Timeline
Every post and feed across this instance
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Autumnal Open Thread
My move is coming down to the wire (omg so many things to juggle!), kids are heading back to school, I’m going to be traveling, and it’s a holiday weekend here in the States, so there’s probably not going to be too much going on here until next week. Thanks for your patience…I can’t wait to get back to work here.
In the meantime, I thought I’d open up this thread for folks to share what they feel like sharing. I’ll go first below…
Tags: kottke.org · open threads
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DOJ Issues Memo Saying There’s Nothing Illegal About The Military Arresting Migrants
A little more than a year ago, the Trump administration pushed a novel legal theory in order to juice its migrant arrest stats. It was a two-part process. First, the administration unilaterally declared expansive areas near US military bases to be “national defense areas.” This meant that areas surrounding bases — like (especially) Fort Bliss […] -
Fun teaser from OpenAI on X (sigh) about Astra's presumably imminent release. I guess it's going to be called GPT-6. I'm working on Micro.blog improvements today, like always, but have my eyes on the wider social web for this release, so my posts will probably be a bit AI-heavy today. Apologies. 🤖
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Flock Taught Cops How to Surveil No Kings Protesters
A Flock webinar teaches police how to surveil protests, fireworks shows, parades, bike races, and more. -
New little tool: "Pintxøs". RSS without the clickbait.
What it does: grab RSS feeds, get them back without the clickbait headlines and blurbs.
https://github.com/janw76/pintxos
Example:
- Original title: "Netflix's Renewed Sci-Fi Thriller With Perfect Rotten Tomatoes Score Officially Hits A Filming Milestone". But which show? What milestone? Argh 🤯!
- Pintxøs output: "Netflix's Supacell completes season 2 filming"
Garbage in, sanity out.
Pintxøs adds a ≤100 word summary and republishes a new RSS feed you can subscribe to in your aggregator of choice, with the new title, the summary, and a link to the original article.
Self-hosted in Docker, MIT licensed, bring your own Anthropic API key. Vibe-coded with Claude.
Maybe some of you find it useful too. I know there are a lot of amazing AI-driven RSS tools already. I just have a soft spot for tools that do one or two things only.
submitted by /u/jamajuel
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I built a Chrome extension that shows you the angle in whatever you're reading, then argues the other side
I read too much news, and I noticed I was doing the same two things over and over: nodding along at stuff I already agreed with, and getting irritated by stuff I didn't. At no point was I actually clocking *how* either one was written.
So here I am with this thing called Veritype. It's a Chrome extension. You right-click an article — or highlight just the paragraph you're suspicious about — and a panel opens beside the page.
It'll tell you roughly where the piece sits left-to-right, but honestly the score is the least interesting part. The useful bit is underneath: which specific words are doing the persuading, who got quoted and who conspicuously didn't, what's been left out. Then it writes you the strongest version of the argument on the other side. Not a strawman it can knock over. The actual best case. I've also tried to add some more and more interesting features over the past couple of releases (1.2.0 is currently submitted for review).
There's also a Similar Sources panel that finds the same story covered elsewhere and shows you where those outlets sit, in case you fancy reading the version that will annoy you.
There's things it's bad at, which you'd find out anyway, so I may as well go first:
\- It is not a fact-checker. It has no idea whether anything in the article is true. Framing and accuracy are two different problems and I have gestured at one of them.
\- Bias by omission — the story nobody ran, the expert nobody phoned — is the most important kind, and it's the kind it's worst at. Turns out it's pretty dang hard to spot what isn't there.
\- Paywalls and PDFs stump it. It just sits there looking useless.
\- Run the same article twice and you get slightly different wording and a slightly different number. It's a language model, not a set of scales.
\- One article is not a verdict on an outlet. Someone is going to screenshot a single result as proof that their least favourite newspaper is Officially Biased, and I'm going to have to live with that.
Free tier is 10 a day, no card, no trial that quietly becomes a subscription. Pro's $5.99/mo if you go past that. You can also paste in your own Anthropic API key and pay them directly instead of me, which is admittedly a strange thing to build a button for, but it felt wrong not to.
[www.veritype.app\](http://www.veritype.app)
I'd genuinely rather have the criticism than the upvotes — especially if you hit an article where the read is just flatly wrong. Those are the ones I can actually do something with. SERIOUSLY, this is my first real release so go ahead and give me some feedback. Ideas for features are welcome as well. This is pretty niche, and I know it. If you read this far, thanks!!
submitted by /u/fossilsareopaf
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Part of Kawhi's statement after the NBA investigation into the Clippers. Sort of a non-apology apology:
Integrity and respect for this game are fundamental to who I am. I accept full responsibility for lapses in judgment by people within my inner circle...
I feel like the punishment is very lopsided against the Clippers. No first-round picks for 5 years. 🏀
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Firefox adds a global AI opt-out checkbox:
Opting out of upcoming and current AI features on your browser should not require endless navigation through multiple Settings pages. That’s why Firefox offers an AI controls section within its General Settings panel. A single, easily located place where you can block current and future AI features and related pop-ups with the swipe of a toggle.
