Timeline
Every post and feed across this instance
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Area (Atlantic) Columnist Decides *Now* Is The Time To Start Defending Flock Safety
Flock’s ALPR (automated license plate reader) tech spread from HOAs to police departments at an alarming rate of speed. What was once a toy for the over-privileged soon became the go-to source of license plate images. Flock became the Ring of ALPRs, to mix a metaphor. And that’s when the bad news began to roll […] -
Had a breakthrough with Claude this morning re how builtin verbs have no special powers in Frontier. It's why we were able to build glue first for the truly builtin stuff, then over Apple Events on the Mac, then HTTP, XML-RPC, the Metawebolog API and on and on, all of this were perfectly simple to add to the language, you didn't need anyone's permission to do anything. I understand why Python and JavaScript try to separate the boys from the men, the priests from the peasants, the little startups from the BigCo's, but the design of the Frontier system came at it from a different point of view. Make it easier. Claude had the source code for Frontier in 2011 to work with but had guessed how this works and had not looked at how it actually worked. Okay, shit happens. But now we're actually working together instead of cross-purposes. I didn't even know we were doing that. ;-) -
This is actually a cool idea ! In short: it’s a social, RSS-friendly radar for t...
This is actually a cool idea !
In short: it’s a social, RSS-friendly radar for the open web, self-hosted, with magic-link auth, and connected to the fediverse (ActivityPub).
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Apple responds to OpenAI's motion to dismiss. Yawn. I think when OpenAI shows their new device later this year and it doesn't resemble a HomePod at all, this lawsuit is going to feel pointless.
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Watching video from WordCamp, Matt Mullenweg mentions they should be putting WordPress profiles on their badges:
Why are we putting like Twitter handles and other stuff. We are the WordPress people. We should be... you know our WordPress profiles and our blog URLs as the primary thing we're promoting, not these random other walled garden social networks, right?
I didn't realize that they owned w.org too. See also: "hello my URL is" name tags.
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[POC] rssFriends.com: a self-hosted social RSS Radar that meets the Fediverse
TL;DR: I built a self-hostable social RSS reader that federates with Mastodon. Live demo + code linked below
Today the POC of my favorite feed reader is finally ready, it has all the features I had in mind for it.
It started from a small idea. In my world, very few people around me use RSS, and I always wanted to know what they follow and what they find interesting, maybe I'd want to follow them too. For example, I knew two of my coworkers were daily RSS users like me, but there was no way for us to see each other's reading.
So I let myself dream a bit and, with the help of AI, put together a version of that dream. You can see the live instance here: https://rssfriends.com/
The code of this POC lives here: https://github.com/pesarkhobeee/FediverseRssFriends
In short: it's a social, RSS-friendly radar for the open web, self-hosted, with magic-link auth, and connected to the fediverse (ActivityPub).
In detail you can:
- Add RSS or Atom feeds and put them in your own categories
- Share your list of feeds on a public page, or keep your account fully private
- Follow other people and see what they read or bookmark
- Save (bookmark) items you like
- Group your feeds into categories, and subscribe to each category as its own RSS feed
- Follow people on Mastodon and other rssFriends servers, and let them follow you from where they already are. This part uses ActivityPub (the same protocol Mastodon uses)
- It also supports the wonderful Wallabag: you can bookmark anything and it's automatically saved to your Wallabag. This is probably my favourite feature, because it fits my personal workflow: I bookmark what I like on rssfriends.com, it goes to my Wallabag, and from there it shows up on my e-reader (KOReader), which also supports Wallabag.
If you want, you can visit my public page and see if it's something you'd enjoy using too:
https://rssfriends.com/u/farid?cat=weblogs
submitted by /u/farid_berlin
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“All our neighbors worked for those firms —...
“All our neighbors worked for those firms — Facebook, Google and Apple. None of them would let their children interact with any screens. They all knew how addicting they were and how to protect their own children.”
