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| @rmdes | local | — | |
| @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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While working on a new blog post, I asked AI a question about my older blog posts and it showed me this one from 2016: Blog when you disagree. I still think this is a powerful aspect of blogging. Posting to your own blog is inherently independent. You post for yourself instead of for a community.
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Zero Knowledge Proofs Aren’t Age Verification Silver Bullets
Age verification (laws and regulations requiring platforms and websites to assure or estimate that a user seeking to use an online service is of a certain age) is everywhere. At the time of writing, about half the states in the US have some internet age verification law in place, and dangerous proposals, from the KIDS Act to the Kids Online Safety […]Reply source -
Daily Deal: Plantum Plant Identifier (iOS only)
The Plantum app is a digital tool that helps to identify plants, diagnose plant diseases, and improve plant care. The app can identify over 40,000 plant species, assess their health, and give specific care advice. Plantum offers a suite of digital tools that help users improve plant care by considering light conditions, soil, water schedule, […]Reply source -
Walking the Length of Manhattan . I did this, solo,...
Reply sourceWalking the Length of Manhattan. I did this, solo, right before I moved out of NYC. Loved it. Will do it again someday.
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“When Jason Ganos was asked to help sell an old box full...
Reply source“When Jason Ganos was asked to help sell an old box full of NES cartridges…” How 97 Copies of an Unreleased Version of Super Mario Bros. Duck Hunt Were Discovered in a Wisconsin Warehouse.
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CBP Officers And Contractors Abused Government Databases To Stalk Their Exes
This news will come as no surprise to anyone. Those who have been following police misconduct revelations for years have seen this happen time and time and time and time again. Those who are in the business of engaging in police misconduct have known for years that it’s easy to do and it seldom gets […]Reply source -
What a great idea for a book: Cookbooking: A Fan’s...
Reply sourceWhat a great idea for a book: Cookbooking: A Fan’s Guide. “An eclectic, visually stunning pop-history, Cookbooking explores the most influential and beloved cookbooks through photographs, listicles, graphics, and snappy writing.”
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Behind the Blog: Early Birthday Reflections
This week, we discuss our party and panel coming up, and do some light reminiscing.Reply source - Reply source
Claude is still learning that there's unprecedented depth to Frontier. A bunch of real developers worked full time for a decade or more creating new layers on the web, a foundation that became the social web of today. In doing that we invented a bunch of formats and protocols, but here's the thing Claude didn't get and probably still hasn't gotten -- there's code in there to support all that stuff. How else do you think it came about? People just did what we said to do? At Google? Apple? Microsoft? And on and on. They supported this stuff so they could interop with us and steal our users (which is a fine reason to interop, probably the only real reason). I was trying to think of a metaphor that expresses the difference between Frontier and languages like Python, JavaScript, etc. It's like a ski mountain. The languages are trails on the mountain. But there aren't any lifts, lodges, no ski patrol, lessons. And because it includes all of that, metaphorically, we can do integrations that can never be done with the other languages. Claude has absolutely no experience with this kind of product, and always snaps back when you let it, to the idea of Python, with different syntax. -
Trump FCC Weakens U.S. Broadband Speed Goals To The Benefit Of Elon Musk And Comcast
I’ve spent the better part of a lifetime studying and writing about the way corrupted lawmakers and U.S. telecom giants work hand in hand to erode U.S. broadband standards and mapping so they can obscure the way corruption and monopoly result in limited broadband competition — resulting in shitty, expensive, spotty, and slow U.S. internet […]Reply source -
DOGE’s Screwworm Legacy May Be Tons Of Euthanized Cats And Dogs
Of all the things I thought the Trump administration would cause to enter the public lexicon, I certainly did not have screwworms on my list. If you somehow haven’t heard of this, screwworms are actually a fly that lays its eggs by burrowing into the flesh of other animals. Those animals are mostly cattle, sometimes […]Reply source -
The website that created an AI clone of its editor in chief
Every CEO Dan Shipper on doubling headcount while automating everything, building an agent out of 30,000 copyedits, and the “dirty secret” of writing with AIReply source -
Bumbling Warner Bros CEO David Zaslav Sees $197 Million Stock Sale Bonanza On Top Of Looming $550 Million Golden Parachute
Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslav oversaw years of dysfunction during the last wave of pointless Warner Brothers AT&T and Discovery mergers, which included tens of thousands of brutal layoffs, consistent creative infighting, endlessly higher prices, cancelled programming, and endless chaos. Unlike most of us, who’d be shitcanned and ostracized, Zaslav is the kind of affluent […]Reply source -
“ The principal aim of President Trump’s second...