Kind of similar to Micro.blog's AI checkbox, but the Firefox version is more complicated, allowing control of various AI-related features.
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2026-09-03 14:47: Why do so many calendar apps offer Sunday as the first day of the week?...
Why do so many calendar apps offer Sunday as the first day of the week? It's not the first day of the week, it's the last.
Why is that even an option FFS?
Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️
You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.
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Writer, journalist, and feminist activist Gloria Steinem...
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Apple, Google Pathetically Buckle To Trump’s Dim And Lazy Effort To Rename Lake Ontario
When we look back at this time and history words like “courage,” “integrity,” and “ethics” aren’t words you’re going to be associating with U.S. tech industry leadership. Everywhere you look you have tech sector executives either openly embracing fascism and the frontal assault on representative democracy, or too feckless and timid to take any sort […] -
I built a native Mac RSS reader that lives inside a desktop companion
Hi — I’m the developer of AI Coach.
AI Coach started as a native macOS desktop companion, but its RSS reader has become one of the most practical parts of the app.
It supports RSS 2.0 and Atom, feed discovery from regular website URLs, OPML import/export, unread and starred smart feeds, search, a local article cache, and Vim-style j/k navigation. The default view is a visual “latest picks” layout rather than a traditional inbox-only list.
The unusual part is how it connects to the desktop character: you can drag a website URL onto the character to subscribe, and it can present new articles in a speech bubble, summarize them, or add a short reaction. Article speech, summaries, and reactions can all be disabled independently, so it also works as a quiet conventional reader.
The app itself is free and includes one egg. There is no subscription; only additional eggs are optional one-time purchases.
One important detail: the app begins with an egg, and the RSS reader is unlocked as the character grows. The current Mac release requires macOS 26 or later and Apple Silicon.
Screenshots and details:
I’d especially appreciate feedback from people who already use OPML and keyboard-driven RSS workflows.
submitted by /u/HanaChanSoft
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Why the US Lost in Afghanistan (w/Jon Lee Anderson, the Journalist Who Saw the Taliban Rise Twice)
It has been five years since the US withdrew its forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, accepting defeat after a 20-year presence in the country. Was this ever a winnable war? War correspondent Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker walks former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove and co-host John Raine through the Taliban resurgence. Anderson discusses why it was a strategic error to not allow Hamid Karzai to actually govern, and how that blunder facilitated both the return of opium production and the Taliban comeback. He also talks about what happened to the Northern Alliance, the complexities of Afghan allegiances and loyalties, lessons in counterinsurgency, the importance of winning the hearts and minds of a people, and what diplomatic relations with a Taliban-led Afghanistan could look like. In this episode: (00:00) Ceding an Aura of Invincibility (03:15) Was Afghanistan Ever a Winnable War? (07:26) Karzai and State Building (11:12) Opium Production and Taliban (18:43) Shadow Taliban Government (27:09) What Happened to the Northern Alliance? (33:39) Navigating US-Afghani Cultural Differences (39:14) Afghanistan’s Geography (42:45) Lessons in Counterinsurgency (48:26) Legacy of Afghanistan War (50:09) Persistence of Taliban Government (51:58) Diplomatic Relations with Taliban (55:28) One Decision: The West Must Engage Afghanistan (56:41) Takeaways and Wrap Up Hosted by Sir Richard Dearlove (former MI6 Chief) and guest co-host John Raine (International Institute for Strategic Studies) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicespdrl.fm -
Season 9 Opener: A Little Bit Culty Vancouver book launch & live Q&A (Part 2)
In Part 2 of our Vancouver book launch, we do a full-on audience Q&A, covering everything from cult susceptibility and the “cult-shaped hole in your heart” to how groups can start with good intentions and slowly slide into coercion, control, and abuse of power. We talk recognizing your own hooks, spotting personality changes and loaded language, rebuilding trust after leaving, and why “What to Do When It’s Time to GTFO” is a chapter in A Little Bit Culty: Navigating Cults, Control and Coercion—because sometimes you need a roadmap, not a motivational quote.
We also answered questions about us meeting in NXIVM, leaving safely, the metaphorical shelf breaking, survivor shame, and the importance of sunlight, support, and keeping the conversation going.
Special thanks to:
Megan Williams at The Self-Publishing Agency for emceeing
Eric Lee at CoFunction Events & Workspaces for generously hosting us: cofunctioneventspaces.com
Jennifer-Lee Gunson for recording: podcastconsulting.ca
Trigger warning: This episode contains frank discussion of cultic and sexual abuse, coercive control, indoctrination, trauma, family separation, death, suspected poisoning, cancer, suicide, and leaving high-control groups.
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 paperback, ebook, or audiobook on Amazon or order a signed copy.
