Posts in: rss

🎙️ Russ Roberts responded to my comments from yesterday on his conversation with Munger. There is an episode of EconTalked with Sam Altman that goes into the Y Combinator version of AirBnB’s founding. But the details are not relevant to my point, as I replied. This is why I still keep an X account.

Friday links, and it's RSS all the way down

  • Cory Doctorow: You should be using an RSS reader. Almost a year old, but an important preamble for what’s below, especially if you only have a vague idea of what RSS stands for.
  • Buttondown’s blog: The story of how RSS beat Microsoft (ᔥDave Winer, or rather his link blog so I couldn’t figure out a way to link to his actual post made on September 10th, 2025. This was his comment to the link: “We weren’t trying to beat anyone, we just wanted to make a level playing field where bloggers and news orgs could coexist on the web.")
  • From the man himself: It’s really simple. Dave Winer’s pre-notes for September 18th, 2025, which will be the 23rd anniversary of the release of RSS 2.0.

A format like RSS has to be loved. And if you make it too complicated or vague, with too much political shuffling of the deck what you get is ActivityPub. That’s what RSS would have become if it went down the path the tech industry wanted to take it down. We have a perfect artifact to look at. An A-B comparison. Couldn’t be more stark. And, after almost 23 years, RSS is still simple.

In the unlikely case you are reading this but aren’t using RSS feed readers, may I suggest a few resources, in no particular order:

  • Feedbin (most user-friendly, but you have to pay)
  • Feedly (more enterprise-oriented but still good; has a free tier)
  • Feedland (Dave Winer’s own creation; unorthodox and completely free)
  • NetNewsWire (open-source, iOS/macOS only)

And if I get just one person to stop scrolling down social media walls and start making rivers of news of their own, this Friday won’t have gone to waste.

Thursday links, from life-changing to trite

  • Derek Lowe: Life, Maybe, On Mars, Unless We Change Our Minds. You may have heard that the Mars Rover may have found evidence of microbial life in the planet’s past. If like myself you couldn’t find time to watch the 1-hour press conference, this is the most concise yet understandable explanation I could find.
  • Nick Maggiulli: The Bar Only Gets Higher. On why it is becoming ever-harder to just get on with one’s life.
  • Scott Sumner: Less wrong. He seems to be sad that we don’t live in a world of rational people. I am not so sure.
  • Gina Trapani: Welcome to my blog. Her posts on Lifehacker are some of the first I followed via RSS at a time before even Google Reader was a thing (remember Bloglines?) Well, she is back blogging and I have started following for old times' sake.
  • Andy Baio: DOOMscroll. A simple online game you should not play more than once.

Power tools of the mind

Sascha Fast of the Zettelkasten blog writes, in a post titled The Scam Called “You Don’t Have to Remember Anything”:

Rowlands et al. wrote about the so called “digital natives” that they lack the critical and analytical thinking skills to evaluate the information they find on the internet. We need a fully developed mental map of the subject in order to derive value from the results of an internet search.

In short: You need a trained brain to actually benefit from the internet.

But not just from the internet, as the post elaborates. This applies equally or even more to LLM outputs. A great example comes from a recent post on Andrew Gelman’s blog, though not from the man himself, where a human and ChatGPT 5 both try to improve upon a statistical model in a new-to-me language called Stan. Now if you don’t know Bayesian statistics or Stan this will all look like gobbledygook and ChatGPT won’t help you understand.

LLMs are also seeping into the everything-bucket software, the one whose primary purpose is to black-hole every article and textbook you will never read or video you will ever watch. Well now it can also give you the illusion of knowledge and control because you can ask questions about the contents. This is something Casey Newton learned this year:

I can give Notion a sprawling question like “how did the Cambridge Analytica case resolve” and get a good summary of regulatory actions across several years and countries. And by default, web search is off, meaning I know that its AI systems are drawing only on the vetted journalism that I have saved into my database.

This is a dream come true. I finally have a meaningful way to sift through millions of words of article text, ask follow-up questions, and get citations that I can use in my work. Notion may yet prove to be the AI librarian that Readwise never became.

One more thing I’m trying: I mentioned above that I continue to experiment with different ways to save material that might be useful later. Recently a Reddit post turned me on to Recall, which positions itself as a “self-organizing knowledge base.” Currently available as a web and mobile app, Recall lets you save web pages, YouTube videos, PDFs, podcasts, Google Docs, and other materials into a single database that it then organizes on your behalf.

To be clear, I myself have asked for something like this from my everything-bucket software of choice, DEVONthink. And it delivered! But now I am realizing, and Sacha’s post was a good reminder, that these are becoming command line-level power tools — Hole Hawgs of the mind if you will — which can and will do great damage if not used carefully. And unlike the Hole Hawg they are freely available and come with no instruction manual. Caveat utilitor.

A few quick news hits from the FT

All gift links. Enjoy.

Monday links, assorted

  • Jacobin magazine interviews Lily Lynch: Serbia Is a Showcase of Authoritarian Neoliberalism. An objective assessment of the situation in the Balkans, if you are interested in that sort of thing. It covers not only Serbia but Montenegro as well, and Kosovo too for those who consider it separately. The prime minister of Kosovo, Albin Kurti, comes out well. Everyone else — “the West” included — not so much.
  • Jeff Atwood: Is Worse Really Better? Starts with a brilliantly disturbing story from Steve Martin then riffs on an excellent observation he had: “The consistent work enhanced my act. I learned a lesson: it was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the circumstances.”
  • Mike Solana: The Abundance Delusion. The book is still sitting on my pile, less and less likely to be read as time goes on, and here comes a very good rebuttal if not of the book then of the movement it spurred.
  • Emi Nietfeld of Wired: The Baby Died. Whose Fault Is It? A harrowing tale of surrogacy.

Friday links, China edition

Mid-week links (warning: two of them are to X posts… Xosts?)

As the deployment of digital technologies continues to generate ever-more stratospheric concentrations of wealth, the masses sink deeper into the void left by the evisceration of social solidarity and the rise of automation. The often-missed point about sovereign individuals is that not everyone gets to be one. But everyone should aspire to be one, and in the meantime follow one, as they walk down the road to selfdom.

Worth reading for that last sentence alone.

Labor day links, and there are many of them

Happy grilling!

Mid-week links, headline edition