Rainy day to be on the road. Clouds and skyline in the distance as we drive back through Dallas. | Continue reading
The New York Times: Frustrated by Gaza Coverage, Student Protesters Turn to Al Jazeera. People see what they want to see, look for news that confirms their own perspective. Let’s queue up some more TikTok videos too! 🤪 | Continue reading
From the road trip a few days ago, a train somewhere along Texas highway 79. | Continue reading
Yet more Apple + AI news from Bloomberg: Apple Inc. has closed in on an agreement with OpenAI to use the startup’s technology on the iPhone, part of a broader push to bring artificial intelligence features to its devices, according to people familiar with the matter. I’m fascinat … | Continue reading
Very curious what OpenAI is up to with their announcement coming up on Monday, from this post on Twitter X. In the last few months they’ve announced all sorts of big improvements with just a blog post. Seems significant. | Continue reading
Nothing surprising in today’s NYT story about Apple’s AI plans. I wanted to comment on this part: Apple plans to bill the improved Siri as more private than rival A.I. services because it will process requests on iPhones rather than remotely in data centers. Apple genuinely belie … | Continue reading
The first update from Ghost about ActivityPub has a screenshot of their early experiment. There’s also a lot about timing: In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back … | Continue reading
Excited to announce that @kimberlyhirsh is joining the Micro.blog team. She’ll be helping part-time with curation and community. We’ve been talking to Kimberly for a while and I’m happy she can join us as @jean moves on. I’m looking forward to working with Kimberly, and seeing wh … | Continue reading
This interview with Jack Dorsey provides some closure to his part of the Twitter and Bluesky story. On leaving the Bluesky board: So I just decided to delete my account on Bluesky, and really focus on Nostr, and funding that to the best of my ability. I asked to get off the board … | Continue reading
Micro Camp is one week from today! I updated the home page with the schedule. | Continue reading
We recorded a new Core Int just a couple hours before Apple issued their apology about the Crush ad. Still had fun talking about new iPads, then a discussion of Mastodon as a non-profit and more. | Continue reading
Because everyone is mad about everything now, I try not to overreact to the latest hot takes until I see things for myself. Finally watched Apple’s “Crush” ad, and sort of agree with the consensus that it feels wasteful, uncomfortable. Ads should inspire, and this does not. | Continue reading
It’s hard to believe it has been seven years since Jean joined me to work on Micro.blog. After a few emails back and forth in early 2017, Jean and I met at Fairlane Coffee while I was up in Portland. I showed her an early version of Micro.blog and we talked about how we could wor … | Continue reading
Posted to my blog from the passenger seat of the car and then we immediately drove into a national forest with no cell coverage. It’s so easy to take internet access for granted. | Continue reading
Traveling this week so a bit scattered, but also working on a couple pretty important blog posts about Micro.blog. In a perfect world with a larger company, maybe there’d be a PR firm to review the timing of everything? It’s all good, though, and whenever posts are published will … | Continue reading
Jean has posted the schedule for Micro.blog. It’s even more micro this year. Micro Camp changes a little every year. I don’t think we need to be set in exactly the same pattern. This time we’re going to lean into more Q&A, extending the State of M.b so there’s plenty of time to a … | Continue reading
I was actually thinking about going to Dragonsteel Nexus, even though it doesn’t make any sense to travel to Salt Lake City for a book release. Luckily the event sold out right away, no need to decide. I should take all that money I just saved and throw it away on an iPad that I … | Continue reading
TikTok lawsuit against the United States seems weak on first glance. This argument that they can’t move the source code to a new owner is hard to take seriously: …precipitously moving all TikTok source code development from ByteDance to a new TikTok owner would be impossible as a … | Continue reading
Busy morning, so only just now catching up on all iPad announcements. The Verge as usual has a good overview. I’ve fallen out of using iPads, but tempted again by the new pencil. | Continue reading
Broke the corner of my old Apple Watch screen, not badly, but enough that it was time to upgrade after several years. New one is a tiny bit bigger and noticeably faster. | Continue reading
It’s fine to have multiple social web protocols, because this is a good time to experiment and see what sticks. But there’s a limit, and I’m drawing the line at Farcaster. ActivityPub, AT Protocol, and Nostr each provide unique strengths. We do not need a blockchain-based additio … | Continue reading
Helpful blog post from @matt17r about the steps he used to migrate a blog between accounts on Micro.blog. Hope to make this even smoother in the future. | Continue reading
