Had no idea about this secret album from Mariah Carey, produced with her friend Clarissa Dane. Gina Trapani blogs:
To blow off steam, she writes a grunge rock album inspired by alt-rock bands like Garbage, Hole, and Sleater-Kinney. She records it at night with the band after the Daydream sessions, channeling her frustrations into the music, and picks the most perfect name for such a project: Someone’s Ugly Daughter.
Love this. 🎶
Last month I blogged about the yogurt shop murders. Now they solved it, further exonerating the suspects who were wrongfully charged. One of them was even sentenced to death… What a tragedy upon tragedies if we had accidentally executed an innocent man. Hope the parents and friends find some peace.
Because it’s now in the public domain, I can test video uploads with Steamboat Willie posted to a page on my own blog. Almost 100 years old. Still good.
Really good series. Aces to the finals, but the Fever kept getting back in the game over and over. Fitting to end in OT. 🏀
Congrats to the Iconfactory on releasing Tapestry 1.3. Nice to explore their take on adopting Liquid Glass. Most apps I use haven’t updated yet.
Since I mused last week about expanding the video hosting in Micro.blog, I’ve been working on some behind the scenes changes to make that happen. I’ll post more about it this week. But already in early testing I’m happy to say it is dramatically better.
Sora 2 is invite-only, so not entirely sure the scope of it, but I’m getting the feeling that it’s much more of a move into social than Sora 1. Sam Altman writing on his blog:
Social media has had some good effects on the world, but it’s also had some bad ones. We are aware of how addictive a service like this could become, and we can imagine many ways it could be used for bullying.
The OpenAI team deepfaked themselves in the announcement videos. Bizarre!
The sky and clouds while walking yesterday.
Kagi launches Kagi News. I love this approach of having a single, daily update:
We publish once per day around noon UTC, creating a natural endpoint to news consumption. This is a deliberate design choice that turns news from an endless habit into a contained ritual.
I usually have a few books I’m trying to read and switch between them. This new Kindle feature “Story So Far” seems genuinely useful if a long time has passed since putting a book down. From The Verge:
There will be new AI-assisted reading tools, too, including a feature called Story So Far that generates a spoiler-free recap of a book up to the point you’ve read
I care a lot about personal domain names and blogging, of course, and that bleeds into how we approach URLs in Micro.blog. Trying to keep the simplicity of short, readable CDN URLs as we expand to support longer videos, which are more complicated to host.
Typepad is shutting down today. That deadline came up quickly. It’s the last day to export any content. Micro.blog and WordPress both support importing Typepad archives.
From the “this would be a good blog post” department, Kevin Rose has thoughts about ChatGPT Pulse that he posted on Twitter / X:
It’s an agent that continuously researches on your behalf, building on topics from your recent conversations. I’m really having a hard time wrapping my head around this paradigm, because it’s truly unlike anything we’ve seen before.
It’s like having a knowledge partner that follows you around, deepening your understanding of whatever you’re curious about.
I blogged over the weekend about Pulse. I’m a few more days in now and it’s still good.
Reading through this great 3-part blog post series from Stephanie Booth about rebooting the blogosphere:
from my “reading interface” (ie, the RSS reader), make it super easy to comment, share, react or link to a publication and start writing something new
A key point in Micro.blog from the beginning was to unify reading, blogging, and replying. A little-understood feature in Micro.blog is you can follow any blog, for example search “climbtothestars.org” to follow Stephanie’s blog. Need to keep improving that.
The New Yorker has a long profile of Tim Berners-Lee:
Somehow, the man responsible for all of this is a mild-mannered British Unitarian who loves model trains and folk music, and recently celebrated his seventieth birthday with a picnic on a Welsh mountain.
Wait, how did I not know that he loves model trains? 🚂 Looking forward to his memoir: This Is For Everyone. 📚
New book: Adventures in Animation. We were at Alamo recently and before the movie there were the usual shorts and old commercials. One struck me immediately and I thought: that looks like Richard Williams. It was.
Doing some more work with FFmpeg. It’s amazing how far video and audio tools have come. Ages ago when I was working on my app Wii Transfer, I had to jump through all sorts of hoops. Although that was in the Flash days before HTML 5 video.
Enjoying the WNBA playoffs. Today is Aces / Fever game 4. And the NBA preseason starts on Thursday! 🏀
Asked Codex for a simple fix to something, and it went way off in the weeds and wrote its own Ruby and Python shell scripts to test its theory about the bug. Too thorough! Sometimes I really do just want the quick, possibly wrong answer that I can then tweak myself. 🤪
A contrast in two announcements today. This is why OpenAI is a different kind of company than Meta and should not be distracted with an ad-based business.
ChatGPT Pulse from OpenAI. Fidji Simo:
Pulse has already helped me discover new emerging treatments for my health condition, recommended new painting techniques for my art practice, surfaced great weekend events for my family, and more.
Vibes from Meta. Mark Zuckerberg:
Introducing Vibes – a feed of expressive AI-generated videos from artists and creators in the Meta AI app.
Started listening to the latest WP Tavern podcast earlier, with Dave Winer. Great so far. Dave’s fired up! I like it. As he blogged today about not waiting for the silos:
I’m not intimidated any more, I’m fed up and going ahead without them.
We can build a better web. Open, connected, portable.
Alex Heath writing on his new blog / newsletter site Sources that Fidji Simo is planning for ads in ChatGPT. I’m disappointed in this. It is going to be very difficult to do ads without compromising something.
Sources say that Simo has recently been meeting with potential candidates, including some of her former Facebook colleagues, to lead a new team that will be tasked with bringing ads to ChatGPT.
Matt Birchler has been in App Store review limbo, waiting for a week while his customers can’t upgrade to pay for his own app. So frustrating. Quick Subtitles looks like a cool app.
Over the summer we started including little book cover previews on the Micro.blog timeline when a book is mentioned. People loved this, and of course wanted it on their own blog too. That is starting to roll out now.
As an example, here’s what the books category page looks like on my own blog. If there is already a photo included in the post, it skips including the cover:
To accomplish this, Micro.blog inserts a bit of HTML into the published post, without modifying the source Markdown. The cover image can be further styled using the CSS class microblog_book. Because we also add some inline styles, you may need to add !important in your CSS to adjust margin and padding.
Happy reading! 📚
Final trailer for Wicked: For Good. After the first movie, I have complete faith in them to finish strong. Can’t wait to see what they do with No Good Deed and For Good. 🍿
I own about a dozen domain names in the form micro.tld. Most for things not announced yet, some that won’t ever happen. For better or worse, it’s the brand. Too many fun domains out there. 🤪
Facebook has had 3 billion users for a while, but I wasn’t expecting Instagram to already have 3 billion monthly active users. Insane scale.