FeedCity

If you want others to follow you, you have to offer them your users. And a format alone has no users.

And you have to trust your users to choose the best product, and you have to have a great product, that they appreciate, even though they have choice.

Just coming out with something better in a format will get you zero uptake. Unless you have users they can switch to their product, they simply won’t hear you.

That’s why Atom never replaced RSS, which already did everything people needed and was already supported by the NYT and the news industry.

That’s why AT Proto will never overcome the huge lead Twitter already has.

For more tips on what does and doesn't matter in open formats and protocols, check out my Rules for Standards-makers.

PS: This started as an early morning rant on Twitter.

The GPT-6 Astra announcement yesterday was a bit anticlimactic because most people don’t have access to it yet. That’s fine, plenty of things to work on with the old-and-busted GPT-5.7 Sol.

Also listening to the interview with Greg Brockman on Stratechery this morning.

I’ve been working on Micro.blog for about a decade and only now does it feel like it’s really starting to get good.

My first job after college was on the 39th floor of the Empire State Building. I wrote software for our customers, in BASIC, from a teletype in our office, talking to our mainframe in New Jersey. It seemed magical at the time. But when I hit a bug, a mystery -- you'd try this and that, and not get anywhere on something that seemed so simple, you could stare at the problem for an hour, trying desperate things, getting no closer to the problem. One night, I was the only person in the office, I thought they should put programmers in the Empire State Building with windows that open. I'm having the same feeling with Claude. I know when this project is done, I will have Frontier, and I know what that's like. If I didn't so totally look forward to that I would never try to finish the project, I hate this mode of working with the bot. Ugh.

It's around this time of year that Santa makes his first appearance on my blog. Want to get out in front of the others.

More and more I'll realize that Claude doesn't do anything until you tell it to do it. We have a list of big things that need to be done before shipping. Whenever I get up for a break, I tell Claude to work on its overnight tasks, things we've pre-arranged while I work. Somet...

Just said this to Claude: "This is a very broken piece of software. If you were a real developer you'd never hand off something so broken to your coding partner." If I said this to a human partner they might quit, feeling under-appreciated perhaps. And I can say it to the machine, but it will change absolutely nothing. I really just want to get this project done and start using it, and reduce my reliance on Claude to getting small bugs attended to, or new features, a lot has happened in the 20+ years since I worked on Frontier.

Today is Bandcamp Friday: https://saltercane.bandcamp.com/album/deep-black-water

Tomorrow is Salter Cane Saturday: https://saltercane.com/tickets

six strings
sit still
song soon.

colours shimmering,
sun lowering.

leaves leaving,
seasons deepening.

trees lightening:
branches preparing.

winds cooling,
time wintering.

I wrote this poem with reference to a series of key words in the first edition of Planet Persephone's Go Offline zine. I used "lightening", "time", "shimmer", "colour", "deep", "leaves", "wind", and "winter".

Today was really fun. The conversation at Front End Study Hall was rich. We discussed email, including a library I’ve yet to try called MJML which allows creating a unified file which compiles into html code which renders consistently in the many different mail programs. I’m not using it for my newsletter (yet?), but I...

1. I love puzzles.

2. I love Rube Goldberg contraptions.

3. I love solving problems (I have an inner-Columbo).

4. People are the biggest piece of the puzzle (again Columbo).

5. It teaches me about myself and my limited vision and imagination (if I had unlimited vision and imagination, I would never program a bug, and if I did it would take me 0 seconds to find it).

6. I yearn to work together with great minds. Programming gives me that, when I use someone's API. And when the API anticipates my needs, and is instantly understandable, I feel the soul of another artist is present. I imagine this is how musicians feel when they play another musician's song or symphony.

I'm sure there's more to it. But today I'm working on a "lite" problem, and I'll figure it out, but right now I'm enjoying the fact that I don't get it.

Back to work Dave!

James Talarico is a special candidate. Just watched this video of his rally in Plano. Feeling optimistic seeing that crowd in the Dallas suburbs. 🇺🇸

I don’t usually repeat all the little deploy notes from news.micro.blog, but I’m especially happy about fixed video playback in the timeline. It has bugged me for a while that the aspect ratio or dimensions get wonky briefly when clicking play. Much better now!

Catching up on the foldable iPhone rumors ahead of next week’s announcement… Kind of bummed it’s called Ultra. Fold or Duo could’ve been great. Maybe at $2k, they needed a more serious name.

I didn’t see Apple’s Knowledge Navigator video until the early 1990s, a few years after it was produced. I was pretty struck by it. It has taken a few decades, but we’re basically there now: OpenAI’s Astra intro video.

Bernie Sanders is pretty freaked out about the Hugging Face hack. From a quote on Politico:

Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results.

Uh, cataclysmic? An earthquake is cataclysmic. The hack on Hugging Face, while quite bad, didn’t hurt anyone. Working on stronger safety measures is the right response and that appears to be what OpenAI has done.

Thursday session

Fun teaser from OpenAI on X (sigh) about Astra’s presumably imminent release. I guess it’s going to be called GPT-6. I’m working on Micro.blog improvements today, like always, but have my eyes on the wider social web for this release, so my posts will probably be a bit AI-heavy today. Apologies. 🤖

Part of Kawhi’s statement after the NBA investigation into the Clippers. Sort of a non-apology apology:

Integrity and respect for this game are fundamental to who I am. I accept full responsibility for lapses in judgment by people within my inner circle…

I feel like the punishment is very lopsided against the Clippers. No first-round picks for 5 years. 🏀