In today’s post, Seth Godin captures something that I’ve been thinking about but have had trouble communicating well: When someone makes an obvious mistake, it’s tempting to label them with a term that’s dismissive or even hurtful. A label is permanent, a noun, a way to sort and … | Continue reading
Rolled out some Micro.blog improvements to uploads on the web today. For example, if AI is enabled there are auto-generated accessibility descriptions for photos, and now you can edit the description without first needing to use it in a post. Plus some more UI tweaks for uploads. | Continue reading
My son has had the worst luck with his car. A few weeks ago, broke down driving back from Arizona… after having it checked out at a mechanic. New radiator and other work in New Mexico. Now today, a similar problem out in the Texas hill country. | Continue reading
All the broken pecan shells are in one spot under the tree. Must be some happy squirrels living here. | Continue reading
Went looking for an old tweet and then got lost in the archive. I have all my tweets (mostly 2006-2012) on my blog and it’s like a snapshot of a different life. Still me, but so many things change. | Continue reading
This week’s ATP has a members-only special segment about vibe coding. One snippet from John Siracusa, encapsulating much of the conversation: As programming tools have gotten better, the demand for programmers has gone up, not down. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he gave a de … | Continue reading
John Gruber blogging about whether the tariffs will impact Apple: It’s under-remarked upon, but Apple, to a point of almost obstinance, considers pricing part of the brand for its products. They tend not to raise or lower prices with the ebbs and flows of the world economy or eve … | Continue reading
While I’m commenting on YouTube videos today, I love that half of Casey Neistat’s video about the Switch 2 is actually about the New York subway. | Continue reading
Nice 9-minute edit by The Verge of the Copilot event, including a protester interrupting the presentation. I get that AI is divisive but it does actual harm to scream at another human in this way. So much outrage now is funneled into attacks when for many topics it’s not even cle … | Continue reading
Greg Morris has been doing great work on Micro Social, and he’s got a buy me a coffee page! ☕️ Perfect way to support an indie app and help grow the Micro.blog ecosystem. | Continue reading
It’s all fun and games with the global economy until your tariffs start interrupting Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders. 🤪 | Continue reading
How to people feel about web apps that take over common keyboard shortcuts like command-S? We’ve added a handful of keyboard shortcuts to Micro.blog on the web, and I really like it, so I’d like to add a couple more. | Continue reading
So many great lines in this piece by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic: By the numbers, the tariffs are less an expression of economic theory and more a Dadaist art piece about the meaninglessness of expertise. | Continue reading
Who knew Bill Gates was such a good blogger? Love this story of Altair BASIC in a quirky, unique design with animating text. | Continue reading
Apple stock getting destroyed today. I feel for small investors who are caught up in this. But also maybe a lesson for Tim Cook and his $1 million donation to the inauguration. Trump is reckless. You might think you’ll benefit by supporting him, but really you’re just empowering … | Continue reading
Today’s update to the Mac app addresses a few things related to managing uploads. It’s now easier to upload a new photo, or start a new post from an already-uploaded photo. These screenshots highlight a couple of the new items: There are also some bug fixes and little improvement … | Continue reading
Had a dream where one of my notebooks had special AI pages. I could write questions on them with ink and answers would appear. Too much ChatGPT on the brain. Also, the future will be just as much The Diamond Age as it will be Her. | Continue reading
Haven’t had coffee or left the house in a couple days after being sick, and those are two of my favorite things to do. Finally outdoors again. The gloomy weather isn’t helping… Need some sun. | Continue reading
The latest update to Micro Social adds location check-ins for Micro.blog. Very interesting! There’s so much potential here that we haven’t had time to follow through on, so great to see another app pick up the slack. | Continue reading
Excited for the Nintendo Switch 2. The kids have our old Switches, so I had picked up a Lite mostly for travel and miss having something that can connect to the TV. | Continue reading
Rest in peace, Val Kilmer. Glad he was able to reprise his role from Top Gun, in a way getting the thanks and goodbye he deserved before he passed. His part in Heat will always be my favorite. | Continue reading
Extraordinary what Cory Booker has done. A lot of people feel powerless right now, with little substantive action possible. Talking for 24 hours accepts those limits and leans in to the symbolic. 🇺🇸 | Continue reading
I was sick most of yesterday and tuned out of any social web drama, so was at first surprised to learn that this week’s FediForum has been cancelled. Details on their Mastodon account: We’ve all had a difficult few days. Tempers are high. Some of what’s been happening in the Fedi … | Continue reading