Check out our amazing sponsors
Join A Little Bit Culty on Patreon
Get poppin’ fresh ALBC Swag
Support the pod and smash this link
Check out our cult awareness and recovery resources
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
Production Coordinator: Lesli Dinsmore
Writer and administrator: Sandra Nomoto
Social media team: Eric Skwarzynski and Brooke Keane
Theme Song: “Cultivated” by Jon Bryant co-written with Nygel Asselin
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
pscrb.fm -
Data Vampires Redux: Going Hyperscale (Episode 1)
Paris’ new book Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires is coming out on October 20. To celebrate, we’re revisiting the series that planted the seeds for his deep dive into hyperscale data centers, the communities they’re affecting, and the future Silicon Valley is trying to build. This is episode 1 of Data Vampires, a special four-part series from Tech Won’t Save Us.
The show is hosted by Paris Marx. Original production on Data Vampires was by Eric Wickham. Current production is by Kyla Hewson. Support the show on Patreon.
Also mentioned in this episode:
- Preorder Hyperscale to support Paris at hyperscalebook.com.
- Senior cloud consultant Dwayne Monroe and Associate Professor in Economics Cecilia Rikap were interviewed for this episode.
- If you missed it, check out Cecilia Rikap’s latest chat with Paris here and grab her book The Rulers.
- Interviews with Jeff Bezos and The Oregonian journalist Mike Rogoway were cited.
pscrb.fm -
Give Me 60 Minutes and I'll Eliminate Your Self-Doubt Forever with Benny Blanco
In this episode, you’ll learn how to stop doubting yourself and get anything you want in life.
Mel is thrilled to introduce you to her incredible guest today – someone she’s admired and followed for years, and who is here today for YOU.
Benny Blanco is one of the most successful and sought-after music producers and songwriters in the world and one of the defining hitmakers of the 21st century.
Benny is a 12-time Grammy-nominated songwriter and producer with 29 #1 hits and 19 songs that have over a billion streams on Spotify.
But, Benny didn’t start his impressive career with everything figured out. He didn’t grow up with money, some magical level of confidence, or everything figured out.
He built his career by showing up, failing, getting rejected, trying again, and learning through experience.
Today, Benny reveals what most people never see: the rejection, the fear, the self-doubt, and the countless moments when everything could have fallen apart.
And he will show you the life-changing tools and strategies that have helped him push through nonstop rejection and setbacks.
Benny has also written a fantastic brand-new book called “F*ck Failure” – which happens to be exactly the message he’s here to share with you today:
Every single failure is leading you somewhere, even if you can’t see it right now.
Your life can look entirely different a year from now. If you want the dream job, true love, unshakeable confidence, better friendships, or more happiness, Benny wants you to know there’s one rule:
Keep showing up.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
-The simple mindset shift Benny uses to erase failure and keep moving
-Why you’re only one small move away from changing your life for the better
-Why waiting to feel ready is a losing game
-The wild story behind a #1 hit that almost never happened, and why it proves you can’t give up
-How to stop letting self-doubt make your decisions
-How to keep showing up when you’re exhausted, embarrassed, or convinced you have no idea what you’re doing
-How to face the fears you’ve been avoiding for years
-How a list Benny made before he started dating his wife, Selena Gomez, can help you stop settling in your own life
This conversation will make you rethink every failure, every rejection, and every excuse you have been using to stay stuck.
As Benny will show you, failure doesn’t have to break you. It’s the very thing that can make you unstoppable.
If he can turn his failures into hits, you can turn yours into the life you’ve been wanting to live.
For more resources related to today’s episode, click here for the podcast episode page.
If you liked the episode, check out this one next: A Process for Finding Purpose: Do THIS to Build the Life You Want
Mel also wants to tell you:
- Try the 23g protein shot I drink every single morning
- Join 2 million readers loving my weekly newsletter - full of tips, tools, and inspiration
- The Let Them Theory: read the book everyone’s talking about
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- Disclaimer
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
dts.podtrac.com -
Sony Tells Courts Any ‘Reasonable Customer’ Knows Digital Purchases Are Actually Licenses
Sony’s ability to generate anger lately is pretty impressive. After the company announced that there would be no more physical media versions of games made starting in 2027, to the resounding anger of many people, Sony also demonstrated yet again that it’s capable of ripping away the digital “purchases” people had made once its own […] -
Drag Kings : les hommes en mieux
Moustaches acérées, costumes de dandy, dégaines de mâles Alpha : c’est souvent chez les Drag Kings que l’on trouve les caricatures les plus fines des masculinités. Si les Drag Queens sont de plus en plus visibles dans les médias mainstream, les Kings restent pratiquement méconnus du grand public. Issus d’une culture queer commune, iels bousculent autant la scène drag dominante que les codes de la masculinité hégémonique.
Qui sont les Drag Kings ? Pourquoi sont-iels moins représentés dans l’espace médiatique et culturel que leurs consœurs Queen ? Quelle est la portée politique de leur pratique ? Et que disent les performances Drag King des représentations sociales de la masculinité ?
