Dan Moren reviews the Xteink X3 at Six Colors:
…it’s well positioned as an impulse buy. And while I don’t want to dissuade you, I have to note the biggest caveat of all: the world.
Amazon still dominates e-books too much. If Kindle was DRM-free, I would’ve ordered an X3 already.
Ben Thompson today, writing about the OpenAI security incident and more:
The fact that models do what humans say is cold comfort if the models are in the hands of bad actors. That, though, simply emphasizes the point that the best defense against powerful models is equipping defenders with powerful models of their own.
There may need to be multiple tiers of model access. ChatGPT and Claude should be well-aligned with many guardrails to prevent casual, mainstream users from getting led astray. But powerful models need to exist too, for researchers and security experts.
Trying to find the humor in people lecturing me about X, as if I don’t know after joining Twitter 20 years ago and working directly with all the major Twitter client app developers whose products were destroyed… But in fairness, my about page also glossed over this. I’ve added an extra sentence to it that helps:
But there were frustrations with Twitter too, a period that is documented at length in my book Indie Microblogging. I quit Twitter in 2012 as a statement of principle against closed, developer-hostile platforms.
Bookmark: worseonpurpose.com/p/on-quality
It's a lot simpler and faster to install new instance of rss.chat. You don't have to create and host your own database, that's now built into the server using SQLite. Full instructions on how to install. If you have questions or issues, we've started a thread on the repo. More about this to come.
Reminder: We have a server for anyone who wants to try RSS.chat.
Tuesday session in Glencolmcille 🎻🎷
When Bluesky launched, I loved the domain names for usernames and the PDS approach, but I don’t think I fully appreciated storage and lexicons until there were more different platforms using it. Spent a lot of time today thinking about how Micro.blog could better interoperate with all of this.
I don’t need any new Slack-like things, but Buzz is actually pretty interesting. It’s built on a Nostr relay and has a whole page about domain names and identity:
myproject.com is your workspace. Not a GitHub org page that happens to have your name on it. Not a Discord server that Discord could delete tomorrow. Your domain. Your relay. One thing.
I’m getting a little maybe written by AI vibe from some of the docs… But regardless, it makes a good (if verbose) case for the architecture.
Pckt, a blogging app built on top of AT Proto, has added notes. Notes are like microblog posts or blog comments, but with their own lexicon outside of the normal Bluesky namespace:
Think quick thoughts, or live blogging, or small updates throughout your day. Notes can be shared, quoted, or re-blogged, and they can either stand on their own or become part of the conversation around a longer blog post.
Timely with some of my own posts, Firefox posted on X for the first time since Jan 2025:
We took time off of X, but we’re back. The internet is changing again, so we’re here as an independent voice for our users and the open internet.
Mozilla never stopped posting on their own separate account. I feel like “the internet is changing again” could use a link to a longer blog post. I assume that’s partly about AI, and most AI people are still only on X.
Nice surprise today to see a pair of new Stormlight novellas, outlined by Brandon Sanderson and then written by his pals. From the preface:
A mini-novel about Jasnah surviving in Shadesmar while everyone tried to figure out what was going on with Szeth and the Ghostbloods in the Physical Realm. I eventually decided that the novel worked better without Jasnah distracting us, as I wanted Shadesmar to be a big part of Oathbringer—and it would be better reserved for there.
📚
“I don’t think about you at all.” — Don Draper
If only it were that easy. Over the last year I’ve been reflecting on why negative, overly-personal complaints have affected me so much. I think it’s two things:
Both of these get better with time. But neither is completely fixable without becoming a different person.
Thinking about the new debate on AI model distillation, I re-read my long-ish post from two years ago about fair use. There was a lot of AI training backlash at the time. I still like the post. Fair use and open web principles are intertwined.
OpenAI continues to fix design issues with ChatGPT for Mac. It almost works the way I want if you click on the ChatGPT mode and then choose “…” → “Organize sidebar” → “In one list” so the coding projects don’t get in the way.
This week we’ve started adding a special discovery interface for Bluesky starter packs. It’s live now on the web. The way I’m thinking about it: we’ll feature a selection of starter packs that change over time, but we also index many other starter packs you can search for. This will expand. 🦋
Last week as I was reevaluating the X API, I said I’d pause for a week. I’m now going to hold it indefinitely. It’s a distraction we don’t need, and in my attempt to make it easy to use, I didn’t appreciate how confusing the money part of this would be.
As I said in a follow-up post:
The mission has never changed: post short posts (and everything else!) to your own blog, which makes the web better, and also opens opportunities for smaller, safer communities.
I still believe in POSSE. It also inspired this post over the weekend about politics and open web principles.
