There’s a lot of talk about how AI can get facts wrong. That’s fair, but in my experience it’s correct most of the time. Even when it’s slightly off, there’s usually some useful truth in the answer. Much more frustrating is voice assistants who can’t even begin to give an answer. | Continue reading
More and more I find myself keeping ChatGPT open and asking it even dumb questions that Google or DuckDuckGo could answer just as well. “If it’s 1pm in California, what time is it in Poland?” Having an ad-free, simple response is nice. This is going to completely upend the search … | Continue reading
I recorded a video on YouTube showing how Micro.blog’s new tweets archive import feature works. It’s 6 minutes long and I explain more about how the different parts fit together. | Continue reading
Daniel Jalkut blogs about Micro.blog’s new tweets import and how it can work with MarsEdit. | Continue reading
It’s not all about Elon Musk. Ben Thompson has made variations of this argument on Stratechery and Dithering, but I wanted to quote this segment from the Sharp Tech podcast where I thought Ben particularly nailed it: Part of the irony of everyone getting upset about Elon Musk kil … | Continue reading
Share extension is back, and better! There’s a new beta of Micro.blog 3.0 for iOS with support for sharing photos and links from other apps. Grab it on TestFlight. Note that this is still a beta and there are a couple glitches, for example with cropping photos sometimes. | Continue reading
Substack Notes is interesting but they seem to have forgotten a valuable part of the rest of Substack: content ownership and portability. Your newsletter/blog can be at your own domain name, but “notes” are just another silo on someone else’s platform. | Continue reading
Today we launched a new feature: importing an archive of your tweets to Micro.blog. This is available to all paid subscriptions and can be accessed on the web under Posts → Import. Very early Micro.blog customers may remember that we used to have a Twitter import feature alongsid … | Continue reading
If you’ve procrastinated downloading your tweets archive from Twitter, I would do it now. It takes up to a day to get it, and who knows if it will change or break in the future. | Continue reading
Went to see Air. Loved it. So hard to make dialog in a movie like this not sound fake, but they pulled it off. Felt very real. Best movie I’ve seen in years. | Continue reading
ChatGPT continues to impress. I’ve started asking it programming questions just to save a few minutes here or there. For example, this question returned a detailed answer that was exactly correct: I’m using Ruby and DataMapper with MySQL. How to get a list of unique years used in … | Continue reading
Just posted a new Core Intuition. More on our favorite recent topics: the Twitter API shutdown and AI-generated images and text. | Continue reading
Love that feeling when I realize that previous me had already written code to do exactly what I need today. There’s a whole database table I forgot existed to solve this. | Continue reading
Wanted an illustration for an upcoming feature, and spent some time using DALL•E for the first time. Fascinating. Generated dozens of images, then drew some parts myself and put them together. I don’t think these models should be trained with copyrighted works, but credit is murk … | Continue reading
The Fediverse Report continues their great summarization of recent hot topics. On trademarks, Eugen is certainly within his right to trademark Mastodon. I chose not to trademark Micro.blog because it’s too close to microblog, which is a word everyone can use. I also prefer “socia … | Continue reading
Fascinating discussion on the latest The Talk Show with @gruber@mastodon.social and @danielpunkass about AI. What does it mean for humanity when more tasks can be automated and fewer people need traditional jobs? As a developer, a lot of my time isn’t coding but thinking how some … | Continue reading
Blast from the past: video of my old iOS app Tweet Library. I forgot how much I loved this app. | Continue reading
When I started building Micro.blog, I tried to limit dependencies on external platforms. The main connection is via cross-posting, which is an optional feature and not what I consider the core platform. So for example, I resisted integrating tweets into Micro.blog’s timeline, eve … | Continue reading
Did a first pass of rewriting all my Twitter API 1.1 code to 2.0. Halfway through I started to seriously question why I am bothering, given the limited lifespan of this code. It’s straightforward to push through, except for one wrinkle: Twitter never finished implementing media u … | Continue reading
There’s a lot going on with the S-GPT shortcut. Very clever to have trigger words in the speech that help integrate with system tasks. I also keep imagining the potential for this when voice assistants are powered by it. | Continue reading
