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| @paul | local | — | |
| news.rss.chat | source | — | — |
| scripting.com | source | — | — |
| euwatch.micro.blog | source | — | — |
| www.techdirt.com | source | — | — |
| simonwillison.net | source | — | — |
| www.manton.org | source | — | — |
| feeds.kottke.org | source | — | — |
| rss.beehiiv.com | source | — | — |
| www.404media.co | source | — | — |
| brilliantmaps.com | source | — | — |
| shellsharks.com | source | — | — |
| www.platformer.news | source | — | — |
| podstandards.org | source | — | — |
| zacharykai.net | source | — | — |
Timeline
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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. -
Libraries Beg Brendan Carr To Back Off Plan To Make U.S. Broadband Shittier, More Expensive
Back in June, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr announced he’d be reviewing the FCC E-Rate program with an eye on “reforms.” Generally, when Brendan Carr promises “reforms,” usually what he means is either “I’m going to destroy this program,” or “I’m going to illegally make changes to this congressionally-mandated program that ensures telecom giants like AT&T get more money […]Reply source -
Buc-ee’s Billboard Near Beaver’s Mini Mart Vandalized As Corporation Gaslights Mayor
This Buc-ee’s vs. the Beaver’s Mini-Mart is just not going to go away. While Buc-ee’s has made quite the name for itself as a trademark bully over the past several years, it may have finally run into a combination that is more than the corporation can handle. Between John Oliver’s continued coverage of this lawsuit, […]Reply source - Reply source
I've never run out of Codex tokens before, so it's always felt essentially unlimited. At 4% remaining now with a day left! Uh oh. I don’t think my usage has changed much except that I’m running with
/fastand Ultra more often. -
An LLM wiki changed how I work
And everything else I learned about productivity this yearReply source -
An Update On How I Use AI To Help With Techdirt (It’s Still Not Writing Articles)
Over in our Insider Chat, someone recently pointed out a tiered “REAL Rating” five-tier scale designed to replace the fairly blunt and misleading question of “did you use AI on that?” with something a bit more nuanced. As someone who believes the discussion about AI could use a lot more nuance, I’m all for the […]Reply source - Reply source
Catching up on news from D23. Cartoon Brew has a rundown of some of the theme park changes coming up. The first Lion King ride will be in Disneyland Paris... A little surprised they never built that in Animal Kingdom.
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This is a wild story: The Scientist Who Lived with...
Reply sourceThis is a wild story: The Scientist Who Lived with Dozens of Children from the Pacific Islands. “I realized I’m in the middle of a pedophile operation that has been run out of the N.I.H. by a Nobel laureate for thirty years.”
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“Scientists have found that people are being...
Reply source“Scientists have found that people are being exposed to more toxins than previously known, and beyond damaging lungs, wildfire smoke may affect hearts, brains and other organs.” (Research is preliminary & ongoing but sheesh…)
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Coalitions
Reply sourceMy post earlier about X didn't resonate exactly as I had intended. Let me zoom out.
Let's think of proponents of the social web as a coalition. People actively choose to be on the fediverse, atmosphere, and (though it's a dated term) blogosphere. There are people who:
- Dislike Elon Musk for political reasons.
- See federation as the answer to developer-hostile platforms.
- Want a more distributed web with personal blogs.
- Hope smaller communities will encourage civility.
- Care deeply about web standards.
These are all different things. Which of these matters most to you will shape your perspective.
I believe that blogging is the best way to contribute to the web. Because of this, many other things follow. For example, it’s better to post to your blog and X (or your blog and LinkedIn, or your blog and Instagram) than it is to post to Mastodon alone.
We spend so much time on this social network vs. that network that we risk missing the big picture. Maybe the social web has gotten too tribal and in turn too far away from principles.
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FOIA Documents Show Epstein Files Had Flag List Which Included The Term ‘POTUS’
MAGA, the GOP, and the Trump administration don’t really care about the victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking. The MAGA GOP made a lot of noise during Biden’s single term because they were sure the files would show a Pizzagate’s-worth of Democratic political figures engaged in the ritual abuse of underage girls. Once Trump was […]Reply source -
Ring of Fire in the Sky
Reply sourcePortuguese photographer Rui Santos captured this shot of the recent solar eclipse.