Enjoyed this illustrated story by Jackie Lay about the life of Victoria Woodhull, who ran for president in 1872. | Continue reading
Just great defense from the Longhorns. Love their midrange shooting too. I picked UConn vs. Texas for the women’s championship game, so could still happen. 🏀 | Continue reading
Finished reading: The Bear and The Nightingale by Katherine Arden. Beautiful and haunting. 📚 | Continue reading
Spurs / Warriors tonight. Not a close game but still fun. It has been too long since I was last in San Antonio. 🏀 | Continue reading
Whether you’re an AI optimist or skeptic, or somewhere in between, you can probably relate to this blog post by @paulrobertlloyd. It’s going to dominate tech headlines for at least a couple more years until everyone is completely burned out on hearing about it, then (maybe) fade … | Continue reading
Decided to subscribe to The Atlantic. There’s a certain kind of story that I miss from the NYT and WaPo after cancelling both those subscriptions last year. I still don’t want to obsess with the news, but when I dip my toes in, I want the coverage to be good. | Continue reading
We talk about Apple getting into trouble with Siri + LLMs, but Google has major problems too. Their search business is going to fall out from under them. Not sure they have the decisiveness to actually redesign their main product. | Continue reading
I’m enjoying Kagi instead of Google, but it’s still not quite right. For a paid search engine, there should be no clutter. If the query is an actual question with an answer, give me a ChatGPT-style UI, free of distractions. If the query is to find a web page, give me 10 blue link … | Continue reading
Did not finish: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty. I enjoyed the first part of the book but after setting it aside just couldn’t get back into it. 📚 | Continue reading
More details of when Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI board, from an upcoming book by Keach Hagey: The board felt they couldn’t divulge that it had been Murati who had given them some of the most detailed evidence of Altman’s management failings. They had banked on Murati calmi … | Continue reading
There seems to be a timezone bug in Siri + ChatGPT. To get better answers while driving I experimented with telling Siri to “ask ChatGPT to…”, but anything that needs the time is 5 hours off. I assume Apple is including the current time in a prompt to OpenAI, in GMT. Hopefully an … | Continue reading
My NCAA women’s bracket is still holding on with that Longhorns win! Great game Texas / Tennessee. 🏀 | Continue reading
Randomly stumbled on my post from two years ago about Threads joining the fediverse. It holds up so well it could’ve been written yesterday. Still no sign of Meta completing the parts of ActivityPub like account migration that would ease up on lock-in. | Continue reading
Got an email today for a class action lawsuit about chicken that I thought must be a phishing scam or a joke, but it appears real. The lawyers are going to make bank on this one! I don’t remember overpaying for chicken 5 years ago… I do wonder how they got my email address. | Continue reading
xAI buying Twitter / X seems pretty sketchy. In practice, I guess it means the platform will live on for a while. I would not bet on xAI’s long-term success, though… OpenAI has billions of dollars of real revenue. xAI has effectively none, I think, outside of Twitter itself. | Continue reading
To be a blogger, you have to be okay with writing into the void. Some posts will resonate with people. Some posts will get comments. Most won’t. Sometimes I’ll write a post and I’ll think to myself, “This is pretty good! This is the blog post that people are gonna talk about and … | Continue reading
I’m drawn to blogging about divisive topics, but it would probably be healthier to avoid it. People can be so tribal now that everything is either good or bad. Our views have become extreme caricatures of the truth. | Continue reading
The pond at The Village, walking back to the mechanic to pick up my car after getting coffee. | Continue reading
I’m cracking up at the images in this Severance + Lego post on Daring Fireball. Who is that red minifigure? 🤣 | Continue reading
Wow, just watched the final minute of Lakers / Bulls from last night. Love basketball. 🏀 | Continue reading
ChatGPT’s new image generation is incredibly good. Too good. You can see it in the thousands of Ghibli-ified photos all over the social web. Hayao Miyazaki is going to come out of retirement again to tell us how we’ve all lost the plot on creativity. When we look back on this mom … | Continue reading
This is a helpful post from Paul Frazee about ATProto lexicons. One of the challenges for making Micro.blog a PDS is what to do with longer blog posts with titles that don’t fit cleanly into Bluesky’s lexicon. Don’t really want to reinvent the wheel here. | Continue reading
A fun experiment in between bug fixing… I added a films page to Micro.blog, with posters for Letterboxd links people have recently included in blog posts. Might evolve into a more complete feature later. | Continue reading
Worked on some book-related improvements in Micro.blog this morning. We try to integrate with all sorts of things — Google Books, Open Library, Libby — but a lot of it is not exactly officially sanctioned. Added more Goodreads scraping today. In for a penny, in for a pound! | Continue reading