A Year of Mornings

There’s a new mark above or below as read in NetNewsWire. It feels like it was designed for me. Some feeds that I subscribe to - mostly aggregator style feeds - have too many items in them. I don’t usually have the time to go through all the items in one go. In those cases, I was usually marking all as read without reading or doing nothing. This solves that feature.

Added a life calendar to my about page. Now to add entries to the system.

HBO Max is putting on vertical shorts by Jay Peters

Warner Bros. Discovery is bringing a vertical video feed to HBO Max to help you find something new to watch. Streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney Plus, and Peacock already offer TikTok-like vertical video feeds to surface content that might be interesting to users, and now HBO Max will have a similar feed of its own.

Much of the content I see on YouTube Shorts for example is just clips from shows and movies, clipped for vertical form factor. And they are entertaining.

The problem is not the content. The problem is where the people are. I don’t find myself opening Netflix when I want to watch vertical videos. I’m on Instagram or YouTube and then they show me the vertical videos.

The problem is that people don’t pick up Netflix or HBO to pass time at work or elsewhere. They pick up Instagram or YouTube.

I’m 38 and I Can’t Support Myself Anymore by vōx

When you become chronically ill or disabled, you begin to understand how deeply this ideology has embedded itself into the psyche. The shame of no longer being able to work consistently feels personal. As though my body’s inability to keep pace with capitalism says something fundamental about who I am.

How the Role of Book Cover Design Has Changed in the Age of Social Media by Madelyn Johnson

In the before times, a cover served primarily as an interpretation of the text: a visual invitation intended to both entice readers and help them understand the book’s content. When working on a new cover, designers would ask themselves: What is this novel? What emotional experience does it promise? These were the questions they attempted to answer though their work.

Today, another question has quietly entered the designer’s studio: How does the reader of this book want to be perceived? Or more bluntly: Who do they want to be?

These questions do not replace the original brief, but they do increasingly compete with it, in a shift that has placed a new but largely unspoken pressure on book cover designers. A cover no longer simply needs to communicate genre or tone. It must also construct an identity that a reader of that book can inhabit. If book covers once translated text for their readers, they now operate in reverse: translating readers for their audiences. In this context, the old adage has been inverted from don’t judge a book by its cover to judge a reader by the covers on their books.

This is an interesting note.

The AI giants’ new problem: open AI by Robert Hart

“The question for American firms may increasingly become: How much capability do we need to release openly to prevent Chinese models from becoming the default platform for the open ecosystem?” Sharma said. A more plausible outcome could be a “portfolio strategy,” she said, with companies keeping “their very best model proprietary while releasing increasingly capable open-weight models to maintain developer adoption and ecosystem influence.”

I wonder why can’t Europe do this? They clearly need models of their own. And there is a lot of talk about sovereignty. If you’re using Chinese models you’re not really sovereign.

RSS in 2026 — the best distribution channel nobody uses · intrepidkarthi by Karthikeyan NG

Creators want analytics. Email gives you opens and clicks. RSS gives you nothing — you cannot see who is reading. For creators who measure success in dashboards, RSS feels like flying blind. For creators who measure success in actual reading, RSS is fine.

I agree. I use RSS feeds primarily to track and read things on the web. My website promotes and has a feeds page.