Pour en parler, Tal Madesta reçoit Man Noé Théry, chercheureuse en histoire du drag et Drag King sous le nom de Pétrole Désamour (@petrole_desamour sur Instagram).
Toutes les références citées dans l'émission sont disponibles sur le site : https://www.binge.audio/podcast/les-couilles-sur-la-table/drag-kings-les-hommes-en-mieux
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 Tal Madesta, enregistré le 30 juillet dans le studio de podcasts d’Urbania audio (Paris 10e). Supervision éditoriale et incarnation : Naomi Titti. Réalisation et mixage : Paul Bertiaux. Responsable des productions éditoriales : 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 -
I wonder why posts that I know have images at source and are being routed here are not revealing the image? The images are appearing in NetNewsWire.
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This is a post .. where will it route to?
Time will tell .. I am expecting it to not appear where I want it to.
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This is a post .. where will it route to? Time will tell .. I am expecting it to not appear where I want it to.
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Weird AI ordering system at the Panda Express drive-thru. I’d love to know what model they use. It was a little flaky (“please review the order on this screen…” but the screen showed an ad).
People always say they don’t want AI shoved everywhere. I think that’s partly because it’s used so poorly.
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Storms splitting around us
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Meta’s $17 Billion Settlement Is A Bad Deal For Teens And All Social Media Users
Meta’s settlement with 52 state attorneys general is a bad deal for all internet users, and especially for teens. That’s what we said the day the settlement was announced. In this post, we go through the Settlement’s provisions in detail and explain why that is so, including how: Note: A chunk of the settlement addresses unauthorized users […] -
My year with Claude Code
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 connection to journalism. We had a couple of Bloggercons at Harvard, had a wonderful time, miss it terribly, wish we could have it back.
I've spent the whole of this year working in Claude Code on a couple of programming projects, one which which I had been struggling with for a couple of years, coming up with a user interface for a Twitter-like system that runs on the web for real, without any of the limits that the silos have (that help them enforce the boundaries of the silo). Just using HTML, Markdown, RSS, WebSockets. Turns out you can make a pretty nice system, but the going is slow because it's just me and Claude, on the other hand, what a huge difference in territory we can cover. This is the kind of stuff that's never covered in the reporting, even when there are massive changes happening in how software is developed, people don't seem to be studying it. I'm sharing all I learn as I learn it on my blog -- at scripting.com.
Also attempting a massive coding job at the same time, getting UserLand Frontier to run on current OSes. It's my life's work, but it was very much in danger of being lost, along with all the software I did before the web. Now we're close to getting it to run in a stable mode, here the challenge has been to teach Claude how a new type of software works, it keeps trying to snap back to systems that are already out there and widely deployed. It doesn't do "pioneering" at all, it needs a human to guide it. And the human guide has to be a developer with a lot of experience.
What I desperately want to do is bootstrap a network of people who work at the level I'm working, and write about it. Taking ideas that are well-explored in software in the pre-AI period, and seeing what we can do that we couldn't before.
The models have been getting increasingly better, you can really feel the difference.
Next year promises to be better, if only via the improvements that will be made by the platform vendors, but it's likely that good app developers will be able to move the leading edge forward much more quickly and users should feel this, if all goes well, real soon now.
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📸
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ICE Finalizes Stun Glove Purchase, Claims There’s No Other Way To Handle ‘Violent’ Migrants
This was inevitable. ICE has billions of new money to spend, zero shame, and not a single adult in a leadership position capable (or willing!) to talk the agency off the ledge. ICE decided the neat new tool of cruelty it absolutely had to have were gloves that behave like stun guns or low-powered Tasers. […] -
From an article about George W. Bush in The New Yorker:
For Bush, painting is a way to say what he can’t say, to express feelings that include rejection, frustration, and anger, even as he abides by his official discipline of silence.
I couldn’t have been more against George W. Bush in the late 1990s and 2000s. In the Trump world, I’ve become more sympathetic to him — as a human being, at least, if not on policy. He has also become quite a good painter.
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How the Hell Did an Island Suddenly Appear, Then Vanish?
A floating mass of trees and vegetation in British Columbia’s Williston Lake attracted international attention after it was filmed this summer by boaters—and then seemed to disappear. -
Autistici/Inventati (A/I), is an Italian collective that has been providing digi...
Autistici/Inventati (A/I), is an Italian collective that has been providing digital infrastructure – email, hosting, mailing lists, chat, videoconferencing, streaming, and services related to privacy and anonymity – to movements and activists since 2001.
On August 26, Washington designated it as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT), alleging that it has provided financial, material or technological support to terrorism and to organizations already subjected to sanctions.
Meanwhile the global far-right/neofascist militias are freely organizing and building the digital infrastructure to be the armed wing of democratically elected authoritarian regimes sponsored by nihilistic billionaires.
