FeedCity

Today I updated the Micro.blog web interface with better links and icons in the timeline, and a new context menu for editing your own posts or muting a conversation. There are a lot of related design fixes too. Just a better design and more room for us to build new things on.

Reflecting on the Astra launch… It was a killer business instinct for Greg Brockman to say, “yeah, this is basically AGI.” Dario Amodei is much more cautious. He’s not going to say that about Fable. But it works because it actually feels true. Marketing not based on truth is just bullshit spin.

I wanted to quote a couple things from this OpenAI blog post on alignment by Jakub Pachocki: The fundamental challenge of AI alignment is generalization. As machines become smarter, they find themselves working on higher-level concepts, and placed in environments increasing...

With the 40th anniversary re-release of the original Transformers movie coming up, I finally watched the 2007 Transformers. I had skipped it because it looked all wrong. The design doesn’t look like Transformers to me. Also watched Bumblebee, which it much better, just a better feel, better sound.

Like I do, very often, I went to Pacific Beach Today. Here’s the panoramic photo I took before I went in the water. Here’s the Bing maps rendition of the spot. How impossibly blue is that water? The current was strong. I had an instinct that the current was strong and north. That’s the state...

Nitter and XCancel are back online after being shut down for a couple weeks following a cease and desist letter from X. I’m a little surprised. From the GitHub project page:

Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.

Working on some web timeline design tweaks that will go live in the morning. I’ve been stubbornly insisting on text labels for Reply, Bookmark, etc. where every other network uses icons only. Going to mostly keep that, but the new version looks way better.

Earlier this year I noticed my Artemis reader page (the page that lists posts published by sites to which I am subscribed) was loading slowly. The logic to generate the page encompasses several hundred lines of code, which do everything from retrieving posts from the databas...

Worrisome reporting from Mark Gurman:

Ternus and services chief Eddy Cue want to make even more money from the App Store and figure out ways to raise margins and squeeze additional recurring revenue from the platform. Schiller, on the other hand, seems to believe that such moves will only further irk developers and governments. While there was no internal blowup or anything like that, it’s something he wanted no part of.

John Gruber adds:

I sure hope that’s not true, because that would be awful — making a bad situation worse — and pretty much the exact opposite of what Apple ought to do.

Earlier this week I was chatting with a friend about the skills I am learning from art history. One of the most influential concepts I have learned is to “look closely”. The idea is to spend time with a single thing – to study it closely – and think about what you see in mor...

Sunday session

Today's song: So into you.

We got past the bump, and I'm getting stuff done. I write this stuff because I will probably forget most of the frustration. Frontier is a hard piece of software to get going, it's got a lot of integrations, which you want when you're using, but hard when you're getting it all to work the first time. And this port is very much like getting it work that way. But Claude does some things poorly and others spectacularly. It can play the role of a CPU and run the code and tell you where it will fail. Helpful when you don;t have a working debugger to step through the code and see exactly how and why it failed where it did. Before debuggers it was either all or nothing.

I think I would really like the foldable iPhone. But at over $2k, I can’t justify blowing that much money on a phone. It would be a crazy business expense when I could put that money back into Micro.blog hosting or paying people. Other folks may have different priorities, and that’s fine! 💰

Pretty thorough article at The Economist about whether AI is creating or destroying jobs:

Add it all up, and The Economist estimates that AI has so far created around 1m new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles. America’s AI infrastructure splurge has created many of them.

You could argue that construction-related jobs are temporary, but I don’t think so. There’s going to be demand for years.

I got some great feature and bug fix suggestions on Friday. Over the weekend I’ve implemented several of them (some shipped already, some need client app updates).

Every day with Claude I end up debugging the things it broke overnight. Yesterday I actually got a useful script written and debugged, along the way reporting glitches but no deal-stoppers. This morning, after updating to the latest version, the script doesn't run. It's been ...