Small fan I keep in my laptop bag. Doesn’t completely solve Texas summer but helps a tiny bit. Need to find a USB-C version. ☀️ | Continue reading
Last post about Biden for a while. Dave Winer makes a point I’ve wanted to blog about: If Biden gets disabled, or dies, before or after the election – VP Harris steps up. Now everyone can relax. I’m not worried that Biden will die or have to resign halfway through his term. That’ … | Continue reading
This political cartoon by Dave Whamond is so good. “C’mon man!” | Continue reading
I’m starting to accelerate my challenge to visit all 88 state parks in Texas. Had a few slow months and realized it would take four years to finish at that pace. Way too long. I think two years is about right. | Continue reading
I have mixed feelings about where we go in the Democratic party. I think I’ll be relieved if Biden steps aside because it resets everything about this campaign. The people voted for Kamala Harris too and she will be able to articulate the message against Trump more clearly. On th … | Continue reading
Lunch at LBJ State Park. Picked up a turkey melt sandwich from a food truck in Johnson City, Cast Iron Punk. | Continue reading
Joe Biden in a written statement today: Not the press, not the pundits, not the big donors, not any selected group of individuals, no matter how well intentioned. The voters - and the voters alone - decide the nominee of the Democratic Party. How can we stand for democracy in our … | Continue reading
Many of the hot takes about fair use for AI training are either “AI is stealing content” or “everything on the web is free”, but the discussions in between those extremes are more interesting. Let’s explore it with a thought experiment. This blog post isn’t a declaration that I’v … | Continue reading
I wrote a weird blog post draft about AI last week that I wasn’t sure what to do with. Inspired by listening to the latest ATP in the car today to publish it. One thing that resonated with me: people have strong feelings about AI, but blog posts are a good way to explore what we … | Continue reading
Enchanted Rock. It’s too hot today so I can’t be bothered to hike to the top, but it’s still nice. | Continue reading
Mark Gurman says that some of the core parts of Apple Intelligence will arrive with iOS 18.4 next year. This is sort of consistent with what Apple said at WWDC, but I think users will be confused that a new Siri is rolling out piecemeal. | Continue reading
Everyone who has implemented ActivityPub from scratch knows that there are implementation-specific quirks that trip up developers, making compatibility between apps more difficult. Some of these issues are being clarified by the Social Web Community Group. Test suites will help t … | Continue reading
The world has changed since The New York Times was founded in the 1850s. It used to be that opinion sections and letters to the editor were great places to hear a diverse set of perspectives. Now the whole web is that. Journalists are straining their credibility when we most need … | Continue reading
The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other major news outlets should scrap their opinion sections. There are more than enough places on the web to hear what people think. Cable news is already overrun with non-news. Let’s refocus on reporting, not influencing. | Continue reading
We subscribed to the Alamo Drafthouse season pass for the summer. Makes it easier to decide to go to pretty much any movie. 🍿 | Continue reading
Back from the early screening of Fly Me to the Moon at Alamo — fun movie! — and watched the Biden interview with Stephanopoulos. Not bad. Wish the convention was sooner so we could officially nominate either Biden or Kamala Harris and be done. 🇺🇸 | Continue reading
Even folks who assumed the best intentions with Apple’s DMA compliance can surely see that the iOS “notarization” process is in violation of any reading of the DMA. Apple has created a new tier of app review. It’s wrong. See more with Epic Games on 9to5Mac. | Continue reading
I updated the Micro.blog for Mac app today. Several improvements including an easy way to just see draft blog posts. | Continue reading
A new spin-off project from omg.lol: Spake. This is similar to what we were trying to do in Micro.blog with microcasting. Short-form podcasts or audio narration for posts that are much easier to get started with. | Continue reading
Patriotic delivery robot. Kirk Watson and Lloyd Doggett spoke briefly after Mueller’s parade. Paraphrasing Doggett: we have a choice this year between democracy and a path leading to autocracy. 🇺🇸 | Continue reading
What’s bothering me this week is that I’m feeling like I felt when we were in limbo between election day 2020 and when the votes were counted a few days later. It’s probably going to be fine, but maybe it won’t be. 🇺🇸 | Continue reading
Nick Heer summarizes the OpenAI sandboxing news, initially covered by The Verge. I think the “security risk” of this is largely overblown. Many apps (including my own!) store files on your Mac with the assumption that no one else has access to your computer. | Continue reading
Finished reading: The Assassin’s Blade by Sarah J. Maas. A set of novellas that take place before the main series. 📚 | Continue reading
After I blogged about a new text editor for Micro.blog, I ran into a couple tricky problems and work stalled. If 37signals does open source their Writebook editor, which I believe is the plan, I think I could use it with a couple tweaks. It’s pretty close. | Continue reading
