More details of when Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI board, from an upcoming book by Keach Hagey: The board felt they couldnā€™t divulge that it had been Murati who had given them some of the most detailed evidence of Altmanā€™s management failings. They had banked on Murati calmi ā€¦ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 5 hours ago

There seems to be a timezone bug in Siri + ChatGPT. To get better answers while driving I experimented with telling Siri to ā€œask ChatGPT toā€¦ā€, but anything that needs the time is 5 hours off. I assume Apple is including the current time in a prompt to OpenAI, in GMT. Hopefully an ā€¦ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 6 hours ago

My NCAA womenā€™s bracket is still holding on with that Longhorns win! Great game Texas / Tennessee. šŸ€ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 9 hours ago

Randomly stumbled on my post from two years ago about Threads joining the fediverse. It holds up so well it couldā€™ve been written yesterday. Still no sign of Meta completing the parts of ActivityPub like account migration that would ease up on lock-in. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 10 hours ago

Got an email today for a class action lawsuit about chicken that I thought must be a phishing scam or a joke, but it appears real. The lawyers are going to make bank on this one! I donā€™t remember overpaying for chicken 5 years agoā€¦ I do wonder how they got my email address. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 10 hours ago

xAI buying Twitter / X seems pretty sketchy. In practice, I guess it means the platform will live on for a while. I would not bet on xAIā€™s long-term success, thoughā€¦ OpenAI has billions of dollars of real revenue. xAI has effectively none, I think, outside of Twitter itself. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 11 hours ago

No one caresā€¦ for now

To be a blogger, you have to be okay with writing into the void. Some posts will resonate with people. Some posts will get comments. Most wonā€™t. Sometimes Iā€™ll write a post and Iā€™ll think to myself, ā€œThis is pretty good! This is the blog post that people are gonna talk about and ā€¦ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 15 hours ago

Iā€™m drawn to blogging about divisive topics, but it would probably be healthier to avoid it. People can be so tribal now that everything is either good or bad. Our views have become extreme caricatures of the truth. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 23 hours ago

The pond at The Village, walking back to the mechanic to pick up my car after getting coffee. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 day ago

Iā€™m cracking up at the images in this Severance + Lego post on Daring Fireball. Who is that red minifigure? šŸ¤£ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 day ago

Wow, just watched the final minute of Lakers / Bulls from last night. Love basketball. šŸ€ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 day ago

AI art is bittersweet

ChatGPTā€™s new image generation is incredibly good. Too good. You can see it in the thousands of Ghibli-ified photos all over the social web. Hayao Miyazaki is going to come out of retirement again to tell us how weā€™ve all lost the plot on creativity. When we look back on this mom ā€¦ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 day ago

This is a helpful post from Paul Frazee about ATProto lexicons. One of the challenges for making Micro.blog a PDS is what to do with longer blog posts with titles that donā€™t fit cleanly into Blueskyā€™s lexicon. Donā€™t really want to reinvent the wheel here. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 day ago

A fun experiment in between bug fixingā€¦ I added a films page to Micro.blog, with posters for Letterboxd links people have recently included in blog posts. Might evolve into a more complete feature later. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 2 days ago

Worked on some book-related improvements in Micro.blog this morning. We try to integrate with all sorts of things ā€” Google Books, Open Library, Libby ā€” but a lot of it is not exactly officially sanctioned. Added more Goodreads scraping today. In for a penny, in for a pound! | Continue reading


@manton.org | 2 days ago

Simon Willison has added notes (a.k.a. microblog posts) to his blog. Iā€™ve really been enjoying his takes on AI. Heā€™s usually the first I see jump in to explore a new modelā€™s capabilities. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 3 days ago

Iā€™ve blogged about apologies before. They carry a lot of weight with me. Weā€™re human, we make mistakes, we learn. Just as I donā€™t trust people who canā€™t apologize, Iā€™m also wary of people who canā€™t accept a heartfelt apology. It says more about you if nothing short of perfection ā€¦ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 3 days ago

But her emails! The Signal leak is an amazing contrast with Hillaryā€™s server. There was nothing this consequential in her emails, only a handful maybe classified. But more than that, she apologized. Trump and his team will never apologize for anything, ever. Donā€™t trust people wh ā€¦ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 3 days ago

Sometimes in the debate about federation, we miss that open APIs are still very valuable alone. Blueskyā€™s API has so many nice touches including many requests that do not need authorization at all. Iā€™d like to see Mastodon ease off some of its more strict requirements for e.g. HT ā€¦ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 3 days ago

Seeing an increase in security proxies like Cloudflare interfering with legitimate Micro.blog requests to other services. Likely not related to the new AI Labyrinth, but along the same lines: when you try to catch ā€œmisbehaving botsā€, youā€™re going to affect real users too. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 3 days ago

Micro.blog expanding photo servers in Europe

Today weā€™re rolling out a big improvement to our new EU-based servers. Along with the option to host your web pages in Europe, Micro.blog will now also copy your photos and other uploads. It will copy your data the first time the feature is enabled, and then going forward will ma ā€¦ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 4 days ago

