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Had the Switch 2 pre-order in my cart but kept changing my mind, gonna skip it until there’s a game I really want. Hopefully won’t be too hard to get later. 🕹️

Nashville Public Library.

I really like this post from Ashley Willis, about doubting yourself and the fear of what loud people on the internet might think of your writing:

I don’t know exactly when that changed. There wasn’t one big moment, just a slow fade. Something dimmed. I started second-guessing myself more.

Micro.blog’s backend is running so much more smoothly now after I addressed some memory issues yesterday. I often assume I know where problems are, and it takes actually digging in to discover I was wrong, the problem is fixable in a different way than I expected.

Nailed it. I’m too amused by wall outlets and light switches gone wrong, it’s surprisingly common. This one in the hotel stairway.

I’ll be speaking at EFF-Austin next month! An updated talk about blogs, social networks, the fediverse, and where I think the open web is going.

In the Bluesky announcement about checkmark verification is the tidbit that 270k accounts have linked their username and domain name. 270k custom domains! That is very cool and a great sign for the open web.

Micro.blog went off the rails today, for some reason the day I’m out of town an old memory leak decided to blow up into a much worse problem. I think I’ve got it under control now.

Speaking of Objective-C, when I see example code that looks like this:

NSMutableArray<NSString *>* paths

I simplify it to:

NSMutableArray* paths

I don’t think declaring types everywhere improved the language at all. Let a dynamic language be dynamic. 🤪

Experimenting with a special build of Micro.blog for Mac with Gemma 3 (4 billion params) running inside the app. Seems a good balance of download size and RAM, allowing me to run some AI magic on device that might be cost-prohibitive or wasteful on the server.

There’s no place I appreciate Apple Pay more than at the gas station air pump, instead of using quarters. 🛞

Yair Rosenberg writing at The Atlantic about the arson at the Pennsylvania governor’s residence. The suspect was struggling with his mental health and influenced by attempts to vilify Josh Shapiro over the war in Gaza:

But those struggling with internal demons don’t originate our external ones; they reflect them. In their confusion and pain, such individuals latch on to those already targeted by the broader culture and its preexisting pathologies, showing us not who they are, but who we are.

New laptop sticker, from Vintage bookstore and wine bar. Booksellers not algorithms. 🍷

Thinking about AGI. The big step that is missing is personal AI being able to learn when it answers a question. So if I use deep research and my AI goes off and spends 10 minutes researching an answer, all of that should be fed back into the model for later.

Gus Mueller:

To me, Objective-C has always felt expressive and capable, doubly so when I first started using it.

After Swift became popular, I felt kind of guilty still using Objective-C so heavily, but I’m over it. Micro.blog for Mac is all Objective-C. I did two new releases this week.

Finished upgrading a server. Some things should be faster! (And some won’t be.) I’ll continue to look for places to optimize.

Coffee yesterday at Lazarus. ☕️

Now that I’m using Hetzner in the EU, I’m having difficulty understanding Linode pricing. For example, dedicated 16 CPUs on both hosts:

Linode: $288
Hetzner: $110

This is a massive difference. Is Linode that much better? I feel like a fool for paying this.

Micro.blog for Mac continues to improve. Just released version 3.5. A new feature I like in this release: paste a photo from the clipboard directly into the Uploads section to upload it.

Also added a Preview button. I use this with command-shift-P but I’m sure some people didn’t know it was there.

I’ve switched my coding questions over to o4-mini. It’s very good and fast enough.

At this point, for me personally, not using AI for coding help would be like not using Stack Overflow or Google. I could go back to the 1990s when I had a printed reference open in front of me while coding, but why?

The Sam Altman interview at TED is worth a watch. Awkward and full of tension. But some good thoughts in it, probably the most I’ve seen Sam pressed on the big issues.

Didn’t sleep enough. Nightmare that I was arguing with the Subaru mechanics. Too close to reality. 🚙

Sad to hear there were two deaths in the FSU shooting. When news broke that it was a handgun, it gave me a small bit of hope that it wouldn’t be as terrible as it could’ve been. Imagine an AR-15 instead. That is why they should be banned.

Great post from The Fediverse Report about Bluesky complying with requests from the Turkish government and how a labeling service can be used to hide accounts:

Such a moderation layer allows Bluesky (the app) to apply moderation decisions that are only experienced by people currently geolocated in a specific country, more on that below. A few days ago, the Turkish moderation labeler became active, and the labeler started hiding accounts, making the accounts invisible for people in Turkey.

Taria & Como looks like a clever, crank-friendly platformer, part of the upcoming season 2 on Playdate. There’s a trailer on YouTube.

The Internet Archive is asking for help to defend against lawsuits:

A coalition of major record labels has filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive—demanding $700 million for our work preserving and providing access to historical 78rpm records. These fragile, obsolete discs hold some of the earliest recordings of a vanishing American culture.

The Internet Archive is a unique force for good. Sad that they have to waste any time on this.

Matt Mullenweg blogs about the WordPress 6.8 release, how WordPress might use AI in the future, and the experience of being deposed at the WP Engine trial:

I really appreciated the due process and decorum of the rule of law, and just like code, law has a million little quirks, global variables, loaded libraries, and esoteric terminology. But wow, after a full day of that, I’m mentally exhausted.

I like the way Tony Stubblebine is running Medium. On sticking with diversity, equity, and inclusion:

Medium was built by and is run by a diverse group of people. This diversity is a raise-the-bar strategy. As a CEO, I feel confident that embracing diversity as a strategy increases the business, cultural, and intellectual capabilities of our company.

Unfortunately the acronym DEI has been poisoned. I think it’s fine to abandon the letters, while keeping to the principles.

Some interesting data here in the MIT Technology Review about energy use for AI data centers:

Electricity demand is on the rise from a whole host of sources: Electric vehicles, air-conditioning, and appliances will each drive more electricity demand than data centers between now and the end of the decade. In total, data centers make up a little over 8% of electricity demand expected between now and 2030.

There is so much noise around AI that it’s increasingly difficult to tell what is misinformation or just outdated.

Dave Winer has more thoughts on the “Twitterlike is a bad shape” post:

Each decision we make in developing our means of discourse shapes the discourse. And with the character limit and the inability to edit, and the incentives are all wrong (I can tap into your follower flow without your permision just by posting a reply) and makes almost all discourse spam or abusive or both. I’m planning a different structure for discourse in the World of WordLand.

I’m not a Gmail user or Notion user, but gotta say the UI and interactions in Notion Mail look quite good. I’ve watched a few videos for inspiration.