FeedCity

WSJ:

Vibe slop happens when coders replace the hard work of designing and testing a system with the shortcut of prompting AI to whip it up … and the resulting software won’t stand the test of time. It’s become a big enough problem that the world’s main repository of open-source code — GitHub — has instituted new policies and features to combat it. […] 

These systems are supposed to make senior engineers so productive that companies can lay off junior engineers, but in reality, many companies are trading near-term productivity for long-term woes. Not only does the pipeline of junior talent dry up, but residual effects include buggy software, service outages, security vulnerabilities and mounting technical debt.

Sean Hollister, reporting for The Verge (gift link): Here’s Google’s full statement on withdrawing its proposed modifications to Judge Donato’s permanent injunction, via Google spokesperson Dan Jackson: We’ve agreed with Epic to withdraw our motion to modify the US C...

New rss.chat feature: It now supports feed discovery, so you can subscribe to any html page on the site in a compatible feed reader. I tested it in FeedLand and NetNewsWire and it works. Works on any instance, not just ours.

Indiana, January 2026.

I mentioned the previous post on rss.chat, and it developed into an interesting thread, something that I've never had the option to discuss. AT Proto makes a similar offer to developers that we do. The difference is our world is wide open, it's just already burned-in web prot...

Terrence Malick has a strange double.

Finished reading (for the first time in 30 years): Encounters with the Archdruid by John McPhee. If you’re new to McPhee, this might be the ideal place to start. It’s the book in which he perfects the narrative method he would follow for the rest of his career, and the first one in which he explores the geological themes that would later become his obsession. Nobody is better than McPhee at illuminating difficult questions by showing how real peropla engage those questions, and engage each other. 📚

In my experience in software development, it's good to start small with something useful, learn how it works before adding big new features. That's the basic principle of bootstrapping. I thought that Mastodon, for example, took on too big a job. Same thing for the protocol ...

If you cannot get enough squircle talk, Michael Tsai has a whole roundup of different takes, some of which you may not have seen already. Here is another thing: robbing icons of a variable for creative excellence and flexibility is just another form of context flattening. You know how Instagram and YouTube are host to […]⌥ Permalink

Finished reading: The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut 📚

The European Commission: The European Commission adopted a delegated act today (14 July) introducing new rules that exempt additional products from EU requirements on the removability and replaceability of portable batteries. Under the EU’s Batteries Regulation, portabl...

Wednesday waves (a day late) 🌊👋

Super low tide morning.

Kashmir Hill, of the New York Times (gift link), learned about an A.I.-generated biography of her for sale on Amazon for $27. It is just one of many wholly-generated books available there: Amazon does not mind if people hawk A.I.-generated books on its platform, unless they are truly and deeply terrible. “Charlie Kirk: An Inspiring […]⌥ Permalink

Quiche Industries (Greg de J.): Starting today, Quiche Browser disables AI overviews in search results by default, out of the box. Compare how much space and time they waste. I love the web too much to let that nonsense bury links to real websites made by humans. This ...

Tuesday’s episode of Dithering was a good one, especially for the DF audience, so we’ve moved it outside the paywall and made it free-to-listen on the web. (We don’t (yet?) have an RSS feed that you can put in your podcast player for these occasional free episodes, alas.) I have a slightly different take on Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI than I’ve seen expressed elsewhere.

If you don’t subscribe to Dithering, you probably should. Two episodes per week, 15 minutes per episode. Not a minute less, not a minute more. $7/month or $70/year — or, get it included with the Stratechery Plus bundle.

Added a layer to the Docs menu, the blog posts I've written here and elsewhere, and a podcast, in the Blog posts section.

OpenAI, in a statement to Bloomberg this week:

“While we take these allegations seriously, we’re not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit. We believe in fair competition and allowing people the freedom to work wherever they choose, and we’re focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.”

“We’re not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit” is very different from, say, “This complaint has no merit.” Again, a curious response.

Paul Kafasis: With last year’s release of MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple made a mess of app icons. In the first betas of MacOS 27 (Golden Gate), however, there are signs of a turnaround. We’re urging Apple to continue making improvements, by restoring the ability for MacOS app icons to have distinct shapes. […] After decades […]

Adam Engst: Of the TidBITS readers who chose to respond to the poll, only 1% said they use clear icons on the Mac, and no one admitted to using tinted icons. On the iPhone, clear icons were twice as popular—a whopping 2%—and just 1% of respondents said they use tinted icons. Dark icons, which retain […]

Jason Koebler (tweet, Reddit): The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared data […]