn't sunk in yet that they won the East. And next week we'll be watching them in the NBA finals. It's the team that matters. Brunson is great, despite what I wrote after they went down 2-1 vs the Hawks. But the other players are great too in different ways. And there are so many of them, not just the starters. Every one with a distinctive personality and all of them super smart and committed to the team and each other. What makes it work? You can see it in how they play -- trust. They trust each other. Their fates are intertwined. And they knew it before they had this amazing streak of wins in the post-season. I love the Knicks even when they lose. I'm not sure how you love them when they are champions. We'll figure it out.

Have you noticed that sometimes Claude is great and other times an idiot. Maybe it's me. I have to remember that Claude is not a computer. It's something else.

Tyler Hall: Rejected after six days waiting for review, and four minutes after launching the app for the first time. The app uses one or more entitlements which do not appear to have matching functionality within the app. com.apple.security.network.server I guess they never opened the Settings window during all the time they spent reviewing the […]

OpenAI (Hacker News): This proof is an important milestone for the math and AI communities. It marks the first time that a prominent open problem, central to a subfield of mathematics, has been solved autonomously by AI. It also demonstrates the depth of reasoning these systems now support. […] The proof is available here. The […]

Jeff Johnson: Several of these apps have a link to a privacy policy web page that’s hosted on a generic free site such as sites.google.com, docs.google.com, github.io, wixsite.com, or vercel.app, which is always a bad sign. A couple of the apps use URL shorteners for the privacy policy link: bit.ly and shorturl.at. Why is that […]

Sarah Perez (Hacker News): The era of the “ten blue links” is officially over. At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined “intelligent search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box […]

“CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI.” Aaron Levie, CEO, Box About two months into first encountering ChatGPT, I decided it was time to create a digital version of “me.” Not me, but all …

The latest typewriter interview is with Brad Neely. Several people told me this is the best one yet.

From my letter, “Fledging season”: I spent an afternoon scanning diaries from 2023 for a speaking gig and I came across all the spring entries from when we had owlets in our backyard owl box. I was obsessed with those owlets and I couldn’t help comparing them to the two young humans we had in […]

Tom Stafford:

A lot happened in 2016. It would be easy to imagine that the entire reason for this change was the election of Donald Trump as president, and to stop looking for other causes, but something else also happened which I think we should at least consider, and that other thing says something important about how social media and human psychology interact.

In March 2016 Twitter completed their transition to the algorithmic feed, meaning that it was the default for all users to have their timeline populated by what Twitter thought they would want to see, rather than a chronological feed of posts from people they had decided to follow.

The Photos app surfaced this 2024 photo today. ❤️ Bob (my dad) with the Bob Moore statue at Bob’s Red Mill. I hope they are making pancakes together in heaven. 🥞

Count me a big fan of the infographics the Vatican has helpfully made to illustrate the main points of Leo’s encyclical. 

Mowing the lawn earns you one beer.

Claude just asked if I was breaking for the day. At 10:53AM. Why did it ask me that? Now I can't stop thinking about that. The answer is no. I have a few more hours before I stop.

I need and easy way to do a mini-podcast. An idea that should be said verbally, but it's short and self-contained, about the length of an untitled blog post, like the one you're reading now. Example.

Ultimately your job as a developer is to turn your creation over to users to figure out. Listen to see if patterns emerge. Even better give the users the tools they need to build apps out of our apps, together. This is how humans build layers of tech.