FeedCity

Issue 111 – Back the winners

From the transcript of Sunday’s Face the Nation on CBS: Shyam Sankar: You know, I take — I think there’s a profound truth to Pascal’s saying that every human has a god-shaped hole in their heart, and it’s important to understand that many of these folks in Silicon Valley...

Currently reading: Anna Karenina, for the first time in some years. Endless joys here, and I’m reminded that there’s a certain kind of scene that Tolstoy does uniquely, and wonderfully. Here, for instance, a dinner party at which Levin finds himself encountering Kitty, who ...

Lionel Trilling (1963): 

How far from our imagination is the idea of “peace” as the crown of spiritual struggle! The idea of bliss is even further removed. The two words propose to us a state of virtually infantile passivity which is the negation of the "more life" that we crave, the "more life" of spiritual militancy. We dread Eden, and of all the Christian concepts there is none which we understand so well as the felix culpa and the "fortunate fall"; not, of course, for the reason on which these Christian paradoxes were based, but because by means of sin and the fall we managed to get ourselves expelled from that place. 

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: If you were hoping to surprise someone with an iPhone Duo for Christmas, you might be out of luck, as Apple’s online store in the U.S. is already showing an estimated shipping date of January 25 for all configurations following the start of pre-...

Worth repeating: Expect an avalanche of new software because the dam has broken, one person who knows what they want, and understands UI design can make a big complex app in 2-3 months. Over a weekend you can snap together an app from common UI concepts. Think of making software the same way you play with LEGOs.

Andrew Deck and Hanaa’ Tameez, Nieman Lab: Meta can use web scrapers to crawl and collect content from websites “associated with” business accounts on its platforms, according to its new commercial terms of use. […] The new terms broadly cover business accounts that manage pages and groups, run advertisements, push marketing messages, and use the […]⌥ Permalink

Renée DiResta, writing for Lawfare: There is a real event underpinning the story, and an authentic chart showing a dramatic decline in automated internet traffic. But the leap from a viral chart to the disappearance of Russian propaganda bots is a large one. Much of the apparent corroboration comes from anecdotes about how social media […]⌥ Permalink

Time announced its roundup of what it thinks are the best inventions of 2026. Among them are John Ternus — or so it would seem — and the iPhone Duo. Andrew R. Chow profiled Apple’s new CEO, and this excerpt has caught some eyes: But Ternus and other Apple executives say they aren’t concerned. In […]⌥ Permalink

At the old pre-June prices, you could buy a 128 GB Apple TV and a pair of HomePod Minis for $350 ($150 + $100 + $100). Four short months later, with today’s new models, that combination would cost $600 ($300 + $150 + $150).

The Court of Honor, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893 (Photograph by C. D. Arnold)

The Franke Reading Room at the Art Institute of Chicago

The CGI in The Magician’s Nephew, as we see it in the trailer, makes the movie look like an ad for Skittles. 

This Leo Robson essay on Ralph Ellison is the single dumbest thing I have ever read in the LRB. Only a radically tone-deaf reader could make an assessment this triumphantly condescending: “Invisible Man, for all its intricacies and coiled ironies, has an element of stridency, and Ellison’s pronouncements leave little room for debate about his views.” Robson clearly thinks he’s much smarter than Ellison, and that arrogance makes him a disastrously bad reader of an endlessly complex book — and an endlessly complex person.  

The photos we made most recently, especially the ones that took the most effort, are the hardest to judge. In this video, I talk about recency bias and effort bias, using photos from a recent backpacking trip in the North Cascades. I also share a faster way to gain perspective on your work that doesn’t involve waiting for years.

To me the variety of languages in Europe is highly valuable, something to cherish. Even if in practice it also provides many hurdles, in order to bridge languages and be able to scale things across Europe. Maintaining the cultural differences is important as a source of creativity and variety of ideas, while at the same […]

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The Hack (Hacker News): Like the Trojan Horse, passkeys are legitimately elegant on the surface, but there is something troubling inside. What’s important to know is that unlike with any other kind of login credential, you do not have ultimate control over your passkeys. With passwords, you can choose where to write them down; with […]