You can always count on Teslas to have fun vanity license plates. | Continue reading
Still a little puzzled by the link handling in Threads posts. Every character in the URL counts toward the total, even though the URLs are shortened when displayed anyway. I don’t want to run a URL shortener in 2024 but it would help. | Continue reading
Good post from Jason Snell about Apple services: Apple is building an enormous business that’s based on Apple customers giving the company their credit cards and charging them regularly. And that business is incredibly profitable and is expected to continue growing at double-digi … | Continue reading
Dan Murrell blogs about how he uses ChatGPT to add features to his iOS app: Why should I spend time writing all the code when I could instead describe what I want, and evaluate and adjust minor bits instead? This is going to become more and more common. Importantly, you can’t bli … | Continue reading
Here’s an example screenshot in the Mac app of how I use bookmark summarization. I bookmark things I might blog about and get a nice summary of the story. Then later I might add tags or make highlights and use those as quotes in blog posts. | Continue reading
From the M.b news blog, bookmark summarization via our future robot overlords is now available to everyone. I love this feature. New for everyone: when you bookmark a web page, Micro.blog will automatically include a summary of the page in your bookmarks list. This was previously … | Continue reading
Made a tweak to how timelines in Micro.blog are stored, especially helpful for our poor servers when there are lots of inactive accounts. Our memory usage for Redis servers continues to be out of control, gotta chip away at it. | Continue reading
Lots of news in Vincent’s weekly update, including the end of Gluon, work on M.b, and handing off Sublime Ads… I like the new name: Shameless Plug. Good luck with it @michal! | Continue reading
Great journalism from The Washington Post this morning on a suspicious $10 million withdrawal in Egypt and the investigation on whether it was linked to Trump. This should be a movie: According to the bank records, employees assembled the money that same day, entirely in U.S. $10 … | Continue reading
This list at The Washington Post of each person freed today is really good, with details on each one. Great day for the families. Joe Biden is good at his job. 🇺🇸 | Continue reading
Nilay Patel in the intro to the latest Decoder: But putting a bunch of computers in a data center and running them at full tilt is how basically everything works now. If you have a moral objection to AI based on climate concerns, you might have a moral objection to TikTok and You … | Continue reading
Discourse’s backups are SQL, but I needed a Markdown or HTML export. I asked ChatGPT to write a quick Ruby script that loops over the possible post IDs and downloads the Markdown using the special “/raw” URLs in Discourse. Reviewed it line by line and tweaked it slightly, but it … | Continue reading
Maya Rudolph returning to SNL! From CNN: Rudolph will reprise her portrayal of Vice President Kamala Harris when the NBC show returns for its fiftieth season this fall, a source with knowledge of Rudolph’s plans told CNN. Rudolph will play Harris through the 2024 election. This i … | Continue reading
This approach from Wix to let AI write blog posts is all wrong. You know what works, though? Write your own blog post, then paste it into AI and ask it to tell you what your own post means. Then edit it yourself as needed. Really helps refine whether you’re communicating clearly … | Continue reading
This is a fun new series from Stephen Hackett on the Performa line. I had the Quadra 605 which I think really was just a Performa with a different name. Branding silliness in those days. | Continue reading
Some good replies to my post about Reddit, Micro.blog, and robots.txt yesterday. One wrinkle that may not be obvious: when the pref is enabled, we run bookmarked text through AI to summarize it. This is another reason why I feel better erring on the side of respecting robots.txt. … | Continue reading
Last night’s Idina Menzel show was really something special. Didn’t realize she is also returning to Broadway next year in Redwood. She sang a couple songs from it… I’ve gotta find a way to be there. | Continue reading
Trump picked Vance when he had all the momentum — getting shot, the convention, Biden’s stumbles. With the election upended, I hope Kamala stays more rooted with her pick. This is not about exciting the Democratic base. We’re already excited! Strengthen the campaign in the midwes … | Continue reading
There’s an interview from David Pierce at The Verge with Friend founder Avi Schiffmann. Friend is an AI device companion that is trying to make you less lonely, not solve any productivity problems. Here are my random initial thoughts about it. It’s too easy to dismiss these kind … | Continue reading
Belatedly realizing that Reddit’s robots.txt change means that Micro.blog’s bookmark feature now can’t archive a copy of pages, because we check robots.txt. This is the kind of trickle down effect when a site withdraws from the open web, it hurts other services and incentivizes b … | Continue reading
Enjoying watching the Olympics. Some live, some delayed. Still fun even if I’ve already heard a little about the outcome. | Continue reading
Miss the days when you could have a $199 iPod Touch around for testing betas and other things. Getting a device to test Apple Intelligence on iOS would set me back $600 (iPad Air) or $1000 (iPhone 15 Pro). Brand new iPad Mini, regular iPad, and non-pro iPhone 15 can’t run it. App … | Continue reading
Thought about installing the iOS 18.1 beta today but caught myself, remembering AI won’t work on my iPhone 14 Pro. I keep forgetting because my phone still feels new. | Continue reading
