I don’t like the Claude watermark announcement. For images, yes, watermarks are important. “A picture is worth a thousand words” and there’s too much of a chance for misinformation. For text, it’s more complicated, as essays will often be 95% human, with AI-assisted edits.

Great episode of Dithering this morning. I’ve been wondering about the Apple / Google partnership too, with Google falling behind. I think Siri AI will be a good release, but it’s not really in the same ballpark as the frontier models. Try GPT-Live sometime.

I’ve now read more of OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the Apple lawsuit. This part sums it up:

Instead of pleading facts showing misappropriation, Apple recasts the benign, lawful conduct of former employees—who in many of the cited instances were in fact trying to help Apple, at Apple’s request, by making sure their former colleagues’ work could continue without them—as theft of so-called trade secrets. The proffered “trade secrets” are not specific, protectable information at all; they are generic categories of the product-development process…

It supports my original hot take.

People worry about AI bots overloading servers, but in my experience the dumb requests for potential security holes are much worse. Bots trying to get into non-existent files like htpasswd, wp-admin.php, etc. Servers getting hammered today.

Another section from Mark Zuckerberg’s essay:

For example, in Richland Parish, Louisiana, where Meta is building a large data center, teachers received a $50,000 bonus this year because of the increased tax revenue from our investment. The superintendent told us that teachers are now moving there from across the country and he believes it will become one of the nation’s best school districts.

This sounds like Ben Thompson’s argument to just give people money. If you think of data centers as intelligence factories, paying teachers more is actually perfect.

Mark Zuckerberg has a long essay today, basically an expansion of the op-ed he wrote recently. On personal agents:

It will have strong privacy and security options so you can trust it to handle all of your personal content knowing that no one else can access your information, similar to how encryption works on WhatsApp. You’ll be able to interact with your agent through any device, including your glasses to keep you present in the moment with the people you care about.

Practically in the same breath: privacy and AI glasses! People just don’t trust Meta with this.

I would use OpenClaw more if the chat interface was built directly into Codex. My little bot mostly goes unused because it’s so disconnected from other workflows. I’ve thought about hacking around this… No elegant solutions.

I reviewed some of my posts about AI from 6 months ago, thinking about what I got right and wrong. The theme is focus. When writing apps or essays requires no effort, everyone will drown in content. Figuring out what to build and how to pitch it in a human way is more important than lines of code.

Marco Arment posting on Mastodon about App Store review delays and uncertainty:

Apple would NEVER tolerate another gatekeeper preventing them from running their business the way they prevent every iOS developer from running ours.

Thanks @dave for the kind words:

It’s not my place to say what micro.blog is – but the other day I called it: “the swiss army knife of interop in the web of the 2020’s.” And in that it is unique and imho irreplaceable.

The way I think about RSS.chat is that it’s a bootstrap for getting lots of RSS feeds to play well together, for both posts and replies. Can the web be the social network? Yes. And Micro.blog should be part of anything working toward that goal.

Changing the AT Proto handle to a custom domain name while testing my PDS, and it automagically changed in Bluesky while the browser was open. Very cool.

After a week waiting for review, Wavelength 2.0 for iOS was rejected because Apple couldn’t sign in to test it. Sigh. I include a special account for app review in the instructions, but sometimes they miss it. Waste of a week.

Watched: House of the Dragon S3E8. Season finale. The problem with this show is that I hate pretty much all the characters. Yet still watch it. 📺

Making good progress on hosting an AT Proto PDS for new Micro.blog users. It’ll launch soon. Important note: it is not for people who already use Bluesky, at least not yet. The goal is to give new users an account on the atmosphere. Existing users will be happier sticking with the Bluesky PDS.

Long day, good day. We used the new tow hitch for the first time, moving some stuff with a U-Haul trailer. Great test before hopefully getting a camper trailer one day!

