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Pretty sure this is why folks got tarred and feathered in the 1770s.
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Christ is my all
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San Antonio, TX
Last night I finished the 8-part series available on the PBS app, and I'm happy to recommend it with some minor reservations. The storyline created by Dumas is of course enormously complex and detailed (the Modern Library version of the novel in our library runs to over 1,400 pages), and that complexity has always presented difficulties for screenwriters of the almost countless adaptations on film and television. Even with the luxury of almost 8 hours of broadcast time, there are huge sections of the novel that have to be skipped over or severely compressed. Edmond Dantès' social education by Jeremy Irons in the Château d'If is compressed to a matter of minutes. The discovery of the treasure is depicted in a couple minutes, and then moments later he's a wealthy man riding a horse.
On the other hand, the resources available for the current production are extensive and lavish. The estates and castles must have been a godsend for the cinematographers. The quality of acting is excellent through out. I'm so happy to see cinema with cast members unfamiliar to me; the world is full of superb actors - it's not necessary to ride the coattails of celebrities as Hollywood does.
I believe the series will drop on public PBS channels near the end of March. For now it can be viewed on the PBS app. I welcome comments from readers who have seen this.
San Antonio, TX
Not every website has an RSS feed. Some never did. Some had one years ago and quietly removed it. And some sites have content that updates regularly but was never structured as a feed in the first place: job boards, product listings, event calendars, changelog pages. Until now, if a site didn’t offer RSS, you were out of luck.
Web Feeds is a new feature that creates RSS feeds from any website. Point it at a URL, and NewsBlur analyzes the page structure, identifies the repeating content patterns, and generates extraction rules that turn the page into a live feed. It works on news sites, blogs, job boards, product pages, or really anything with a list of items that changes over time.
This is a huge feature and has been requested for years. I’m so thrilled to finally be able to offer it in a way that I feel comfortable with. Other solutions including having you select story titles on a re-hosted version of the page, but it was clumsy and error-prone. This way, we use LLMs to figure out what the story titles are likely to be, present the variations to you, and then let you decide what’s right. So much better!
How it works
Open the Add + Discover Sites page and click the Web Feed tab. Paste a URL and click Analyze. NewsBlur fetches the page, strips out navigation and boilerplate, and analyzes the HTML structure. Within a few seconds, you’ll see multiple extraction variants, each representing a different content pattern found on the page.
Progress updates stream in real-time while the analysis runs. NewsBlur typically finds 3-5 different extraction patterns on a page. The first variant is usually the main content (article list, blog posts, product grid), but sometimes the page has multiple distinct sections worth subscribing to. Each variant shows a label, a description of what it captures, and a preview of 3 extracted stories so you can see exactly what you’d get.
Select the variant that matches what you want to follow, pick a folder, and subscribe. NewsBlur will re-fetch and re-extract the page on a regular schedule, just like any other feed.
Story hints
Sometimes the initial best guess isn’t what you’re looking for. Maybe the page has a blog section and a job listings section, and you want the jobs. Click the Refine button and type a hint like “I’m looking for the job postings.” NewsBlur re-analyzes the page with your hint in mind and reorders the variants to prioritize what you described.
What gets extracted
For each story, NewsBlur extracts whatever it can find: title, link, content snippet, image, author, and date. Not every field will be available on every site, and that’s fine. At minimum you’ll get titles and links. The extraction uses XPath expressions, which means it’s precise and consistent across page refreshes as long as the site’s HTML structure stays the same.
When things change
Websites redesign. HTML structures shift. When NewsBlur detects that the extraction rules have stopped working (after 3 consecutive failures), the feed is flagged as needing re-analysis. You’ll see a feed exception indicator, and you can re-analyze the page with one click to generate updated extraction rules.
Use cases
Some examples of sites that work well with Web Feeds:
- Company blogs without RSS — Many corporate blogs dropped their RSS feeds years ago. Web Feeds brings them back.
- Job boards — Track new postings on a company’s careers page.
- Government sites — Follow press releases, meeting agendas, or public notices.
- Changelog pages — Monitor when a tool or service ships updates.
- Event listings — Keep tabs on upcoming concerts, conferences, or local events.
- Product pages — Watch for new arrivals or restocks on stores that don’t offer feeds.
Availability
Web Feeds are available to Premium Archive and Premium Pro subscribers. The ongoing feed fetching and extraction runs on NewsBlur’s servers like any other feed.
If you have feedback or ideas for improvements, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
One of the best new features ever. I say that but just wait until I launch the Daily Briefing and story clustering, both coming sooooooon... also I just finished AI prompt classifiers for text and for images, so that's also coming. Hoo boy, lots of good stuff. And Android redesign is nearly complete!
San Francisco
San Antonio, TX
2 public comments
San Antonio, TX
Les Orchard:
I started programming in 1982. Every language I’ve learned since then has been a means to an end — a new way to make computers do things I wanted them to do. AI-assisted coding feels like the latest in that progression. Not a rupture, just another rung on the ladder.
But I’m trying to hold that lightly. Because the ladder itself is changing, the building it’s leaning against is changing, and I’d be lying if I said I knew exactly where it’s going.