Not sick of me singing the praises of OpenAI yet? Their batch API is incredible. An elegant design, if you can say that about an API, and very powerful. | Continue reading
Another advantage to having a blog as the center of all things is that when I’m busy, I can just temporarily disable cross-posting to other services. I can also tune down the Micro.blog timeline settings to see fewer replies to other people. The writing process is the same, just … | Continue reading
Finished reading: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. It didn’t quite work for me, lots of interesting characters but very little story. Still enjoyed it, just not as much as her recent novellas. 📚 | Continue reading
It’s hard to tell when a blog post is first published if it’s any good. A few days later, a year later, then you know. | Continue reading
Sort of spontaneously went to see The Fall Guy. Really fun movie. 🍿 | Continue reading
In college in the 1990s, I joined the socialist student organization. I saw every issue in stark contrast — a measure of fairness and justice. If I was young on campus today, I might be protesting the war in Gaza. But even in college, truthfully I wasn’t a great activist. I remem … | Continue reading
Jason Fried: I’m still doing this because the world is flooded with overpriced, crappy, subpar software. It hurts people and it hurts the economy. Reminds me of when 37signals would redesign popular sites like FedEx. Part of it was a way to get attention for what they could do, b … | Continue reading
New episode of Core Intuition about this week’s tweaks to the CTF, plus a discussion of how Micro.blog is using AI. We talk about my decision to have a global AI setting and how some customers feel very strongly that AI use should be limited. | Continue reading
Finally checked out the Carpenter Hotel’s coffee shop yesterday. Nice place. Had a little break from the rain outside. | Continue reading
Great teardown video from iFixit on the Rabbit and Humane devices. The closing line also highlights why these need to be standalone devices: Both at best should’ve been an app. But that might have more to do with the restrictions on Apple and Android’s app stores than anything el … | Continue reading
Recorded another very short video for YouTube about how we’re starting to use the auto-generated photo descriptions in the new post screen. As you can see in the video, it’s still a little clunky. I’ll improve the timing and UI flow as we use it more. | Continue reading
There’s a redesigned version of Lillihub for Micro.blog available. I’m amazed by how many features it supports. Check it out if you’re looking for a different take on the user experience or text editing UI. | Continue reading
Been working on a Gaza-related blog post off and on for months, mostly threw it out and rewrote it this week. Sometimes I draft a post and it feels good to write it down, so I never actually post it. Other times I can’t let a topic go until it’s published. | Continue reading
Admittedly I’m not a subscriber so haven’t read the full text for M.G. Siegler’s Vision Pro article this week, but the opening paragraph is not fooling around: Arguing about the shipment projections for Apple’s Vision Pro is sort of like arguing about how many tickets were sold o … | Continue reading
How is it May already? Reminder that Micro Camp is coming up in just a little over two weeks! We’ll get the full schedule up later, but the plan is to start at noon Pacific. It’s free. We’ll have a livestream and chat. micro.camp | Continue reading
The API folks at OpenAI continue to do great work. You can just tell when developers have their act together. Felt the same way the first time I used Stripe. The latest improvement is vision models in the batch API (Twitter X link), which should eventually bring down my costs. | Continue reading
The “it should’ve been an app” arguments would resonate with me more if Apple let you replace Siri. There’s just no way to get enough integration on iOS. It is hard to innovate around Apple and Google, but I’m glad some developers are trying to, because that’s how we get new thin … | Continue reading
Patrick Rhone has a new book: For You: This book was written for my daughter Beatrix in honor of her 16th Birthday. It is inspired by many events and conversations we’ve had over the years. This book is for you, too. Because these lessons are universal. | Continue reading
Saw this poster the other day and was fascinated by it. I’m posting it to capture the time we live in. It also inspired me to read a few random articles about horses in the Middle East, including this one from 2016 in The New York Times: Palestinians and Israelis in the business, … | Continue reading
Neat video from Brandon Sanderson at C2E2. I’m tempted to go to Salt Lake City for the Wind and Truth release. None of the books I’m reading are hitting… I’m pushing through, but part of me wants to just start re-reading all of The Stormlight Archive. | Continue reading
I’m 48 years old. If you start counting with my paid internship in college, I’ve had a roughly 30-year career in the software industry, give or take a year. I feel extremely lucky that the web came along just as I was getting my feet wet as a developer. World-changing technologie … | Continue reading
Great blog post from Om Malik on the current AI hardware from Humane and Rabbit, and where things are going. | Continue reading