FeedCity

On Twitter: "I envision a network of twitter-like systems built out of components of the web and nothing more. Every part replaceable."

The only twitter-like system that does text right is Elon Musk's X. I find that somewhat ironic. It's also the only twitter-like system where there's any kind of an actual community. They also have an API that works, has been around for more than a couple of years, and doesn't have a W3C working group messing with it. There's a lot of hype flying around, and we don't have any real journalists covering it so there is no real source of truth. I think the entrepreneurial twitter-likes should stop thinking in terms of owning the web and start adding back the text features the original Twitter thought the web didn't need, over 20 years ago.

The fourth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out: In Episode 4, I chat with Marisabel, the author of Konfetti Explorations. We talk about, among other things, websites as gardens, sharing art on one's personal website, and seasons of making our websites. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts.

Demolition continues on 51st street.

Kath Korevec, who works at OpenAI, in a post on X:

Devs do a lot more than “just coding.” They write docs, design apps, design architecture, manage devops, work with data, etc. It’s no wonder codex is so good at “all the things.” It’s because we built it for developers.

Steve Troughton-Smith in a Mastodon post:

The best kind of WWDC is the WWDC that gives me a big grab-bag of tools to make my apps better along several axes, and doesn’t burden me with a huge amount of needless churn just to tread water.

John C Reilly has only one audiobook, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He's the best audiobook narrator. Wish he would do more. Also there's a great interview with him on the Rachel Martin podcast.

With Nvidia announcing the RTX Spark today, I revisited my quick comment from last year about the DGX Spark. It appears the price went from $4k to $4700 since then. Mac Studio price hasn’t changed.

No pricing yet for the RTX. It has better specs, but you’ve gotta run Linux or Windows.

Of course hardly anyone needs a computer with 128 GB of RAM. I’m only interested in following this because some new things are possible when users have (let’s say) 24 GB. With memory so expensive right now, and cloud-based AI continuing to outpace everything else, local AI models will be somewhat limited. I think more apps could adopt a hybrid approach of using both cloud AI and local when possible.

If you work at Automattic as a developer, if there's another Radical Speed Month for devs, if you want, let's work on a project together even though I don't work for the company. I'm most interested in making products work together where the result gets people thinking about the web in a new way. A8C has a big enough product set, and FeedLand and WordLand are by design well-equipped to talk with other products. I love APIs and we have some good ones to work with, and some very underexplored (imho because we got too fixated on the silos for so long). Very much open to ideas, and I love working with good developers. Maybe I'll post some ideas here. I'm esp interested now in hooking other projects up with FeedLand.

Maybe the best way to deal with the AIs is to quarantine the data centers on the moon or Mars, and if you want to hook up to the network, you have to move there, and quite possibly not be allowed to return, depending on how things go. It would make it possible for us to change our mind after we see a preview of the consequences. Now the big question, would you volunteer??

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A year ago I experimented with running local AI models inside Micro.blog for Mac. I did a bunch of work on this and then threw all of the code out. It wasn’t good enough.

I’ve now come back to it. With data center backlash, I think people want options that reduce our dependence on cloud models.

It’s wild that the corgi correctly predicted every game in the western conference finals. That’s a good dog. 🏀

Anthropic submits draft to go public:

Today, Anthropic, PBC confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of our common stock. This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review. The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors.

Something I learned over the weekend: Anthropic’s run-rate projections count token usage, not just subscriptions. Their revenue is probably not as stable as a normal SaaS company.

Reflecting on how WWDC has changed, I still like my blog post from 2014. I could update it for the modern era, but I’m not inspired to do so. In a way, the best of WWDC will always be captured in those great moments from a decade ago, or even farther back. Perhaps it’s part of getting older.

New Kickstarter campaign from Jason Snell and Myke Hurley to fund a podcast series covering Apple history:

Designed in California will consist of at least 30 episodes dropping over 12 months, looking at a wide range of Apple history, drawing from the best sources available.

It has been a while since we bumped the system requirements for Micro.blog for Mac. Current version runs on macOS 11 Big Sur. This feels like a good stopping point. The next version (4.0) will require macOS 14 Sonoma, so it’s more modern but still fine for the Tahoe haters.

Spider-Noir is off to a great start. I didn’t realize until we queued it up over the weekend that it was a TV series, not a movie. Watched most of it in black and white. 📺

Can’t believe WWDC is next week. Obviously the new Siri will the headline, but hope we get some other tweaks to Liquid Glass and general robustness.

Apple will improve Xcode too. Many developers barely touch Xcode now, though, so curious how Apple will keep it relevant, or if they even need to.

Codex added a profile with token usage over time. Interesting.