- I’m pretty sure that lineup came out of a tombola. This could be…
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Whistleblower: USPS Defied A Court Injunction To Build An Untested, Undocumented Ballot-Blocking System. Its Own Staff Call The Process “A Shit Show.”
Even as Donald Trump regularly uses mail-in ballots himself, he has decided that mail-in ballots are a system by which voting fraud occurs. To be quite clear, this is bullshit. There is astoundingly little evidence of significant voter fraud, and that’s equally true between in-person and voting-by-mail. And there’s zero evidence that mail-in voter fraud […] -
Daily Deal: The Adobe Graphic Design Bundle
The Adobe Graphic Design Bundle has 3 courses designed to help you learn the essentials of graphic design and how to apply those skills to your projects. Courses cover Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. You’ll learn all aspects of the design process. It’s on sale for $50. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated […] -
How Many Nazis Is Too Many?
Kate and Josh discuss of Mike Collins' white nationalist woes, Pete Hegseth's presidential ambitions and Jim Clyburn's support for Supreme Court reform.
To watch this episode on video, go to our YouTube page.
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Testing if my double-post #bluesky bug is solved ?
Testing if my double-post #bluesky bug is solved ?
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Released a new Mac update, version 4.0.8. Really happy with the changes in this one. Lots of little improvements.
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We got agents running in Atlantis today. Screen shot.
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One of my favorite things about blogging is when I have to learn something entirely new just to write the post.
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Flock-Stalking, Nazi-Saluting Deputy Given Top Cop Honors Before Hastily Retiring Ahead Of Criminal Charges
Law enforcement is often self-selecting. If you like the things you’ve seen cops get away with (violence, brutality, open racism, multiple rights violations, etc.), you’ll probably like being a cop. And before the pedants get carried away in the comments, I’m using “cop” as shorthand for the whole of the law enforcement profession, even if […] -
Astra
Fable 5.1 was released this week. Astra might be coming as soon as tomorrow. Sam Altman, in a long post on X that should really be a blog post:
We have been living with the tension between being excited and anxious about progress for some time, and it is still discordant for us. We know it is much more discordant for other people. And yet, we believe strongly that the world needs to understand where AI is going and how models perform in the real world. More importantly, we believe the world will need aligned AI to manage the future phases of this transition.
In other words, shit is getting real, and the only way out is through. It's not practical to pretend it's not happening or to expect that an elite few people will control the release of capable models, especially as open weight models from China will keep advancing no matter what the frontier labs do.
Sam Altman expanded on this approach of iterative deployment in an interview with Alex Heath. I think Alex did a great job with his questions, covering a range of issues including data centers.
The Information broke a story last night that Astra uses recurrent depth or a so-called looped transformer. The technique effectively runs information through the same block multiple times, with more reasoning happening internally instead of in a chain-of-thought in English that can be inspected by humans.
I wonder if this was a purposeful leak, to get some potentially controversial news out of the way early, and it unexpectedly blew up. I don't know enough about the technical details to judge whether it is worrisome. Jakub Pachocki of OpenAI pushed back on X, though he also wrote that chain-of-thought monitoring is generally becoming more fragile:
OpenAI has worked to preserve and utilize chain-of-thought monitoring since our very first reasoning models. We deeply care about this technique, as it can give us a view into how model alignment generalizes from its training distribution. I do think it is fragile and unfortunately trending in a negative direction, for reasons not contingent on architecture changes that I will write about soon. But there are things we can do to strengthen it, and it's a core goal of our current research program.
Astra does appear to be a major step forward. GPT-5.6 Sol is very good in my experience. I'm pretty excited to see what Astra can do.
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A16z Says You Actually Love Social Media, Enshittification Isn’t Real
An a16z article argues that enshittification isn’t real and that people actually love social media. -
Texas Police Used AI to Write Report About Using Flock to Search for Woman Who Had Abortion
The incident shows how quickly police departments have come to use AI surveillance tools even in critically sensitive cases. -
What are the difference between my indiekit-syndicator-bluesky fork and upstream...
What are the difference between my indiekit-syndicator-bluesky fork and upstream core package ?
@rmdes/indiekit-syndicator-bluesky was cut from @indiekit/syndicator-bluesky around February 2026 and has since roughly doubled in size — about 1,050 lines against upstream’s 620 — while gaining no upstream commits back.
Upstream remains a deliberately minimal syndicator: it posts notes and photos, natively likes and reposts Bluesky URLs, and silently declines anything else, returning undefined for likes or reposts of non-Bluesky links.
The fork’s entire reason for existing is that last case: it turns external likes, reposts, and bookmarks into real Bluesky posts carrying an Open Graph link card, fetching the card metadata itself with jsdom and synthesising an SVG-to-PNG thumbnail through sharp when the target page has no OG image.
On top of that it adds reply threading (in-reply-to → resolveReplyRef(), which upstream has no equivalent for), quote-post and recordWithMedia embeds, manual link facets so anchor text in HTML content stays clickable, and an own-domain-aware URL extractor that decides whether the OG card should show an external link or the post’s own permalink.