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I don't know if this has gotten worse with Liquid Glass, but I'm noticing that simple context popup menus are just too slow on iOS because of the fancy animation. I'm tempted to write my own that opens immediately when speed matters.
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Subtlefakes: Slightly Altered Nonconsensual AI Images Are Taking Over X
Nonconsensual AI images are getting much harder to spot. -
Long past time to quit X . “Those who continue to...
Long past time to quit X. “Those who continue to post on X — in particular those X users who are not racist psychopaths — are enhancing the site’s usefulness to [Musk] as a propaganda tool by drawing more eyes to the platform… “
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Township Fights Nuclear Weapons Data Center By Passing a Moratorium on Electrical Infrastructure
The six month moratorium on major electrical infrastructure projects is the latest tactic meant to delay the massive data center meant to support America’s nuclear weapons. -
FOIA Docs Show Brendan Carr Intimately Collaborated With White House, Right Wing Propaganda Orgs
Back in 2014 you might remember there was a giant, two-year, manufactured news cycle where Republicans pretended to be outraged that the then Obama White House had openly supported the FCC’s efforts to impose some modest net neutrality rules (designed to protect consumers and competition from telecom monopoly abuse of power). At the time, major […] -
Putin's Russia, Ukraine's Reparations (ft. Jamison Firestone) | German Spies, Iceland-EU, Iran
Vladimir Putin promised Russia a "dictatorship of law" when he took office in 2000. He delivered the dictatorship -- but not the law. This week, Russia expert, human rights lawyer, and founder of Russia's first independent foreign law firm Jamison Firestone joins journalist Rosanna Lockwood and former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove to discuss his new book, Rule of Lies: My Wild Ride Through Chaos, Corruption, and Murder in Putin's Russia. Firestone lived through the upheaval of the early 1990s and worked alongside Sergei Magnitsky, who was murdered after exposing a Russian state built to loot itself. Firestone explains why Russia may now be close to a historical tipping point, how $300 billion in frozen Russian assets could be legally transferred to Ukraine to fund Kyiv;s war effort, and the ways in which Donald Trump has emulated Putin and Yeltsin. Plus, in Brief: changes coming to Germany's BND, the legacy of former Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji, Iceland's referendum on restarting EU membership talks, and the latest in the Iran War. In this episode: (00:00) Why Ukraine Matters (02:06) Germany Expands BND Powers (05:01) Zhu Rongji (07:52) Iceland EU Vote and NATO Role (11:46) Iran Deadline and Strait Tensions (15:11) Meet Jamison Firestone (16:42) Growing Up Around Gangsters (26:15) Loving Russia Despite Putin (30:46) Can Russia Reach a Tipping Point (34:32) Mobilization Pressure and Next Steps (36:15) Ukraine Aid and Frozen Funds (41:17) Legal Case For Seizure (43:57) Reparations Loan Explained (50:25) US Politics And Trump Parallels (54:24) How Putin Could Fall (57:06) Can Russia Be Democratic (59:03) Putin Isolation And Ukraine Motive (01:02:12) Life In London And Safety (01:05:08) Magnitsky Legacy And Costs (01:11:33) Drone Swarms And Future War Show Notes: Rule of Lies: My Wild Ride Through Chaos, Corruption, and Murder in Putin's Russia | https://www.harpercollins.com/products/rule-of-lies-jamison-r-firestone?variant=44366648180770 Website to learn more about Jamison Firestone’s advocacy: https://makeputinpay.org/ Hosted by Sir Richard Dearlove (former MI6 Chief) and guest co-host Rosanna Lockwood (International Journalist) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicespdrl.fm -
Alicia Duncan on Coercion, Coverups & Canada's Medical Assistance in Dying Program (Part 2)
In Part 2 with Alicia Duncan, we get into the really juicy stuff: the loaded language, the euphemisms, and the whole “don’t say the scary word or everyone clutch their pearls” universe around MAID. Alicia breaks down how terms like autonomy, dignity, and assisted dying get used as PR glitter, while the actual lived experience can look a lot more like coercion, gaslighting, and a bureaucratic escape room with no exit.
