/reader

Sometimes I forget about the way Micro.blog archives any web page you link to or bookmark, including images and styling. I just checked the database and there are hundreds of thousands of web pages and millions of resources. Slowly turning into a personal, miniature Internet Archive.

I think Sandbar is on to something with their ring. I've wanted a faster way to record notes and post drafts for a while. But the Apple Watch should really be able to do this.

Thinking about how much code is written by AI is becoming less interesting to me. We didn't used to care how much code was written by literal copy and pasting. Although maybe we should have? 🤪

I’ve seen the new Mac ad on TV several times now and really like it. There’s obviously something special about it. Didn’t realize at first that it was voiced by Jane Goodall.

Watched: Pluribus S1E1, We Is Us. Not sure what to think of this yet. Rhea Seehorn is good, but want to watch a little more to see where the story is going. 📺

Not sure if this is fair or not, but I think of Bird Bird Biscuit as a hipster version of Chick-fil-A. And to be clear I love both.

If you are on the TestFlight beta for Micro.blog iOS, you will have seen our experiments to enable Liquid Glass. I'm admitting defeat today, going to opt out of the new UI for the next version. There are too many little glitches.

OpenAI continues to shoot for the moon. Based on a tweet by Sam Altman, they seem fairly clear-eyed about it. It’s a gamble that AI will be needed everywhere. OpenAI will either succeed or fail spectacularly.

I would bet on OpenAI long before the likes of Perplexity and startups riding only hype.

Scott McNulty blogging about the new Star Trek LEGO set:

$400 is a lot of money for some pieces of plastic, but how can you put a price on happiness?

The minifigures look great. Wish I could just buy a few of them without the full set. We have no space for more LEGOs.

Trying something new! A short video to start my morning. Coffee at Cosmic. ☕️

Enjoyed this video with Matt Mullenweg and John Borthwick. I thought I was familiar with Betaworks, but I had never actually heard John speak. Some interesting thoughts here about the future.

Watching the Wicked special on TV. I’m fine with it being one long commercial for the movie. Can’t wait. 🧹

My blog has always been a mix of personal posts and business topics. It’s not a collection of press releases. It’s not perfect and it’s not everything. I think where we often go wrong is judging people harshly from a snapshot of their life, mostly out of context. Much better to look for the good.

Staying busy this week. If I stop to let my mind wander, I can start to feel grief inching closer, like a dark fog coming over the water. Gotta stay on ground away from the coast, with things to do, for now.

Unwired.

From the Elon Musk vs. OpenAI depositions, there are a couple more details around the firing of Sam Altman, but it appears mostly the same drama. Smoke but no fire. However, there was this fact that I did not know:

According to the deposition, during Altman’s ouster, Anthropic reached out with a proposal to merge with OpenAI and take over leadership of the company.

Listening to the final episode of Under the Radar. Congrats to David and Marco on a great 10-year run!

Leaning heavily into the YOLO mindset for travel planning right now.

The second of three big things for today: updated Mac app! This has the movies and TV show search that I previewed earlier this week.

Added one of the oldest requested features to Micro.blog today: editing the slug for a post. There's a new page for managing URL paths. A couple other things will go here later, like batch delete, to avoid cluttering the main editing interface.

Good morning! Coffee at Houndstooth. Big day, going to release the new Mac app and blog about the upcoming video hosting. Maybe a new web feature too. ☕️

Watched the first quarter of Spurs / Lakers but can’t stay up for the whole game. It’s not helping that the sun seems to set at 5pm now. 🏀

Thinking again about file over app by Steph Ango. We have a lot of export and import options in Micro.blog, but I always think there’s more to do. It’s hard to make file access seamless with web apps.

From the NetNewsWire blog about version 6.2:

...there is one new feature of potential interest: we’ve added support for Markdown in RSS feeds.

Micro.blog feeds also now support Markdown in RSS, for any blogs updated starting today. If you haven't edited your RSS feed, you'll get it automatically.

Good story by David Pierce at The Verge on the coming web browser wars. He talked to people at all the major browser and AI companies. Browser competition will be good, although I don’t see AI replacing the search and address bar the way some companies think it will. (I’m still using Dia.)

Fidji Simo blogs about companies that use AI to do more, not to downsize:

Organizations that approach AI as a way to multiply what they create will be so much more successful than those that use it to subtract.

Layoffs make no sense to me for already-successful companies. Layoffs are the mindset of private equity, squeezing out more profit instead of improving the product. Companies that prioritize layoffs will find themselves lapped by the competition.

ChatGPT Pulse is my favorite product of the year. It’s expensive, but it’s the first new thing I’ve seen in software in years. Love reading about what it’s come up for me each day. Here’s a snapshot, because it knows I’m thinking about Spain. (And if I scroll, it has actual work / code topics too.)

Ben Thomson in a long article today about the AI bubble and its potential benefits, especially lasting power infrastructure:

It’s sobering to think about how many things have never been invented because power has never been considered a negligible input from a cost perspective; if AI does nothing more than spur the creation of massive amounts of new power generation it will have done tremendous good for humanity.

Tim Sweeney on Twitter / X welcoming a Google proposal to fix exclusive app distribution and payments:

It genuinely doubles down on Android’s original vision as an open platform to streamline competing store installs globally, reduce service fees for developers on Google Play, and enable third-party in-app and web payments.

Epic’s lawsuits were derided by many, years ago, but there’s no question now on how consequential their approach has been. We’re finally seeing real progress.

Another excellent article about AI in The New Yorker: The case that AI is thinking. It captures both the fear that we aren’t that special and the inspiration for what might be possible. I continue to find AI clarifying — a signal to focus our work and lives on what are uniquely human strengths.

In addition to technical debt problems, when using AI for coding we have to be careful of feature creep. If there’s hardly a cost to adding a feature, it’s too easy to add all the wrong features.

Voting desert. 🇺🇸

Now that we have more confirmation that Siri will be powered in part by Gemini, I think Apple should address the other weakness in their AI strategy: the yearly update schedule. Decouple the cloud improvements so that server changes can be rolled out any time, not only at WWDC or a major iOS update.

Sneak peek video of next Mac version of Micro.blog with new Movies sidebar item. This will ship later this week.

Election Day. There are lots of propositions on the Texas ballot. Kind of feel if you can’t easily memorize your vote choices, there are too many. 🇺🇸

Wind turbines, driving back from Corpus Christi.

Mural in Corpus Christi.

Working on something new for the Mac app and thinking about how disclosure triangles are sort of a lost art. We’ve web-ified most UI design.