Reply source“The principal aim of President Trump’s second term is revenge,” says Jamelle Bouie. “Revenge shapes the president’s priorities, drives his actions and structures the decisions of his government.”
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Weird Al Yankovic’s Tiny Desk Concert
Reply sourceHoly moly, NPR’s Tiny Desk has been going for a long time. Weird Al Yankovic first stopped by the desk in 2010, so early that they didn’t even have it on YouTube until more recently. And the other day, they had him back for a second session!
Yankovic focused on originals the first time around, but for this show he brought parodies of Don McLean’s “American Pie” (“The Saga Begins,” from 1999’s Running with Scissors) and Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” (“eBay,” from 2003’s Poodle Hat), as well as the Weezer pastiche “Skipper Dan,” from 2011’s Alpocalypse. And, for fans of the breathtakingly factual 2022 biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, he performs the film’s Emmy-losing closing-credits blues-rock jam “Now You Know.”
We only get so many gifts in this life, so let’s set an intention here and now to return “Weird Al” Yankovic to the Tiny Desk in the summer of 2042. But if he’s gonna come back and see us (or whoever’s buried us and moved on) at a sprightly 82, we’ll have to ask him to bring a string section, just to keep things fresh.
Tags: music · Tiny Desk Concerts · video · Weird Al Yankovic
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Reading up on AT Proto Spaces. (Wait, when did we start spelling it Atproto?) It's private-ish, not encrypted, and kept out of the relay... I think this is going to be a big deal.
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Anil Dash built a standalone Touch ID sensor to use...
Reply sourceAnil Dash built a standalone Touch ID sensor to use with your Mac if you don’t have a newer Apple keyboard. It’s open-source…the code and instructions are on Github.
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ICE Says It Will Fit Every Officer With A Body Cam, Restrict Public Access To Recordings
After immigration officers murdered two people in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the DHS made some noises about outfitting officers with body cameras. Six months later — and following even more killings — nearly every officer was still bereft of state-owned recording devices. The administration offered this excuse for its lack of compliance with its own promises: While talking […]Reply source -
Analysts Warn U.S. Economy Becoming Overly Dependent On...
Reply sourceAnalysts Warn U.S. Economy Becoming Overly Dependent On Anne Hathaway. “We estimate that Anne Hathaway films currently account for a staggering 63% of all U.S. exports.” Zendaya is the other 37%.
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The EU Wanted A Deepfake Detector. It Got An AI Scarlet Letter.
I spoke a little about this on last week’s Ctrl-Alt-Speech, but now that Anthropic has come out with more details about how its text watermarking works, the debate has shifted into overdrive. Many people are upset about it, even though it appears that Google has already been doing something similar with the output from Gemini. […]Reply source -
Daily Deal: iPhotography Training Course
Sure, just about anyone can point and shoot with a camera, but only a true expert can snap a photo that’s worth sharing with the world. From exposure to shutter speed and everything in between, this award-winning training walks you through the nuts and bolts behind capturing truly stunning photos. iPhotography is the leading online […]Reply source -
'Darth Vader' Wants Flock in San Diego
"The emperor is a fan of Flock, and we must continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum," Vader said during the meeting.Reply source -
When you take screenshots of posts in iOS social apps...
Reply sourceWhen you take screenshots of posts in iOS social apps like Bluesky or Threads, they use this little trick to replace the “Follow” button with the app’s logo.
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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 […]Reply source - Reply source
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. ;-) - Reply source
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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“All our neighbors worked for those firms —...
Reply source“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.Reply source -
Long past time to quit X . “Those who continue to...
Reply sourceLong 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.Reply source -
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 […]Reply source - Reply
Test post
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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 […]Reply source -
Conceptual integrity and counting lines of code
Reply sourceLast 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 […]Reply source - Reply source
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 […]Reply source -
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.Reply source - Reply source
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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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 […]Reply source -
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 […]Reply source -
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.Reply source -
'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.'"Reply source - Reply source
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 […]Reply source -
Synonyms and antonyms
Reply sourceTwenty 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.