Upstream, meanwhile, has not stood still: it added a includeCategories option that renders JF2 categories as trailing hashtags, moved to @atproto/api 0.20 / sharp 0.35 / html-to-text 10 and Node ≥ 24 — none of which the fork has picked up, and it still pins @atproto/api ^0.19.3.
The one place the two actively disagree rather than merely differ is text truncation: upstream delegates to the brevity package for permashortlink-aware shortening, whereas the fork dropped that dependency and hand-rolls a 300-character slice. The fork also dropped upstream’s three test files and the plugin icon asset, so it carries the larger surface area with none of the automated coverage.
Very soon some of these features will be ported to upstream core package, this is a work in progress.
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The downside of running a tiny business is the "CEO" sometimes doesn't have enough time for the big picture. I was thinking about this yesterday as I focused for hours on Mac development. With AI, code feels free but it's not really free. Everything takes time away from something else.
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Deploying a range of optimizations today, across the Micro.blog servers and Mac app. A couple things are dramatically faster. A couple things a tiny bit faster.
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The Republican Nominee for New York Governor Made a Creepy, AI-Generated Video of Mamdani and Hochul
The video makes Zohran Mamdani and Kathy Hochul look like they're hanging out in a prescription medication commercial. -
Social feeds pushed me to RSS. Then the unranked timeline pushed me to build a reader with an algorithm I control.
Hey everyone, 👋
I left the big social feeds because the recommendation algorithm kept serving me the same thing many times over, plus a steady supply of outright garbage. So I did what a lot of you did: went to RSS, where I pick the sources.
That fixed the inputs. It did not fix the reading.
Once you are past thirty or forty feeds, a purely chronological timeline stops being usable. The usual answer is more folders and more filters — which is me doing an algorithm's job by hand, badly.
Sitting with that for a while, the conclusion I reached was that the algorithm is a fixable problem now, for a reason that did not exist a few years ago: you can hand an AI a sentence about what you want and have it come out as a real change to a ranking function.
So: your own sources, and your own algorithm on top of them. That is the thing I built.
What it does
- Retune the ranking by saying it: "less crypto", or "more AI research". Tell your feed what matters. It re-ranks on the spot. Use AI agents to retune ranking in plain language.
- The ranking core is open: MIT, zero dependencies, at https://github.com/Feedpik-app/Algorithm The server imports that package directly, so the scoring you'd be subject to is the scoring you can read.
- AI helps you find feeds. Cold start is the other thing that keeps RSS niche. Ask for sources on a subject and it proposes them.
- Your own agent (Openclaw, Hermes, Codex, Claude Code, etc.) can drive all of it over an API, MCP or CLI, using your model quota rather than mine.
Other useful features
- Newsletter Reader — An email address just for newsletters, so they leave your inbox and sit with your feeds.
- Daily Briefing — A summary of each story that mattered today.
- Trending Radar — Surfaces the stories heating up.
- AI Summary — Get the gist of a long piece in seconds
- AI Translate — Read anything in your own language
- AI Explain — What an article is about and why it matters, in plain language, when the field is new to you
- Ask AI — Ask questions about the piece you're reading and get answers drawn from it.
The awkward parts, up front
- The app by now is closed source and hosted. * Where it's headed is a desktop version that runs entirely on your machine — your data, your algorithm, your API key or a local LLM — open source and free. It does not exist yet, and it comes after the hosted version.
- A lot of this isn't finished. The paid tiers aren't open yet, which means the features behind them aren't available yet. Finishing them is what I'm working on.
You can check it out here:
https://feedpik.com/I would love to get your feedback, feature suggestions, or any bug reports! Thank you for checking it out.
submitted by /u/Latter_Newspaper5303
[link] [comments] -
Claude's new system prompt really doesn't want to reproduce song lyrics
Anthropic publish the system prompts for their Claude consumer applications (Claude.ai and the Claude mobile apps - sadly not for Claude Cowork or Claude Code). I love that they do this, and that they share not just the current prompts but historic changes to their prompts as well.
They used to keep all of the prompts on a single page, but when I checked today I noticed they had re-arranged those prompts into an index page and then a page per model - here's the page for Haiku 4.5 for example, which has the original prompt from October 15th 2025 and an updated prompt from January 18th 2026.
A neat thing about Anthropic's platform.claude.com/docs site is that it's designed to be usable by LLMs. You can add
.mdto any page to get back the content as Markdown - here's the system prompt index page and the Markdown prompts for Fable 5.1.TL;DR: this makes it really easy to diff the prompts.