Stunning. Here’s what makes this shot look a little different from other eclipse photos; from APOD:
Usually the solar corona appears white, and to some observers the corona of last week’s total solar eclipse did appear this pearly color. But this time, totality observers in Spain saw a corona that appeared unusually golden. For one reason, from Spain, the totality occurred when the setting Sun was near the horizon. That low, sunlight travels through a large amount of air which scatters out blue light. An unusual amount of smoke in the air from nearby forest fires acted as a second filter, further scattering the remaining blue tones and deepening the already gold-dominated light.
Tags: 2026 solar eclipse · astronomy · eclipses · photography · Rui Santos · Sun
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How to make a good Star Wars movie for once ....
Reply sourceHow to make a good Star Wars movie for once. “Stop making stuff that’s so self referential and start focusing on projects that once again are bringing things from the outside and putting them in a Star Wars container.” Fan service is bad storytelling.
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And also a trailer for season 2 of Star Wars: Ahsoka ....
Reply sourceAnd also a trailer for season 2 of Star Wars: Ahsoka. Huh. Lots of Anakin, but where are the space whales?
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ABC Sues The FCC For Massive First Amendment Violations
After years of feckless capitulation, ABC is clearly developing something vaguely resembling a backbone. The company has filed a new lawsuit against Brendan Carr and the FCC (pdf), (correctly) claiming that the agency has been engaged in a coordinated campaign of harassment that violates the First Amendment and tramples the company’s free speech rights. The […]Reply source -
Daily Deal: Hypergear 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Dock
The Hypergear 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Dock is meticulously engineered to reduce the cable clutter and streamline your daily routine. Featuring 2 dedicated wireless charging surfaces, you can power up your phone and AirPods easily. In addition, you can charge your Apple Watch with the built-in charger mount. Stylish and compact, the dock is perfect for […]Reply source - Reply source
Pretty significant design changes coming to Mastodon for version 5.0. I don't use Mastodon often (my blog posts get to the fediverse from Micro.blog) but these seem like good changes.
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Trailer for VisionQuest , the third leg of the...
Reply sourceTrailer for VisionQuest, the third leg of the Wanda/Vision/Agatha trilogy. Huh. “Ultron! Human avatars only!”
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Why do people care if Claude puts watermarks on text it wrote. It's screwing with its writing, not yours. As a person who publishes their own writing, and carefully labels it when it's written by an AI bot (docs, change notes, podcast show notes, quotable things it said), I want people to be able to tell that I wrote it, this is what I thought, I'm not just shoveling random written sludge to people, sloshing around, devaluing every bit of real writing in its midst. I bet teachers love the idea. Why does everyone have to have an opinion about every damned thing? And of course I have even more to say on the subject.
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In Bourgogne, they’ve been recording grape date harvests...
Reply sourceIn Bourgogne, they’ve been recording grape date harvests since 1354. This year’s harvest set a record for earliest start: Aug 8. “From 1354 to 1987 the average start was 28 September. Since 1988 it runs 13 days earlier.”
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MAGA GOP Keeps Taking Ownership Stakes In Private Companies, Then Warning You The Communists Are Coming
Words used to mean things. The MAGA GOP strategy lately seems to be pulling a page from the 1980s playbook (a Trump specialty) and declaring anyone they don’t like to be “communist.” The whole thing is laughable. Even if you disagree with some of the policy positions of far left groups like the Democratic Socialists […]Reply source - Reply source
Got let in to Bluesky's Attie. I'm impressed with it so far. I wonder if this will end up being a paid product. Can't be cheap to run.
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Anthropic’s Text Watermarking Proves AI Companies Do Not Care at All About Writing
AI companies see words as interchangeable and have zero clue how to judge the “quality” of writing.Reply source -
Post-pandemic vaccination rates of US kindergarteners...
Reply sourcePost-pandemic vaccination rates of US kindergarteners continue to fall and “nonmedical exemptions” based on “personal or religious beliefs” jumped 0.8% in just 1 year.
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I had missed that Automattic's renewed push into education comes with a free .blog or .art domain name. It's just for one year, but still great to get students thinking about owning their writing. I wish I could offer that.
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When I blogged a couple weeks ago that X seems to be growing again, I think some people didn't believe me. Yesterday, Federico Viticci returned to X:
Over the last two years, I've fundamentally changed as a creator. I'm still a writer and podcaster, but I guess I'm also a new kind of "builder". Today, I need to find new readers, listeners, and developers, wherever they may be.
