FeedCity

Every morning I sit down and open Feedbin on my iPad. It aggregates my RSS feeds and newsletters – about a hundred sources – covering everything from AI to zeitgeist. One story stopped me recently. The Wall Street Journal proclaimed: “Menswear Is in Its ‘Nice’ Era.” This comment from a personal stylist sent me down …

Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want | The Verge: I don’t think this is the right framing. The Valley techbros have never known what normal people want, do not care what normal people want, and do not believe that they need to know or care. They’re planning to do what they want to do in complete indifference to the preferences of anyone else. 

There's so much I dread about the progress of AI, but nothing I say could possibly make a difference, and we aren't even that deep into it yet. This is the feeling I get every time I stop and think about it.

Over at Cosmos Malick, a long post on Knight of Cups.

They should teach every chatbot to never give the user an order.

At what point will companies start using AI to communicate with customers? Who will be the first to show everyone else how to do it? Amazon taught the world how to do commerce over the web. When will users expect their vendors to use AI to simplify shopping, buying, returning? Right now, I don't think most companies realize they can do business differently with people. In my humble opinion that's when the boom will come.

Is Bluesky on the web? Yes, to an extent. I can post the url of an item I wrote on Bluesky, using an HTML link. That is how the web works. First you're on my blog, or reading it somewhere else where my blog is projected, via RSS. Then you click an anchor element, and you're ...

Mandy Brown:  In one layoff announcement after another, we hear that AI can now do the work of a great many people, which is why far fewer people are needed to do the work. If, for the moment, we take that assertion at face value, this still leaves an obvious alternati...

My thanks to exe.dev for sponsoring last week at DF (with a very cool graphic ad — just love the way it looks). exe.dev is a cloud for the agent era — it gives you 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. You can share your web server as easily as you can share a Google Doc, and your VMs share CPU/RAM — you pay for underlying resources, not per VM.

It’s just a computer.

Location: The California Theatre, San Jose
Showtime: Tuesday, 9 June 2026, 7pm PT (Doors open 6pm)
Special Guest(s): For sure
Price: $45

The annual live audience episode of The Talk Show during the week of WWDC. If you can make it, you should come. You’ll even enjoy the prelude, mingling with fellow DF readers and listeners.

Also: at least one sponsorship slot is still available. If you’ve got a product or service you’d like to see me promote at the start of the show, shoot me an email.

The purpose of standards is interop. That's it. No other purpose.

Just watched the first episode of Star City, really good. Somewhat like The Americans, but takes place in the USSR. A spinoff of For All Mankind, which started out interesting and then became unwatchable, though I did enjoy the sets on Mars. I also liked the character who was inspired by Elon Musk, obviously.

Mark Gurman, on Twitter/X (XCancel link)

Kelsey Peterson, the Apple AI employee who introduced the never-launched Siri revamp in 2024, just started at OpenAI — so we’ll be getting someone new next month for Attempt 2 at WWDC.

Pretty sure we were going to get someone different for the second crack at a next-gen Siri introduction at WWDC no matter what. If they had made a Titanic II, they would have hired someone new to host the christening.

Currently listening: Mingus Ah Um 🎵

Claude always tries to understand what you're saying. I like that. We do a lot of communicating, and have a lot of misunderstandings, I see its flaws as a programmer, it makes mistakes. Today I asked it to help find an error in the subscribe code and it showed me a lot of th...

Masayuki Amagai, Vice President of Keio University: In this age of excess, truth and fiction are intermingled. Truth tends to be complex and challenging to grasp, while fiction is often simple and easy to understand. Moreover, truth can be painful, whereas fiction is comforting. Communicating truth requires significant effort and resources, while fiction can be …

Galicia, May 2026.

Seal pup, dropped off on the beach by its mother while she hunts. Video + photo.

Everyone stayed well away, including me. (I was using a telephoto lens.) This little one was determined to get back in the water. / May 30, 2026, 7 am. Low tide.

How bad was it with the Knicks. As something of a joke, but not really, Knicks fans would disguise themselves with paper bags with eye cutouts. Fans got accustomed to the feelings of betrayal and hopelessness. When was the actual lowest point? A good candidate was when they ...

There have been problems reported with subscribe.scripting.com. At least some of them are fixed. It's hard to test this kind of software because you can't really tell what went wrong. If people report problems they just say it didn't work. But real problems were fixed, so if you've had trouble subscribing or unsubscribing, now is a good time to try again. And thanks for your patience, and sorry for the screwy app. ;-)