Subscribe
IndieWeb
Jimmy Kimmel highlighted the ridiculous “Unites States” spelling mistake on the White House AI signature page. But I’m more obsessed with the signatures from the AI company execs.
I can’t talk, because my signature is rough, but Greg Brockman, what…?! Amazing. Love Jensen Huang’s too, very nice.
As I remarked during DevDay, live demos fail sometimes. That’s what makes them real. OpenAI’s Holly Li recorded a do-over video on X, a single 9-minute take of using Dots. Good way to bounce back.
David Smith is bringing back his Developing Perspective podcast:
I don’t have fixed plans yet for the format or frequency, but I feel like I have something to say, and I want a venue to explore what it is now like to be an indie app developer.
Looking forward to this. Short, solo podcasts can be really nice. I need to dust off my own little podcast too.
The new Kindle looks very nice. Tempted to get one because my current Kindle Paperwhite got dented. But now there’s the choice of plastic or aluminum! I feel like lighter is better.
Kev Quirk thinking about moving to a solo fediverse instance since he’s not actively checking Mastodon:
The majority of my timeline is fun, but the outraged minority have ruined for me. To the point where I don’t want to be there, and I’m much happier having not checked the timeline for the last month or so.
Listening to the Vergecast podcast’s wrap-up of DevDay… I think it’s a big deal that Dots is powered by Astra. It’s just not going to make the same kind of mistakes as Muse has so far.
I guess not shocking that a product that’s $100/month is better than one that’s $0/month.
Reddit announced they are winding down RSS feeds:
Because RSS is now a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse, we’ll stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026 while preserving moderation workflows that depend on it through supported alternatives.
Just another silo.
A pilot on a Dubai-to-Tel Aviv flight has been arrested after he stabbed the other pilot and appears to have tried to crash the plane, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. A passenger described how he put the alleged assailant in a chokehold before grabbing the plane’s controls to stabilize the flight.
I signed up for next week’s FediForum. I implemented a first pass of the LOLA portability spec for moving accounts to Micro.blog, so thinking that might be a good time to coordinate testing with others. Also looking forward to hearing the latest on the AT Proto side of things.
There’s lots of new stuff in Wavelength 2.1. My favorite is an easier way to add audio narration to existing blog posts. In the Posts tab, you can tap to show the post text while you record reading it. Gives a little extra human touch to your blog posts.
I wrote more about audio narration in Micro.blog two years ago.
OpenAI’s Dots product is pretty interesting. Soon after I configured my dot and gave it a name, it suggested something it could help with. It already had a connection to GitHub and memory of all the things ChatGPT knew about my work.
Casey Newton writing about Dots for Platformer:
As someone who plans to use Dots for work, though, paying for the product builds my trust in it. Zuckerberg says Meta plans to fund Muse by taking a cut of transactions, which means that it will soon be some team’s job to massively increase the number of transactions that take place within Muse.
Catching up on the White House meeting and related video with AI company leaders. Something odd about seeing these folks together instead of individually on a stage. I can’t tell yet who is the most annoyed about having to say SI instead of AI in front of Trump.
We had quite the Micro.blog server meltdown tonight. So sorry to everyone. We’ve had some blips this year, but it’s been a long time since there has been this bad of an outage. I think everything is good now. 🤞
OpenAI really did pack a lot into DevDay. The most interesting features for me are Dots and the Jev-like Decisions API. That will be super useful.
Watching the DevDay livestream. There is nothing like a live demo. Even when things are slow or go slightly wrong, it feels so much more real.
For a live presentation, everyone in the audience is rooting for the speaker. For a pre-recorded video, everyone is just waiting for it to be over.
John Voorhees is live-tweeting DevDay over on X. Nice look inside the venue. We need to make it more appealing to do this kind of coverage from indie microblogs, not silos.
Mark Gurman has a blog post about John Ternus attempting to streamline Apple:
The early ideas under consideration include relying less on traditional spring and fall product release schedules… […] Ternus wants the company to introduce products more frequently — throughout the year.
Sounds great! But:
They have discussed launching new services and extracting more revenue from existing products and offerings.
Not great.
Dave Winer reflects on the passing of Om Malik too young, and the work left to do for the open web.
Reuters on Anthropic’s IPO filing:
Anthropic plans to caution potential investors in its IPO that advanced AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” an extraordinary warning by a company seeking to profit from the same technology.
Yawn. There will be hacks and there will be other big problems, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that the risk to humanity is 0%. We are resilient and won’t be wiped out by robots. I’m so burned out on the extreme rhetoric.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be careful. Of course we should. OpenAI scrapping GPT-6.1 over safety is a good sign.
My OpenClaw server mostly just sits there idle, but one thing I love is it automatically updates Micro.blog’s latest app versions help page. It checks what the current shipped version is and also if there’s an app in review. I still maintain the release notes by hand, for now.
Bummed to hear that Brightline is filing for bankruptcy:
For months, the company has been grappling with an unsustainable $5.5 billion debt load even while the passenger operations have become profitable. Now, a restructuring plan led by a major municipal-bond insurer appears poised to push the Fortress Investment Group-backed rail network into court to reorganize its deeply distressed balance sheet.
Hopefully they can restructure and keep moving forward. We need the Vegas line finished and new rail in Texas.
After a reminder from @danielpunkass, I’m playing with Automattic’s Spacefast again. Honestly don’t love the name, but what they’ve created is fascinating. Agent-first publishing, very complete API too. Clever onboarding that I could learn from.
Michael Tsai blogging about Grok Bot and agents generally:
I don’t trust xAI (or Meta) with my data, but it doesn’t seem like Siri AI can do all that much. So far, I’ve been too busy to do much with agents, even on a test Mac. But I don’t think agents are going away, so there’s a tension here that will need to be resolved eventually.
In the latest Connected Places fediverse news, this improvement in Mastodon 4.7 stood out to me:
Mastodon 4.7.0 can now recognise a remote account that changes its handle by using its underlying ActivityPub identifier. This does not mean Mastodon’s own users can change their handles yet, but it means that Mastodon can better work with software where that is already possible.
Quite a big deal. In practice, might rarely pay off because an id URL is probably going to be tied to the domain name, but still a welcome step forward.
If the future is more agents and fewer traditional apps, it’s a threat to the App Store business, so Apple will resist it. The company that was willing to obsolete its own product (the iPod) to make a great phone… That company doesn’t exist anymore.
Ben Thompson writing about how the future will be on-demand UIs and agents that bypass needing an app at all:
…no one wants to use apps because they are apps, apps were just the vehicle for people to accomplish something or entertain themselves; once people realize they can get straight to the job to be done it will seem odd they did it any other way.
This is why Muse’s mission statement marks a pivotal moment. It might even be dangerous for the web, handing more centralized power to Meta.
The iPad update to Epilogue that I blogged about this weekend is now available. Apple review time: 22 hours. Not bad, except… Google review: 30 minutes.
