Something very significant is happening in Texas with reviewing death row inmate Robert Roberson’s trial. He was supposed to be executed last week. Abbot and Paxton are of course useless, but the legislature is trying to make it right. This article in the Texas Tribune is a good place to start.
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Early voting started today! We went to our location but the line was insanely long. Gonna try again tomorrow. Hopefully a good sign for turnout. 🇺🇸
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I’m using iOS App Intents for the first time as a developer. My gut feeling when this was all introduced was that it was way too limited to create an extensible, universal Siri that works in lots of contexts. I still believe that. Some cool things are possible, though.
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When I get a questionable notification summary in the iOS 18.1 beta, I run the original text through OpenAI to compare. It’s usually better. Certainly not a deal-breaker, but the thing about AI is it needs to actually be good or you lose the illusion.
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WNBA finals, game 5, a minute and a half left, tied game… This is what it’s all about. 🏀
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Ben Werdmuller has several ideas for building on the fediverse, including add-on services, SDKs, rebuilding his platform Known, and a “fediverse VIP” for professionals.
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Sunny day in Austin. Finally got the adapter for my new solar panel so I can actually test everything. Getting about 60 watts. Not a lot but plenty to keep my Jackery in the car topped off for charging gadgets.
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Love this episode of The Vergecast about a YouTuber opening a coffee shop. I would also like to open a coffee shop / bookstore one day… I browse commercial real estate listing way too often.
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Mimi Uploader is now free for the rest of the year. Great opportunity to do more photo-blogging on Micro.blog.
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Updated my Texas state parks page, now up to 17 out of 88 parks. Need to get back on schedule to have any hope of finishing this challenge within a few years.
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Eisenhower State Park near my campsite this morning. I had so much fun last night for the Honda Element meetup! Lots of cool cars, all different.
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Posted a new Core Intuition. This week we talk about trademarks… with Micro.blog, not WordPress. When to call a lawyer and other decisions of running a small business.
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Traveling today, but carved out a nice morning in Dallas to fix and deploy several bugs. Loving this weather too.
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Great post from Cory Doctorow on using RSS:
Using RSS is a chance to visit a utopian future in which the platforms have no power, and all power is vested in publishers, who get to decide what to publish, and in readers, who have total control over what they read and how, without leaking any personal information through the simple act of reading.
It’s weird that we still have to tell people about RSS in 2024, but that’s just how it is.
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I ported another Hugo theme over to Micro.blog. It’s called Soho, based on the Hyde theme. Just needed a little adapting for microblog posts. Available for previewing in the plug-in directory.
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I’m less than a week into using Arc on the Mac, and already I’m so used to it that when I hop into Safari, everything is a little off.
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The new color Kindle looks really nice. I don’t read comics on the Kindle or make highlights much, so the only advantage for color would be book covers… Almost worth it. I bet those look great.
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I missed the beginning of the Texas debate but from what I saw in the second half, Colin Allred did really well. Ted Cruz is so obnoxious. Always a tough race here, though. 🇺🇸
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I recorded a quick video demo of the new theme preview in Micro.blog. This is such an obvious feature but it was sort of tricky to do before because of how Micro.blog is architected with static-site generation. Working pretty well so far!
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Good glass-half-full analysis from Jason Snell about the new iPad mini with A17 Pro:
…this model feels more like a holding action that gets the iPad mini onto Apple Intelligence… while also using up some amount of chip excess. If I had to predict when we’ll see a next-next-generation iPad mini, I think I’d guess that it will probably be sooner than three years from now.
More thoughts on WordPress
Things have accelerated since my post about Automattic and WP Engine a couple weeks ago. I’m writing this follow-up post not to pick sides, but because it feels right to blog about something this significant happening in the website hosting world.
Banning WP Engine from WordPress.org sort of cascaded to other problems. The popular Advanced Custom Fields plugin maintained by WP Engine was forked to Secure Custom Fields. David Heinemeier Hansson blogged about open source licensing.
Matt Mullenweg responded to DHH with personal attacks, but he has since removed the post and apologized, recognizing that he had crossed a line:
I’ve been attacked so much the past few days; the most vicious, personal, hateful words poisoned my brain, and the original version of this post was mean. I am so sorry. I shouldn’t let this stuff get to me, but it clearly did, and I took it out on DHH, who, while I disagree with him on several points, isn’t the actual villain in this story: it’s WP Engine and Silver Lake.
I also noticed DHH’s reply on Twitter X to the original post:
I don’t think people are irredeemable, and I know how stressful it can be to be under siege. But you have to stop digging to get out of a hole.
I’ve never run a company the size of 37signals or Automattic. I can relate a little, though, to feeling you’re being attacked unfairly from multiple sides. When it’s your company, your name, and you’ve invested more or less everything in making it work.
Years ago someone left Micro.blog and at the time I genuinely thought it was going to hurt our business. I was losing sleep, worried that what I had created was too fragile. Even a single person can have a big impact on a tiny company if what that person says resonates with others. Every subscription is precious. In that case years ago, I chose to stay quiet in public but I sent a few private emails that in hindsight I probably shouldn’t have.
(It wasn’t really that bad. I try to avoid sending anything in email that I would regret if it was made public.)
Back to Matt, he has provided such steady leadership in the community for years that it makes the current chaos seem even more dramatic. Because Matt is putting out fires, I’m not sure he’s had time to take a step away, look at the situation with fresh eyes, and plan a long-term strategy to resolve this.
I liked Brandon Kraft’s blog post about how easily conflated all the terms and trademarks have become:
It pains me that the last few weeks have conflated everything. Automattic has the exclusive trademark license for commercial usage of “WordPress.” The license is a fact, whether you think it is good, bad, or neutral. Automattic allowing in-kind donations (e.g., sponsored time) as consideration for a sublicense seems fine.
Automattic vs. WP Engine is such a newsworthy event that many people are chiming in without understanding how all the pieces fit together. It’s the social media outrage machine, amplifying whatever the accepted narrative is.
I’ve heard a couple people say — including this post today from Ben Werdmuller — that WP Engine should fork WordPress so they have something they can control. Probably so, but that also gets to the root of the problem: WordPress is literally in WP Engine’s name! It’s not exactly like if my platform was named Hugo.blog instead of Micro.blog, because we use Hugo behind the scenes, but it’s not far from that either.
Names are powerful. Matt effectively owns WordPress because he owns the name. The community is more intangible, owned by no one. It’s hard to grasp even what the community is because it’s not a single thing, it’s thousands of people with different backgrounds and goals. There’s no question that this saga has hurt the community, but like Matt’s apology post, I don’t think it is hurt beyond repair.
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A few more notes about the new theme preview feature at the help site.
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New iPad Mini with the A17 Pro and AI looks good. At first I was surprised by the $500 price, thought for sure the previous model was less expensive, but no. I’m still enjoying the iPhone Pro Max as a mini mini iPad, but I’m already used to the iPhone size, so it no longer feels very big.
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New way to preview themes, from the news blog:
New way to preview themes, from the news blog:
Added new Preview button for themes in the plug-in directory. This will create a special preview version of your blog to try out the theme. Also improved the tab bar and navigation around plug-ins.
Added new Preview button for themes in the plug-in directory. This will create a special preview version of your blog to try out the theme. Also improved the tab bar and navigation around plug-ins.
I’m going to try to record a video demo of this later. It’s a big change.