I have a lot of respect for Federico. If he feels he needs to connect with folks on X, that's his call. I'm sure he's going to keep blogging and podcasting too!
Let me be clear: I'm not going to post on X. But I'm not blind either. Part of running Micro.blog is paying attention when things change.
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Whoa, Columbia House (12 cassettes for 1¢) is finally...
Reply sourceWhoa, Columbia House (12 cassettes for 1¢) is finally going out of business after 71 years and several pivots (records to reel-to-reel to 8-tracks to cassettes to CDs to VHS to DVDs to Blu-ray).
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Looks like we're getting the camera AirPods soon. I'm curious how Apple is going to frame the privacy for these considering all the Meta glasses backlash. Even if the image never leaves your phone, will people trust it?
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Frontier observations in 2026
Reply sourceAs I've been writing test scripts for the Frontier project, I was finding omissions or mistakes one at a time. Finally I asked Claude to research this. Where are the holes you didn't fill as we were going along? The list is surprisingly long. Then I asked it to look at other things that were left unimplemented. There were lots.
Claude is not really at fault for any of this. The first goal we went for is write enough of Frontier so my nodeEditor build scripts will run. Then it took on lots of other jobs. And all that time I never thought to ask "what haven't we implemented, or stubbed up?" Then I did, and was shocked at how many verbs there are. I had forgotten, I'm not sure I never even knew, because it's so easy to add a whole section to a verb set, and you only see the details if you expand the table.
I want to try to draw people who were serious Frontier developers in the 90s and 00s and beyond, because there are questions that have come up about what we should bring with us. I'll start with an example. Here's an outline of the system.verbs.builtins.tcp table. The question is -- how much of this code should be brought across from the 90s to the 20s? Obviously the DNS verbs. There aren't many and we used them all the time. FTP verbs? Borderline. We don't use FTP very much these days. We had an IM table with verbs and drivers. I remember when Jake worked on this, but I don't think it got much beyond a demo. And the very lowest-level stream-oriented TCP verbs? Well tcp.httpClient needed them, in the 90s and it was the basis for all our HTML and RSS work, our first feed reader built on that code. But HTTP support built into Node.js is pretty great in 2026. We'd be foolish to do anything but call into it. That's one of the reasons I migrated to JavaScript in 2013. There are plenty of other examples like this, and my answer is generally we'll save them for last, and if no one asks about them, we'll retire them. Figure if a platform hasn't updated in 12 years, and doesn't run on any hardware anyone ships before this transition, we have less to worry about than normal. And if need be, we always can add them back at a future date.
Another example, until late last week Claude was arguing with me about the correct use of directions in the op.go verb. This is so incredbily well documented, over and over in so many places. And it knew about all of them, yet it still thought its choices for directions made more sense. The question had already been answered in the mid-80s.
It also thought it was a language that ran in the context of a Unix OS, like Python or PHP. Yes, it could be used that way, but all of its advantages based on integration of the database, language, verb set, runtime would be missing. It's an OS of its own that runs on many OSes, now it will run anywhere Electron runs, so in the future it will have access to everything, on the desktop and the server. You could even run a headless version, we tried that for a week or so and hated it. Too limited and too slow.
I'd like to get feedback from people with experience, and honestly people who are good to work with. :-)
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The area known as Tornado Alley continues to shift...
Reply sourceThe area known as Tornado Alley continues to shift eastward (from Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas to Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin) due to “a warming climate that helps transport warmer and more-humid air farther north and east than in the past”.
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John Gruber follows up on a number of issues around watermarking. On what to even do with detection tools:
There cannot exist a single detector for all LLMs. And even if you find out that it says it’s a match, that an email or blog post or Slack message was very likely generated by, say, Claude, what are you going to do? March into your colleague’s office and tell them you caught them?
Watermarking critiques are compelling because there are multiple points against it. Worse quality (maybe), false positives with quoted or lightly edited text (likely), centralized control of keys (yes).
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X's Algorithm Feeds Off Ragebait and Impacts Democrats More, Study Finds
X is driving engagement by making users fight in the replies.Reply source - Reply source
It's hard in the moment to know when to stand up to bullies and when to let it go. Glad to see Disney pushing back against Trump's FCC.