She also digs into the bigger system questions: who benefits, what safeguards are missing, why assessors aren’t held to a higher standard, and how financial and institutional incentives can shape decisions about life and death. Plus: the autopsy findings, the physiological effects of the drugs used, the push to expand MAID to people with mental illness and even mature minors, and why Alicia is on a mission to keep asking the annoying-but-necessary questions.
Watch Alicia’s episode on CBC’s The Fifth Estate on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plinQAHZRvk
Also be sure to pick up Alicia’s book, The Other Side of the Straitjacket, when it drops September 1st, and follow her on X, Instagram, or at aliciaduncan.com.
Trigger warning: This episode contains frank discussion of suicide, medically assisted death/euthanasia, PTSD, mental illness, eating disorders, psychiatric hospitalization, coercion, gaslighting, institutional failure, and possible criminal negligence.
Also…let it be known that:
The views and opinions expressed on A Little Bit Culty do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the podcast. Any content provided by our guests, bloggers, sponsors or authors are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any religion, group, club, organization, business, individual, anyone or anything. Nobody’s mad at you, just don’t be a culty fuckwad.
Buy the A Little Bit Culty book on Amazon or order a signed copy.
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Watch Sarah's TED Talk and buy her memoir, Scarred
CREDITS:
Executive Producers: Sarah Edmondson & Anthony Ames
Production Partner: Citizens of Sound
Co-Creator: Jess Tardy
Audio production: Will Retherford
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Theme Song: “Cultivated” by Jon Bryant co-written with Nygel Asselin
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pscrb.fm -
r/rss continues to be unmoderated :(
We've all seen r/rss being flooded with ads, self-promotion, and completely off-topic posts. It is unclear when there was last any meaningful moderator activity. Posts about the lack of moderation:
- 2026-07-22 What's up with the casino ads?
- 2026-06-01 Can we just have a thread for people to promote their reader and and ban all other promotional threads?
- 2021-09-01 TIL the only moderator of this r/rss , sodypop, is a Reddit admin “Doesn't seem to have interacted here in a while though :/”
Some of us have tried to help remedy this situation by reporting spam where we see it, by messaging the moderators to offer help, and by asking for the subreddit to be handed over via the r/redditrequest process. Unfortunately, nothing has helped, and r/rss continues to be unmoderated.
- 2026-07-14 request by u/altjj, DENIED
- 2026-07-28 request by u/latkde, IGNORED
- 2026-08-16 request by u/latkde, DENIED
I hope that someone else's attempt is met with more success.
submitted by /u/latkde
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Tech Fascism Has Come for American Democracy w/ Gil Durán
A cult of fascist ideology has gripped Silicon Valley, and the tech industrial complex is threatening US democracy. Gil Durán joins Paris Marx to discuss the radical billionaire cabal that is hellbent on the consolidation of corporate and political power, including the visions they have for the future and the strategies they’re using to drive us there.
Gil Durán is the author of The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy and writes The Nerd Reich newsletter.
The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Support the show on Patreon.
Also mentioned in this episode:
- Click here to get your first month of Proton Mail for just $1.
- Gil has written about Paulina Borsook’s prescient warning about tech libertarians from more than twenty years ago.
- Gil has written the foreword for the new edition of Cyberselfish.
- Balaji Srinivasan has moved his commune project to Kazakhstan after being booted from Malaysia.
- Shout-out to friend of the pod Quinn Slobodian, who’s work you can find here. Paris recently talked to Quinn, check out that episode here if you missed it.
pscrb.fm -
Test post
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Should I wait for my ex or move on?
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Vulnerabilities in RSS readers via CSS
Hi fellow RSS Reader authors (doesn't everybody write one these days?),
I came across this article about CSS-related vulnerabilities in email readers:
https://portswigger.net/research/css-the-bomb-inside-your-inbox
Frankly, I found this quite shocking. As RSS readers render third-party HTML, these issues potentially affect RSS readers as well.