I’m sure a lot of Trump supporters are having a hard time processing what is going on with multiple potential charges against the former president. Doesn’t seem fair, right? Why was he impeached twice and always in legal trouble? But it’s simple: he was a corrupt president. … | Continue reading
Attempts to refill the bird feeders have resulted in squirrels taking over the backyard. They are relentless. I’m downstairs trying to work and keep getting distracted looking out the window. | Continue reading
Interesting to compare the main headlines from feed reader home pages: Feedbin: “A nice place to read on the web” (Love it!) Inoreader: “Take back control of your news feed” (Also good!) Feedly: “Track insights across the web without having to read everything” (Enterprise-y!) | Continue reading
Molly White has a good post covering Feedly’s “protests” feature. But even ignoring all those problems, it didn’t seem like this belonged in an RSS reader. Even minor features should support a product’s main reason for existing, or its mission. | Continue reading
Deploying code to servers, on a train that has no wi-fi. Everything will be fine. | Continue reading
Grabbing coffee this morning before heading back to Austin, catching up on email. Still thinking about Taylor Swift last night. Incredible show. AT&T Stadium is massive… 70k people at the concert, times 3 nights here, so 210k people just for the Dallas / Fort Worth area. | Continue reading
Good write-up about FediForum from The Fediverse Report. On the $40 pricing, I was a little skeptical at first of excluding too many people, but the attendance size was just right. Great participation. For the fediverse to reach its potential, there should be a mix of business mo … | Continue reading
If you use Drafts, check out this new action for Micro.blog. Post drafts, publish, choose your blog, cross-posting, and more options. Thanks @donnydavis! | Continue reading
The plug-in Search Space by @sod has been updated to 1.0. It’s a nice upgrade over the older search I wrote, searching blog posts, replies, and even the new podcast transcripts. | Continue reading
Taking the train up to Dallas tomorrow for a quick 24-hour trip. Initially was trying to save money in coach, but just upgraded to a roomette so I can more easily work and enjoy the trip. Hope when Brightline is finished with the Vegas line they can expand to Texas. | Continue reading
Posted Core Intuition 551! This episode covers the launch of Micro.blog’s new podcast transcripts feature, and more generally what AI is good for. A short show, just 22 minutes this week. | Continue reading
Wrote a help page with some more details about automatic podcast transcripts in Micro.blog, a new feature we shipped this week. Really happy with how this feature came together. | Continue reading
The new Twitter API tiers are about what was expected. Disappointing. For Micro.blog, we plan to support cross-posting for a limited number of months, to let folks wind down their use of Twitter. There’s no future on Twitter so all we can do is smooth over the shutdown for custom … | Continue reading
Just finished a quick demo of Micro.blog at FediForum. Might’ve talked too fast. The variety of demos is so interesting. Mastodon clients, Planetary, WordPress, Flipboard, and others. It’s an exciting time for the open web. | Continue reading
We’ve launched a new feature for Micro.blog Premium customers: automatic podcast episode transcripts, powered by OpenAI’s Whisper model. I’m excited about this because it’s one of the more practical, time-saving solutions coming out of the rise of AI. The automatic transcripts ar … | Continue reading
NSDrinking tonight! I’ll be there. I haven’t joined in a while, so will be nice to catch up with folks. Anyone’s welcome. | Continue reading
It’s pretty incredible how little has changed in podcast RSS feeds in 20 years. That’s a good thing. The podcast ecosystem is not exactly suffering because of any confusion or missing spec features. | Continue reading
I agree with the spirit of the Podcast Standards Project but I’m concerned about the details. The specification seems overly strict in a couple places (like guid) that will not be compatible with a bunch of feeds. | Continue reading
The automatic code reloading in React Native is still kind of wild to me. I committed some changes, pushed to GitHub, then switched branches to something else, and the UI updated while the app was running in the simulator. Surprised me even though I know it works that way. | Continue reading
Just pushed out another TestFlight beta of Micro.blog 3.0. This has some really nice new stuff for managing uploads. Also the return of basic photo filters! Getting closer. Still missing: share sheet. | Continue reading
The new Zelda looks great. Love the fuse ability featured in this gameplay video. | Continue reading
I’ve been playing with Wavelength Messenger. Not to be confused with our own Micro.blog companion app for podcasts, also called Wavelength! I wish it was called something else, but ignoring that I think there’s a lot to like. John Gruber’s introduction is the best place to start. | Continue reading