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The National Park Service Is Using Flock. Rangers Are Pissed
“I fear for the day when a visitor's National Park experience is interrupted by being pulled over and held at gunpoint because a license plate reader misread their plate.”Reply source -
The Ellisons Again Threaten To Move CBS/Paramount Somewhere Shittier And Hotter If State Antitrust Lawsuit Isn’t Settled
Paramount bosses Larry and David Ellison aren’t having much fun in the wake of a 12 state antitrust lawsuit that risks derailing their $111 billion attempt to dominate what’s left of U.S. corporate media. There’s been a certain creeping desperation apparent the last month or two; whether it’s the company’s top lawyer claiming that critics […]Reply source -
Screwworm Infections Get Worse, Government Unleashing Drone Army For Surveillance
A couple of months back, we discussed how screwworm infections had reappeared in Texas for the first time in decades. The foreign surveillance program designed to keep this from occurring in partnership with countries south of the border dissipated after losing funding as a result of the DOGE bros deciding it just wasn’t worth it. […]Reply source -
Another California Court Has Now Broken Media Advertising, So The Copia Institute Asked Another California Appeals Court To Fix It
A few years ago a California appeals court produced the unfortunate Liapes v. Facebook decision. In this decision, it gave the go-ahead to age discrimination claims under California’s Unruh Act resulting from ads not being served to users of certain ages. It’s a nonsensical application of anti-discrimination law, because ads are not themselves the goods […]Reply source -
Pornhub's Parent Company to Pay $120 Million to Settle Child Sexual Abuse Lawsuits
The deal settles class action lawsuits claiming Mindgeek's sites hosted and profited from abuse videos of minors.Reply source - Reply source
We just sent a new Micro Monday email update out! Still getting our bearings again with email. I also built a new system to manage and send the emails. Learning a lot, as always. 🤞
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Flock Safety Decides To Implement A Few Changes After Months Of Negative Press
Flock Safety has spent a few years building a massive network of ALPR (automated license plate reader) cameras. Flock’s cameras are a step ahead of competitors. They not only grab plate/location info, but they provide searchable tags/images that cover everything from car make/model to specific vehicle features. These photos also include images of the drivers […]Reply source -
“ Sand temperatures above 29°C now produce 95–99%...
Reply source“Sand temperatures above 29°C now produce 95–99% female sea turtles instead of the historical 50–50 ratio, creating a reproductive bottleneck that could collapse populations within two generations.”
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404 Media put an AirTag in a used book to track it to an Amazon scanning facility. (Clever investigative reporting or legal gray area?) Not sure how much we can read into this because Amazon has been scanning books for over 20 years, ever since the "look inside" feature.
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A.J. Jacobs recently interviewed “the Papa Bear of...
Reply sourceA.J. Jacobs recently interviewed “the Papa Bear of Puzzling”, Will Shortz and came away with seven lessons he learned from him. “Creativity is usually more about evolution than revolution.”
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Federal Court Rules That Blocking Speech Is Protected By The First Amendment, But Recommending It Isn’t
This ruling came out a week and a half ago at this point and I’ve been so annoyed with it that I kept putting off writing about it, but it’s so bad that it requires a discussion. A federal district court in San Jose denied motions from a bunch of the big tech companies seeking […]Reply source -
Daily Deal: The Complete Arduino, Raspberry Pi & ESP32 Bundle
The Complete Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and ESP32 Bundle has 14 courses covering what you need to get started on building out your own smart home. After learning the basics, courses show you how to create a weather monitoring system, a smart home security system, a plant watering system, and more. Courses also cover getting familiar […]Reply source -
Unwinding the Great Tech Power Grab . “If tech seeks to...
Reply sourceUnwinding the Great Tech Power Grab. “If tech seeks to replace democratic governance itself, then the response has to be more democracy, not less.” Lots of related links in this piece too.
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Listening to the latest AppStories podcast about how to grade Siri AI. I like the way John and Federico approach this. Siri AI can be both way better than old Siri and also not nearly as capable as frontier models. Who after using GPT-5.6 Luna for free is going to use Siri instead?
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Rather Than Investigate The Alex Pretti Murder, The DHS Investigated Minneapolis Activist Groups
Two murders in less than a week. That’s how the surge went in Minneapolis — a city targeted because the city and state were run by members of the opposing party. It was political persecution pretending to be a public safety effort. Trump and his administration buddies amplified accusations of government funding fraud. Trump himself […]Reply source