House of Nettles

Get You an RSS Reader that Displays Tags

2026-08-10T01:31:43Z

I'm sure all of you have already read my Apologia for RSS (the very first post on this blog!) and I'm sure you're all reading this in an RSS reader you've chosen for one reason or another. But does your RSS reader show you everything a post contains, or is it hiding the deepest, juiciest quips and chatter from you?

I've been on Tumblr since its heyday back in 2011, and it's now the only social media I can really say I use regularly^[1]. One of the aspects of its culture I appreciate tremendously is the concept of "chatting in the tags". Tags in Tumblr are snippets of text attached to both posts and reblogs, but only the original instance. If you reblog a post, that reblog doesn't include the tags of whoever you reblogged it from.

Although tags were presumably intended primarily for cross-referencing posts on the same topic, Tumblr culture has adopted them as a way of writing sotto voce commentary on posts, visible only to people who are following you specifically without escaping into the larger network. Sometimes people use this to be funny, sometimes to relay anecdotes, sometimes to be catty. Universally, it gives a window into the personality of the person you chose to follow, above and beyond just their curatorial decisions about what to post.

Even on one's own posts, tag chatter provides a means of adding a bit of commentary that's tangential to the post itself, of a different tone, or a little more personal than they want escaping into the wider network.

One of Tumblr's virtues, and in fact one of the main reasons I still use it at all, is that it provides RSS feeds for every user. These are the main way I read the website at all! What's more, these feeds actually contain that user's tags. For the technically-minded among you, the feed entry looks like this:

<item>
  <title>
    gonna be a lover for a minute, reblog and put in the tags the last movie that you LOVED like&hellip;
  </title>
  <description>
    <p><a class="tumblr_blog" href="https://perfectday1972.tumblr.com/post/792148193180827649/gonna-be-a-lover-for-a-minute-reblog-and-put-in">perfectday1972</a>:</p><blockquote><p>gonna be a lover for a minute, reblog and put in the tags the last movie that you LOVED like intensely loved like 5 stars on letterboxd LOVED</p></blockquote>
  </description>
  <link>https://www.tumblr.com/nex3/824507509470625792</link>
  <guid>https://www.tumblr.com/nex3/824507509470625792</guid>
  <pubDate>Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:40:35 -0700</pubDate>
  <category>PlayTime</category>
  <category>although todayhat was a rewatch</category>
  <category>most recent new one was Chimes at Midnight</category>
</item>

Those <category> elements are the tags. Neat! But totally useless in practice unless a reader actually displays them.

My blog, the one you're reading right now, has tags as well. Not only that, I use them for chatter just like on Tumblr! And, naturally, they're included in my feed as well. But I worry that people who subscribe to that feed won't see them, because most RSS readers hide them entirely.

A Half-Hearted Recommendation

My current RSS reader is NewsBlur. There are things I like a lot about it, like the ability to natively convert emails to feeds, a solid mobile app, and of course the ability to see tags. There are also things I don't like so much, like the awkward UI^[2] and the willingness to capitulate to the mania du jour and add LLM features.

Its failings aside, NewsBlur is still the best reader software I've found after a decent amount of searching, and I'd much rather put up with its foibles than lose out on the ability to see what my friends have to say about their posts and reblogs. If you feel the same way, I'd recommend giving it a try. It's entirely fine!

Even if you don't, I encourage you to reach out and file a feature request with whatever reader you do use to add some way of seeing tags. If enough people want it, then maybe it'll even happen!

I can't say I recommend it, since the owners (as for all profitable social media) regularly do heinous shit like banning trans women for talking about how often they ban trans women. Their sole virtue is that they're less eager to fuck up the good things they have going than the rest of the social media bourgeoisie. ↩︎
I really liked the UI of the late great Google Reader, and I don't entirely understand why more readers don't just copy it wholesale. I have yet to find one that does and also meets my other criteria^[3]. ↩︎
I must not implement an RSS reader. Implementing an RSS reader is the time-killer. Implementing an RSS reader is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my ideal RSS reader. I will let it pass over and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the ideal RSS reader has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. ↩︎

2026-08-09T23:46:50Z

Nikhil Suresh wrote:

AI Mania is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

Over the past year, I’ve run point on all of our company’s sales, led the technical components of all but two of our engagements, and over the lifetime of this blog have had something like 300 catchups with professionals from around the world. This has ranged from people on the ground in niche service industries to executives at Fortune 500 companies¹. Because of this, I've had a front-row view to our collective institutions across both the private and public sector undergoing breath-taking mass psychosis. This essay is an attempt to describe the bizarre dynamics that are currently at play, as I am in the rare position where my wellbeing is not contingent on paying lip service to madness, and to reassure the people trying to survive amidst all of this that they are not crazy.

