FeedCity

I hate VAR so, so much. ⚽️

The value of a papal encyclical — certainly for non-Catholics and maybe even for Catholics — stems not from the quality of the arguments it makes but rather from the quality of the responses it provokes. Leah Libresco Sargeant’s new piece is an excellent example.

Asturias, June 2026.

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch: With the latest iOS 27 developer beta, Apple is giving testers an early look at one of the upcoming improvements to its AI-powered Siri: the ability to adjust how quickly and expressively the AI assistant speaks. In iOS 27 beta 3, out...

Sometimes Claude's judgement sucks, and that's why Jive coding usually produces a dashboard app. A different piece of software will drive it in a different direction. That's what I meant by AI-izing, in an earlier post.

I continue to be bemused by the sheer number of these AI-generated book-promotion scams — I get them every day. Most of them never make it to my inbox, which speaks well for current spam-filtering software, because they look more legit than spam typically does. This too shall pass, and I will be glad when it does. 

Dorothy L. Sayers: Works and Days is now available for pre-order at Amazon as well as the OUP website. (It’s not yet on bookshop.org.) And the pub date has been moved up to September 28! 

I used to be a single-thread developer, but now I'm multi-tasking, I can work on two things at once. Claude is now able to research and fix certain problems, and his work is in a sandbox where it doesn't have any access to the surroundings, and can't make too big a mess, and it's going great, if there's a mistake it can quickly be corrected.

I think AI is the perfect innovation as we reach the crash point of the climate crisis. Who cares if we burn more CO2 now, the effect is miniscule for the explosive crisis that could be coming any day or week. One that we have no ability to recover from. To say it's unenvironmental would be like complaining that you want more Pepsi from the flight attendant while the plane is crashing into a small city. Anyway, but maybe after the crash, one data center will survive, and maybe the beauty that our civilization created will be sustained.

Inside the big AI companies they are certainly AI-izing every app conceivable, and even teaching the AI's how to AI'ize, because AI inside a standard productivity app which includes social network software will be one of the basic UI tools, and that means hidden technology like SQL databases can now be end user products, so the vision of the designers of SQL that they would make a database a manager could program, would finally be realized.

I'm an independent developer working in Claude Code, we're in the endgame of a product cycle, where the core is working and it can be used for the thing it was designed to do (biggest consideration). This is the time when you need users banging on it and reporting problems. ...

One of the silver linings of AI use is that it makes you a better writer.

Robin Sloan:

Basically, this is one of those designs that might not totally “work”, but the attempt is so vital and so valiant that it punches through the dimension of merely “working” or “not working” into some other space. We’re never going to bust out of the prison of the mobile-optimized, single-column scroll if we don’t try stuff like this. 

I’m so glad Robin linked to this site, which seems to have been made by people who never noticed that the World Wide Web has been taken over by malicious greedy parasite-platforms, but instead just kept experimenting with HTML and CSS in much the same spirit that drove people to customize their MySpace pages back in the day. Maybe in my retirement I’ll become a CSS ninja and obsess over the designs of the ayjay.org world, the way some dudes my age obsessively build scale models of World War 2 fighter planes. 

Katie Paul and Courtney Rozen, Reuters: Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged shortcomings in the company’s sweeping restructuring at an internal town hall on Thursday, saying the systems known as AI agents had not progressed as quickly as he had expected, according to a recording heard by Reuters. […] In retrospect, he said, the “trajectory […]⌥ Permalink

Marcel Thee, Nikkei Asia: Following Australia’s move in late 2025, Indonesia became the first non-Western country to announce restrictions on social media access for users under 16. Rules unveiled on March 6 require platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Roblox to introduce age verification checks and remove underage accounts. The restrictions were supposed to […]⌥ Permalink

Finished reading: Wasteland Warlords series, book 1. Wasteland Warlords 1 by James A. Hunter and Eden Hudson. Published 2023. 150 pages. Started July 6, 2026; completed July 6, 2026. Posted: July 7, 2026 at 4:04 AM UTC. Tagged: fantasy, litRPG, post-apocalyptic.

Finished reading: Discount Dan's Backroom Bargains series, book 3. Kiosk Kingdom by James A. Hunter. Published March 31, 2026. 680 pages. Started June 25, 2026; completed July 6, 2026. Posted: July 7, 2026 at 1:28 AM UTC. Tagged: fantasy, humor, litRPG.

Sam Schott: As of 2026-07-28, this project is archived. It’s been a fun challenge to develop a syncing client, but unfortunately, I find too little time to invest in Maestral these days. I’ve also moved away from using Dropbox myself. Maestral will still remain usable in the medium term, but will no longer be actively […]⌥ Permalink

The USMNT completely unready for this game. I haven’t seen them like this the whole tournament. They are lethargic and confused. How is this possible? ⚽️

The current location of Penguin Random House:  Where Random House’s offices were located before a simple publishing house became a vast conglomerate: