Good discussion on Dithering today about the updated ChatGPT for Mac. I hope a few folks at OpenAI listen to this. As @gruber says, it’s all fairly obvious stuff… The UI is fixable.

Hmm. Had to verify my age before using Bluesky from the web this morning. Good news is the verification process was fast.

I thought the Texas law was to put the burden on the App Store and Google Play to centralize age verification. A little confused now about the scope.

Sometimes even with the robots help, you take on more than you can manage. GPT-5.6 is great. Shipping the Mac app, Sites feature, and Work all at the same time was too much.

Sites is amazing… from the web. Chat on the Mac needs a redesign. Expecting lots of app updates until they get this right.

Shout-out to Google for the amazingly quick app approval times. Minutes. I assume it’s mostly automated… Which it should be for apps that have been shipping updates for years without malware or gimmicks.

Added a new book calendar page to my blog, to visualize when I finished reading books over the last couple of years. Planning to make this available as an option to anyone on Micro.blog. First I need to blog more about what is going on behind the scenes for this feature.

ChatGPT’s update for Work and Codex puts the design in a precarious position. There is so much going on. If it was me, I would take a step back and think about how to keep a simple chat interface that scales well to Codex without immediately feeling overwhelming.

In addition to launching GPT-5.6, they’ve combined the ChatGPT and Codex Mac apps. I guess that was bound to happen. It still needs a little more work to feel right for normal, non-coding chats.

Even with AI being able to clone almost any app, Micro.blog is fairly safe because no single person actually knows everything the platform can do. 🤪

“I’ve got one idea that I’m especially psyched out of my mind about. You know, it’s one of those ideas where you’re just like… Yes!” — Miles Finch

There are really two very different ways of coding with AI. One is to quickly iterate with small changes. The other is letting an agent go off and work on a hard problem or high-level goal, where it churns for minutes or hours. For the first, model speed is almost everything.

Thinking about the impact of GPT-Live announced today. Two things…

First, Apple farming out Siri’s foundation to Google puts them in a weird in-between state where maybe they can’t technically build something like this, but also they can’t just use someone else’s model. As if they’re trapped.

And second, I’m sure GPT-Live was architected for the Jony Ive device. I’ve had a hunch for a while that it could be something special. No one has cracked the AI voice assistant device / wearable because for it to be great you have to start by rebuilding everything. GPT-Live is like the first generation iPhone’s multitouch.

Figured out how to publish the AT Proto schema for blog.micro.content. Neat. The schema is just a PDS record, with a DNS entry to resolve the name.

Added a page to document some of how Micro.blog works with Bluesky, including Standard.site compatibility. I’ll add more to this as I think of implementation details that are useful to know.

Cleaned up a few things in the web interface for books this week, including a new popup menu for switching bookshelves. Here’s a quick 12-second screencast video.

Daniel Jalkut and I had hoped to record a bonus post-WWDC podcast, even scheduled it, but now it has been weeks… There’s always something going on. Amazing that we used to record a weekly show for a decade or more!

JA Westenberg:

The smartphone is the enemy of deep thought. Deep thinking needs sustained attention, incubation, and boredom. Boredom is the soil where creativity grows.

One of the minor disappointments with getting piled on a year ago is that I now tend to second-guess many of my blog posts. Will someone run with the worst interpretation, ready to repost without context? This leads to watering down drafts, sometimes editing them into vague pointlessness.

Finished reading: The Passing of the Dragon by Ken Liu. Beautiful short story. Also includes a surprise commentary on the mess that is social media. 📚

Good write-up of fediverse blogging apps including Micro.blog at Federated Mind.

We shipped Micro.blog 3.0 for Android today. See the full release notes here. I think this is the first time that both iOS and Android have had exact feature parity. We previously had some code on iOS that was only written in Obj-C.

Finished reading: Homebound by Portia Elan. Good concept, but the separate timelines didn’t really come together in a big way at the end as I was hoping. Still enjoyed it. 📚

Anthropic published research on what patterns inside Claude — patterns they’re calling the J-space — reveal about how it might be thinking while it processes a prompt: If you’ve heard of language models having a “scratchpad” or “chain of thought”—text they write to themselv...

While watching the game last week, the announcers were clearly very skeptical of the red card. If the suspension had been reversed without Trump getting involved, I think it would’ve been the right call. But now the whole thing is tainted with the appearance of corruption. Not good. ⚽️

John Gruber with another blog post on native Mac apps:

What keeps me using ChatGPT and keeps me away from using Claude is not that ChatGPT happens to be written using native APIs like AppKit. It’s that it looks and feels like a Mac app — you know, with a Settings window that is … a window.

🙂

On the Codex side, unfortunately the app is at least partly Electron. OpenAI has hired great Mac and iOS developers, though, and Codex has some of the best Mac integration I’ve ever seen — the Computer Use feature especially, which uses Apple accessibility APIs. ChatGPT iOS also has a lot of SwiftUI.

This is cool, via @dave, how the HyperTexting app is using blogrolls to help with the “web as a social graph” interface. Automatically works with Micro.blog’s recommendations feature.

Sounds like GPT-5.6 will be this week. If I were OpenAI, I wouldn’t overhype this. Let it speak for itself. With Mythos and Fable, the hype is exhausting.

Putting the final touches on an Android update for Micro.blog. We had some changes ready a month ago that somehow I forgot to actually release. ☹️ This will be 3.0, getting us closer to syncing up both mobile platform versions too.

Google Play approvals are so fast now, must be largely automated.

Unexpectedly, my favorite part of Micro.blog’s email newsletters is that I get an email with all my posts from the last week. It would be useful even if I was the only subscriber. Monday morning is a great time to quickly reflect on what was happening last week before moving on.

Finished reading: Tower of Dawn by Sarah J. Maas. Dipped back into romantasy. Some of this series I’ve read and some I’ve listened to the audiobooks. Personally works better as a book for me, not narrated. 📚

Tim Sweeney, fighting for openness in the App Store and protecting forests in North Carolina:

Sweeney strives to protect large swaths of land with high conservation value before developers get possession. In 2016, he donated 7,000 acres of forest east of Asheville to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In 2021, he gifted 7,500 acres near the Avery-Mitchell county border to the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy. That year, he also teamed with conservation groups to preserve a two-mile coastal barrier south of Topsail Island.