Skimming through some junk mail, always looking for things to unsubscribe from, and this is an actual email subject line from LinkedIn: “Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, is popular in your network”. No kidding! Algorithms losing the plot. 🤪

Federico Viticci and John Voorhees have posted an explanation about returning to X: MacStories is precious to us. It’s not just how we earn a living; it’s one of a small number of independent websites that still cover apps, Apple, and a growing list of topics, including vid...

While working on a new blog post, I asked AI a question about my older blog posts and it showed me this one from 2016: Blog when you disagree. I still think this is a powerful aspect of blogging. Posting to your own blog is inherently independent. You post for yourself instead of for a community.

Reading up AT Proto Spaces. (Wait, when did we start spelling it Atproto?) It’s private-ish, not encrypted, and kept out of the relay… I think this is going to be a big deal.

Apple responds to OpenAI’s motion to dismiss. Yawn. I think when OpenAI shows their new device later this year and it doesn’t resemble a HomePod at all, this lawsuit is going to feel pointless.

Watching video from WordCamp, Matt Mullenweg mentions they should be putting WordPress profiles on their badges:

Why are we putting like Twitter handles and other stuff. We are the WordPress people. We should be… you know our WordPress profiles and our blog URLs as the primary thing we’re promoting, not these random other walled garden social networks, right?

I didn’t realize that they owned w.org too. See also: “hello my URL is” name tags.

I don’t know if this has gotten worse with Liquid Glass, but I’m noticing that simple context popup menus are just too slow on iOS because of the fancy animation. I’m tempted to write my own that opens immediately when speed matters.

Continuing to improve the Logs page in Micro.blog. I think the color for different tasks helps. Still a little nerdy, but it’s a very useful page to understand what Micro.blog is doing.

Finally ran out. But then I remembered that the 5.3 credits are tracked separately. I had also forgotten just how fast 5.3 Spark is! For simple changes, it’s not bad.

Did not finish: Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao. I loved the idea and it starts well, but 25% in the writing didn’t quite work for me. Decided to put it down, there’s too much else to read. 📚

Listening to Fireflies by U2 and Martin Garrix. Can’t wait for the new album. 🎶

Twenty years ago I participated in NaNoWriMo. I was just remembering how I had a printed book that was all synonyms and antonyms. Handy when I got stumped on just the right word to use. That’s how I think of editing with AI, except instead of words it’s phrases. AI is good a...

New trailer out for Wildwood. This looks extraordinary. Hope it’s even half as good as it looks.

Micro.blog book pages are looking pretty good.

Seems like we might be settling in for a 5% Apple tax across the board, globally, based on the US court and EU compromise. I don’t love it. Linking to external payments should give Apple 0% and nothing more.

Related, I saw this scare sheet yesterday while managing my account in Disney+.

I’ve never run out of Codex tokens before, so it’s always felt essentially unlimited. At 4% remaining now with a day left! Uh oh. I don’t think my usage has changed much except that I’m running with /fast and Ultra more often.

Catching up on news from D23. Cartoon Brew has a rundown of some of the theme park changes coming up. The first Lion King ride will be in Disneyland Paris… A little surprised they never built that in Animal Kingdom.

My post earlier about X didn’t resonate exactly as I had intended. Let me zoom out. Let’s think of proponents of the social web as a coalition. People actively choose to be on the fediverse, atmosphere, and (though it’s a dated term) blogosphere. There are people who: Disli...

Pretty significant design changes coming to Mastodon for version 5.0. I don’t use Mastodon often (my blog posts get to the fediverse from Micro.blog) but these seem like good changes.

Got let in to Bluesky’s Attie. I’m impressed with it so far. I wonder if this will end up being a paid product. Can’t be cheap to run.

I had missed that Automattic’s renewed push into education comes with a free .blog or .art domain name. It’s just for one year, but still great to get students thinking about owning their writing. I wish I could offer that.

When I blogged a couple weeks ago that X seems to be growing again, I think some people didn’t believe me. Yesterday, Federico Viticci returned to X:

Over the last two years, I’ve fundamentally changed as a creator. I’m still a writer and podcaster, but I guess I’m also a new kind of “builder”. Today, I need to find new readers, listeners, and developers, wherever they may be.

I have a lot of respect for Federico. If he feels he needs to connect with folks on X, that’s his call. I’m sure he’s going to keep blogging and podcasting too!

Let me be clear: I’m not going to post on X. But I’m not blind either. Part of running Micro.blog is paying attention when things change.

Looks like we’re getting the camera AirPods soon. I’m curious how Apple is going to frame the privacy for these considering all the Meta glasses backlash. Even if the image never leaves your phone, will people trust it?

John Gruber follows up on a number of issues around watermarking. On what to even do with detection tools:

There cannot exist a single detector for all LLMs. And even if you find out that it says it’s a match, that an email or blog post or Slack message was very likely generated by, say, Claude, what are you going to do? March into your colleague’s office and tell them you caught them?

Watermarking critiques are compelling because there are multiple points against it. Worse quality (maybe), false positives with quoted or lightly edited text (likely), centralized control of keys (yes).

It’s hard in the moment to know when to stand up to bullies and when to let it go. Glad to see Disney pushing back against Trump’s FCC.

We just sent a new Micro Monday email update out! Still getting our bearings again with email. I also built a new system to manage and send the emails. Learning a lot, as always. 🤞

404 Media put an AirTag in a used book to track it to an Amazon scanning facility. (Clever investigative reporting or legal gray area?) Not sure how much we can read into this because Amazon has been scanning books for over 20 years, ever since the “look inside” feature.

Listening to the latest AppStories podcast about how to grade Siri AI. I like the way John and Federico approach this. Siri AI can be both way better than old Siri and also not nearly as capable as frontier models. Who after using GPT-5.6 Luna for free is going to use Siri instead?

He hadn’t posted in several years until today, so I didn’t realize that Greg Brockman had a blog. It’s powered by Svbtle. Some interesting posts in the archive, including one about OpenAI’s mission from 2019 co-written by Ilya Sutskever:

Just like a computer today, an AGI will be applicable to a wide variety of tasks — and just like computers in 1900 or the Internet in 1950, it’s hard to describe (or even predict) the kind of impact AGI will have.

GitHub is struggling this morning. It’s slightly interfering with my work, so hopefully they get it under control soon. I’ve become quite dependent on it as a bridge to deploys and code review. Replacing GitHub is not currently worth all the integration hassle it would introduce.