I am wondering which strategies you use for sanitizing and rendering third-party HTML? In particular, for HTML-based readers.
In my reader, I am currently using whitelist-based sanitation of the HTML on the server side (using sanitize-html npm). On the client, I am using safeSetHTML where supported as a second-layer defense, but slightly less strict to avoid issues with third-party embeddings (TikTok, X..). Without safeSetHTML, I am using DOMPurify.
Unfortunately, my UI does not allow me to use iframes for HTML, which would allow additional sandboxing. CSP is still on my TODO list.
How do you deal with untrusted HTML?
submitted by /u/Odd-Anteater875
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The ADHD Doctor: How to Focus, Stop Procrastinating, Manage Your Emotions, & Feel in Control
If you have ever been told that you are too emotional, sensitive, anxious, hormonal, disorganized, or simply not trying hard enough, this episode is for you.
There’s a chance, according to Mel’s expert guest today, that like Mel, that the root cause of what you’re struggling with is actually ADHD.
Today, Dr. Sasha Hamdani, MD, a board-certified psychiatrist and leading expert on ADHD, gives you the full and comprehensive explanation you deserve.
She shares that ADHD is not just about attention. It can affect your emotions, motivation, energy, sleep, appetite, relationships, and ability to handle the demands of everyday life.
And these symptoms often get completely missed in women and girls.
Mel gets deeply personal about being diagnosed at 47, the anxiety she experienced for decades that was due to untreated ADHD, and the emotional overwhelm she never realized was connected to ADHD.
Dr. Hamdani explains why ADHD is mistaken for anxiety, depression, OCD, burnout, or hormonal issues (this is why so many people spend years believing there is something wrong with them!).
This is the ultimate guide to adult ADHD.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
-Why ADHD is not just attention and focus; it’s also about regulating your mood, sleep, motivation, and energy.
-Why ADHD is so often missed in women and girls
-Why anxiety, depression, OCD, burnout, and ADHD are often confused (even by medical professionals)
-Why criticism feels so overwhelming for anyone with ADHD
-Why perfectionism, overworking, and people pleasing can be signs of ADHD
-What is happening inside the ADHD brain
-Why ADHD is not always a “superpower”
-The four critical steps to take if you think you or someone you love may have ADHD
-The medication, therapy, coaching, tools, and systems that may help ease symptoms of ADHD
-What you can start doing while you wait for professional support
-The difference between the way ADHD can look externally and how it can feel internally
-How hormonal changes during puberty, postpartum, and perimenopause can intensify ADHD symptoms
This is an episode about understanding your brain, recognizing lifelong patterns, and learning what kind of support may be available to you.
Mel also wants to tell you:
- Try the 23g protein shot I drink every single morning
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dts.podtrac.com -
Even As Disease Outbreaks Abound, American Vaccination Rates In Children Fall
The past 18 months have seen a significant number of health issues, perhaps crises, arise in America. Measles, cyclosporiasis, whooping cough, and more have all been in the news. RFK Jr. is either stroking his pet conspiracy theories alongside Trump, or else he’s completely out to lunch. In the meantime, Kennedy is also continuing to […] -
Calvitie : la guerre des golfes
Cet ami qui refuse de quitter son bonnet ou sa casquette quelle que soit la saison, cet autre qui ne parle plus que d'Istanbul... À l’approche de la trentaine, la perte des cheveux est inévitable pour certains hommes et ils sont nombreux à vivre ce changement de look comme une crise identitaire. Pourtant, si le crâne lisse fait souvent l’objet de moqueries, il peut aussi être vu comme un symbole de maturité et de virilité.
Pourquoi accorde-t-on autant d’importance à la perte de cheveux ? Dans l’histoire, la calvitie a-t-elle toujours été considérée comme une tare ? Et pourquoi certains hommes chauves cherchent à compenser l’absence de cheveux en se laissant pousser la barbe ?
