FeedCity

I applied to speak at WordCamp US in Phoenix in August. I want to give a rip-roaring speech about how WordPress is at the center of the universe and it doesn't even know. Let's get busy filling in the blanks. Writers are ready. If we build it they (developers) will come. To much sulking, let's get out there and kick some butt. I excerpted elements of my application on Twitter.

Really Open this time vs Really Simple last?? Hmm.

Dries Buytaert says you have to grow the ecosystem, not just yourself.

My latest mixtape captures my attempt to get over the depression and anxiety that can accompany “The Gulp” in between when you finish something and finally push it out into the world. (Don’t worry, it has plenty of bops!) It’s also the first time I’ve ever given a mixtape an epigraph. (From James Hollis’s Finding Meaning […]

Yeah I’m 😂 as I eat lunch. 

Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.

I’m not sure if this link works outside the US, but Apple TV’s MLS Wrap-Up show has highlight from the LA Galaxy vs. Houston Dynamo FC match they shot exclusively using iPhone 17 Pros. Follow the link, choose “English”, and then choose “Full Replay” — then skip to 40m:15s or so.

They show one of the professional camera rigs they used, with a long lens attached. I’d say the match footage looks good, but also definitely does not look as good as usual. Impressive for a phone camera, but I’d be a tad annoyed if I were a Galaxy or Dynamo fan and one of my team’s matches was used for a stunt like this.

If you want to know who’s responsible for the good karma the Knicks are experiencing look to Kevin Durant. While while he was trying to build some weird rivalry between the Knicks and the Nets, the Knicks were building a contender.

The decline of pushball = the decline of civilization. 

Now that I have three blogs — The Homebound Symphony, Cosmos Malick, and micro.blog — I really don’t know what I would do without MarsEdit. What a great app. 

Another great thing about building software with Claude Code, I can implement something the simple way knowing that later on I can change it to work in the more complex way without having to relearn all the code. Claude doesn't have any trouble with piled up complexity. This is a fundamental change in the way I develop functionality. There was a very real limit to the complexity my mind could handle, but now with a sort of infinite size disk for my brain whatever I want to do as long as it can be described in almost mathematical terms, we can do it. It's another layer in the stack. We haven't had one of those in a my lifetime, they were all invented before 1955. Seriously big deal.

The big wait betw Knicks series isn't just hard on the team, it's confusing for the fans/addicts like me. It's about the time of year that the Knicks are no longer in, and two teams I don't care about enough to watch are in the Finals. Maybe one or two games. It's like jury duty, at some point you realize you're so confused because you're in a courtroom, but where is the jury. Oh no the jury is inside me. Who's in the finals this year? We are. Geez I guess I've finally succumbed, I never think of myself as part of a team, but now I actually feel like I'm part of it. Will have to think about that.

The most important point about rising AI use in the arts is simply this: Millions of people desperately want affirmation. They don’t want to go to the trouble of writing or painting or drawing or making music, but they want people to believe that they have done so. We should be thinking often about the intensity of the need to be recognized, to be thought not basic but special. 

In which I disagree with Edward Mendelson about Auden’s Christianity. 

Dan Goodin, reporting for Ars Technica: The technique, laid out in a research paper, exploits a side channel, a form of leak resulting from physical manifestations such as electromagnetic emanations, data caches, or the time required to complete a task. By measuring the ...

Scott Hanson is working on the Baseline theme for WordLand.

I've hesitated at calling FeedLand a feed reader. I'm concerned people would stop listening right there. They know what a feed reader is. But FeedLand is not like most feed readers. Your subscription list is public, as it is in Twitter or Facebook. And when you're looking at ...

Writing a lot of test posts. And thus have coined some (mostly) rhyming pairs of words. Greek sneakers. Geek peekers. Feast of yeast. Villa in Manila.

The best thing I have seen so far on Pope Leo’s encyclical is this reflection by Yuval Levin, in which Yuval notes with pleasure Leo’s use of the story of the Tower of Babel but wishes that the story had been pursued further. For anyone who might be interested, some years ago I wrote a series of posts on the theme of building in the Bible: 

• One 
• Two 
• Three 
• Four 
• Five 

I think they hold up pretty well. 

It’s been a while since I posted something for the Pacific Wave Appreciation Society. I’m going to try doing a Wednesday Wave series.

For the video, I dusted off my DJI Osmo 3 gimbal to provide a steadier viewing experience. 😇

Shot today at 1:35, swells 6.8 ft. 🌊

Some years ago Edward Mendelson published an essay about Auden’s secret acts of kindness — sorry about the paywall — and someoine who studies Auden keeps stumbling across his generosities. Just today, for example, I happened to read that (a) when James Schuyler had his first...