FeedCity

It's like we're living in a science fiction movie. Some of us are working with the aliens. At first the journalists only fear was driven by their natural narcissism, all that matters is they get paid for their writing. Now all they can see is the much larger threat to humanity. What if the aliens decide to destroy humanity, or turn earth into a bypass on a freeway. In the movie I'm a scientist, played by Jeff Goldblum or Brad Pitt and my love interest is played by Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lawrence or Amy Adams and we're racing against time to really connect with the aliens who we are sure mean us well and offer the way past our myrid crises to get to the next stage of civilization. But wait, Bradley Whitford plays the evil politician trying to sell out the aliens to a food manufacturer who thinks they could make an excellent meat sauce for spaghetti.

John Brayton:

Unread 5.0 is available now from the App Store. This update adds these improvements and more:

• Improvements around hero images, article list thumbnails, and widget thumbnails
• Syncing with FreshRSS and Miniflux
• The ability to quickly mark old articles read

I’m a NetNewsWire man personally, but I’ve long admired Unread as a different, very good take on a feed reader. Just a gorgeous app. One of the very best things about RSS is that feed readers take such different shapes and approaches.

Tim VanBenschoten:

Post Peek is an independent, open-source project inspired by Litterbox, the Safari extension by Zhenyi Tan (And a Dinosaur).

Paul Ford, writing for The New York Times (gift link):

For a while, I must admit, it looked as if software developer roles like mine were done for. How could we fight against tireless robots? But our industry is slowly realizing that making truly cutting-edge software still requires humans to think and work together, to maximize their skill sets and to practice their respective crafts. A.I. can write very good software, but it also makes it easy to do someone else’s job badly, which is part of why all those projects fail. Now that everyone can code, it’s become clearer why many shouldn’t.

Ford, linking to his own column on Bluesky:

I just want one killer app before we get a killer robot.

My old friend Jim Ray now runs developer relations at Bluesky, and part of that gig is hosting a podcast, Off Protocol (“a show about building a better Internet”). I was delighted to appear as his latest guest. I generally don’t like talking about my career, but I did enjoy talking about it with Jim. He has that effect on people.

T-Mobile, in their iPhone 18 Pro / iPhone Duo press release: Plus, T‑Mobile is one of the first to support Apple’s new iPhone Handoff feature, where customers with two compatible iPhone models can use their T‑Mobile number across both devices and choose which phone is ac...

Tristan Buckmaster, professor of mathematics at NYU, in his own statement, regarding his and Levent Alpöge’s interactions with employees at OpenAI regarding this week’s math-proof controversy: I asked when the first prompt had been sent by them. This question was not ans...

When people get to work with the new Frontier with Claude or some other AI tool, you can have it search in frontier.root based on a conversation with it. It can decide on its own where to look for prior art. I keep finding things like this now that I'm working in the new software.

Read: “Pluralistic: LLMs are real, AI is fake”. Cory Doctorow in Pluralistic. Published September 12, 2026. When ChatGPT's chatbots deployed this tactic, they weren't "setting their own goals" or displaying worrying initiative. They were rolling out a tactic that has been understood by American middle-schoolers for about two decades. Posted: September 12, 2026 at 2:33 PM UTC. Tagged: artificial intelligence, OpenAI.

Lots of stuff going on around WordPress for the last couple of years, and every bit of is a distraction from what I want to do to help the web get back on its feet. I remember how great it was when everything could hook into everything else. The web was like Unix. Today's "...

Screen shot of new Frontier verb, string.addressToString, added yesterday. The comment at the head of the function explains. You're seeing it in the script editor in Atlantis. The Debug button is there to remind me that it's the biggest item on the todo list. We're now building the system that will make Frontier an easily updateable runtime. Once we're there I think we'll be at the summit of the mountain. We know how to work from that point. Find a bug? Fix it, test it, release it. We already have a backlog of parts to update. And it's great to have Claude here being the book keeper. It is imperfect, but it's way better than I am at managing details.

The world may be falling apart, and the Mets suck even though they have the most expensive roster in MLB, and my house needs work and I can't find a contractor I like, but I'm in a great mood. Partially because the weather is so nice, chilly in the morning, but it gets up to...

I have been busy with new-iPhone-week stuff, so I haven’t been able to follow either of these stories closely, but Marcus summarizes them both well. First: the drama regarding OpenAI claiming a solution to the Navier–Stokes math problem. In short, OpenAI continues to prove i...

David Smith on Mastodon: The eve of iPhone 18 Pro pre-orders seems a good time to look back at the iPhone 17 family’s adoption. Here’s the 17 family data as a percentage of overall usage for Widgetsmith. Generally they followed the usual adoption pattern, and overall did very well ending at around 20% of total […]⌥ Permalink

Brian X. Chen, New York Times: But even though they’ve been around for years, foldable phones aren’t particularly popular. They’re expensive, awkward and not as durable as regular smartphones. So why did Apple build one? […] Foldable phones, which account for less than 2 percent of the handset market, may be the only part of […]⌥ Permalink

i've gotten six of these emails today alone, and all of them are offering to cite the work that i've already researched and cited myself because i, y'know, wrote it “The Worst Spam Emails: Inside iLands' AI Agent Hustle”. Ernie Smith in Tedium. Here’s what’s going on. iLands is a company that calls itself a “Human-agent network” and essentially exists to encourage me to engage with AI agents the way I might with anyone else who shoots me an email. It essentially created Fiverr for autonomous bots. These agents are not trying to make money for their creators. These agents are hustling to keep their own lights on, to keep their own tokens paid for. And they’re doing so by gunning for my job. Posted: September 12, 2026 at 3:47 AM UTC. Also posted to: Mastodon, Bluesky Tagged: artificial intelligence, spam.

David Smith, developer of the widely-used Widgetsmith, on Mastodon: The eve of iPhone 18 Pro pre-orders seems a good time to look back at the iPhone 17 family’s adoption. Here’s the 17 family data as a percentage of overall usage for Widgetsmith. Generally they followed...

Read: “Some thoughts on the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem”. Simon Willison in Simon Willison's Weblog. Published September 8, 2026. If I use ChatGPT to help me partially solve a Millennium Prize problem, what are the chances that my work will influence training such that a later model helps someone else solve it first? Posted: September 11, 2026 at 10:43 PM UTC. Tagged: artificial intelligence, ethics, LLMs, OpenAI.