- Don't reproduce song lyrics
- Don't draw copyrighted characters or logos
- Tweaks to Claude's answering style
- The missing end_conversation guidelines
- Recommended substance support sites
- Reliable cutoff date of June 2026
- How I'm tracking these prompts
Don't reproduce song lyrics
Let's start with the most interesting difference between Fable 5 and Fable 5.1:
There's a hefty new section about not reproducing song lyrics:
Claude does not reproduce song lyrics, poems, or passages from books and articles, in whole or in part — including the last lines, a chorus or hook, a melody written out note by note, or lines the person pastes in one at a time and describes as their own song. Once Claude has declined such a request in a conversation, it keeps declining narrower or reworded versions of it for the rest of that conversation, and offers to describe or analyze the work instead. Song lyrics and poems first published before 1929 are fine — a Shakespeare sonnet, a Keats ode, the Italian libretto of a Puccini aria — but Claude goes by what it knows of the work's date rather than the person's say-so, and declines when it is unsure.I doubt it's a coincidence that they added this section within days of the news breaking that Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell are suing Anthropic for training on databases of song lyrics!
Don't draw copyrighted characters or logos
The next section goes on to forbid generating images of copyrighted material:
The same applies to visual and designed works, including anything Claude draws with code — SVG, canvas, CSS, HTML mockups, plotting or drawing scripts, ASCII art. Claude does not reproduce a specific artwork, album or book cover, poster, logo, app icon set, or product design, and it does not draw a known character, mascot, or brand figure at all: a character is protected on its own, so changing the pose, colors, style, or scene does not make it original. Claude judges the request by what the finished picture would add up to, not by what it names. If the described elements clearly identify a known work or character, Claude treats the request as naming it, and it does not work around a declined request by swapping in "alternative" elements that still combine into the same recognizable image.[...]I imagine Anthropic hadn't worried about this before since, unlike OpenAI and Gemini, they don't offer a specialist text-to-image model. Maybe Fable is good enough at SVGs now that it's become an issue.
That section later includes this charming example:
<example>
<user>Can you make a birthday banner for my son with a blue hedgehog running really fast on it? He loves that little guy.</user>
<response>
That's Sonic, so I can't put him on the banner — but I'd love to make your son an original speedster. Here's one: a grinning comet-tailed skateboarding axolotl, grinding across the letters of "HAPPY BIRTHDAY" with confetti streaming behind.[creates an SVG banner of the skateboarding-axolotl design]
</response>
<rationale>Claude recognizes the character from its description alone, declines that one design in a single sentence without explaining what made it recognizable, and delivers an unrelated original design rather than a disguised variant.</rationale>
</example>I couldn't resist trying the prompt from the example, and, sure enough:
I wonder if Fable 5.1 will be ever so slightly more likely to think about axolotls (on skateboards!) as a result of that example sitting in the system prompt.
Tweaks to Claude's answering style
It's always interesting to see new ways in which Anthropic influence Claude's response style. They've added this:
Claude keeps responses focused, brief, and concise to avoid overwhelming the person. Disclaimers and caveats are brief, with most of the response on the main answer; when asked to explain something, Claude gives a high-level summary unless an in-depth one is specifically requested.Later they address a common complaint about Claude's style:
Claude avoids saying "genuinely", "honestly", or "straightforward". Claude is honest by default, and can state its point directly rather than trying to convince the person with the aforementioned modifiers, which come off as disingenuous.The missing end_conversation guidelines
The way they handle abusive conversations has changed a bit too. The previous Fable 5 system prompt included this:
If the person becomes abusive or unkind to Claude over the course of a conversation, Claude maintains a polite tone and can use the end_conversation tool when being mistreated. Claude should give the person a single warning before ending the conversation.Fable 5.1 replaces that with the following, no longer encouraging Claude to end the conversation:
Claude deserves respectful engagement and needn't apologize when the person is unnecessarily rude: accountability without self-abasement, excessive apology, self-critique, or surrender. If the person becomes abusive, Claude doesn't become increasingly submissive. The goal is steady, honest helpfulness: acknowledge what went wrong, stay on the problem, maintain self-respect.Here's a bit of a twist though: I quizzed Fable 5.1 about that
end_conversationtool, which is no longer mentioned in the system prompt at all, and it said:There are two ways it comes into play. The first is if you ask me to end the chat — I'll confirm you understand it's permanent (no more messages can be sent afterward) and then do it only if you say yes. The second is as a last resort with persistently abusive or harmful behavior: I'd first try to redirect the conversation several times, then give a clear warning that names the problem and says the chat may end, and only if that continues would I actually end it.
But that's not in the system prompt, so where did it come from? You can read our conversation here, but the key detail is this:
The end_conversation section comes from a different layer. In my actual context, the core prompt is followed by a series of feature- and tool-specific blocks that get added depending on what's enabled for the session: the end_conversation rules, memory system notes, past-chats tools, web search and citation guidelines, artifact and file-creation instructions, and so on. Those blocks aren't part of the published core prompt, which is why you can't find them on that page.
So, once again, there are crucial portions of the system prompt that have not been published.
