FeedCity

Synopsis: Four drug-addled Englishmen are lost, confused, and at one another’s throats until a quiet, friendly Texan comes along to give them new hope and a new sense of purpose. 🍿

Every phone now ships with an assistant. You ask, it answers. Lame. We built a phone that writes software instead. The app idea you’ve had in your notes for years. The side hustle you will never get around to building. The weird thing only you would want. Describe it, answer a few questions, and it’s on your home screen — yours, working, sendable to a friend. No app store between you and your ideas. The first fifty units go to teams who’ll push on it and tell us what breaks.

Jason Snell: Apple’s most valuable asset is its brand. Not its real estate, not its intellectual property, not even any particular product. Even the mighty iPhone has no value if, over time, the traits that differentiate it from competitor products are erased. Apple’s br...

Timothy Pratt, the Guardian: The US Department of Justice is attempting to prosecute an Atlanta resident in connection with the movement against the police training center known as Cop City because he had GrapheneOS on his phone, an open-source operating system that enables users to enter a passcode and wipe a phone clean. […] Meanwhile, […]⌥ Permalink

Natalie Kaufman, in a Wall Street Journal article headlined “Young Adults Are Letting AI Do Their Talking for Them — Even in Person”: [Niharika] Abbaraju, 20, is part of a growing cohort of young adults outsourcing deeply human tasks to AI. Many, struggling with social anxieties great or small, will seek assistance ahead of a […]⌥ Permalink

BTW, I had no idea the WordPress connection was coming and here it is.

Over at Cosmos Malick: The Girl’s Story. 

This is something. WordPress now supports RSS.chat in an interesting way, and it's surprisingly deep. Once it's crossposted a message to RSS.chat, any comment in response will be cross-posted to the comment thread of the post on RSS.chat. What's great about this is that you never can tell what people will do when you are on the web. Matthias is a friend, I was on his podcast last year. If people use this connection and see how it works. Then we'll get an idea of where to go next.

Of course we have a feed for RSS.chat updates.

How we document APIs. We did a lot of work on API docs this morning. Claude had done a draft, which we published, and turned over to users, and on review realized it was insufficient. That was the word I used, and rolled up my sleeves, told Claude we're going to get this stuff right and set a pattern as we go forward. At the end I asked Claude to summarize what we agreed on, and it's more or less exactly what I was aiming at. If you're working with Claude on docs for APIs, I offer this up as open source, feel free to point your Claude at this doc. I have a vested interest, in my job I read a lot of awful API docs.

Putting themselves in customers’ shoes today, how many ads do Apple’s executives want stuck in the results when they search for an app in the App Store?

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF to promote their MCP server. Debugging SSO, managing users, adjusting auth policies, configuring branding: every configuration task has lived behind a UI that only a human can drive.

The WorkOS MCP server gives agents the same access as your dashboard login. Hundreds of operations, discoverable at runtime. Connect in one command via OAuth, with scoped tokens instead of a master API key. Pass a screenshot of your marketing site and ask your agent to match the login page. If a human had to do it before, an agent can do it now. Connect your agent today.

A shipwreck with a great deal of champagne (and other things) 

I’m teaching a class this term called Four Big Books. I describe it here. 

Mapping Trump’s crypto empire on Last Week Tonight

A frequently asked question about RSS.chat. How about adding external feeds to the timeline. Of course we thought of doing this, and even started development, you might even find some traces in the code of that attempt. The thing about bootstraps is you can't anticipate all...

A new utility exports the contents of a Frontier object database into a single large JSON file. I needed this because I'm preparing to move my code editing suite to Drummer running on new Mac hardware. Took a long time to get here, but with Claude's help the project looks possible. In the meantime the list of stuff I want to do with RSS.chat, while much shorter than it was, still has some juicy bits in it.

Many of the questions about RSS.chat center on how do we make this centralized. I don't want this, I want feed readers to add some features and then we can connect these systems together in a million different ways. They just have to think differently about subscription lists. Not radically different, even.