FeedCity

Some interesting data here in the MIT Technology Review about energy use for AI data centers:

Electricity demand is on the rise from a whole host of sources: Electric vehicles, air-conditioning, and appliances will each drive more electricity demand than data centers between now and the end of the decade. In total, data centers make up a little over 8% of electricity demand expected between now and 2030.

There is so much noise around AI that it’s increasingly difficult to tell what is misinformation or just outdated.

Dave Winer has more thoughts on the “Twitterlike is a bad shape” post:

Each decision we make in developing our means of discourse shapes the discourse. And with the character limit and the inability to edit, and the incentives are all wrong (I can tap into your follower flow without your permision just by posting a reply) and makes almost all discourse spam or abusive or both. I’m planning a different structure for discourse in the World of WordLand.

I’m not a Gmail user or Notion user, but gotta say the UI and interactions in Notion Mail look quite good. I’ve watched a few videos for inspiration.

This is a great post outlining many of the problems with Twitter-inspired social networks: Twitter and its imitators have adopted a structural design that is fundamentally bad for people. This isn’t just a matter of who’s in charge; it’s a problem with the thing itself. I’...

Parker Ortolani blogging about whatever new device Jony Ive is working on and its potential as part of OpenAI:

OpenAI has been spitting out incredible new products at a ridiculously fast pace over the past several months and I do not see Sam Altman wasting anyone’s time. The fact that he wants to pull the project into OpenAI says as much. That suggests it might end up being close to a new kind of phone—perhaps familiar in shape, but powered by something so fundamentally different.

I’m following a few Bluesky custom feeds, but I hadn’t paid close attention to Graze until today. I wonder how users will react to seeing ads? It’s an interesting approach because the money here goes mostly to feed creators. Lots of new questions about who should monetize the network.

Inspired by this post from John Gruber about ChatGPT’s memory, I also asked it to “describe me based on all our chats”. Here’s the response: You’re a deeply thoughtful, independent-minded developer and writer who cares about doing things the right way—even if it’s harder. Y...

Great post from Ben Werdmuller about the future of Bluesky. Many people can’t get past comparing the technical differences of ATProto and ActivityPub. Surprise, they’re not the same thing. They have different goals. Ben’s post skips that and focuses on how the business fits with an open protocol.

I’ve been using top for what, 30 years? But honestly my eyes still sometimes glaze over. Realized I can keep a ChatGPT log running and just paste in top results and it can tell me how the utilization is going, if it’s better, worse, where to look for problems.

This week is mostly about bug fixes and performance for me. Got the new Mac app update out and lots of server work. But got a preview of something @vincent has been cooking up and it’s going to be so nice. Just needs a few more days to fully bake.

Another big update to Micro Social:

Release version on V1.7 pushed to TestFlight.

• Support for drafts
• Redesigned posting & editing screen
• Support for cross posting options
• Option to open links in external browser
• Location default map provider and opening app

Micro Social https://microsocial.micro.blog/2025/04/16/release-version-on-v-pushed.html

Worked a little on archiving all the Core Intuition episodes in one place. We’ve used a few hosts over the years — DreamHost, S3, Libsyn — and things are bound to break eventually if all 600+ episodes aren’t together.

Gutter.

Upcoming video social app Neptune will allow hiding follower and like counts:

A key distinguishing feature of Neptune is that it lets creators hide their total followers and likes. This “ghost metrics” feature is optional, however, and is designed to help users avoid the pressures associated with follower count, yet still caters to creators who may want to showcase their metrics.

Good. Might as well go all the way and hide counts by default.

TechCrunch: OpenAI ships GPT-4.1 without a safety report. I don’t want to overreact to this, but as an OpenAI customer it is a little concerning. System cards are fascinating and even if they don’t paint a perfect picture, the transparency is good.

OpenAI working on a social app? From The Verge:

Entering the social media market also puts OpenAI on more of a collision course with Meta, which we’re told is planning to add a social feed to its coming standalone app for its AI assistant. When reports of Meta building a rival to the ChatGPT app first surfaced a couple of months ago, Altman shot back on X again by saying, “ok fine maybe we’ll do a social app.”

Stay in your lane, OpenAI! 🤪 But I think OpenAI and Sam Altman work on a lot of different things, so who knows whether a social app would actually ship.

Meta is a problematic business and more people should move to open platforms, but I have to agree with Ben Thompson’s take on the trial. It’s too late and too complicated to try to unwind the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions:

…both of those businesses were what they were in 2020 because of the investments that Facebook made in the intervening years; I think it is just fundamentally wrong to be re-litigating regulatory decisions of this nature years after the fact — and that certainly applies to 2025.

My last post to Instagram was 2017. My photos are now on my own blog where they belong.

I like the attempt at transparency in this statement on AI from Revenant, an animation and effects studio in Scotland, via Cartoon Brew. They’ll use AI for rapid prototypes and streamlining workflows, but:

…we’re also clear on what we don’t use it for — we don’t use AI to shortcut the creative process, we don’t lift style or work unethically, and we always put human creativity first

AI 2027 is a good read. Both endings seem wildly unrealistic, but as a warning it did make me think. So it worked. Just seems greatly accelerated beyond a few years from now.

Thinking about the Tesla Superchargers that have been torched recently… Anyone who uses violence or property destruction to further their cause is actually undermining it. We’ve gotta be better than that.

Protests like the marches a couple weeks ago are the model. Peaceful, legal, effective.

Ran a few tests with the new GPT-4.1 family of models. I think I’ll go 4o → 4.1 for photo keywords and accessibility text, but maybe not immediately. The old pricing and capabilities are still really good. Currently using a mix of 4o, 4o-mini, and 4o-transcribe.

Over the weekend I got to ride in a Waymo for the first time, in Phoenix. See @cheesemaker’s perspective in this video. It’s a surprisingly smooth, nice ride. It drives as good or better than an average human driver. I was expecting to be nervous but after about 30 seconds it feels normal.

I don’t have any expectations for the FTC vs. Meta trial starting today. It seems wild and unlikely that Meta would ever have to spin out Instagram a decade after acquisition. Feels too late, too closely tied up in the Meta empire.

New Mac app for Micro.blog is out today with a couple improvements, including a little interface for editing the auto-generated accessibility text for uploaded photos. Here’s a screenshot:

There’s a pretty significant difference between good AI models and great ones. I sometimes think about how I could integrate local models directly into the Micro.blog apps, but I wouldn’t want it to be worse than using (for example) OpenAI. How many of my users really have a Mac with 24+ GB of RAM?

Dave Winer writes a longer blog post about inbound RSS. The idea is let’s have more systems able to both generate RSS feeds and read them in automatically. If you have that complete loop for posts, you don’t need much else to have a social platform.

Apparently there will be big updates to the design in the next iOS and iPadOS, but I assume it will be mostly superficial. I’d like to see a rethink of text selection and editing. It’s still too finicky without a keyboard and mouse.

Rob Fahrni blogs more thoughts on Dave Winer’s call for inbound RSS:

The problem is the platform folks tend to say “use our API.” Which makes sense, but most API’s are painful in some way because of authentication or some hoop you have to go through. If the platform natively supported inbound RSS it would greatly simplify the developer and user experience.

Micro.blog was designed around inbound RSS. We had that before we had blog hosting. It’s still a unique architecture that I haven’t seen any other platforms replicate.

Back in Austin, down at St. Edward’s for Staple! Amazing that the first show was 20 years ago. Got to meet Kazu Kibuishi and pick up the final Amulet book.

Updated my NBA arenas web page for the game last night in Phoenix. A few good moments in the game but Spurs lost badly, missing too many players even beyond Wemby.