joeross.me

Matt Webb wrote about his open source in-page chat tool, cursor party:

“If you’ve visited my actual website, rather than reading by email or whatever, such as reading this very post, you may notice somebody else’s cursor pass by as you’re reading.”

It’s a wonderful, playful, well-executed idea.

This 1956 promotional video is a time capsule of New Jersey when my parents were kids.

This Technicolor color film was produced in 1956 for the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company, and based on a 1953 John T. Cunningham book This is New Jersey.

It’s surprisingly light on corporate propaganda. However, the mention that one third of the state was below the Mason-Dixon Line was a little too… wistful, especially given the paucity of people of color in the film.

🔗 Rich Idiot Tweets

Nick Heer has a great post about the vapid coverage of vapid Elon Musk, but this bit from the end of Heer’s post struck me as the perfect Twitter bio for Musk:

words from the fingers of a dipshit

🔗 Apple Will Revamp Siri to Catch Up to Its Chatbot Competitors

Tripp Mickle, Brian X. Chen and Cade Metz report at The New York Times that:

The decision came after the executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT. The product’s use of generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry, create computer code and answer complex questions, made Siri look antiquated, said two people familiar with the company’s work, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly.

Apple can’t be serious here. My earliest IFTTT recipes made Siri look antiquated. Siri has been, to put it as politely as Siri deserves, trash for years. The user experience of the earliest Echo Auto was head and shoulders above Siri. If you need a reminder set, Siri will work more often than not. But that’s been its only viable use case since release.

Apple has been marketing off of machine learning since 2018 and probably earlier, so it’s just bonkers that they didn’t decide to scrap Siri at least that long ago and turn their machine learning resources toward something better.

🔗 Does the Statute of Limitations Ever Apply in Legal Malpractice?

Hey look, my employer has a blog about the kind of work I do, and I wrote a thing for it.

🔗 Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book | Books | The Guardian

I’m not quoting from the review or her memoir because Noem is deplorable, and because, somehow, it’s worse than the headline suggests.

When people tell you who they are, believe them.

🔗 Manton Reece - An update on the pricing update

Micro.blog is such a great value. Like omg.lol, Micro.blog is a positive community built by people who didn’t see exactly what they wanted on the web, so they decided to make it.

🔗 QuickLink Opener – FlohGro

I do something similar (even in name), with quicklinks.lol, but Floh Gro’s solution using an action in Drafts for iOS is faster, and private.

🔗 Manton Reece - Recommendations and blogrolls on Micro.blog

I’ve long meant to get a blogroll up on this site, and it’s another testament to the fact that I’ve chosen the right community that it was recently integrated into Micro.blog, including auto-updating, public OPML and JSON exports.

🔗 U.S. versus Apple: A first reaction – Six Colors

I haven’t read the complaint yet, but this was… not what I expected Attorney General Merrick Garland to have his people focused on…

🔗 Scholarfy | Google Scholar bookmarklet by Johan Ugander

This is a useful bookmarklet to move a standard Google search to Google Scholar. I use it with modified version I made with ChatGPT to search an exact phrase, for use in searching for legal opinions.

Here’s “my” code:

javascript:location = ‘scholar.google.com/scholar"’ escape(document.forms[0].elements[‘q’].value) ‘"';

🔗 32-Bit Cafe

The best part about the 32-Bit Cafe is that we’re trying to move the internet forward productively in the ways we can make an impact, participating in the creation of web services, websites, and weird, wacky web projects. We want to bring back the idea of personal websites to the many of us who have been stuck in social media cycles since the emergence of Web 2.0. Not to mention, we’re not just helping people build their first websites; we’re also making our own hosted services for anyone to use and participate in to help with decentralizing hosted services.

This is exactly the kind of thing I love to see.

🔗 Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

Bill Toulas, writing at Bleeping Computer:

Targeting open-source software developers tends to backfire for companies, as others fork or clone the code repositories to prevent the projects from disappearing.

At this time, the Haier home assistant plugins have been forked 228 times, many occurring since the news of the legal threats.

Now?

1,462 forks.

These were niche plugins for niche software for a niche audience before Haier let the lawyers loose.

Hey Haier, Ms. Streisand called… she wants her effect back.

List of Indie Dev Sales Events

Matt Corey put together a list of developers holding sales in an indie software version of Amazon’s Prime Day:

Below, you’ll find a list of over 100 (🤯) Indie apps that are offering discounts for Indie App Sales, July 11-12! Each of these apps is developed by an Indie App Developer - that can mean a lot of different things, but generally speaking, these are built by very small teams, or individuals either full time or part time. Indie App Developers are the epitome of small businesses, and sure do appreciate your support!

Via Jarrod Blundy at HeyDingus

Mark Frauenfelder, writing at Boing Boing:

A recent study of sleep loss and depression found that one night of total sleep deprivation generally worsens mood and emotional regulation in healthy individuals, but induces a temporary lift in spirits for some individuals with depression. . . . The findings were remarkable: lack of sleep escalated negative mood among the healthy subjects, but eased depressive symptoms in 43% of the patients with depression.

Presented without comment. 😐

Here’s a link to the study itself. Let me know if any copies fall off the back of any trucks, because i don’t have access to PNAS.

Firefox address bar modifiers - the tilde.institute wiki:

The address bar has become our entry point to the internet these days. Firefox in its default configuration does some sort of smart guess on what you type there. If it resembles a URL then the browser makes that request. If not, it sends the string you typed to your default search engine. It also includes some fuzzy search matches from your history and all that, which is fine 90% of the time, but sometimes you need a bit more control over what results it shows you.

I had no idea. These are super-useful.

(via Hacker News)