FeedCity

Typepad is shutting down after an amazing 20+ years. It was spun off of Movable Type back in the very early days of the blogosphere. Seth Godin used to use it too, and I see that his old URLs redirect, which is great.

John Gruber with analysis of the latest lawsuit in the Masimo patent saga:

It reads to me like that same decision would have been made, at the same time, if Kamala Harris had won last year’s election. But that’s the problem with a pay-to-play corrupt government like Trump’s, and Tim Cook’s willingness to play along to any degree, no matter how mild. By currying favor with Trump, it now looks like any decision from the U.S. government that goes in Apple’s favor might be because Apple curried favored with Trump. I genuinely do not believe that’s the case here.

Walked to the coffee shop to pick up a to-go coffee, first time in over a week, since being sick. Covid is everywhere at the moment, so I was trying my best to avoid spreading anything. Really missed working out of the house. 😷

It's the future, and the great power of the X galaxy, on the planet Y of star Z, has accidentally elected a despotic prime minister who also happens to be an excellent standup comic. Kind of like Robin Williams, from the planet you come from, but he's a centipede and only br...

Released a lot of little bug fixes for the Mac app recently, so it’s already up to version 3.6.9. As long-time listeners of Core Intuition know, I don’t do .10 releases, so it’s time to bump to 3.7! But gotta justify that version number. What features to add? 🤔

Notes added to the What Is the Web doc.

2003: "The Rule of Links is that you link when it's appropriate to do so. Linking is an art. It's a choice. You don't link from every word or even every noun, or from the subject of every sentence."

The last few days we've been exploring the ideas behind the web, to decide what, if anything that we're doing today is either on the web or of the web. On the web seemed relatively easy. But of the web is a bit more elusive. Until Ken Smith found this quote of Ted Nelson in the original 1989 proposal by Tim Berners-Lee for what would become the web. "Human-readable information linked together in an unconstrained way." I like this, because it, like the definition I came up with for weblog, talks about the activity as opposed to the technology. Human-readable is essential. And most essential is "unconstrained." If something requires a link, you should link to it. If you don't it ain't the web.

There’s a short “Apple ❤️ Gemini” segment on the latest Upgrade. Does a good job of covering the pros and cons of Apple partnering with Google on Siri. I’m warming up to the idea.

Anthropic experiments in using a Chrome extension instead of building their own web browser. Also some good notes about safety. I’m still enjoying Dia, but it does seem like a lot for everyone to create a new browser.

See, I have a bit of a problem with letting other people define me. I’ve really gotta work on that…

An update on offering Micro.blog for free to teachers and nurses, now that it has been a few weeks. It’s going well! We had some previous users take us up on the offer, and some brand new users. Thinking about other ways to get the word out.

Got excited for a minute when I misread this headline: Libby’s library app adds an AI… Thought it was “API”. We sort of reverse-engineered how Libby works, but it’s not reliable.

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about using AI for polish. The idea was to let AI help with taking care of lots of little details that can be tempting to skip in the rush to get a new feature out. Lately I’ve been thinking about another good use for AI. Not to finish a...

Big update today for Micro.blog folks who have multiple accounts. The iOS, Android, and Mac apps have long supported multiple accounts, but on the web you could only switch between separate blogs on the same account. Managing multiple accounts on the web was frustrating.

Now you’ll find a popover menu in the sidebar to add a new account and select between your accounts. Here’s a screenshot showing me signed into a couple of our official accounts in addition to my personal account:

And for all users, even if you only have a single Micro.blog account, we now have passkeys! This is the password-less standard for quickly signing in. No more waiting for a confirmation email from Micro.blog.

I think perhaps I should have one day every week where I never link to anything. Just to provide a demo of what the web would be like without linking. Which is most of the sites that say they are part of the web. I think that's a lie we should stop tolerating.

I'm working my way through Mr Robot, for the third time I think. If you want to know what I do, it's like what Elliot does, for about four hours pretty much every day. I used to work longer hours but I've found this amount of work is optimal. I make more mistakes after about 1PM. Anyway Mr Robot is a very good thing to watch for the times we live in. The technology is already a little outdated, but they thought of that, there are some settings where they use old PCs from the 80s, with total respect. I like that. And the utilities he uses are pretty much the same ones I use these days. And the context of a world in technological meltdown, I think that's a very realistic scenario. I don't see how our networks can't avoid breaking down. And our health care system, which these days is pretty much the same thing.

Tragic story in The New York Times of suicide and ChatGPT. This probably lines up with the “sycophantic” edition of 4o. As more people use chatbots as therapists, there are so many new potential problems. For minors perhaps there should be escalation to humans, even less privacy.