FeedCity

Watched: High and Low — for the third time. An absolutely bonkers and absolutely brilliant movie, profoundly influential on everything from Schindler’s List to modern heist movies to any number of animes. 🍿

Ruben Bolling’s long-running Tom the Dancing Bug is one of my favorite comic strips. I’ve been a huge fan since the early 1990s, when I started reading it in alternative newspapers. (Newspapers were sort of like websites, excepted they were printed daily or weekly. I swear.)...

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week. Login looks simple until you’re building password resets, email verification, MFA, social providers, session management, and the enterprise SSO your first big customer asked for last week.

WorkOS AuthKit lets you:

• Offer SSO, MFA, passkeys, passwords, email codes, and social sign-in.
• Add and remove users automatically with SCIM provisioning.
• Track who did what with audit logs.

Try AuthKit today.

Verizon, in a post headlined “Switch to Verizon and Get the New iPhone Duo Now. No Trade-In Needed.”: Verizon will support iPhone Handoff, giving customers the flexibility to use a single Verizon phone number seamlessly across two compatible iPhone models. Whether using ...

Mark Gurman, today, in his weekly Power On column for Bloomberg (gift link): Without a serviceable version of the new assistant, Apple couldn’t deliver the experience it had envisioned. That left the hardware ready to go, but the software nowhere near finished. So Apple...

Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, reporting, wrongly, for The Information in January this year (paywalled; here’s MacRumors’s summary) Apple’s pin joins a growing portfolio of AI-powered products the tech giant has under development, including AirPods equipped with enhanced senso...

The healthcare system in the US is grossly inefficient, incredibly bad and getting info to and from patients.

Teach everyone in healthcare to try to use their portals as their first resort of communicating with patients.

They waste so much of their time and our time playing phone tag.

I don't know if it's this way in other countries, but it is universally a phone-voice-based comm system in the US.

The Financial Times: Apple had originally promised delivery of the Duo by October 23, but within hours of orders opening, delivery times through Apple’s website had slipped into late January. US mobile carriers also saw delivery times for new orders pushed back. “The pr...

Manton Reece:

All I can come up with is that Apple doesn’t want you to buy the wall-mounted version unless you’re really sure that’s what you need. If the wall-mounted version was cheaper, some people might buy it based on price, then be unhappy because it’s too much trouble to install.

Oh, that clicks for me.

I do see some political content in my feed on X. For example, this extraordinary video posted by Abdul El-Sayed, who seems poised to become the next junior senator from Michigan. You should watch it. It’s so good you might suspect the questioner was a plant, but in fact, he ...

Currently contemplating: Portfolios of Ansel Adams by Ansel Adams, John Szarkowski. I bought this book in 1982, but this is the first time I’m going through it systematically and very slowly. 📚

Montana, March 2026.

I wrote a piece entitled The Web of Markdown on Oct 6. I have to keep looking it up, but I do remember writing it very quickly and deciding it needed a memorable title, like the ones about texcasting, and podcasting and all the other bits that went on to be something. It's one of those times when it seems to have potential with other developers, they seem to see the same logic in it that I do. A way to disconnect from VC control of the web and try again with the open basis, the un-owned basis. There was a fork here at some point in the last 10 or so years, we just refused to see it as such. And btw it was not a very polite piece, but I wasn't feeling polite when I wrote and decided not to edit the anger out of it. I don't like having been so wrong. But it's a fact and denying it doesn't change it.

Anyway, what this means is we're building a site of files that live in Markdown-Land while what you're reading right now is in HTML-land (although someday soon you will read them in Markdown too, confusing right). Chrome is the authority of HTML. It owns the web. We give up. If this were Westeros I would probably be joining the Night's Watch. We have work to do and it might be related to what the Other Web wants to do, but it probably (hopefully) doesn't. I will continue to publish in HTML, and it's up to Google and the EFF if the quality of my writing is suitable for their web. I have no say in it, they have not shown up to negotiate or even discuss. They are silent. Somewhat like the maesters of the Citadel? There must be a bigger plan! :-)

Ansel Adams, Moon and Half Dome (1960). Larger version here, and you have to see the larger version. It’s worth remembering that, as Louise Story wrote some years ago, “Yosemite does not often appear as it did at the moments Adams tripped his shutter. Nor is it easy to stand where he stood and capture the same images.” 

Phil Christman: When I finish reading James on Spencer, as when I finish reading Robinson or David Bentley Hart on Dawkins or Tallis on Dennett or Midgley on everybody, I appreciate again the infinite variety of consciousness, the plurality of its ends. Its excessiveness.&n...

Walking Angus this morning we passed a house with an enormous murder of crows on it, maybe thirty or forty of them, all cawing as loudly as possible. I remembered E. B. White’s poem:

In their assemblies at the edge of town,
Crows introduce resolutions, then vote them down.
How many times in summer, waked early by the mosquito,
Have I lain listening to the crow’s loud veto!

Stephen Nellis and Deepa Seetharaman, reporting Wednesday for Reuters: An OpenAI employee who left the ChatGPT maker for Apple ​sent more than 100 files about an unreleased product to a personal account and later made a presentation about the unreleased product to senior...

David Hume: The Separation of the Learned from the conversible World seems to have been the great Defect of the last Age, and must have had a very bad Influence both on Books and Company: For what Possibility is there of finding Topics of Conversation fit for the Entertainm...