Robb Knight:

I’m shutting down EchoFeed within the next 12 months when the final subscriptions expire. It will continue to run as it is until then so if you’ve already paid you have access until the end of your subscription.

EchoFeed was launched just a couple of years ago and I have been using it ever since to automatically publish links to the latest posts on Bluesky and Mastodon. It has been a really good service — the kind of thing I happily paid for and, in the best way, would forget about.

But the reasons Knight gives for shutting it down are completely understandable. Trying to manage this kind of service with, say, hundreds of normal users would probably be challenging; with lots of abusive users, too, it sounds like a nightmare.

If you know of a similar service, please let me know.

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Chance Miller, of 9to5Mac, serving here as Apple’s official bad news launderer:

It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed.

Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.

Mark Gurman reported last year that it was “on the back burner”.

The Mac Pro was, realistically, killed off when the Apple Silicon era ended support for expandability and upgradability. The Mac Studio effectively takes its place, and is strategically similar to the “trash can” Mac Pro with all expandability offloaded to external peripherals. Unfortunate, but I think it was dishonest to keep selling this version of a “pro” Macintosh.

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Berber Jin, Wall Street Journal:

CEO Sam Altman announced the changes to staff on Tuesday, writing that the company would wind down products that use its video models. In addition to the consumer app, OpenAI is also discontinuing a version of Sora for developers and won’t support video functionality inside ChatGPT, either.

OpenAI is not shutting this down because it has ethical qualms with what it has created, despite good reasons to do just that. It is because it is expensive without any clear reason for it to exist other than because OpenAI wants to be everywhere.

If you are desperate for a completely synthetic social media feed, Meta’s Vibes is apparently still around. Users are readily abusing it, of course, because that is what happens if you give people a text input box.

Update: In a tweet, OpenAI has confirmed it is shutting down Sora. But, while it originally announced “We’re saying goodbye to Sora”, it changed that about an hour later to read “We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app“, emphasis mine. The Journal has not changed its report to retract claims about shutting down the platform altogether, though, while OpenAI continues to promote Sora API pricing.

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Typepad:

After September 30, 2025, access to Typepad – including account management, blogs, and all associated content – will no longer be available. Your account and all related services will be permanently deactivated.   

I have not thought about Typepad in years, and I am certain I am not alone. That is not a condemnation; Typepad occupies a particular time and place on the web. As with anything hosted, however, users are unfortunately dependent on someone else’s interest in maintaining it.

If you have anything hosted at Typepad, now is a good time to back it up.

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