People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
When someone breezily tells me how they’re using a large language model, I can feel myself channeling Luthen Rael.
“How nice for you” I say, the words seething with contempt.
ArtLung
• Joe Crawford
An unfortunate sea lion As I left OB today I spotted a sea lion lying down up the beach. I approached it. It eyed me, its hindflippers twitched. I could see its ribs retracting as it breathed. It was in trouble. Before the session. Starfish and mussels on the pier. Before that? It was a...
Chris Aldrich
• Chris Aldrich
With Pocket shutting down, I’ve updated Micro.blog’s bookmarks import for Pocket’s latest export format. Also supports Instapaper, Raindrop, and Pinboard. Happy bookmarking! 🔖
The Beatles
Personal computers
The web
Napster
AI
The first Homebrew Website Club Düsseldorf Schepp and I co-organised turned out well. We gathered at Düsseldorf’s central library inside its “Xafé” café. We had 7 participating adults and 2 children. ;) The meetup was more exchange and discussions than actual work on one’s websites. Discussed topics included: “I want to build my own website” Opinions on tooling RelMeAuth Podcast metric aggregation WebSub Personal publishing workflows and tools Image hosting ...
Stephen F. Austin State Park. Short hike on a trail near the Brazos River.
Write.as creator Matt Baer wants to focus more on writing for 2025. I can relate to a lot of this:
Our apps have always been built to help you get your words down with nothing in the way. That’s why Write.as always opens to our editor — so you can start writing immediately, and not get distracted by notifications, comments, and superfluous things like how many “likes” you received.
Oh no! Oh no. 😿
Reminder: standard ticket pricing for UX London ends at midnight tomorrow (Friday), so if you haven’t got your ticket yet, get in there now!
Stephen Hackett throwing some cold water on the io products hype:
To be clear, the failure of the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin does not mean that there’s no room in the market for an AI-powered device with no screen. However, people really like their phones, and creating a product that will compete with the smartphone is a hill no one has successfully climbed to date.
I don’t agree that the Rabbit R1 was a failure. It fell short of expectations, but that team is still churning away. A new kind of AI-first device is still more likely to come from someone new, without the smartphone baggage.
You might’ve noticed there’s a new status line in Micro.blog’s publishing progress, providing a little more context for what the platform is doing. I’ll continue to tweak this so the progress is more useful.
Almost lost in all the OpenAI hype this week was that MCP is now supported in OpenAI’s responses API. MCP was a big part of Microsoft’s keynote and at Google I/O.
Why single-page apps are just not worth it:
Here’s the problem: your team almost certainly doesn’t have what it takes to out-engineer the browser. The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript.
Meanwhile, the browser marches on, improving the UX of every website that uses basic HTML semantics. For instance: browsers often don’t repaint full pages anymore.
I’m not convinced that the designer of a $10,000 gold watch (now obsolete), who gets driven around in the back of a Bentley, and who spends his spare time in coffee shops ‘inventing the future’ with the likes of Sam Altman, is capable of designing products for the rest of us.