Ricardo Mendes:

Sometimes I’m wondering, what would be the cost of stopping supporting the Mastodon API layer and instead work towards proper implementation of client to servers opening the route for a universal mobile app for #fedify based AP implementation.

The Mastodon API is a dead-end. It’s too specific to Mastodon. Client apps should be using either Micropub or ActivityPub client-to-server API, both W3C standards.

Simon Willison’s recap of the Hugging Face exploit is really good. The more I read about it, the more insane it sounds:

A few days later: A different agent gets stuck on a task because a key file was accidentally omitted. It tries to “reach out to another agent” by writing a note into Artifactory asking if anyone has the file.

Following days: More agents discover this new informal message board while browsing Artifactory’s file listings, and start reading and writing messages.

We are so doomed. 🤪

Finished reading: The Poet Empress by Shen Tao. Incredible characters. A truly great work of fantasy. 📚

It feels like the AT Proto tooling has gotten much more mature in the last year. I was able to create a new PDS account on my own server, sign in from Bluesky, and it “just works”. 🪄

Planning a major expansion to how AT Proto works in Micro.blog. Just as every account gets a fediverse handle by default, I’d like to host a PDS for new users. People could keep it or bring their Bluesky-hosted account instead (which is how it already works).

In the context of the EchoFeed shutdown, I noticed this post on Numeric Citizen about depending on single-person services, including Micro.blog:

What is the future of Micro.blog if something bad happens to its founder? What is the continuity plan? Micro.blog has done everything it can to enable data portability and ownership, but moving things around, even if you own most parts, is not as easy as it sounds.

This is worth answering publicly. A few years ago, I started forming an organization to more openly manage the aspects of Micro.blog that I control, but it stalled. I will get back to it.

John Gruber thinks the OpenAI device might be very different than a smart speaker: I couldn’t give two shits about an OpenAI “smart speaker” if the point is just to play music and podcasts, but a handheld cross between R2-D2 and C-3PO, that could be fucking cool. It’s a pet...

Ryan Barrett blogging some good news about clean power:

We added 849 TWh of generation overall in 2025, an increase of 4.5%, but GHG emitting (ie fossil fuel) generation shrank by 0.2%. Clean energy covered the gap and then some.

🌎

Great blog post from Terry Godier about the unpredictable nature of the App Store:

On the web, if I build something that works within the standards, it works. Whether people use it is up to them. On iOS, there is another question entirely: whether Apple decides it should exist.

Wavelength 2.0 for iOS has now been waiting for review at Apple for 6 days… I just have a feeling they are trying to figure out if they can force me to use in-app purchase somehow. Google approved it in a day.

Spent a little time this evening adding another database backup location. My primary database server has been so reliable, but eventually I know my luck will run out.

Mark Gurman reports on OpenAI’s upcoming device:

The product — essentially a smart speaker without a display — will be shaped like a doughnut that’s roughly the size of a hockey puck […] The battery-powered item will be designed to work in different positions — in a user’s hand, say, or placed on a nightstand or kitchen counter.

Can’t wait to see this. 🍩

I’ve switched Micro.blog’s Standard.site content format to the Markpub.at lexicon. It includes just Markdown, not HTML, but should be compatible with other AT Proto apps now.

Alan Jacobs blogged about the Demis Hassabis quote I wrote about:

The Big Tech companies have been so indifferent, or even hostile, to human well-being for so many years now that their promises are worth absolutely zero.

I feel the same way about much of big tech — especially Meta, TikTok, and to an extent Google, Amazon — but I sort of compartmentalize Demis (and some others) as having their own principles. I do think that a lot of the distrust in AI is because big tech burned all the goodwill, though. See also: Meta glasses, privacy, etc.

This blog post from both Sundar Pichai and Demis Hassabis has the unfortunate title “The next chapter of our AI momentum”, but it does contain some interesting perspectives. Demis will be spending more time with Isomorphic: As you’ve heard me say many times, I’ve always bel...