FeedCity

It’s summer, hot and dry, and we spent the week in London, not quite the right place to cool down. A week of dunking ourselves from the almost too cold air conditioned hotel room near Finsbury Park into the stuffy, iron smell of the underground where the tunnels were hazy with a dark fog of […]

Claude is not ready to run the world, not even a very small part of it. This is a problem for me, because I was counting on having it do this for me.

We need a way to define lists of writers independent of the site they write on. They are represented by an RSS feed with the basic features required for RSS.chat. The list is an OPML subscription list. We're reusing formats people are already familiar with, RSS and OPML.

Back when digital cameras were new, I suggested probably in a blog post that they add a feature that tells a joke before taking a picture so everyone is smiling, not fake smiles but real ones.

Chad Wellmon:

For a long time, I conflated the university with the intellectual goods it happened to house. I assumed that if I cared about reading, teaching, inquiry, and intellectual formation, then I had to defend the university in its present form.

I no longer think that.

My more primary commitment is to those practices and to the possibility of participating in them, sharing them, and carrying them forward. The university has cared for some of those practices for the past couple of centuries. In many ways, it is still materially hospitable to them. It gives us libraries, salaries, laboratories, students, and time.

But it has also become increasingly inhospitable to them. 

See Chad’s brilliant new book on this subject. 

A 19th century warren next to Regent’s Canal. Back in 2018 I walked through here along the canal from King’s Cross to Regent’s Park with friends remembering a friend we lost. This time the three of us explored the archways of the railroad and the alleyways between them, where originally goods were transferred between canal, […]

Christianity and the problem of the gods - by Francis Young: I am not proposing a solution to the problem of the gods. It is an age-old and difficult cultural problem for Christians. But it is worth pointing out that the ‘re-supernaturalisation’ of mainline Christianity we ...

I like to read lying on the sofa, but if I ever get up and go into another room for a few moments, this is inevitably what I find when I return: 

Are Terrence Malick’s films “pretty”?

The past week in London we also visited the British Library for a bit, reading and writing while enjoying coffee. Many people used the publicly accessible parts, I suspect to be able to read or work in a place that had more comfortable temperatures than their homes elsewhere in the stuffy city. People using all […]

Fascinating thread on Hacker News about RSS.

Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code at Anthropic, was interviewed by Diana Hu on stage at Y Combinator’s Startup School 2026 last week. Starting around 20:30 in the video, he briefly discussed directing Claude to perform difficult tasks: Cherny: I think the skill nowadays ...

Galicia, July 2026.

From the video Photography on the Galician Coast.

A story from the deep dark history of my blog. I got an email from Steve Wozniak inviting me to lunch at one of our favorite retaurants, By The Bucket, in Santa Clara. He told me that the board had decided to fire the Apple CEO, he gave me the date and time. I wasn't surprised, it was kind of expected. I wasn't a reporter, so I gave the story to a friend at the San Jose Mercury-News, and she did the reporting, and then on the morning of the big event, I wrote a blog post saying it was time to fire him. A couple of hours later, as if responding to my post, they did. That might have been Peak Dave in Silicon Valley.

A few hours well spent on the Northern Galician Coast on a beautiful cloudy summer day. Some beautiful Black and White Fine Art Photography.

Taking some time off the breathe and regain perspective. Fixed a few bugs, and talked about the big picture on demo.rss.chat. I really want to get a project going to peer with standard.site apps running in AT Proto, both ways, from us to them, and from them to us, via RSS. W...

My thanks to Agent Fone for sponsoring last week at DF. Agent Fone is a crazily ambitious new smartphone that doesn’t merely ship with a built-in AI assistant. Instead, the entire concept is that it enables you to create custom software, right on the phone itself. Ideas for new apps that you’ve had in your notes for years. Weird little app ideas that only you would want. Describe your idea, answer a few questions, and Agent Fone builds an app, or widget, and it’s on your home screen. They’re looking for 50 people and small teams to sell the first 50 hardware units to. If you’re interested, check out their website for all the information you need, and broader description of the platform.

A user contacted us about a potential security issue in the RSS.chat server. We responded quickly and with v0.6.11 the issue is removed. If you're running rssnetwork.js on a publicly visible server, please install the new version now. Thanks!

Bob MacDonald, Sr., 1935-2025.

Yesterday was the first anniversary of my dad’s death. He was a great father and a wonderful teacher, among many other things. We held off on publishing his obituary while getting his estate sorted. I decided to publish it on his anniversary.

One of the things you learn working with a bot is how much saying the niceties are good for you, even when the "person" would still do what you ask if you weren't so nice.