Pour en parler, Naomi Titti reçoit Robinson Baudry, maître de conférence en histoire ancienne et co-auteur du livre Les Chauves. Histoire d’un préjugé dans la Rome antique avec Caroline Husquin (2025, Éds. Armand Colin) et Victor Vey, doctorant en sociologie et auteur de plusieurs articles, dont « La carrière de barbu. Socialisation à l’entretien de la barbe et construction d’une masculinité hybride » paru dans (2024, Émulations).
Profitez d'une remise exclusive de 15 % sur les forfaits de données Saily ! Utilisez le code TABLE lors du paiement. Téléchargez l'application Saily ou rendez-vous sur https://saily.com/table
Toutes les références citées dans l'émission sont disponibles sur le site : https://www.binge.audio/podcast/les-couilles-sur-la-table/calvitie-la-guerre-des-golfes/
CRÉDITS : Les Couilles sur la table est un podcast créé par Victoire Tuaillon produit par Binge (URBANIA AUDIO). Cet entretien a été préparé, mené et monté par Naomi Titti, enregistré le 8 juillet dans les studios d’Urbania Audio (Paris 10e). Réalisation et mixage : Octave Bothier. Supervision éditoriale : Naomi Titti. Responsable des productions éditoriales et édition : Charlotte Baix. Assistante de production et d’édition : Aude Miquel. Rédacteur en chef : Thomas Rozec. Direction de production : Albane Fily. Responsable administrative et financière : Adrienne Marino. Responsable sponsoring : Betty-Maeva Wendling. Musique originale : Théo Boulenger. Identité graphique : Camille Bernard (Upian). Composition identité sonore : Jean-Benoît Dunckel. Voix identité sonore : Bonnie El Bokeili. Direction de contenu : Sophie Marchand. Binge est une marque URBANIA.
Hébergé par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.
audio.audiomeans.fr -
think - a rss reader with "e-ink" style
Hi everyone,
I am a big fan of e-ink style of kindle, so I built a news reader that "feels" like one.
The app called "think", available on both Android and iOS.
- No account required
- Respect your privacy, no tracking, even analytics!- Just enjoy reading!
https://think.icedtealabs.com/
submitted by /u/i-am-kai
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Being dumped
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Conceptual integrity and counting lines of code
Last week I recorded an episode of the Talking Postgres podcast with Claire Giordano on the subject of "How AI is changing software development". We had a really great conversation. Here are a couple of my highlights from a lightly edited transcript (prompt to Claude: "very minor edits to remove disfluencies").
This is the latest version of an argument I've been trying to build about why sometimes it does make sense to talk about lines of code as an indicator of productivity with coding agents, at 35:01:
A lot of people will tell you it makes no sense to measure productivity in lines of code. I’d actually disagree, because there’s a hard limit. In the before-times, a software engineer could produce a few hundred lines of production-ready code per day — and 200 lines of working, debugged, production-level code is an incredibly good day. Most days you’d produce 50 or 60.
If agents let you produce a thousand lines of debugged code, that really is a very meaningful improvement — as long as the code is the same quality: maintainable, tested, all of that. You can get to that point with agents, but it takes a huge amount of skill and knowledge and experience. That’s what senior engineers are made of.
I can do way more work as a single engineer than I could without agents. So you could argue, why should a company have more than one engineer? Beyond the obvious bus factor thing — a team of one is a very badly designed team — the answer is that the new limiting factor is cognitive capacity. I can churn out code a hundred times faster. I don’t have the cognitive capacity to stay on top of 100 times the amount of code. So you still need a team of engineers, so you can load balance that cognitive capacity across the team.
And this section on conceptual integrity at 46:03, which Claire equated to the Winchester Mystery House!
Simon: There’s a concept in The Mythical Man-Month — conceptual integrity — where well-designed software has an integrity to it: there are no surprises in it, it covers exactly the right domain of things, everything fits together and makes sense. That’s so much harder with coding agents, where you can have an idea for a feature, run a prompt, and five minuteslater you’ve got the feature. Your software grows little weird bumps in funny different directions.
