Hmm, my last post is poorly truncated on Bluesky because I hadn’t considered the title, link, and new summary taking up more than 300 characters. Going to keep my extra summary text shorter in the future. | Continue reading
This is an excellent post by Molly White about the potential conflict between making the world’s knowledge more accessible through AI and the risk of destroying the foundations for open content on the web: The true threat from AI models training on open access material is not tha … | Continue reading
Since writing more about delayed AI + Siri yesterday, I was thinking about this Bloomberg story of a meeting inside Apple admitting that the new Siri works at best 80% of the time, but they want to “get those percentages up”. After a year of development? They need to seriously re … | Continue reading
Bluesky has a proposal to declare user intention for things like archiving and AI training. Looks pretty good. Maybe we should mirror this in robots.txt? It stretches the original purpose of the file but it should be somewhere outside of a specific protocol. There was also CC-NT … | Continue reading
We are so used to being able to do almost anything in software. For example, today I was looking at how long it takes to load the list of your blog posts in Micro.blog. It’s a couple seconds, but I’d like it to be half a second. I know from many years of web experience that there … | Continue reading
Disappointed I missed the world without caesars shirt. Still catching up on SXSW happenings, including Jay Graber’s interview which I just queued up. | Continue reading
Had a couple funny interactions with ChatGPT this week, including when asking it for some help with a coding task. It suggested some code that was really problematic and could easily break in the future. I told it I was worried about that code, and it replied with “You’re right, … | Continue reading
I’ve been out of town for a few days and not coding much, but Vincent has been working on the mobile app. iOS folks, a new TestFlight beta is out with creating a new blog category and editing summaries, plus other fixes. A couple more tweaks and then will ship to everyone. | Continue reading
Overheard, single mom who took her 401k and put it into starting a new business. Not everyone should do this, but… I love it. YOLO. | Continue reading
Responding to John Gruber’s AI post yesterday, Om Malik blogs: Just as Google is trapped in the 10-blue-link prison, which prevents it from doing something radical, Apple has its own golden handcuffs. It’s a company weighed down by its market capitalization and what stock market … | Continue reading
Chet Collins reviews my book Indie Microblogging. Most people who have checked it out have just skimmed through it a little, which is fine! Love to see a detailed look, though. I still plan to publish a final final draft with a few updates. | Continue reading
Ana Rodrigues blogs about how websites can be good as a playground and for others to learn from: But deep down, all I want for my personal website is to give back to the web. I want anyone, regardless of skill level, to inspect elements, understand the structure, and learn from r … | Continue reading
Great post from John Gruber about Apple Intelligence and the Siri delays: Leaders prove their mettle and create their legacies not by how they deal with successes but by how they deal with — how they acknowledge, understand, adapt, and solve — problems. The fiasco is that Apple p … | Continue reading
New feature for Micro.blog’s Bluesky cross-posting: preview cards. This is still off by default, but if you flip it on in Sources, Micro.blog will try to figure out the title, description, and og:image for the first link in your post and attach it. Screenshot: | Continue reading
Federico Viticci wonders if Apple should have their own API that could bridge to OpenAI and Anthropic, offering Apple’s own seal of approval on privacy and security. It would be a nice surprise if Apple did something like this. They could wrap together on-device models and privat … | Continue reading
MarsEdit 5.3.3 is out! This release adds support for Micro.blog blog post summaries with a new “excerpt” field in MarsEdit. | Continue reading
Excellent Dithering today — and Upgrade yesterday for the 2-hour version 🙂 — about how the Apple Intelligence rollout missed the mark. Time for Apple to take off the rails and open up APIs and models so developers can take the lead for a while, like how Mac apps innovated … | Continue reading
Gus Mueller thinks Apple needs to get out of the way with AI: The crux of the issue in my mind is this: Apple has a lot of good ideas, but they don’t have a monopoly on them. I would like some other folks to come in and try their ideas out. I would like things to advance at the p … | Continue reading
After lunch I ended up having to head out of town unexpectedly to visit family, so gonna miss the afternoon SXSW and Fediverse House events. It was amazing catching up with folks who I only knew online, and meeting some people for the first time. Have a great week and safe travel … | Continue reading
Now that bookmark tags are available to all plans on Micro.blog, it’s more consistent to manage bookmarks. I’ve moved my read-later type activities to Micro.blog. Just nice to have it all in one place to bookmark posts and blog about them. Screenshot example of a bookmark with su … | Continue reading