[...]

It has become outright dangerous to even raise the possibility that AI might not be the solution to a problem, let alone be the sole focus of a company’s entire strategy.

In every sufficiently large business we have observed (say, with 500+ employees), we have noted that continued advancement, and increasingly continued employment, has started to require repeated professions of belief in the transformative power of AI for said business. I am not talking about providing ideas about how to use AI in the business – I mean religious profession, declarations of faith. Overwhelmingly these statements are made by non-technicians, though it is not uncommon for technicians to emit deranged statements to curry favour.

I don't love all of Suresh's framings around LLMs^[1], but I do appreciate that his closer exposure to them has given him the perspective to write this piece. This matches my experience very closely. I've so far managed to avoid participating in the false zealotry he describes, but I'm not sure how much longer I can manage it. My colleagues have not. I can hardly blame them.

Meanwhile, it's extremely clear to anyone who hasn't succumbed to the reality distortion field that this monomania is completely corrosive to the organization. Suresh documents the realities of this corrosion, although I imagine most people reading this have seen it in one or another aspects of their lives.

Personally, I'm just doing my best to grit my teeth and try to do good work as best I can, both professionally and personally, until we get back to a point where the managerial consensus is once again that "quality" is a real thing that exists. Until then, I suffer.

I feel that a hard-line zero-tolerance standpoint is necessary due to the myriad negative externalities and the strong tendency for "well I can see it being a bit useful for X" being taken in bad faith as a broad license to use it "where it makes sense". Even in cases where they're not strictly enforceable, zero tolerance policies establish a culture and enable enforcement of at least egregious offenses. ↩︎

2026-08-08T11:32:33Z

There's so little we in the global north can do to aid the historical struggle of Palestine. We can try to sabotage the military-industrial machinery, although that risks serious legal repercussions. We can send money, although many people have little to spare and finding trustworthy recipients is difficult. Or, for no money and no risk, we can choose not to buy entertainment products that Palestinians have asked us to boycott. But for reasons I cannot fathom, even this is beyond so many people!

2026-07-31T01:39:04Z

has anyone ever given a name to the bird that appears in the first shot of the Twin Peaks intro?

2026-07-29T22:26:06Z

Garlic Bread

2026-07-29T21:49:47Z

@topghost wrote:

what do you think is the ideal aspect ratio

1:1. where's that squarephone

2026-07-18T01:15:24Z

just got an idea for a banger couples shirts design

2026-07-17T03:04:38Z

2026-07-11T22:00:24Z

Me: heh heh more like "France"
Frantz Fanon: fermez vos gueles >:-[

2026-07-06T23:14:08Z

Loon Gathering - Mia Bergeron , 2026.

American , b. 1979 -

Coloured acrylic on flat panel , 6 x 6 in.

Communication authenticity and autistic social media

2026-07-06T20:09:58Z

I don’t know if it’s coming from this wishful thinking that’s taken hold again that “neurodivergent people’s communication is honest and clear and direct, but neurotypicals’ is deceptive and unnecessarily vague,” but if it is— From the bottom of my heart, please get off of Twitter for a little bit.

…

2026-06-27T02:48:21Z

"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me yuri" - Himedanshi Julius Caesar

An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

2026-06-22T19:53:18Z

The history deserves recording because most people outside the small world of Arabic font engineering don't know it, and it is wonderful. Classical Arabic typography, by which I mean the manuscript tradition that the early printers of Istanbul and Bulaq spent their careers chasing, justifies a line of text without stretching the spaces between words at all. Stretched spaces are the Latin convention, and in Arabic they produce an effect the scribes would have found simply ugly. Instead the scribe extends the letterforms themselves along the baseline, using what is called taṭwīl or, in the modern technical vocabulary, kashida: the connecting strokes between certain pairs of letters can be lengthened, sometimes lavishly, to carry a line out to the margin. A well-set page of Naskh from the seventeenth century has every line flush at both margins, and the result is the dense, regular weave that anyone who has spent time with a good manuscript Qurʾān will recognise on sight.

