FeedCity

Natasha of “Team YouTube: Last year, we updated how we count public views for Shorts to better capture how viewers watch on YouTube. Now, we’re aligning all other video formats to this same standard for consistency across the platform. Beginning on 8/24/2026, a view will be counted the moment a video begins to play—from the […]⌥ Permalink

WSJ:

AI is trained in part on what people like, and people prefer the brown-nosing, says Myra Cheng, a computer-science Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University and lead author of a March study on agreeable AI. Participants rated sycophantic AI responses significantly higher in quality and, after interacting with a more obsequious model, said they were more likely to return to the AI.

This bodes ill.

Moby, hitting them congas. Live at Way Out West, August 13, 2026.

I today replaced the last handful of embedded Flickr images with self hosted copies, that merely link back to the source at Flickr. This way I am certain that no tracking by Flickr is possible when you visit this site. Five years ago, I stopped embedding Flickr images for new posts. I also started to […]

Twenty-five years ago, I bought the Gorillaz debut album. But it took me until the day before yesterday to finally see (and hear) them live for the first time… and I was not disappointed!

Gorillaz closing out Way Out West on August 15, 2026. 🎵

The home of The Victorian Society was well chosen. 

Kit Wilson:

In 1968, [Kołakowski] was fired from Warsaw University for “forming the views of the youth in a manner contrary to the official tendency of the country,” banned from teaching and publishing entirely, and placed under constant police surveillance. 

As I come to the end of my teaching career, I am bitterly disappointed in myself: I have never been formally charged with “forming the views of the youth in a manner contrary to the official tendency of the country.” 

Gespot in Maastricht afgelopen weekend. Is zoervleisj een soort rendang? Enquiring minds want to know. Wel zoervleisj gegeten vrijdagavond, maar geheel niet aan rendang gedacht tijdens de maaltijd. Misschien vandaag dan maar rendang?

My friend John Gruber is incensed by the idea that AI watermarking schemes adjust the output of a given LLM so that the output can later be assessed as likely coming from it in particular: They say “imperceptible” and “doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability”. Their words. Not almost imperceptible. Not slightly changes the meaning, quality, […]

Angus taking a break from playing in the garden hose, which is his favorite thing to do that does not involve eating.

For my Buy Me a Coffee supporters I wrote a report from Mission Control. 

It’s unacceptable for a tool to sacrifice an iota of clarity, coherence, meaning, quality, etc. for the purpose of embedding hidden clues within the text to suggest its provenance. The idea that anything other than *my* needs should factor into the generation of text *for me* is patently offensive.

Galicia, August 2026.

From the video Why I work on multiple photography projects at once.

In this video I talk about why I keep several long-term photography projects going at once; some built around a place, some around an idea, some I can't even fully explain yet. I get into how I structure them around the places I keep coming back to, what changes when you return to the same spot over months, and why a project might not ever be totally finished.

In the end, the project might not even be the point, but to pay attention.

Cory Weinberg, Jemima McEvoy, Jessica E. Lessin, and Stephanie Palazzolo, writing for the paywalled-without-gift-links The Information: As Amodei has hopscotched the globe to preach about the potential and risks of AI — from New Delhi to Davos to Sun Valley — Clark has a...

James Padolsey, on the Claude-text-watermarking-to-comply-with-an-EU-regulation imbroglio: The same thought that led to this law could have applied to calculators at the time of their inception, had their outputs revealed themselves through artefacts. Thankfully, a sum b...

The Wall Street Journal (gift link): To help alleviate the supply crunch, Apple is looking to Chinese manufacturers. “The Trump administration is not in favor of that,” Lutnick said in an interview after touring an Apple manufacturing facility in Houston. There have to ...

Brent Simmons posted a note in RSS.chat about how to connect with NNW. I have a fairly detailed response, that says dynamic OPML is the way to go, in both directions. I know serving it publicly will be a problem, that's why we're going to move FeedLand into position to solve that. FreshRSS, InoReader and my own FeedLand already support it. It feels like this is getting established. I still want a podcast client to work here. I've pitched a few of them.

Finished reading: Rogues of the Republic series, book 1. The Palace Job by Patrick Weekes. Published 2012. 438 pages. Started July 17, 2026; completed August 16, 2026. Posted: August 16, 2026 at 3:13 PM UTC. Tagged: fantasy, heist, humor.

XCancel: XCancel is an instance of Nitter. Nitter is a free and open source alternative Twitter front-end focused on privacy and performance. The source is available on GitHub at https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [...] Using an instance of Nitter (hosted on a VPS for ex...