Jason Fried introducing Writebook: It’s a dead simple platform to publish web-based books. They have covers, they can have title pages, they can have picture pages, and they can have text pages. […] Writebook is our love letter to truly independent, zero-cost web publishing on th … | Continue reading
John Gruber posting to Threads: I feel great about Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. Go back and watch her in Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. She’s smart, sharp, aggressive, and emotive. Hillary Clinton the day after the 2016 election: I know we have still not shattered … | Continue reading
There are a lot of interesting stats in this Cloudflare blog post about AI bots. I still worry that we might over-correct when blocking LLM training. For example, CCBot is mentioned, but Common Crawl goes back 15+ years and has a variety of non-AI uses. | Continue reading
After today’s blog publishing change, I’m seeing posting about twice as fast for my blog. Your milage may vary, depends on whether replies are included on your blog. I’ve also done some tests with more CPUs and plan to upgrade a few servers if I can bear the cost. | Continue reading
Good new ad from the Biden campaign: The same Trump Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade, ruled that the President can ignore the law, even to commit a crime, because Donald Trump asked them to. He’s already led an insurrection… Donald Trump can never hold this office again. … | Continue reading
We are starting to open up Micro.blog’s notes feature to our standard plan. Private notes with end-to-end encryption and sharing. It used to be limited to Micro.blog Premium. On the web, you’ll see a “Notes” link in the sidebar. Will be fully rolled out with updates to the native … | Continue reading
I’m a little puzzled about why the new proposed fediverse:creator tag is only for approved web sites. Just a slow rollout? Clearly it’s most useful for news organizations with multiple writers, where there’s not a one-to-one mapping between author and fediverse account. | Continue reading
Texas Sage while out walking. Can’t tell in the photo but the bees are happy too. | Continue reading
MacStories has written an open letter asking for AI regulation: …a wide swath of the tech industry, including behemoths like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, have joined OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity, to ingest the intellectual property of publishers without their consent, … | Continue reading
Last week’s debate was a wake-up call for our muddled framing of the issues at stake this year. There are only two things we should be talking about: abortion and democracy. Every other question can have a quick answer and then pivot to those two things. 🇺🇸 | Continue reading
Finally experimenting with Bluesky’s Starter Packs. I created a test pack with a handful of people in the suggested list. When signed in, love how it can be viewed as a timeline of posts. Nice touches to this implementation that I think we could borrow for blog-based recommendati … | Continue reading
At the coffee shop, glanced up at the TV and there’s a news segment on “How To Avoid Sharks”. It’s not fair for me to judge everything they might’ve been covering based on 5 seconds, but is that the best journalists can do today? There’s a real crisis in this country based largel … | Continue reading
It’s almost funny that I’ve had so much praise for Biden because I didn’t support him in the primaries in 2008 or 2020. But he has won me over. 🇺🇸 | Continue reading
Just watched the President’s short speech reacting to the Supreme Court ruling on immunity. Joe Biden is a good man and loves this country. It’s that simple. He was granted new power by the courts today and he refused it. 🇺🇸 | Continue reading
Happy for Derrick White on his 4-year, $125 million extension with the Celtics. He plays hard, knows the game, unselfish, and gets better every single year. Miss him on the Spurs. 🏀 | Continue reading
Audio snippets are fun. I added audio to this short post today too. To me, it underscores that my blog is my own space, not a wall of monotony on a silo. Every blog page adds a little something to the web. | Continue reading
I’ve gotten out of the habit of adding audio narration to my blog posts, so took a few minutes to add audio to this longer post today about AI bots. | Continue reading
I always feel better after shipping new features for customers. Today, expanded our email newsletter support and added a new overview help page for it. | Continue reading
The news can be very deflating. It’s critical to figure out small ways we can make a difference. Frustration should lead to action, not collapse. As Biden said the other day: “When you get knocked down, you get back up.” 🇺🇸 | Continue reading
I read parts of the Trump immunity decision, skipping around to what Roberts wrote and the dissent. The main opinion is dangerous. This court is undermining what we believe in as a country. Need a strong response from Biden. He should have “discussions with Justice Department off … | Continue reading
Jeremy Keith follows up on fighting AI bots, quoting a couple things I’ve said. He closes with: There is nothing inevitable about any technology. The actions we take today are what determine our future. So let’s take steps now to prevent our web being turned into a dark, dark for … | Continue reading
Monday after the debate, and I’m mostly annoyed with Biden’s staff and campaign today. We talk a lot about how he surrounds himself with competent people. I believe that, but they need to adjust and stop scheduling him like he’s 40 years old. More time to think and rest. 🇺 … | Continue reading