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
Staple! is coming up next month, April 12-13, at St. Edward’s in Austin. Special guests Kazu Kibuishi and more! Amazing that the show started 20 years ago. | Continue reading
Great list of folks to follow on Micro.blog. Thanks for the reminder @Miraz! We used to have Micro Monday around here, to help community members be discovered. Here are a dozen of the many Micro.Bloggers I enjoy… | Continue reading
M.G. Siegler: Apple Should Swap Out Siri with ChatGPT. Apple won’t do this, and some users might not want it either, but it’s a legitimate idea. Generative AI provides a very rare moment of disruption. If a good Siri is two years away at best, that’s a long time to risk on someth … | Continue reading
I like the naming on this collaborative Git system based on AT Proto: Tangled. The servers are “knots”. Just the right amount of clever. | Continue reading
Even when it seems the news is all bad, there is something incredible. James Harrison’s blood donations saved two million babies’ lives: Harrison donated blood and plasma a whopping 1,173 times, according to Lifeblood, every two weeks between 1954 and 2018. […] Harrison’s plasma … | Continue reading
I never thought I needed a “leafless tree” emoji but it’s a nice addition. Still hoping for “iced coffee” one day. | Continue reading
Great interview with Dario Amodei on the Hard Fork podcast. About his disappointment at the AI Action Summit conference in Paris: If you’re a public official, if you’re a leader at a company… People are going to look back, they’re going to look back in 2026 and 2027. […] Be caref … | Continue reading
Sideloading on Android has improved since I last used it. It’s a pretty smooth user experience now, while still warning enough that you’re outside the usual “safe” app install flow. Good balance that we’ve wanted Apple to adopt for a decade. | Continue reading
Good morning so far, deployed a few server bug fixes, submitted a new Android release to Google. Lots to do. SXSW coming up toward the end of the week. | Continue reading
Being nominated once and winning once is great, congrats. But nominated a bunch of times and never winning is worth a lot. Edward Norton: 4 nominations. Ralph Fiennes: 3. Like how LeBron with 10 trips to the NBA finals and “only” 4 championships is still the greatest of all time. … | Continue reading
There is nothing like a live performance of Defying Gravity. Even on TV, I still get chills when they nail it. Great way to start the Oscars. 🍿 | Continue reading
Looking forward to the Oscars tonight. I’ve only seen 4 out of 10 of the best picture nominees — A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Dune 2, and Wicked. Wanted to catch The Brutalist but never got to it. For best animated feature, I like either Flow or The Wild Robot. 🍿 | Continue reading
Ben Werdmuller has a good post today about returning to the distributed publishing roots of the web and thinking about how technology should redistribute wealth and power to many people: It starts with software designed for people rather than for capital. The web once thrived on … | Continue reading
We can all see it. It is beyond political parties. Beyond ideology. Beyond whether he is corrupt or competent. David Brooks, on the PBS NewsHour after the Trump and Zelenskyy meeting at the White House: All my life, I’ve had a certain idea about America. That we’re a flawed count … | Continue reading
Watched Away We Go and really enjoyed it. Totally missed this when it first came out in 2009. 📺 | Continue reading
OpenAI released GPT-4.5 this week to Pro subscribers and via the API, but it’s not what I was expecting. It is much more expensive, about 15-30 times the cost of GPT-4o. For my simple needs, like figuring out the keywords in a photo or summarizing a web page, older models are fin … | Continue reading
Watched some of the video with Trump, Vance, and Zelenskyy. We are in a very dark place with American foreign policy. Europe will have to take the lead. We have lost our way here, led by a narcissist whose selfishness and cruelty is almost beyond belief. 🇺🇸 | Continue reading
New version of Micro Social is coming out, from Greg Morris: Apple have approved a new version of Micro Social that includes posting to multiple blogs, managing and updating existing posts as well as a few other improvements. I also fixed an issue on the Micro.blog side with push … | Continue reading
There’s such an increase in distrust of tech companies, we now have to be more explicit about super obvious things that we would never do. Users expect the worst because they’ve been burned. So it goes. | Continue reading
Skimming through some of the negative reaction to Mozilla’s new terms. I took a minute to update Micro.blog’s own privacy policy so that it’s current. Our terms of service has always said you own your data. Never even crossed my mind to sell data it’s such a foreign idea and coun … | Continue reading
iOS will have new APIs for getting the age of a user. Sarah Perez writing at TechCrunch: It puts Apple in the position of collecting kids’ ages via parental input but still puts the onus on the third-party developer to extract and use this information to craft age-appropriate exp … | Continue reading
Love an old train station getting a new life. Bloomberg article from a couple months ago, about the station in Detroit with new office space and green space: But the main attraction is still the 18-story tower, designed by the same architects who worked on Manhattan’s Grand Centr … | Continue reading
Nick Heer is impressed with Alexa+, except: But there is no part of me that would ever want Alexa or any other voice-controlled assistant buying tickets to a show, or booking a vacation rental, or even buying groceries. I also don’t trust AI for this. And yet, in 1995 a lot of pe … | Continue reading
If you’re in town around SXSW, check out Fediverse House, a 2-day event hosted by Flipboard and Surf. Amazing lineup of folks including Mike McCue, Molly White, Evan Prodromou, and Paul Frazee. I’ll also be giving a short presentation during the developer meetup about Micro.blog … | Continue reading
Many news sites and social networks have a headlines section for trending news. Maybe we need to take a hint from traditional newspapers and replace that with a high-profile “corrections” section that is just all the news that’s factually wrong with a summary of the truth. | Continue reading
The measles outbreak here in Texas is such a sad reminder of the real harm of misinformation. So many little kids are in the ICU that it seems likely more will die. Tragic and preventable. | Continue reading
I still want to do more with Open Library. Our app Epilogue can search and get covers from Open Library. But the database just isn’t complete enough and needs more apps to help users add and curate book metadata. | Continue reading
When I added tracking what books you’re reading (and blogging about) to Micro.blog, I used ISBN as the identifier. Every once in a while that’s a problem, like my post today for a short story. I added it manually using the Goodreads ID with a “G” prefix. Not great but maybe a pos … | Continue reading
There’s another lawsuit against Matt Mullenweg and Automattic, this time from a WP Engine customer. It seems to conflate the project code and the servers into a single “WordPress ecosystem”, but that’s not how open source works. The software can be totally free and companion serv … | Continue reading
Finished reading: Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent by Scott Lynch. Great to have another Gentleman Bastard story. Split into two parts in Grimdark Magazine. 📚 | Continue reading
Alexa+ pricing makes no sense. $20/month or free for Amazon Prime subscribers… Prime is $15/month. I can think of a few reasons to do it this way and none of them justify user confusion. | Continue reading
I’m following the Verge’s live blog for the Alexa event. Amazon really should be leading in this space since they created the Echo out of nothing 10 years ago. Fun to re-read my first blog post about the Echo. Alexa+ will be a paid upgrade. Tim Cook is now wondering how he can ch … | Continue reading
Dave Winer: People give Matt Mullenweg a lot of shit, but do they realize how hopeless the open web would be if he and his friends hadn’t kept it going for 20+ years. Fascinating to imagine what the web would look like if WordPress didn’t exist. What would fill the void, and woul … | Continue reading
Trying out Flashes, a photos app for Bluesky. On the surface feels similar to our Micro.blog companion app Sunlit. Lots of potential. | Continue reading
Tried out ChatGPT Deep Research now that it’s on the less expensive plan. Don’t have a lot of use for it, but it’s super impressive as a tool you might take out every once in a while. I used it to dig into some background facts for a blog post. | Continue reading