I’ve been testing the beta of Tapestry and it’s really starting to show the promise of a unified timeline across multiple services. There’s even an Instagram connector from @sod to view Instagram profiles alongside Micro.blog feeds, Mastodon, and other blogs. | Continue reading
We’re working on a few tweaks to Epilogue this week. Just merged in a change that my son worked on. 🙂 If you’ve never heard of the app before, it’s a mashup of blogs and tracking books, like Goodreads… I recorded a video about it last year that still covers most of the ma … | Continue reading
Between killing third-party clients and now only allowing Google indexing, Reddit has withdrawn from the open web in a pretty significant way. Not sure what the impact of this will be. Feels almost Facebook-like, much more of a silo than before. | Continue reading
Finished reading: Blood on Their Hands by Mandy Matney. Wasn’t planning to read this but got into it when @traci started the audiobook. Interesting behind-the-scenes story of Mandy reporting on (and hosting a podcast about) the Murdaughs. 📚 | Continue reading
Experimenting with WebP. I still have mixed feelings about it. The files are smaller, but even introduced 14 years ago (!) my instinct on new formats is they won’t be as universal as JPEG, MP3, and text, which will last forever. | Continue reading
This monolith command-line tool is neat, found via @eay. Downloads a web page and rewrites it to include all resources in a single file. | Continue reading
There’s a new Core Int out today! Daniel and I talk about CrowdStrike, travel, and SearchGPT. | Continue reading
The couch jokes about JD Vance might be funny, but it’s misinformation and not even based on anything true. Sorry to be a buzzkill. We can win without making shit up. In the long run, it hurts credibility on the real arguments against the GOP ticket. 🇺🇸 | Continue reading
Short walk to Somerville Lake right before it started to rain. So quiet this morning. | Continue reading
Looking forward to Rings of Power season 2. Looks like what I blogged during season 1 is still true. They’ve put a lot into this show. | Continue reading
Camping at Lake Somerville State Park. Lots of dense trees and bushes around each site, makes for nice privacy if anyone was actually here except me. Not pictured: the lake. | Continue reading
Cheat sheet for emoji in my blog posts: 📚: about books I’m reading 🇺🇸: politics 🙂: friendly reply, please don’t take offense 🤪: usually gripes that are slightly exaggerated from how I really feel | Continue reading
Elena Rossini has a blog post walking through the compatibility between Mastodon and Pixelfed specifically, and also more generally with Mastodon API clients like Phanpy and Ivory: The ultimate goal of The Future is Federated is to introduce the Fediverse to “regular people,” enc … | Continue reading
ActivityPub folks: I’ve posted FEP-eb22 to document supported features in NodeInfo, so that clients and servers can better communicate about what to show in a client UI. Would love your thoughts on it. There’s some overlap with other FEPs but those seem stalled and not quite what … | Continue reading
To be honest, the Ghost ActivityPub emails are both exciting and a little bit painful for me to read. Ghost is a popular platform and it is definitely a good thing to support an open standard. But also, I did most of this same work 6 years ago, without the jokes and pug artwork. … | Continue reading
My initial take on SearchGPT (without using it yet) is that it should be a step forward for linking to and crediting sources in a way that chat assistants aren’t. It also looks much cleaner than Google, which is a mess of ads and uneven results now. Daniel and I talk about this o … | Continue reading
Not sure what to make of Sam Altman’s op-ed in The Washington Post. When he writes about model weights and export restrictions, I keep thinking of the Llama 3.1 release this week. Feels like more between the lines that I’m missing. | Continue reading
Big news for AltStore to be getting Fortnite. Also from Epic, they are pulling Fortnite from Samsung’s store to protest how sideloading is now disabled by default. And in a way, they’ve sort of been protesting the same thing on iOS for the last few years. | Continue reading
Thinking more about Biden’s address last night and his legacy, it’s remarkable how much he accomplished. Investments in infrastructure and climate, progress on guns. All he had to do was get us through the pandemic and clean up a little of Trump’s mess. Feeling optimistic that we … | Continue reading
Evan Prodromou in a post on Mastodon: If you make a Fediverse explainer, try to show some real communities as the nodes in the network, rather than using software packages and their logos. Companies, local governments, universities, families, friend groups, individuals. I think t … | Continue reading
Today we’ve released a new version of Micro.blog for macOS. This update adds two new features: import from Glass and better support for showing auto-generated summaries of bookmarked web pages. Most of the advanced bookmark features in Micro.blog — like summaries, highlights, and … | Continue reading
Set the presidential address to record while out tonight so we could watch it fully, without all the noise of news and social media. He hit it just right. Moving. “…one day sit behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office as president of the United States. But here I am.” Thank yo … | Continue reading
Federico Viticci on how wired EarPods are still great: I don’t have to worry about battery life, pairing, or latency. Sure, there’s a wire, and there’s no noise cancelling when using them – but these are my “downtime earbuds” anyway, so I don’t care. I find myself using my AirPod … | Continue reading
Nice work from Apple on the web version of Maps. Native apps are great, but some apps really should be on the web, especially apps that you want to link into. | Continue reading