Ever since Apple revealed their AI strategy to lean into on-device models, there has been a sort of tension with the approach from other companies like OpenAI, Google, and Amazon. Was Apple Intelligence going to work? There are advantages: for user privacy because more data stays … | Continue reading
Good morning, Austin. Back downtown after a great day yesterday at Fediverse House. | Continue reading
“This isn’t a time for competition. It is a time for cooperation.” — Evan Prodromou in a panel on different platforms at Fediverse House | Continue reading
Just a few minutes in to arriving at Fediverse House and already it was super valuable. There is really nothing like meeting people face to face. It’s an exciting time for the open web and you can feel it in hearing what people are working on and thinking about. | Continue reading
Micro Social continues to improve. The new version adds a share sheet and iPad support. | Continue reading
We just passed an old wagon and mules on highway 290. It was Cowboy’s Last Ride, a restored wagon from 1899, going 350 miles across central Texas to raise money for St. Jude: At 82 years old, Larry Jollisant, has chosen to honor his life as a cowboy in the most authentic, western … | Continue reading
Interesting segment on The Late Show last night with guest Reid Hoffman about AI. I’ve listened to his Masters of Scale podcast from time to time. On AI, I’ve realized recently that we are not all ever going to agree about the benefits and dangers. It’s a big shift and there will … | Continue reading
Linkrot is always a problem for the web, but please let’s not purposefully destroy our own content when it’s easy to keep it going. John Gruber on 538 shutting everything down: Why not keep the FiveThirtyEight site up and running — at least for a while, if not in perpetuity? It c … | Continue reading
Seth Godin blogs about making the most of a second chance with customers: If a customer service call goes wrong, or if a new employee is stumbling, this is the moment to escalate and get the second impression just right. It shows that we can recover, that we’re listening, and tha … | Continue reading
Listening to the Decoder episode with Panos Panay, I’m almost convinced that what Amazon is trying with Alexa+ will work. Everyone’s expectations are so low with voice assistants. If they actually pull it off, it will be impressive. | Continue reading
Parker Ortolani blogging about the new MacBook Air. I hadn’t even thought about the color until now: For the first time in 24 years, since the introduction of the first white iBook, Apple has a blue laptop again. While the new MacBook Airs are most certainly a “spec bump,” they m … | Continue reading
Interesting new post from OpenAI about safety. About humans being in control: Our approach to alignment centers humans. We aim to develop mechanisms that empower human stakeholders to express their intent clearly and supervise AI systems effectively - even in complex situations, … | Continue reading
Tapbots is working on a Bluesky client, called Phoenix. On making it a separate app, they say: While there may be some conveniences of an app that supports multiple social media protocols, we believe the experience will be much better overall if we keep them separate. We do plan … | Continue reading
Very quick video of the latest Micro.blog for Mac with new blog post summary field. You can type your own summary that will be used in the timeline and cross-posting, or have it generate one for you. | Continue reading
Reminder for folks in Austin, Fediverse House is this weekend, Sunday and Monday. I’ll be there. In a happy coincidence, Sunday is also the anniversary of the first post to my blog. 23 years. | Continue reading
Worked a bunch on the Mac app today, one of my favorite things to work on. Almost done with the next update, so I’ll wrap it up tomorrow morning and release it. Also finally solved that ridiculous “41 new posts” bug. | Continue reading
I like this post from @devilgate about not being discouraged to write, even when we know that doing more than writing could have a better impact: But not everyone can do more, or give more. And even those who can, or could or should: for some of us, writing is not just what we do … | Continue reading
Funny that SF Symbols now has a “robotic vacuum” icon but not just a robot. Wonder if it’s an oversight or because of Android. 🤖 | Continue reading
Sometimes the debugging is all in the wrong place. Spent a couple hours trying to find a bug in JavaScript — lots of printf-style debugging, element inspection, random code changes — only to eventually track it down to a single line of CSS. | Continue reading
Thinking about the Wii yesterday thanks to Sven’s post, I re-read my old blog post from 2007 about when I gave away a Wii in a contest. Wonder what happened to that console and whether the new owners had fun with it. If any kids played it, they would be adults now. | Continue reading
Some of my really old blog posts are still in Textile format instead of Markdown. Whenever I find one, I just manually edit it to fix the links. No memory now of why I didn’t batch convert them years ago. | Continue reading
Apple updates a couple iPads. From Dan Moren at Six Colors: The base iPad’s update is perhaps somewhat more disappointing, as that model was introduced in 2022 and its A16 processor will make it one of the few current main-line Apple devices—perhaps only—not to support Apple Inte … | Continue reading