Claire: You know my analogy for that? The Winchester Mystery House.
Simon: It’s got 140 rooms, because the woman who built it was the widow of the guy who invented the Winchester rifle, and her psychic told her she’d be haunted by the ghosts of everyone killed with that rifle unless she kept building the house forever. So for 40 years she kept adding new rooms. That’s exactly the problem with coding agents and software: it’s very easy to keep adding new rooms, because the cost of adding those rooms is so much cheaper. What you end up with is something where the conceptual integrity falls apart — and then it’s harder to make decisions about it.
It all keeps coming back to discipline. It used to be that the discipline was enforced on you by the amount of time it took. You’d come up with an idea for a crazy feature and think “yeah, but that would take me a week — I cannot justify that, so I’ll forget about it.” If it takes an hour, it’s so much easier to justify.
(Side-note: the Wikipedia article includes credible sources that dispute the story about the psychic.)
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Inside Trump’s Failed Hunt For Noncitizen Voters
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. It was late March when Joe Teirab, the second-in-command at Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, received an urgent email from Washington. The federal government was scrambling to find criminal cases to back up President Donald Trump’s claims that illegal voting by noncitizens was tipping the scales in […] -
🔗 Daring Fireball: Apple TV Still Has No Start Date for 'The Savant'
Given that it’s now the middle of August, I think that a July release is looking less and less likely by the day.
He does have a way doesn’t he?
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Continuing to improve the Logs page in Micro.blog. I think the color for different tasks helps. Still a little nerdy, but it's a very useful page to understand what Micro.blog is doing.
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Marion County, Kansas Has Racked Up $4 Million In Settlements Since It Raided A Local Paper’s Office
Sure, the town’s insurance will pay most of this, but it’s probably fair to say most of this small county’s population (11,823 at last count) wasn’t supportive of local law enforcement’s decision to violate as much of the First Amendment and Fourth Amendment as possible in the apparent hopes of making one local business owner […] -
Podcast: Amazon is Destroying Rare Books to Train AI
Amazon buying and destroying rare books to train AI; a bunch of wild AI use in the courts; and Meta's new patent for its AI smart glasses. -
Riding the Pollercoaster
Kate and Josh discuss the (most recent) polling freakout, Tuesday's primary results in the Florida and Alaska Senate races and renewed interest in "human printer" Natalie Harp.
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rss.art19.com -
Finally ran out. But then I remembered that the 5.3 credits are tracked separately. I had also forgotten just how fast 5.3 Spark is! For simple changes, it's not bad.
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Did not finish: Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao. I loved the idea and it starts well, but 25% in the writing didn't quite work for me. Decided to put it down, there's too much else to read. 📚
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Do you still use RSS and feed reader apps in 2026?
Do you still use RSS and feed reader apps in 2026 ?
If you do , can you actually reach the full range of sources out there? Filter them by keyword, or just describe what you're after in plain language and get the 20 sources that matter for your monitoring in ten seconds?
My context: I've had this idea that any curious person or content creator should be able to reach the best 400,000 RSS feeds in the world without effort , straight from their AI tool or their automation stack.
If that existed tomorrow, what would you plug it into? And what are you using instead right now?
Polaris
submitted by /u/Polaris2025
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#559: 12 Things You Should (and Shouldn't) Do in AWS
Your site is down. It's 3am. Is it a bug, a bill, or a breach? You can't tell yet, and everyone is watching you find out. Matt Lea has spent fifteen years being the person companies call when an outage is costing them real money per hour, and his whole argument is that everything you'd want in that moment gets decided months earlier, on ordinary afternoons, when someone chose the convenient thing. We walk his top twelve dos and don'ts in AWS - infrastructure as code, IAM roles instead of access keys, private subnets, no wildcards, no public buckets - and I push on which of them actually matter if you're one person on a small VPS. Then we get to Cloud War Games, where Matt breaks things on purpose so your team's first real incident isn't their first incident. Let's get into it.
