FeedCity

Parker Ortolani blogging about the new ChatGPT feature to look at past conversations:

…it makes the tool dramatically more intelligent — and personal. By being able to reference things you have talked about before without hoping that the model would catch it or by manually teaching it, it feels more like talking with a person than ever before.

In all the talk of AI models and the technical bits, many people miss that ChatGPT is a success because it’s an actual product now. A competitor can’t “catch up” to ChatGPT unless they also build everything that OpenAI has added around the model.

Manu Moreale blogs about taking over blogroll.org and the new design. Love the colors.

Stephon Castle layup, Spurs at Suns. 🏀

Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix.

Rob Shearer wrote a detailed and fairly scathing critique of Mastodon. I don’t agree with everything in the post, but I do think he’s right about migration: One of the big selling points of Mastodon was that you can pick which instance your account lives on, but it is easy ...

Stephen Hackett commenting on a report in The York Times about Apple not allocating much of a budget to AI servers:

For a company that says it doesn’t like looking back at its own history, very often, Apple makes decisions like it’s the late 1990s and the company is on the verge of failure. That drives it to make incredible products, but it also means Apple can be incredibly stingy. To play in the AI race, you’ve got to be willing to spend piles and piles of cash.

Old train bridge next to new light rail bridge in Tempe.

Dave Winer has written up two improvements Bluesky can make to RSS feeds: including images and including embedded posts instead of the “contains quote post” message. The images are especially important and make the feeds really impractical to use right now because the data is just missing.

Finished reading: Dragonsteel Prime by Brandon Sanderson. I read the last several chapters on my flight. Fascinating to see such an early take on a few pieces that would later turn up in Way of Kings, and other draft ideas for the Cosmere. 📚

The difference between a junior developer and a senior developer isn’t actually about writing better code. It’s that for people with more experience, their gut feeling about how best to solve something is just correct more often. That’s it.

It wasn’t the Amtrak route I had planned for today, but guess this airport train will have to do. Hi Phoenix. 👋

The new park around the old Mueller tower. Walked by here today and hadn’t seen it since the area was under construction.

OpenAI version numbers continue to be hilarious. Looks like the actual release order will be: 3.5, 4.0, o1, o3, 4.5, 4.1. The joke’s on us though because the naming does make a certain amount of sense given the parallel development.

Found leaked technical diagrams of a new roller coaster at Disneyland. No, wait… That’s just the last 5 days of Apple stock. 🤪

For all the negative anecdotes in The Information story, it actually ends on a positive note about Craig Federighi:

Federighi, for one, often knows more technical details about software projects than the junior engineers working on them. Rockwell, who joined Apple in 2015, is seen within the company as a leader with vision, who can bring fresh thinking to projects while skillfully navigating the corporate culture.

AI is incredibly technical. Apple needs someone who actually understands it in charge. I like Craig’s chances for turning Siri around.

Wrapping up the next Micro.blog for Mac bug fix update today. Any bugs we’ve missed recently? Let me know and maybe they can get squeezed in. 🐛

I haven’t read the full report in The Information yet, but just the MacRumors summary is pretty detailed. One comment on this bit:

The indecision and repeated changes in direction reportedly frustrated engineers and prompted some members of staff to leave Apple.

I assume that some of the sources for the story were people who left Apple, so that might’ve slanted the reporting, but this underscores the serious lack of vision we’ve assumed for a year. Apple was fumbling around like AI was a minor optional feature, not the potentially disruptive new foundation for assistants it likely will be.

Was looking forward to a relaxing train trip to Phoenix tonight, with time to read and work, but finally had to bail on the plan. Currently a 10-hour delay after a freight train was blocking the track, plus other random Amtrak problems. I’ll have to start plotting some other trip in the future. 🚂

Waterloo Park. 🌳

Matt Haughey blogs about the uncertainty for small businesses and how bad things might get if the world loses trust in the US dollar:

Not only were the tariffs announced and rolled out haphazardly and far too quickly, but within a few days the tariff against China doubled again. This is no way to let US-based small businesses plan for anything, and what we have today is total chaos in the aftermath.

Matt Mullenweg blogs about the new AI-powered WordPress design builder:

The long-anticipated “Big Sky” AI site builder on WordPress.com went live today. It combines several models and can create logos, site designs, typography, color schemes, and content. It’s an entirely new way to interact with and edit a brand-new or existing WordPress site.

I went through their interface to get a sense of what they’re doing. The AI will create a basic design, then you can tweak the layout, colors, and fonts by clicking around. To actually make the blog live, you have to upgrade to a paid plan.

Jeremy Keith has a good collection of links and quotes about AI crawling. On this specific part of the commentary I continue to disagree, though: If you’re using the products powered by these attacks, you’re part of the problem. Don’t pretend it’s cute to ask ChatGPT for so...

As I hinted at the other day, I’m rolling out command-S in more places in Micro.blog. From the news blog today:

Updated new posts, editing, and notes to support command-S for saving. The convention in Micro.blog on the web will be command-return to save something and close the thing, and command-S to stay where you are if you don’t want to leave the page.

Micro.blog News https://news.micro.blog/2025/04/09/updated-new-posts-editing-and.html

Vincent’s also been working on some shortcut-related stuff that I can’t wait to share. It’s really nice.

Sigh. Amtrak really needs its own tracks:

Train 21 and Train 421 are currently stopped west of Longview (LVW) due to a rail partner’s disabled trainset blocking the tracks in the area. Due to an expected lengthy delay, Train 21 and Train 421 will reverse back to Longview (LVW) to await further updates.

🚂

Greg Storey blogging about how much we’ve divided ourselves and what we’ve lost:

When we don’t talk to each other, we stop trusting each other. When we stop trusting each other, we stop trusting anything —ballots, elections, basic facts. And when we lose trust, democracy doesn’t just wobble. It collapses.

Nice write-up over at TechCrunch of the new Tapestry 1.1:

…one of the larger challenges of multi-feed aggregation apps like Tapestry is that you’re often confronted with duplicates as other users cross-post their updates to multiple services like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Micro.blog. […] The latest Tapestry update is now able to automatically filter out these duplicates, even when the posts are not written exactly the same.

Seth Godin on his 10,000th blog post:

I’d write this blog even if no one read it, but that the fact that you do, that you subscribe to it and share it, that’s my fuel.

David Brooks in The Atlantic starts by echoing what I quoted of his last month, then moves on to history lesson and how we eventually rebuild after Trump. A long, good read:

Humility, prudence, and honesty are not just nice virtues to have—they are practical tools that produce good outcomes. When you replace them with greed, lust, hypocrisy, and dishonesty, terrible things happen.

And:

When the time comes to build a new paradigm, progressives talk about economic redistribution; conservatives talk about cultural and civic repair. History shows that you need both: Recovery from national crisis demands comprehensive reinvention at all levels of society.

Watched the first season of The Rehearsal and it blew my mind a little. Hilarious and insane. 📺

Great story about Bluesky and Jay Graber in The New Yorker. I love this bit:

Then, in December, 2019, she saw a tweet thread from Jack Dorsey about a decentralized social-media project he was launching—Bluesky. Graber told me that she felt a degree of so-called nominative determinism, pulled toward the project because it shared her name. “If fate doesn’t exist, then we must create it,” she said.