Thinking about the new Mastodon collections, it reminded me that we have blogrolls on Micro.blog that don’t get enough attention. Today I improved a few things with adding blog recommendations, including a search across other platforms if you don’t have the URL for someone handy.

A rare selfie for the blog… Enjoying some time with family in Rosemary Beach, Florida. Found this Eadweard Muybridge shirt randomly last month at a Goodwill and had to get it.

Flowers growing through the fence.

Apple opens up app distribution for Brazil:

Beginning with iOS 26.5, developers can distribute apps on alternative app marketplaces, operate alternative app marketplaces, process app payments for digital goods and services outside of Apple In-App Purchase in iOS, and more.

So we’ve got the EU, Japan, Brazil, and partially South Korea. Slow progress, but still progress.

I’m curious what model Codex cloud (that can automatically check GitHub PRs) is using. It often catches bugs that regular GPT-5.5 misses. Perhaps just a different, more comprehensive prompt.

AI researches are in such demand, they shuffle between companies often, and it’s hard to tell which hires are meaningful. Anthropic likes to say that none of their founders have left. Now Noam Shazeer is leaving Google for OpenAI. He was the co-author of the transformer architecture. A big deal.

Josh Baer has died in a plane crash. Tragic. He founded Capital Factory and was a huge part of the Austin startup scene. Thinking of his family and friends, and so many people whose lives he must’ve impacted. Rest in peace.

Mastodon 4.6 is out with featured user collections, similar to Bluesky starter packs. I’m exploring the best way to support this in Micro.blog. The API is similar to quote posts in how it’s built around opting in, so there’s more chatter between servers via ActivityPub.

The new Google Home Speaker looks pretty good, but I don’t think I’m bought in enough to the Google ecosystem for it to be for me. Eventually someone is going to nail the voice assistant speaker. Not sure Alexa+ is it either.

Thanks to Jim Krenz for the kind words in this blog post. I never prompt for app ratings or reviews, but I do love seeing posts like this. I’m always encouraged to keep going. Micro.blog is the best today that it has ever been.

Details still coming out about the Fable shutdown… It’s more nuanced than I was expecting. From the Washington Post:

Senior officials began to consider using export controls to claw back the technology after the company did not identify the new recipients for days.

When Anthropic finally turned over the names, the administration discovered that one recipient was a South Korean telecommunications company the administration suspected of having ties to China, the officials said.

Anthropic quickly revoked the firm’s access to Mythos…

Seems in large part a breakdown in communication.

The problem with stats is you start obsessing over them and get distracted. This is why I don’t even look at website analytics or referrers anymore. But now that we have a little more data on RAM for Mac customers, it is interesting… 56% at 24 GB or more.

This is just people who have already updated to Micro.blog 4.0.

Not sure what to make of Snap’s new Specs. First impression is that they sit in between Meta’s Display glasses and the Vision Pro, both technically and because of the $2200 price. So many young people use Snapchat, wouldn’t a cheaper / less capable / more fun product make sense?

Stephen Hackett has a rundown of some of the xAI data center news:

SpaceX and the NAACP are in a legal battle over the use of turbines in Southaven, Mississippi for powering the Colossus II data center in Memphis. This week, the Department of Justice got involved…

DOJ says Grok, but Anthropic is also now using Colossus II.

I’m still slowly getting over the Spurs losing in the finals. What an amazing season and playoff run that was. 82 games is hard, no guarantee a team can get back there, but can’t wait to see what this team does next year. 🏀

The valuation of SpaceX is wild. When it comes back down to earth, what impact will it have on the market? I don’t worry too much about an AI bubble, but I do worry about the market imploding because so much of the S&P 500 is concentrated in a small number of tech companies.

Finally watched Hoppers last night. Really fun. Used to be that I would see every animated feature opening weekend… So many movies now and it’s harder to keep up. 🪵

Simon Willison blogged more on the Fable shutdown drama:

This whole situation is such a mess. Non-technical decision-makers have been hearing that models that can “craft cyber attacks” are uniquely dangerous for months. Now they look ready to ban any model that can help us secure our code.

Anthropic spent months telling everyone that their model is dangerous. Now they’re annoyed that we believed them. Maybe this is an argument for open weights. Less centralized control, more transparent development.

Several months ago I blogged that we wanted to have more integration with WordPress and Ghost in Micro.blog. I’ve now rolled out the first part of that, with an option to add a WordPress blog to Micro.blog’s web interface. New posts and edits sync back and forth between Micr...

The first Day One journal turned out so well that I ordered another one. They make it so easy.

Brent Simmons blogs about what he’s been up to with NetNewsWire over the last year. I also created a PR for Inkwell sync in NNW, but the work stalled because I wasn’t confident enough in the codebase to definitely say it’s ready to ship. Need to dust that off and try to get it into an update.

Animated feature The Violinist looks special. A couple moments in the trailer reminded me a bit of Grave of the Fireflies, although on balance it probably doesn’t go that far into tragedy. Hopefully gets an American release.

Dan Provost blogs about launching a custom guitar company. Looks really nice. The best products make me wish I was into the thing being made.

My thinking on Anthropic has been shaped most by Ben Thompson and Peter Steinberger. Peter created OpenClaw so is affected by closing models to third-party apps. Ben has an article today after the Fable fallout:

…given that they think only they should be developing leading edge AI, they by extension think that only they should have final say over AI generally. When you further combine this realization with the company’s pronouncements about AI’s ability to conduct all economic activity, you realize that Anthropic’s leadership effectively wants to have power over everything and everyone.

I like this analogy from Alice Bartlett’s blog:

I think with AI you’ve got to be building the software equivalent of escalators if you’re going to do it for prod. That way if the AI goes away you still have stairs, unless you’ve gotten too out of shape to walk up them.

The Guardian reports on an upcoming social media ban for teens in the UK:

Keir Starmer is to ban under-16s from major social media apps such as TikTok, Instagram and X in sweeping restrictions described as “Australia plus”, the Guardian understands.

Eventually we’re going to need to figure out legislation that is a little more narrowly focused than this. But for now I’m fine with it.

I enjoyed this recent Q&A with Brandon Sanderson from London. But also, do I actually want the Mistborn movie? As much as I loved the Lord of the Rings movies, part of me wishes I had never seen them. Each viewing erases a bit of how I imagined the world and characters.

Satya Nadella writes on his blog for the first time in a while, about how companies will evolve with AI:

I believe human agency will be the driver of token capital growth. Humans will set ambitious goals, connect dots across domains, build relationships, and recognize patterns that matter most. Without human direction, you have compute running in circles.

Added a new movies feature that people have been asking for. When blogging about a movie or TV show from Micro.blog, it can now include a little movie poster on your blog post. There’s a preference under Movies → Settings on the web. Similar to what we have for books.

Here’s a screenshot.

Yesterday David Sacks had a long post on X with the administration’s side of the story on the Fable ban:

The Admin did this reluctantly. It’s been very surprised that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue). Anthropic’s reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research community.

He says it’s not because of previous disagreements with the Department of Defense. Maybe, but surely the mistrust between everyone does influence these decisions.