FeedCity

I use an old Pixel 4 for testing Android. I really like the buttons: only a power button and up/down volume. All the buttons are on one side. Not sure how I would redesign the iPhone buttons, but I don’t think they’re quite right.

A month ago I wondered out loud if it was time to add Twitter cross-posting back to Micro.blog. After a lot of thought and feedback from users, I think yes. The goal has always been to help people publish on their own domain first, regardless of where they also choose to sha...

There is always going to be some water spilling, might as well water the plant with it! Great idea at Lazarus on Airport. ☕️

Deployed some fixes and new settings for Mastodon this morning. Always feels good to make things just a little better. 🎉

Satya Nadella writes on his blog about what we potentially give to models for training. He focuses mostly on the enterprise, which I don’t care much about, but this part does describe a real tension of commercial models:

While the great innovation that comes from model providers having fair use rights to train models on public data is needed, I find it ironic that the status quo is to then turn around and impose restrictive terms on distillation, and to reserve the right to learn from customer usage and interaction data. If learning flows in only one direction, economic value converges toward the owners of the learning infrastructure rather than the creators of the knowledge itself.

I think this is something that both AI fans and skeptics could agree on.

Good article today from Ben Thompson about Apple vs. OpenAI:

AI is changing the world, and Apple’s contribution is to deliver two year-old technology differentiated by exclusive access to data it won’t share. It certainly has no interest in delivering on a new AI-driven paradigm that endangers its iPhone franchise in any way; any of its employees who wish to do exactly that, meanwhile, are being told loud and clear that Apple doesn’t just think it owns your laptop, but also your mind and knowledge.

Everyone: You can subscribe to the rss.chat flow, in RSS of course. If you're a developer, read the source for the feed. And then read the source namespace docs re the recent additions, inReplyTo and comments, and a special page that walks through how the RSS feed becomes part of the flow for our social network.

Ruben and I are doing a collaborative writing challenge where we both write our thoughts on the poem “Repeat that, repeat” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. We’re not trying to do an academic formal analysis, rather share our own thoughts. You can read Ruben's post on his website. I...

Simon Willison blogs about how Anthropic keeps extending Fable access, presumably because too many people would cancel their subscriptions and use GPT-5.6 instead:

At this point I think Anthropic should change track and keep Fable permanently available on those plans. OpenAI are winning users simply due to the uncertainty that surrounds Fable access.

Anthropic should do this, but also if they do, it will make their original claim that they can’t support Fable in subscriptions look like a lie. Very interesting to watch. 🍿

TwoMillionKit is a clever solution from Guilherme Rambo (via Daring Fireball) to use private cloud compute by routing through the command-line fm tool. I was accepted into the Small Business Program a few days ago and had forgotten why I had applied until reading this.

Happy to get an Inkwell update out for macOS. From the news blog today:

Fixed several bugs in Inkwell for Mac. Grab the latest version with “Check for Updates” or directly from the help page.

Micro.blog News https://news.micro.blog/2026/07/12/fixed-several-bugs-in-inkwell.html

Robin Sloan blogged about attending a Stop the AI Race march:

These things are growing and mutating faster than anybody can make sense of them. So … here’s a wild thought … let’s slow down, and make sense of them.

I really like Robin’s blog and his books. I don’t think a pause can work, though, because coordinating with China labs and all open source seems nearly impossible. I’d rather see better plans for investing in renewal energy and some kind of UBI-like fund to help with the economy. No matter the speed of AI development, slow or fast, we’re going to need those things.

Something fascinating to me about how relatively little we use AI, compared to what it can do… I don’t spend much on OpenAI’s API, for example, but see this graph of daily costs. What if AI was much faster and much cheaper, what would be possible?

Doing a little inventory of my Mac’s login items in System Settings. There is a bunch of junk in there that can be turned off. I miss the much simpler classic Mac “Startup Items” folder with aliases.

"Historically, the Justice Department has sought to subpoena reporters only as a last resort after other reasonable options have been exhausted." Now the FBI is doing it to satisfy an angry President.

JF Martin on his Numeric Citizen microblog:

…this new saga between Apple and OpenAI represents what I dislike about the tech world: it’s just noise that distracts me from more fundamental and interesting things. Apple is very fond of these legal battles, and I find it all tiresome.

I’ve certainly been frustrated with Lindsey Graham over the years, the Brett Kavanaugh hearing most recently. But credit to him for working in Ukraine literally on Friday… then the next day he’s dead. Stunning. 🇺🇸

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Notes prepared by Claude.ai. In this podcast, recorded July 12, 2026, Dave introduces rss.chat — his first podcast about the project — and explains why he thinks of it as more than a product: it's meant to be an ecosystem, something that exists to create other products or in...