FeedCity

Galicia, August 2026.

It’s sophistry to argue that one can write within a constraint without the constraint affecting the quality of the writing.

Brian Krebs, reporting at KrebsOnSecurity: On Monday, Aug. 31, a source alerted KrebsOnSecurity to a service advertised by a new user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more than 170 million people in North ...

If you want others to follow you, you have to offer them your users. And a format alone has no users.

And you have to trust your users to choose the best product, and you have to have a great product, that they appreciate, even though they have choice.

Just coming out with something better in a format will get you zero uptake. Unless you have users they can switch to their product, they simply won’t hear you.

That’s why Atom never replaced RSS, which already did everything people needed and was already supported by the NYT and the news industry.

That’s why AT Proto will never overcome the huge lead Twitter already has.

For more tips on what does and doesn't matter in open formats and protocols, check out my Rules for Standards-makers.

PS: This started as an early morning rant on Twitter.

My first job after college was on the 39th floor of the Empire State Building. I wrote software for our customers, in BASIC, from a teletype in our office, talking to our mainframe in New Jersey. It seemed magical at the time. But when I hit a bug, a mystery -- you'd try this and that, and not get anywhere on something that seemed so simple, you could stare at the problem for an hour, trying desperate things, getting no closer to the problem. One night, I was the only person in the office, I thought they should put programmers in the Empire State Building with windows that open. I'm having the same feeling with Claude. I know when this project is done, I will have Frontier, and I know what that's like. If I didn't so totally look forward to that I would never try to finish the project, I hate this mode of working with the bot. Ugh.

It's around this time of year that Santa makes his first appearance on my blog. Want to get out in front of the others.

More and more I'll realize that Claude doesn't do anything until you tell it to do it. We have a list of big things that need to be done before shipping. Whenever I get up for a break, I tell Claude to work on its overnight tasks, things we've pre-arranged while I work. Somet...

Just said this to Claude: "This is a very broken piece of software. If you were a real developer you'd never hand off something so broken to your coding partner." If I said this to a human partner they might quit, feeling under-appreciated perhaps. And I can say it to the machine, but it will change absolutely nothing. I really just want to get this project done and start using it, and reduce my reliance on Claude to getting small bugs attended to, or new features, a lot has happened in the 20+ years since I worked on Frontier.

Dan Luu, after finding one wrong prediction after another made by Ed Zitron, comparing him to mediocre futurists, and exploring his writing style: That last sentence really sums up Zitron’s position. “There are so many guys to be mad at the moment”. In this talk, he throws in this jab at Andreesen and blames Andreesen […]⌥ Permalink

Simon Willison:

GPT-6 Astra is “rolling out today to a limited set of organizations and over the coming days will become available to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, as well as through the OpenAI API and AWS” — I’ve not tried it yet myself, so I don’t have a great deal to say about it yet.

It’s going to be API priced at the same rate as Claude Fable 5 and 5.1: $10/million input and $50/million output. This is clearly OpenAI’s Fable competitor, and appears to score higher than Fable on most of OpenAI’s self-reported benchmarks.

1. I love puzzles.

2. I love Rube Goldberg contraptions.

3. I love solving problems (I have an inner-Columbo).

4. People are the biggest piece of the puzzle (again Columbo).

5. It teaches me about myself and my limited vision and imagination (if I had unlimited vision and imagination, I would never program a bug, and if I did it would take me 0 seconds to find it).

6. I yearn to work together with great minds. Programming gives me that, when I use someone's API. And when the API anticipates my needs, and is instantly understandable, I feel the soul of another artist is present. I imagine this is how musicians feel when they play another musician's song or symphony.

I'm sure there's more to it. But today I'm working on a "lite" problem, and I'll figure it out, but right now I'm enjoying the fact that I don't get it.

Back to work Dave!

Howard Oakley: As those new models start shipping on 22 September, the window for the first public release of Golden Gate has narrowed to 15-22 September, with greatest likelihood on the same day as the arrival of those new Macs. […] At the same time as the release of Golden Gate, we should get Tahoe […]

Ryan Whitwam: A US federal judge has sided with Google, ruling that the company will not have to sell its online advertising exchange (previously known as AdX). The US Department of Justice (DOJ) sought this remedy in the long-running ad tech antitrust trial, which Google lost in 2025. However, the remedies imposed upon Google for […]

Ryan Whitwam (Slashdot): The settlement between Google and Epic that aimed to put to rest the companies’ long-running antitrust battle is being withdrawn, and that means third-party app stores are coming to the Play Store. […] While Apple suffered little penalty in its Epic case, Google was tripped up by its anti-competitive management of the […]

Service announcement: I have updated my NOW page. A Now page contains the general activities I’m spending time on these days. It contains the things I’d mention if you would ask me in a conversation what I’m doing currently, after we haven’t spoken for a while. (I am announcing the update of my NOW page, […]

Mark Gurman:

Apple Inc.’s Phil Schiller, one of the most visible and influential executives across both the Steve Jobs and Tim Cook eras, has stepped down from his role leading the App Store and product events.

The 66-year-old executive, who was Apple’s senior vice president of marketing until leaving that job in 2020, made the latest change in recent days, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

This is true, I’ve confirmed. (And the decision was not made “in recent days”, although the org chart change might have been.) Seems natural for this to coincide with the CEO transition. What a run for Schiller.

Finya Swai, reporting for The Hill two days ago: MapQuest has surged in popularity on the app charts after the mapping service said it would not rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America” after President Trump signed an executive order changing its name. The company said its...

Two quick announcements:

Turns out my Sayers biography is already available in digital form — if you’re a subscriber to Oxford Academic: see here.

Over at the Hog Blog, I have a longish essay about the great American autobiographer Pauline Kael. Some links seem to have disappeared from that piece; that’s generally okay, but a key one goes to the interview with Audrey Diwan in the documentary Room 999.

William Bishop of Pew Research: Between scrolling, notifications, and messages, smartphones can be hard to put down. Just over half of U.S. adults say they spend too much time on their smartphone, according to a Pew Research Center survey from May and June 2026. About a third of adults say their smartphone use is about […]⌥ Permalink

Everyone is introducing themselves on the Berkman community mail list, at the beginning of the fall semester, and here's the story I am telling. Good morning. My name is Dave Winer. I was at Berkman in 2003-04, worked on blogging, podcasting, RSS, political blogging and the ...