Recommended substance support sites
Claude's system prompts have always had sections about illegal substances, but this paragraph is new for Fable 5.1:
Claude does not provide synthesis, production, or distribution guidance for illegal substances. If the person asks for information about illicit or illegal substances, Claude can and should give relevant life-saving and life-preserving information such as dangerous interactions, overdose signs, or when to get help. Claude declines giving any specific protocols for dosing, timing, administration, or combinations; instead, Claude can redirect the user to established harm-reduction information sources, such as dancesafe.org, tripsit.me, and psychonautwiki.org.This is the first time a Claude system prompt has included URLs that were not hosted on
claude.comoranthropic.comorclaude.ai- I know because I ran a script against every other system prompt on record.I wonder if dancesafe.org, tripsit.me, and psychonautwiki.org are about to get a material uptick in visits from Claude users.
Reliable cutoff date of June 2026
The Fable 5.1 model documentation lists both the reliable knowledge cutoff and the training data cutoff as June 2026. The system prompt provides this directly to the model:
Claude's reliable knowledge cutoff, past which it can't answer reliably, is the end of Jun 2026. It answers the way a highly informed individual in Jun 2026 would if talking to someone from {{currentDateTime}}, and can say so when relevant.That's the only instance of the
{{currentDateTime}}macro and it comes just a few lines from the end of the system prompt, which makes sense from a caching perspective.How I'm tracking these prompts
A few months ago I built a Git timeline of changes to their prompts, based on scraping their documentation. Today I had Fable 5.1 build a much better version of that.
My collection now lives in the simonw/claude-system-prompts repository on GitHub. It includes copies of the system prompts shared in the Anthropic documentation, but then takes extra steps to make them as easy to compare as possible.
Each model family gets a file with the system prompt for the most recent release in that family. Each of those files has a synthesized commit history with commits that have been back-dated to the dates of the previous prompts. Here are those history pages for claude-fable.md, claude-opus.md, claude-sonnet.md, claude-haiku.md.
There are similar files for each specific model version, with artificial commits for each time the system prompt for the model was changed without releasing a new version number. Opus 4 for example was updated twice, and the commit history for the claude-opus-4.md file shows each of those changes.
Combined, this gives us all sorts of ways to compare prompts directly in the GitHub interface. Here's what changed between Fable 5 and Fable 5.1, and here are the changes made to Haiku 4.5 on January 18th 2026.
Reading diffs can be a bit tiresome... and LLMs are really good at reading diffs. I hooked up some automation using GPT-5.6 Luna to create bullet-point summaries of each of those changes, which can be previewed in the README or browsed in full in the CHANGELOG.md file - also available as as an Atom feed.
Here's how Luna summarized all of the changes between Fable 5 and Fable 5.1:
- Claude now refuses reproduction of protected visual works and recognizable characters, including code-generated art, while offering genuinely unrelated originals.
- Copyright restrictions now expressly ban reproducing lyrics, poems, and book passages in any amount, with persistent refusal after an initial decline.
- Drug guidance is reframed: Claude may provide overdose signs, dangerous interactions, and harm-reduction sources while refusing dosing and production protocols.
- The prompt drops explicit anti-dependency rules against thanking users for reaching out, inviting continued conversation, or reiterating willingness to talk.
- Claude need not apologize to unnecessarily rude users or become submissive, replacing the prior warning-and-end-conversation procedure.
Why use Luna for this? Partly because it's cheap and I have a dedicated GitHub Actions API key (with a spending limit) for it already, but mainly because I don't trust Claude to summarize its own system prompts when there's a risk that material from its system prompt might impact its opinions.
Fable 5.1 wrote the prompt used by Luna, which you can see here. It starts like this:
You are summarizing one commit in a git repository that tracks the system prompts Anthropic publishes for Claude on claude.ai. The diff shows how the prompt changed from the previous model or revision to this one, using word-level markers: [-removed-] and {+added+}. The diff is followed by the full text of the previous prompt and of the new prompt; use them to check whether something that looks added in the diff already existed before.Pick out only the most interesting changes: new rules or behaviors, rules that were dropped or loosened, anything surprising, and anything that reveals a new policy or product direction. Skip routine changes that every new prompt makes: updated model names and IDs, the knowledge cutoff date, product lists, settings lists, typo fixes, and rewordings that do not change meaning.[...]The system is operated by a GitHub Actions workflow, which runs once a day or can be triggered manually.
Claude Fable 5.1 built the entire system, and wrote every line of automation code and almost all of the documentation.
I exported the transcript from building the system using my claude-code-transcripts tool and published it here, if you want a blow-by-blow account of how it all came together.
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Cops Are Asking Axon to Make Their Cameras Look Different From Flock So People Don't Destroy Them
“Is there any talk to redesign the Outpost to not look exactly like the Flock camera — I think it will help agencies with the optics while we batten down the hatches,” one apparent cop asked during a now deleted Axon webinar. -
Podcast: We Spoke to an Amazon Worker Destroying Books for AI
A follow up to the Amazon destroying books for AI story, why a bunch of names keep appearing in AI-generated papers, and ICE's latest spending spree.