The page for WWDC 2025 is vague enough that Apple could still do a live keynote. Not holding my breath. But it feels out of touch to not bring back a couple live demos. OpenAI is doing live streams every couple weeks (there was one today). It shows faith in your product. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 4 days ago

Zac Hall blogs at 9to5Mac that Apple should acquire Mira Muratiā€™s new company, Thinking Machines Labs: Let Rockwell make all the repairs and changes needed to allow Siri to meet the baseline performance that Apple should expect. Tap Murati to focus not on the baggage but instead ā€¦ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 4 days ago

Watching a couple of the videos from ATmosphereConf. The videos are up on YouTube in this playlist. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 4 days ago

Putting the final touches on a nice improvement for our blogging friends across the pondā€¦ Iā€™ll announce in a blog post later today. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 4 days ago

Pete Docter: AI takes something and sands the edges down, so it makes the blob average. And that could be very useful in a lot of ways. But if you really want to do something brand new and really insightful and speak from a personal angle, thatā€™s not going to come from AI fully. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 4 days ago

Got my copy of Dragonsteel Prime in the mail from the last crowdfunding. šŸ“š | Continue reading


@manton.org | 5 days ago

Federico Viticci on mobile app development becoming more accessible to many more people, just as blogging opened up web publishing: Those who wanted to have an online writing space 30 years ago had to know some of the basics of hosting and HTML if they wanted to publish something ā€¦ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 5 days ago

Great historical data for WWDC dates from David Smith. Should be announced soon! | Continue reading


@manton.org | 5 days ago

Generative AI can be both good and bad, just like us. Weā€™re capable of kindness and cruelty. Society, government, and even companies should amplify the best in what we create and do. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 5 days ago

Not sure why I didnā€™t think of this earlier, but there is now a simple weekly email newsletter for all the posts on news.micro.blog. You can subscribe here. We post small and big changes throughout the week that are easy to miss. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 5 days ago

Nice profile of the Internet Archive on NPR: The Internet Archive is among the few efforts that exist to catch the stuff that falls through the digital cracks, while also making that information accessible to the public. Six weeks into the new administration, Wayback Machine dire ā€¦ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 5 days ago

Sounds like ATmosphereConf went really well in Seattle this weekend. So cool to see community events spring up around the social web. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 6 days ago

Finished reading: Queen of Shadows by Sarah J. Maas. Slowly working my way through the series with breaks to read other books in between. šŸ“š | Continue reading


@manton.org | 6 days ago

Since Cloudflareā€™s AI Labyrinth was announced a few days ago Iā€™ve been trying to figure out how I feel about it. Blocking misbehaving bots is good, but creating fake pages and hidden links reminds me of other hacks to trick crawlers that I think could be detrimental to the web. J ā€¦ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 6 days ago

Heading home. Texas / Louisiana border visitors center. šŸ¤  | Continue reading


@manton.org | 6 days ago

Durafan. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 6 days ago

Adding another server in Europe today. šŸ‡©šŸ‡Ŗ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 7 days ago

At a memorial service my mind drifted to what makes us human. I believe in AI as a tool to help us, to learn, to create. But AI cannot feel. Focus on that. The sound of our voice, imperfect. The stories, from life we have experienced. The art, with meaning because it comes from a ā€¦ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 7 days ago

Carolina Jessamineā€¦ I think. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 8 days ago

While out walking today, listened to this great interview on Stratechery with Sam Altman, going over early time at OpenAI and where things might be headed. I know Sam can be a divisive figure, but if youā€™re fascinated with AI thereā€™s a lot of interesting background here. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 9 days ago

This shakeup of Siri leadership is surprisingly close to WWDC. Makes me think we wonā€™t see major changes this year, just a refinement of last yearā€™s strategy with Siri and AI. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 9 days ago

Had a good run for a few months on uptime until today. Iā€™ve upgraded one of our servers to prevent this particular meltdown from happening again. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 9 days ago

Bad timing, had a major server failure this morning. Micro.blog is back online and Iā€™m restoring a few things now. šŸ˜” | Continue reading


@manton.org | 9 days ago

Really positive reaction to my post about adding European web servers for Micro.blog. Thanks everyone! This is the first step, excited to explore more. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 9 days ago

Micro.blog adding European servers

Starting today there is a new option for customers who want more flexibility for where their blog is hosted. When Micro.blog publishes your blog, it runs your blog posts through Hugo, creating static HTML files that are hosted outside of the main Micro.blog platform. Those files ā€¦ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 10 days ago

I avoid deploying new code to servers in the evening. Itā€™s better to make changes when Iā€™m awake for hours and can monitor for problems. But itā€™s kind of a bummer for Europe and the rest of the world because new features always go live while theyā€™re asleep. Might break that rule ā€¦ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 10 days ago

Dave Rupert on ads, enshittification, and taste: I can feel it in my bones when an app or website has prioritized revenue over user experience. A person without taste or high emotional intelligence broke the unspoken contract we had built on mutual respect. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 10 days ago