What I do know is this: I still get the same hit of satisfaction when something I thought up and built actually works. The code got there differently than it used to, but the moment it runs and does the thing? That hasn’t changed in my over 40 years at it.
I’ve been thinking about a different divide than the one Orchard writes about here. (The obvious truth is that the AI code generation revolution is creating multiple divisions, along multiple axes.)
The divide I’m seeing is that the developers who are craftspeople are elated because their productivity is skyrocketing while their craftsmanship remains unchanged — or perhaps even improved. They’re achieving much more, much faster, than ever before. It’s a step change as great, or greater than, the transition from assembly code to higher-level programming languages. The developers who are hacks are elated because it’s like they’ve been provided an autopilot switch for a task they never enjoyed or really even understood properly in the first place. The industry is riddled with hack developers, because in the last 15-20 years, as the demand for software far outstripped the supply of programmers who wanted to write code because they love writing code and creating software, the jobs have been filled by people who got into the racket simply because they were high-paying jobs in high demand. Good programmers create software for fun, outside their jobs. Hack programmers are no more likely to write software for fun than a garbage man is to collect trash on his days off.
Orchard’s fine essay examines a philosophical divide within the ranks of talented, considerate craftsperson developers. The divide that I’m talking about has been present ever since the demand for programmers exploded, but AI code generation tooling is turning it into an expansive gulf. The best programmers are more clearly the best than ever before. The worst programmers have gone from laying a few turds a day to spewing veritable mountains of hot steaming stinky shit, while beaming with pride at their increased productivity.
"Hack programmers are no more likely to write software for fun than a garbage man is to collect trash on his days off."
San Antonio, TX
This week’s big headline is: “Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: AI compute as compensation“. Uh huh. [Business Insider]
The idea is that instead of getting paid dollars to work for an AI company … you get paid in AI tokens. The units that the AI vendor charges API access in. You have to use these tokens in your job, too.
This is not in any way a “new” idea. It’s company scrip — a company’s own made-up money that you can only spend in the company store. Company scrip was always just a scam, and paying workers in company scrip has been illegal in the US since 1938. But you know these guys don’t care.
Other companies would love to pay workers in AI tokens too! And not in, y’know, money.
Tech-illiterate CEOs and venture capitalists keep talking about AI tokens like they’re a commodity you can pile up. Even though tokens aren’t commensurable at all between different models.
The key point is that they love the idea of printing their own money. It’s the word “token.” They want AI tokens to be treated like crypto tokens. Something you can print out of thin air, then exchange like it’s money.
This idea was most recently floated by Thibault Sottiaux at OpenAI: [Twitter, archive]
I am increasingly asked during candidate interviews how much dedicated inference compute they will have to build with Codex.
So firstly, I don’t believe anyone’s asking that. But OpenAI president Greg Brockman retweeted Sottiaux. So this idea is the OpenAI corporate line. [Twitter, archive]
AI bros have previously promoted Universal Basic Income once the AI singularity comes — and not a moment before. Even though we could do this tomorrow — the main barrier to a reasonable welfare system is whiny billionaires who hate being taxed. Specifically, these guys.
Remember that Sam Altman is still a crypto bro, with his proof-of-eyeballs magic bean Worldcoin. Altman’s been pushing the idea of a universal basic income — or universal basic compute — made of AI tokens for a few years now. This is Altman on the All-In Podcast in May 2024, talking to his fellow billionaires: [YouTube]
I wonder if the future looks something more like Universal Basic Compute than Universal basic income, and everybody gets a slice of GPT7’s compute and they can use it, they can resell it, they can donate it to somebody to use for cancer research, but what you get is not dollars but this productivity slice, you own part of the productivity.
This wasn’t a one-off. Here’s Altman again last May, on the Theo Von podcast: [YouTube]
I mean a crazy idea, but in the spirit of crazy ideas is, if the world, there’s like eight roughly eight billion people in the world. If the world can generate eight quintillion tokens per year, if that’s the world, actually let’s say the world can generate 20 quintillion tokens per year. Tokens are like each word generated by an AI. Okay, just making up a huge number here. We’ll say 12 of those go to the normal capitalistic system, but eight of those eight quintillion tokens are going to get divided up equally among eight billion people. So everybody gets one trillion tokens and that’s your universal basic wealth globally.
Altman really likes the idea of made-up credit at OpenAI being the money now. Because he’s a crypto bro.
This token as money talk leaves me wondering if the investment in the AI companies is getting shaky. Nvidia’s just said this latest OpenAI investment round might be the last: [Reuters]
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the latest investments in OpenAI and Anthropic might be the chipmaker’s last in those companies, as the AI companies prepare to go public this year.
Nvidia is about to spend $26 billion building its own open weight AI model too. [Wired]
I’m also wondering if the AI vendors are running a bit low on actual cash dollars, and not just promises and letters of intent.
The good news is that even though these bozos are all sociopaths, AI is not so useful, and more tokens for the AI aren’t so useful either. Unless you’re a terminal vibe coder and probably working at an AI vendor.
I don’t think a lot of people will accept a Copilot allowance in place of actual money. I owe my SOUL.md to the company store.
San Antonio, TX
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