Rob Fahrni

Follow @fahrni on Micro.blog.

Saturday Morning Coffee

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Spicy Mexican CoffeeI’m feeling a bit spicy, like that Mexican Mocha icon. A little heat, a little spice. I’m tired. Just beat and that makes me a little on edge and grouchy. It’s always been a huge personality flaw I try to keep under control but today’s writing will most likely be a bit negative at times. It’s just where my brain is at the moment.

You may want to skip today’s post if you’re looking for positivity.

Apologies in advance to those who brave the waters.

Mike Barnes • The Hollywood Reporter

Michael Madsen, the rough-and-tumble actor best known for his work in the Quentin Tarantino films Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 & 2, The Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, died Thursday morning. He was 67.

I really enjoyed Michael Madsen as an actor, I especially liked him in Kill Bill. Budd was a real piece of work and his scenes with Uma Thurman and Daryl Hannah were extremely memorable.

RIP 🪦

Ged Maheux • Iconfactory

Apple’s new Liquid Glass design that was announced at WWDC25 is more than just a fresh coat of paint—it’s a signal. One that points simultaneously to the future of digital interfaces and to the past. We’re calling it neo-retro.

Ged and The Iconfactory are some of my favorite designers and app builders in the Mac and iOS ecosystem. They absolutely live, eat, and breathe all things Apple and have their own unique style to enhance your app experiences.

There is currently a lot of hate being tossed around the Mac and iOS developer community around the new Liquid Glass design language and I can understand where folks are coming from, it’s very different. Personally, I don’t care to enter the fray of opinions. I’ll just make sure my apps are as ready as I can possibly make them.

I really need some design help with Stream’s icon set and plan to hire Iconfactory to do that work if I can make it work financially. They’re very reasonably priced and their work is incredible!

Jason Torchinsky • The Autopian

Ford has been using essentially the same logo for 116 years. That little fact reminded me about that one time that Ford at least considered changing their storied logo, and the creator of that unselected new logo was one of the greatest graphic designers of all time: Paul Rand.

Go check out this logo. It’s really interesting and I don’t hate it but the original, and still used, logo is iconic and worth keeping. I hope they never change it.

Some other logos I really love are GE’s classic logo type in a circle and the Coca Cola script used for over 100 years.

Nilay Patel • The Verge

Make no mistake, WordPress is one of the most dominant platforms on the web, if not _the_most dominant. Something like 43 percent of websites run on WordPress, in one of its many flavors. That includes The Verge — the backend of our website is hosted by WordPress VIP. So this might be the first reverse disclosure on the show. Technically, we’re Matt’s customer, and like any good customer, I made feature requests.

I’m a big fan of Nilay Patel’s Decoder podcast and Nilay in general. He’s smart and he asks great questions and will push on folks. This interview with Matt Mullenweg was quite good and makes Matt’s actions sound less wild.

I know a lot of folks disagree with what he’s done to WP Engine but we can’t always agree with everything someone does, nor fully understand their motivation.

Anyway, this Decoder episode is a good one.

Laura Pippig • PCWorld

Microsoft is paywalling these features in Notepad and Paint

It’s a pretty sad state of affairs at Microsoft these days. I have a soft spot in my heart for Microsoft having worked directly for them or on contract at least four different times. Seeing them nickel and dime folks in the software they chose to include in the OS release is pretty disgusting. Hey, just leave the AI stuff out if it’s too costly to the organization to give it away. Then again as long as folks can ignore it, it doesn’t really matter much.

There are also better choices available outside of Microsoft’s included app. Notepad++ is a really great choice for a text editor and Paint.net for photo editing or pixel painting.

Yeldar Kudaibergen

To be fair, RSS isn’t strictly required — the real goal is for any social network to be able to follow any other. No need for cross-posting, duplicate accounts, or “check out my Instagram here” links. You should just be able to read what you want, where you want. That said, right now, RSS is still the most practical and universal tool for this.

Yeldar is a bit hopeful RSS can play a key role in social networks and in many ways it already does. Mastodon, Bluesky, Pixel Fed, and I’d imagine many others already publish RSS feeds. I follow quite a few in Stream and many other feed readers can too. If you’d like to aggregate a bunch of different feeds, use a feed reader. It’s all read-only and one direction but it would certainly give you a launch point for interacting with social networks.

