A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about using AI for polish. The idea was to let AI help with taking care of lots of little details that can be tempting to skip in the rush to get a new feature out. Lately I’ve been thinking about another good use for AI. Not to finish a...

Big update today for Micro.blog folks who have multiple accounts. The iOS, Android, and Mac apps have long supported multiple accounts, but on the web you could only switch between separate blogs on the same account. Managing multiple accounts on the web was frustrating.

Now you’ll find a popover menu in the sidebar to add a new account and select between your accounts. Here’s a screenshot showing me signed into a couple of our official accounts in addition to my personal account:

And for all users, even if you only have a single Micro.blog account, we now have passkeys! This is the password-less standard for quickly signing in. No more waiting for a confirmation email from Micro.blog.

Tragic story in The New York Times of suicide and ChatGPT. This probably lines up with the “sycophantic” edition of 4o. As more people use chatbots as therapists, there are so many new potential problems. For minors perhaps there should be escalation to humans, even less privacy.

Guess I won’t be deploying this bug fix right away. 🙁 When deploying to the app servers, I roll each server out of the load balancer to avoid downtime. Can’t do that when Linode’s management interface and API are down.

Congrats to the Iconfactory on the Tot 2.0 release. Looks like a good update.

I haven’t forgotten about holding a small Micro.camp this year. The summer has been full of distractions. I think it’s important that we do an event each year, even if it has to be scaled down a little. It’s a time to mark the progress and hear from people.

Bounce from A New Social is now live. Another big step to account portability between platforms. The more tools like this we get, the more it encourages developers to support migration APIs.

With a new iOS beta dropping today, we’re nearing the end, and I’m still not sure it’s a good idea to update Micro.blog on day one. Liquid Glass introduces lots of weirdness with nav button sizes and tap areas. Not going to rush it.

In the 1990s, I had an internship at Apple here in Austin, in a building they were leasing off 183, just east of I-35. They’ve long since expanded to a new campus in northwest Austin, much fancier, reflecting what a massive company Apple has become. I still often drive by th...

The key to managing a large code base is extreme minimalism wherever possible. Less code. Simpler names for things. Fewer dependencies. It’s hard to convey with a list of rules, but I know it when I see an unmanageable, cluttered project.

Haven’t quite figured out the best UX for passkeys yet. I’ve been slow switching to them for my accounts, but now that it has been a couple years, hopefully the quirks have been worked out.

When I have a hard time finding a title for an essay, I usually pick the most boring, least clickbait-y title possible. I ran a title by ChatGPT and it said my title was bad for SEO and discoverability… That’s when I knew I had found it. 🤪

I dug into a little bit of pulse oximeter history. That to me was the major breakthrough, decades ago, so I’m still skeptical there’s enough innovation in Masimo’s new patent. Maybe all the legal fallout is karma for Steve Jobs’s “and boy have we patented it” bragging during the iPhone introduction.

Great profile of R. F. Kuang in The New Yorker:

I actually am afraid of being totally happy with my work, because, if you are perfectly satisfied with your abilities, there’s nowhere else to go.

Finished reading: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz. Cozy sci-fi! Several robots (and a human) open a noodle restaurant. 📚

It is common on Mastodon to append a bunch of hashtags to the end of a post. I’ve added a new feature in Micro.blog to help wrangle these. Here’s a screenshot from the Account page:

This doesn’t affect inline hashtags, only hashtags at the end if they’re in their own paragraph.

Mark Gurman with another new report about Apple’s effort to rebuild Siri:

The company is simultaneously developing two versions of the new Siri: one dubbed Linwood that is powered by its models and another code-named Glenwood that runs on outside technology.

Executives had long viewed Anthropic as the leading candidate for a partnership, but the financial terms demanded by that company led Apple to broaden the search and bring others into the mix.

Not the time to be cheap. Apple needs the best model and best strategy that fits their company, wherever that leads, however much it costs.

Picked up this little sticker at Muse Coffee Truck while out today. Feels good to get out after being mostly stuck at home sick all week. ☕️

Bluesky blogging about not allowing access in Mississippi:

We believe effective child safety policies should be carefully tailored to address real harms, without creating huge obstacles for smaller providers and resulting in negative consequences for free expression. That’s why until legal challenges to this law are resolved, we’ve made the difficult decision to block access from Mississippi IP addresses.

Just skimmed through Mississippi’s HB1126. It’s more sweeping than similar laws, and there’s no carve-out for small platforms. It’s going to cause more problems than it solves.

Trying out the new Mythos theme for Micro.blog. It’s really good!

I turned on Threads automatic cross-posting from Micro.blog today, just to test something from my account, then promptly forgot about it. Hadn’t posted in months until now. Maybe I’ll keep it on again for a little while before going back to blog + Bluesky only.

Finished reading: The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu. Very different than most modern fantasy, in pace and character viewpoints. Loved it. Truly epic. 📚

We got a nice rain this afternoon, the perfect test for the new gutters. Still landscaping and drainage to do, but this was a much-needed house upgrade.

The albums page on @birming’s photo blog is really nicely done. I’m assuming this uses separate Micro.blog pages and photo collections. Very cool because it gives the illusion of a photo albums feature that doesn’t really exist in the platform!

The term superintelligence has been bugging me. AGI hasn’t been achieved yet and some folks are already jumping ahead to AI smarter than humans? I prefer the idea of AI as a team of the most knowledgeable people in the world, each an expert in their field, working together to solve problems for you.

I’m not concerned about Bluesky’s terms of service — although I’m glad other people are concerned and checking it! — but I do love this sentence that Cory Doctorow wrote:

This is so pro-enshittificatory, it’s like a landing strip for the sole use of Enshittification Airlines, which can land a 747 full of enshittfying nonsense on Bluesky’s users every 10 minutes, around the clock, without worrying about any legal repercussions.

Great post from Kuba Suder about how all the Bluesky and AT Protocol pieces fit together.

Fascinating post by Mustafa Suleyman on the risks of achieving “seemingly conscious” AI, and how we must design systems to help real people, avoiding the illusion of consciousness:

A coherent and persistent memory, combined with a subjective experience, will give rise to a claim that an AI has a sense of itself. Going further, such a system could easily be trained to recognize itself in an image or video if it has a visual appearance. It will feel like it understands others through understanding itself. Say this is a system you have had for some time. How would it feel to delete it?

Skimming over the new Google products. I’m still not in the market for an expensive foldable phone, but I could be interested in a simpler design, without a front screen, more like a foldable iPad.

Continuing to feel better today, so pushed out an email newsletter improvement for Micro.blog Premium folks. I had mostly coded this a couple days ago, was waiting to make sure I could be around to test and monitor it.