FeedCity

A silo is a place where developers feel protected from the unbounded world of the web. In return they are completely controlled by the silo owner. The owner decides where you can go, and can and do revoke privileges. Developers in silos are mostly powerless. Companies usual...

Last week I spent a few days in Switzerland. I went to Zürich on Thursday to meet up with a few people, having a pleasant chat with Beat Döbeli about his 30 year old PKM system Biblionetz, and a nice dinner with long time open data friend André Golliez, who chairs the Swiss Data Alliance. […]

One of the strangest figures of the first half of the 20th century was Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who began his life as an English prince, the grandson of Queen Victoria, but as an adolescent was plucked from his life at Eton and transported to Germany wh...

Gergely Orosz: Meta has a booming business, and is already a beneficiary of AI via increased ads revenue. Meanwhile, my Facebook feed is filled with fake, AI-generated videos, with hundreds of comments from bots and people who seemingly don’t realize it’s AI. It all seems like just more content for Meta to show ads next […]⌥ Permalink

Ben Chapman, reporting for The Independent in 2019: After 40 years of advertising its lager as “Probably the best beer in the world”, Danish brewer Carlsberg has confessed that the famous slogan may not be true. Reacting to falling sales and increasingly harsh comments f...

Early adoption of new technology is generally considered a young-person thing, but maybe Snap Specs will turn that notion on its head. Direct sales in retirement homes?

Apple announced this week it would be implementing its “alternative app marketplaces” and “alternative app payments” schemes to residents of Brazil after a settlement with the country’s antitrust authority. Michael Tsai has a good roundup of the history of this settlement and reactions from developers. The people living in places where Apple’s standard App Store […]⌥ Permalink

NBC News:

The Trump Mobile T1 phone, originally marketed as “Made in the USA,” is nearly identical to the two-year-old HTC U24 Pro, a phone made by the Taiwanese company HTC using Chinese parts, according to a technical analysis the repair-guide and parts company iFixit conducted in partnership with NBC News.

That report is paywalled, but NBC News’s five-minute video is on YouTube, and iFixit has a full teardown report of their own. The only thing that’s surprising is that the Trump T1 doesn’t cost much more than the HTC-branded one ($500 vs. $470).

The Wall Street Journal on Monday: Fox Corp. said it is acquiring Roku in a deal valued at around $25 billion, making a major bet on the future of ad-supported streaming. The deal — Fox’s largest to date — brings together a media company known for its live news and sport...

“They’re about power, aren’t they, and the bloody powerful blokes who wear them.”

Maybe I’m all wet and these things are stylish, no matter what they do to your ears.

“Hey buddy, nice frames.”

Seinfeld’s father tried them out too.

Re: my post on Verizon flat-out admitting their business practices have resembled a scheme from Dr. Evil, Domino’s did something similar regarding their pizza a while back. This 2021 story for Inc. by Jeff Haden describes the turnaround.

This piece of mine is half-essay and half-homily.

The WordPress community likes to say that WordPress powers a certain percentage of the web. This always bothered me, couldn't figure out why, until just now. WordPress is part of the web, that's the nature of the web. There should be no difference between how you connect via...

Today's song: "You who choose to lead must follow. "

I rarely ask my Echo to play a song, because after it plays it wants to know if I want to hear a notice. And there goes the buzz from having listened to one of my favorite songs that perfectly catches the moment.

Whoopi Goldberg says the Knicks should visit the White House. "I want all those black men to stand in our house and remind all of those people — as we try to remind the vice president — that when you try to destroy one part of history, you're destroying all of our history." So true.

I've been trying to understand what the Knicks winning means to me. I'm reminded of the feeling when we sold my mother's house, the house I grew up in, the one my father had died in nine years earier. The site of every battle and come-from-behind victory (I graduated college...

John Ruskin, from The Crown of Wild Olive (1866):

All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty. And I want you to think a little of the deep significance of this word 'taste;' for no statement of mine has been more earnestly or oftener controverted than that good taste is essentially a moral quality. ‘No,’ say many of my antagonists, ‘taste is one thing, morality is another. Tell us what is pretty; we shall be glad to know that; but preach no sermons to us.’

Permit me, therefore, to fortify this old dogma of mine somewhat. Taste is not only a part and an index of morality — it is the ONLY morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, ‘What do you like?’ Tell me what you like, and I'll tell you what you are.

Verizon has sprung for a new ad campaign set in the Austin Powers world, with four stars from the cast — Mike Myers, of course, as Dr. Evil; Rob Lowe as Number Two (Robert Wagner is alive but is 96); Seth Green as Evil’s son Scott, and Mindy Sterling as Frau Farbissina — and...