I’ve been watching Dave Winer’s projects and writing with great interest for years, 20+ to be exact.

He’s now off creating his new weblog editor — WordLand — on top of WordPress.

Dave’s also been talking about inbound and outbound RSS. I get that. Inbound can be used by a service like Mastodon to make a post there. I use Micro.blog as my blogging platform and it does that for me, but I think that’s a little backward for what Dave is after. I think Inbound means the service looks for an updated RSS feed and automagically updates its own timeline with your post. That makes a lot of sense to me.

Outbound is what we have today. When we write to our blog we render it in two different formats; HTML and RSS, among others.

The thing I don’t understand in this particular setup is, how do you reply in that world? Does that work like it normally would and just display on a single social network or is RSS generated somewhere that’s read back by the originating weblog and rebroadcast somehow to form the thread we’ve all become accustomed to on social networks?

I’d imagine it would just show up on the social network the person answered on. That’s fine. It’s not round-tripped but that’s fine. The RSS feed would serve as a read-only source.

Dennis Lee • The Takeout

We are in peak hot dog season; they’re perfect to pluck straight from the vine (okay, refrigerated grocery store shelf) and toss right on the grill. A lot of us will be doing just that, especially on the Fourth of July, which is not only America’s Independence Day but also a certified grilling holiday. So just how many hot dogs do we eat on the Fourth? The answer, in cheeky internet terms, will indeed shock you.

Well, I’m a true American. I had a hotdog yesterday to celebrate the Fourth. I like them. Well, I like brats. Thats what I had yesterday but I ate it like a hotdog. So it’s a hotdog. 🌭😃

Jeet Heer • The Nation

Peter Thiel and his friends feel they no longer belong to our species.

This guy is a psychopath with money. Just like Musk and Trump. They seem to have been hurt by someone early in life and just want to create some strange dystopian society that allows them to do whatever they want. Want to pollute our waters? Sure, Mr. Thiel. Right away Mr. Thiel. Musk, same damned thing.

Let’s get them the money to create their dystopia, on Mars. Then we can ship the whole lot there at once and get on living.

I’m sick of these rich asshole trying to run the world like they’re entitled to it and we’re all sheep here to serve. Without all that money y’all are nothing but weirdos.

Jess Weatherbed • The Verge

AMC Theatres is making it easier for moviegoers to know the actual start time of their film screening and avoid sitting through lengthy ads. A new notice has started appearing when people purchase tickets via the AMC website, warning that “movies start 25-30 minutes after showtime.”

I can certainly appreciate theaters giving us a warning about the ads before the move so we can skip them. The last few films I’ve been to have been super frustrating at the open because I don’t want to spend 30 minutes of my day watching ads before the film I just paid to see.

Zöe Schiffer • WIRED

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is hitting back at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent AI talent poaching spree. In a full-throated response sent to OpenAI researchers Monday evening and obtained by WIRED, Altman made his pitch for why staying at OpenAI is the only answer for those looking to build artificial general intelligence, hinting that the company is evaluating compensation for the entire research organization.

Brain in a jarMy opinion? OpenAI lead the charge for marketing what they, and the industry, refer to as “AI.” I suspect the company known as OpenAI will cease to exist, Altman and the VC’s will make a shit ton of money and move on to whatever is next. That’s why Altman wants to keep his people. He wants that hojillion dollar exit. If you believe he’s doing this for humanity’s sake I have a bridge to sell you in New York City.

While “AI” is changing things for the worse in the corporate world it doesn’t have its uses in software development if you know what you’re looking for and how to validate its correct. These companies have crawled the web and stolen all the code that exists today on the open web. That begs the question “Is this as good as it gets?”

In many ways I’m glad I’m approaching retirement age. That way I don’t have long to live in this “AI” based software engineering world. Overall, it’s not for me. I’m a dinosaur in many way. Old, not that talented, and tired of the grind.

I’m just waiting to be fired. It’s inevitable.

Starbucks is kind of my leading candidate for a new career. I like coffee and people. I feel like it’s a decent place to work.

Yes, I’m feeling more than a bit gloomy over my future, but it feels like a possibility to me. Best have a plan in mind if I can’t find another job.

Tiny Apple Core