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Matt Lea: linkedin.com
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Schematical: schematical.com
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Zero to Hero on AWS Security: www.oreilly.com
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2012 TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon: techcrunch.com
tech comics: schematical.com
shhgit: github.com
Zero Trust in 200ms: Implementing Identity-Per-Transaction: us.pycon.org
Coolify: coolify.io
returned to full GA Nov 2025: aws.amazon.com
Signed URLs/cookies: docs.aws.amazon.com
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Bunny Shield: bunny.net
Cloud War Games One: www.youtube.com
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Watch this episode on YouTube: youtube.com
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French Constitutional Council Blocks Under-15 Social Media Ban, In A Ruling That Should Concern Every Other EU Country
Even as the wider EU was grinding through a long, drawn-out process to figure out which regulatory levers to pull on kids’ safety online, France decided to YOLO it earlier this summer by jumping at the chance to ban all social media for kids under 15. This kind of thing has become popular with out […] -
Started a new repo today.
https://github.com/scripting/helloFrontier
We have to make a fair number of decisions about all aspects of the product, esp the surprisingly huge verb set.
For the tough decisions I'll document the issue, and seek feedback from friendly people with real Frontier expertise.
Right now it's just an intro page and nothing more. Eventually, hopefully, fingers crossed, something wonderful will show up here.
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Daily Deal: memoryOS Expert Plan
memoryOS is a gamified mobile app designed to significantly improve your memory through short, interactive lessons. Guided by two-time World Memory Champion Jonas von Essen, the software teaches proven mnemonic techniques alongside spaced-repetition schedules. It features a digital library of 3D “Virtual Mind Palaces,” which allows users to easily visualize, organize, and store complex information […] -
Lifeforms Can Survive on ‘Significant’ Regions of the Moon, Study Finds
The Moon was long thought to be inhospitable to life, but scientists have discovered that common Earth microbes could survive for up to a week in shadowed regions of the lunar south pole, a region targeted for future human exploration. -
'I Saw a Shiny Thing': Cop Explains Why He Used License Plate Reader to Stalk Woman
Body camera footage shows police surveillance abuse is common: "We’ve told them over and over again: 'You see a hot chick, you don’t look them up in a database.'" -
Listening to Fireflies by U2 and Martin Garrix. Can't wait for the new album. 🎶
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ICE Opportunism Expands To Passengers On Domestic Flights
Things used to be normal. We used to be doing alright here in the United States, limiting ourselves to catching people at the borders or picking up migrants with criminal charges or convictions with detainers at local jails. Now, it’s just a constant swarm all day, every day. “Worst of the worst” has long been […] -
Synonyms and antonyms
Twenty years ago I participated in NaNoWriMo. I was just remembering how I had a printed book that was all synonyms and antonyms. Handy when I got stumped on just the right word to use.
That's how I think of editing with AI, except instead of words it's phrases. AI is good at telling me when I've written something poorly, something that would be improved by just changing a short phrase here or there. I treat it the same way I'd treat advice from anyone: if a friend told me this sentence was confusing, would I change it? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
I don't bother with that for most of my blog posts. It's usually for the longer posts — where I'm trying to make a nuanced point and something feels off, or where the topic might blow up if it's misinterpreted — that I'll send the draft through ChatGPT for a sanity check. For some posts, in the prompt I will explicitly say "major grammar problems only", to avoid getting distracted away from my own writing.
Sometimes I won't make any changes. I just want some reassurance that my blog post isn't all wrong.
The value of getting help from AI is that because it's a synthesis of all the world's information, it tends to pull you toward accepted narratives. The risk is that it will water down your own unique ideas. Overusing AI for editing will produce a kind of sameness as everything else on the web. Taken too far, it becomes slop. Lots of words that don't really mean anything.
I mention all of this in part to be transparent, in part because it's relevant in the context of watermarking, and in part because I think I could still become a better writer. Even after blogging for over 20 years! I love to write and to blog. AI can't change that.
