FeedCity

Sometimes I need to use a Google-style search engine to find something on a reference site. That no longer works in Google. This is a major feature pullback. So far all we've heard in journalism is how it hurts their bottom line, but nothing about the world's information architecture. This is something like every bridge in the world being blown up at the same time, and I don't think that's an exaggeration.

Lorde, suspended. Live at Way Out West, August 15, 2026.

Finished reading: Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose 📚

How much would you pay for a smarter baby? — I can imagine the lawsuits later: “We paid for a smarter baby but instead we got a child who’s compassionate and generous! We’ve been screwed!” 

My thanks to Drata for sponsoring last week at DF. Their message is short and sweet: Leverage autonomous AI agents to automate compliance, manage internal and third-party risk, and continuously prove your security posture.

Tech is very competitive, I learned, even when you give your work away, which I have been doing for a couple of decades. Maybe even especially when you give it away. I want to work with other people, and am always making invitations. When I see a product that fits in with wh...

Via Ian Leslie, a beautifully designed page on ordinary abundance.

Standing in line for two hours and a concert starting at 01:30 is a bit of a stretch for this old geezer, but fuck yes, it was so worth it!!1! (⁠╥⁠﹏⁠╥⁠)

Nina’s first gig in Sweden & first time playing her brand-new song (50 seconds in).

Ninajirachi live at Pustervik, Göteborg, on August 14, 2026. 🎵

Jeff Johnson: Despite my history of uncovering App Store frauds, I rarely go looking for these things intentionally! They’re just so pervasive and obvious, they jump out at me. In this case, I was looking at the list of top paid Safari extensions in the Mac App Store, because two of my own extensions are […]

Alex Chan (Hacker News): Many of these outages were caused by a single bug, deep in SQLite. It took months of intense forensics to track it down. […] This lack of reliable trigger conditions meant we couldn’t reproduce the bug synthetically. Instead, we had to rely on deploying passive, forensic telemetry in our live environment […]

Galicia, May 2026.

One of the highlights of any year for me is when I get to play in a James Dempsey Breakpoints Jam — and we’ve got one coming up in a few days!

It’s this Thursday Aug. 20 at Stoup Brewing in Ballard. Start gathering around 6 pm to hang with fellow Apple nerds. The show will start around 7 pm.

See the Xcoders post James Dempsey and the Breakpoints Jam — More Details for the full scoop (including details on where at Stoup, the food truck, etc.).

This year’s band, the conditional Breakpoints, will be me, Laura Savino, and Ken Case. We’ve played together in various configurations before — the Seattle band works. 😎

If you live in or near Seattle, I really hope you can make it! And say hi. I’m friendly. So’s everybody in the band. 🏝️

I was looking for a good screen shot of Radio UserLand. Just found this one on Facebook, and hope to preserve it via the search feature here.

The exposed lens covers are made of sapphire, not glass, and are thus incredibly scratch resistant. And even if, somehow, do you pick up a scratch on a lens cover, it almost certainly won’t affect image quality at all.

This page from Google Design on their “Material 3” UI language came to my attention after my snarky post about the ungainly new to-do app they bizarrely bragged about on Twitter/X this week. I don’t think this “Material 3” page is new — I think it’s a few years old — but I’d...

I'm still a NYT subscriber, although I don't read it very often, but when there's news I will go there. Anyway, they used to have a 10-article per month gift link rule. I used to ration them, but if by the end of the month I hadn't used them up I'd share links more liberally. A few weeks ago they lifted the limit. I thought that's nice, the NYT found that the web was still useful to spread the news, literally. I thought maybe they had a vision beyond the usual dotcom slop. Not so fast. Your friends can't read the articles unless they become a registered user. I bet they always had that, but this time I read the smaller print. Why can't some company do something just for goodwill and free advertising, without such an obvious business model? Having people think you care counts in the business world. As Marge Gunderson from Fargo would say, "Don't you know that?"

What if one day Claude could only speak Chinese.

I've been doing this for all of this year, and the frustration finally led me to this rule, which I just asked Claude to play back for me. I offer it to you, a human, on how to get your Claude to work better for you, as it does for me. What follows is what Claude wrote as I ...

Why Ruskin should have been horsewhipped. 

Mark Zuckerberg, in a (much) longer version of an essay originally published last month in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal: The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will […]