[...]

The one great exception is Amiri, the Naskh face that Khaled Hosny, an Egyptian doctor by training who taught himself OpenType tooling over the course of about a decade, built and released under the SIL Open Font License in 2011 and has polished continuously since. The name is the lineage: Amiri revives the typeface of al-Maṭbaʿa al-Amīriyya, the Bulaq Press face that set the 1924 Cairo Qurʾān, which means the best free Arabic font of the digital era is a one-man reconstruction of the best government-funded font of the metal era, and I never get tired of saying that sentence. And it is engineered, not merely drawn. The required ligatures are done with care; the 1.0 rewrite, in 2022, reimplemented the allāh ligature to be more cautious about when it fires. The mark stacking holds up under fully vowelled text. And since that rewrite the font carries a curvilinear kashida: feed it elongations and it substitutes graded, swelling curved strokes, in four sizes, the way the pen would. Scroll back to the mockup card at the top of the page; those curves are Amiri's own work, performed live in your browser. If you are reading an Arabic text rendered well on the open web in 2026, there is a respectable chance you are reading Amiri. The rest of the ecosystem (Scheherazade New from SIL International, Reem Kufi also by Hosny, the various Noto Arabic faces Google commissioned) fills in around it.

…

2026-06-20T22:24:12Z

Microsoft saw the Netflix model of "sell a subscription for a tremendous amount of content at a loss to drive the old industry out of business" and thought that was just the sort of evil they loved to do. Then they started game pass without stopping to realize that they were the old industry they were going to drive out of business.

2026-06-18T20:27:25Z

The Course of Empire: Destruction (1836), by Cole Thomas

Gabe Whisnant wrote:

Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran has jointly agreed in good faith on on the following:

[...]

The United States of America undertakes to terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the United Nations Security Council resolutions

[...]

Pending the final deal, the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran agree to maintain the status quo. The Islamic Republic of Iran will maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program, and the United States of America will not impose any new sanctions, and will not deploy additional forces in the region.

…

This is incredible. I feel like maybe people don't understand how world-historic this is. Not only did the United States of America lose this war, there's a strong argument to be made that this is the worst the USA has ever lost a war. The only other war that's even in the conversation is Vietnam, but the consequences of that loss were entirely domestic. The US wasn't forced to make any geopolitical concessions at all^[1] despite losing soundly.

In fact, the USA has never in history had to make major strategic concessions after a war^[2]. Every single goal it had going into this conflict—forcing regime change, further hobbling the economy, eliminating the nuclear program, bolstering Israel's expansionism—is explicitly disclaimed by this treaty. Not only that, but the latter three ended up in a substantially better place for Iran than the status quo ante bellum.

This is a world-historic event. This is the USA's Suez canal moment^[3]. I don't see how the country can go on enforcing its hegemonic will globally after so thoroughly failing to do so in Iran, especially when the domestic appetite for war has been obliterated after decades of quagmires even before this spectacular loss. Maybe the US will be able to fall back to Monroe doctrine lines and continue to coup the Americas at will, but illegally abducting Maduro already failed to produce regime change (although it did prompt meaningful concessions) and it's hard to imagine the US having more leverage now than it did at the beginning of the year.

And just to be very clear: this is a resoundingly positive development. Since World War II, the United State of America has been far and away the greatest force for evil in the world. It has done everything in its power to prevent the development of real sovereignty, democracy, and prosperity of the masses, and to destroy those anywhere they've managed to take root. It has and continues to enact genocide and slavery as matters of policy, and props up fascists and ethnostates to force its will across the globe. Every loss for the US is a victory for the people of the world, and this loss in particular is one to be celebrated as a triumph.

Obviously the country did unify under a communist government, which you could consider a geopolitical outcome of the US's withdrawal, but it was also absolutely going to happen if the US didn't enter the war at all so I don't think it really counts. ↩︎
The US did make fairly substantial concessions after the Cuban Missile Crisis in terms of removing their missile installations from Turkey, but that wasn't a war. It was also done in secret so it ended up being considered a failure by the Soviets even though they accomplished their primary goal. ↩︎
To dramatically simplify, the Suez canal crisis was a British/French/Israeli attempt to strongarm Nasser's Egypt that was so thoroughly quashed by the USA's overwhelming diplomatic and economic opposition that it marked the end of the UK's status as an imperial superpower. ↩︎