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Senator Chris Murphy: "How on earth are we going to ask the American people to take risks for us when there's a 5-alarm constitutional fire and we need them to be out on the streets, with hundreds of thousands of people if we're not willing to show courage and take risks ourselves."

I’ve been banging on for a while now about how much I’d like a declarative option for the Web Share API. I was thinking that the type attribute on the button element would be a good candidate for this (there’s prior art in the way we extended the type attribute on the input ...

Podcast: We still need universities. 21 minutes.

If you aren’t sure how to ask for help with software, try first asking ChatGPT or another AI chatbot to help figure out what’s going wrong. It has infinite time to help, and won’t mind if the problem turned out to be a random browser plug-in that was misbehaving.

It often suggests trying things you might not have thought of.

I use it myself esp as often is the case there’s no one who can or is willing to work for me for free. I’m already playing it $20 per month, and for that I get as much time as it takes.

Really good for organizing your approach to a problem.

Had a good run for a few months on uptime until today. I’ve upgraded one of our servers to prevent this particular meltdown from happening again.

Bad timing, had a major server failure this morning. Micro.blog is back online and I’m restoring a few things now. 😔

A thread I wrote on Bluesky about how the RSS world, an earlier instance of the writer's web, was overtaken by Twitter and why, which boils down to this -- the reading platforms wouldn't work with each other. So Twitter made subscription one click. And RSS made sites include ...

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.

[Brandon Vigliarolo at The Register] In the wake of the French and German governments joining forces to build an alternative to Notion and Google Docs, the Dutch government has passed eight motions to avoid US software and move to a home-grown stack. ""With...

[Ella Yurman in Teen Vogue] This interview with Musk's daughter Vivian Wilson is everything. "The Nazi salute sht was insane. Honey, we're going to call a fig a fig, and we're going to call a Nazi salute what it was. That sht was definitely a Nazi salute. T...

I like Jeff Nichols' piece, but I don't agree that the writer's web is blogging. I think it's bigger. Blogging is part of the writer's web. Today's writing network is much more powerful, the software tools are stronger, and new UI standards have evolved. Things like Digital Ocean, Markdown, Font-Awesome and Node.js didn't exist last time we took a serious look at writing on the web. The web with all its features is still here. WordPress has created a strong foundation to build on, at least as good as the social media platforms, but better because it's of the web, with no limits. We've got the beginning of a new platform, one where developers compete to create great writing and reading environments, and we don't need federation because the web takes care of that.

[Meredith Whittaker in the Financial Times] A great op-ed from Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal on the ludicrous demands by the British government for Apple to backdoor its encryption: "Imagine a government telling a car company to secretly weaken th...

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 f...

More tomorrow.

[Jasmine Mooney] A nightmare account from a Canadian citizen detained by ICE: "I was taken to a tiny, freezing cement cell with bright fluorescent lights and a toilet. There were five other women lying on their mats with the aluminum sheets wrapped over the...

I avoid deploying new code to servers in the evening. It’s better to make changes when I’m awake for hours and can monitor for problems. But it’s kind of a bummer for Europe and the rest of the world because new features always go live while they’re asleep. Might break that rule tonight! 🇪🇺

Wednesday session

I cleaned out my desk a little over five years ago. It feels like last week. I was leading engineering at ForUsAll, a fintech company that seeks to make it easier for small businesses to offer retirement plans for their employees. The co-founder, David, had been wearing a m...

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.

Simon Willison attempts to clarify vibe coding:

I’m seeing people apply the term “vibe coding” to all forms of code written with the assistance of AI. I think that both dilutes the term and gives a false impression of what’s possible with responsible AI-assisted programming.