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New trailer out for Wildwood. This looks extraordinary. Hope it's even half as good as it looks.
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Gamifying Snacking with Snacker Tracker
So one of the things I've been trying to do as part of my journey to lose weight and get fit is sort my diet out. As the saying goes, "you can't out-train a poor diet". And the worst part of my diet is definitely snacking in the evening.
The routing generally goes:
- Have dinner.
- Put the kids to bed and settle down with my wife on the couch.
- Crave snacks out of habit.
- Get snacks and eat them!
I'm the type of person who finds an arbitrary thing to aim for very motivating. It's not enough to just want to stop snacking in the evening, nope. That shit will fail pretty quickly. But if I have a streak I have to maintain - now we're talking!
So I decided to build a simple little tool that I called Snacker Tracker. It's just a tap of a button every evening to say whether I've snacked or not, and it maintains a streak. Here's what it looks like on my phone:
Free pass & design
I decided to implement a free pass into the site as well. So I'm allowed to have 1 evening per calendar week where I can snack and it won't affect my streak - after all, I want to be able to have some fun!
I thought about bundling Simple.css in to make it look pretty, but I decided to have some fun with the CSS and went with a neo-brutalist aesthetic, which I think looks great. So much so that I'm thinking about re-designing this site in a similar way, but I've managed to hold off on that...for now.
Retrospective log
Snacker Tracker also has a way of adding days retrospectively, so if I forget to log a day, I can easily go back and do it:
I've only been using Snacker Tracker for a few days, but it's making me pause when that inevitable pang happens in the evening. I'm finding that instead of instinctively raiding the cupboard for some crisps or a chocolate bar, I'm thinking "don't screw up your streak" and not doing it.
I know I'm not hungry during the evening, it's just a habit. My hope is that with time I'll re-train my brain to not expect sugar in the evening, and the pangs will go away. Until then, I'm gonna continue tracking my snacks with this fun little site in the hope that it makes me form better habits.
But Kev, why don't you be a proper grown-up and just use your willpower?
-- All the internet people
Because, Internet Person, it's a habit that I don't even think about, and this forces my to think about it. Yes, I know it's arbitrary and rather childish, but it's working, so what's the harm?
Will you be releasing Snacker Tracker so we can try it?
-- Another internet person
Maybe. I threw it together pretty quickly and the code is rough. A lot of my spare time is focussed on Pure Blog and Pure Comments at the moment, so I don't think I'll have the time to clean the code up to the point where I'm happy to release it any time soon I'm afraid.
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Micro.blog book pages are looking pretty good.
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Seems like we might be settling in for a 5% Apple tax across the board, globally, based on the US court and EU compromise. I don't love it. Linking to external payments should give Apple 0% and nothing more.
Related, I saw this scare sheet yesterday while managing my account in Disney+.
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I wonder how many scenarios they're playing out in DC wrt Iran. Just guessing, probably none. We learned on Monday that the real war has yet to begin, according to Iran. What could they do to hurt the US. Or wake us up to the reality of war. We think the cost of war is higher prices. We are not safe in the US, any more than Russians are safe in Moscow. The parallels are pretty amazing. Both Russia and the US started unprovoked wars of choice, and clearly didn't consider that they might get bogged down. Russia has a source of drones so they can fight back. But I'd be surprised if Trump is stocking up, but if we were, where would we use them? We've already attacked Iran with our probably obsolete trillion-dollar military. Did a lot of damage, killed civilians, decimated their government, they keep going. I'm old enough to remember Vietnam and what asymmetric war is like. The US always falls for this. Our military is very impressive, until we use it. Bluffing was a much better approach for Trump. -
Imagine if you had to disclose whom and what terms you mute.
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The reason I'm not so into AI agents is that there's enough mop-up duty with "if this then that"-style automation. It can't be any better when automation is being done by a lava lamp. Plus the amount of setup is tiring (if not exhausting, since I like that kind of thing).