Coffee Greeks in Bastrop. ☕️

Good things happen in bookstores. Painted Porch in Bastrop. 📚

Rolled out some random little UI improvements this weekend. This is my favorite, including photo thumbnails on the collections page.

Dave Winer:

How can you tell you’re working on the web? When you do something new and innovative you help your competitors‘ users without forcing them to use your product.

When I linked to the letter about open weights yesterday, I mistakenly thought it was written primarily by Nvidia. It has since been co-signed by Microsoft, OpenAI, Mozilla, and others.

Looks like Anthropic will skip it. See also, my blog post from April: OpenAI got its name right.

I’m going to roll out a major update to Micro.blog Studio’s video and podcast hosting on Monday. Video uploads will automatically extract the audio and serve as a separate MP3 in the podcast feed, with support for alternateEnclosure tags. Finally. Really happy with how this has come together.

After a couple weeks, realizing that GPT-5.6 Sol extra high is overkill for almost everything I do. Burning the GPUs for little benefit. My default is now regular high and I think it’s a tiny bit faster. Always with /fast mode enabled too.

Finished reading: The Crown Tower by Michael J. Sullivan. Listened to the dramatized version with voice actors and sound effects. 📚

One minute I’m writing code, then working on a blog post, and then the next thing I know I’ve downloaded the Rushmore screenplay to check something. I’m all over the place today.

A letter from NVIDIA about open weight models:

Open weights let every organization match the right model to the right job at the right cost, reserving frontier-scale capability for genuine frontier problems and running efficient, specialized models everywhere else.

Jensen Huang had avoided social media until today, when he posted to X for the first time to share this. Hmm.

Substack tries to be too clever with its dickovers and even basic HTML and images. It means that a blog on Substack is unlikely to be indexed properly by the Wayback Machine. A real problem considering how much writing is on Substack.

Well, well, well… LeBron James will finish his career with the 76ers. This is going to be fun. 🏀

Resubmitted my request to Google to approve us for YouTube upload. It has been rejected twice already, who knows why. I wrote the code almost a year ago, so very disappointing that customers can’t use it.

Good thoughts by Dustin Bluck about the decline of indie podcast apps. While I was reading, I kept thinking “we need to do video!” and then I got to that part:

Video podcasts should be embraced yesterday. There’s absolutely nothing about RSS that demands it be audio-only. Podcasts have never even been audio-only. There’s at least some evidence that video time is replacing audio. This is only going to get worse.

Grain.social is a photo social network built on the AT Protocol. Today I’ve added following users and cross-posting from your blog to Grain. When you follow a Bluesky user in Micro.blog by searching for their handle, like username.bsky.social, we now aggregate both their Blu...

John Gruber blogging about why there’s no way to disable Apple ads:

Apple doesn’t offer ad-free tiers for the App Store or (soon) Apple Maps because, I think, they can’t bring themselves to admit that by adding ads to these services they have made them worse.

Also, me in 2010: I hope iAd fails.

A few random phrases that are currently annoying me: “step change”, “hill climbing”, “first principles”. I can’t even really pinpoint why.

I don’t like Meta, and as a Spurs fan I don’t like that they included a Knicks celebration in this… 🙂 But the ad is pretty good.

Let’s consider where the open web has the greatest opportunity over the next decade, starting with these rough numbers: Blogs: 600 million total blogs X: 550 million monthly users Threads: 500 million monthly users Bluesky: 44 million total users Mastodon: 10 million t...

Inspired by this blog post from Nick Heer, I took a closer look at Grain and also Flashes. I’ve prototyped support for Grain in Micro.blog and will ship it today. Flashes mostly piggybacks on existing Bluesky lexicon, so doesn’t really need special support from what I can tell.

Had fun experimenting with some new integration for RSS.chat today, to roll out sometime this week. Give me a new feed or API and I’ll happily start writing code.

Big update to MicroSphere, a third-party iOS app for Micro.blog. Its bookmarks feature can now track read or unread status. So cool to tap around in new apps like this and see a different take on the UI.

Dan Moren reviews the Xteink X3 at Six Colors:

…it’s well positioned as an impulse buy. And while I don’t want to dissuade you, I have to note the biggest caveat of all: the world.

Amazon still dominates e-books too much. If Kindle was DRM-free, I would’ve ordered an X3 already.

Ben Thompson today, writing about the OpenAI security incident and more:

The fact that models do what humans say is cold comfort if the models are in the hands of bad actors. That, though, simply emphasizes the point that the best defense against powerful models is equipping defenders with powerful models of their own.

There may need to be multiple tiers of model access. ChatGPT and Claude should be well-aligned with many guardrails to prevent casual, mainstream users from getting led astray. But powerful models need to exist too, for researchers and security experts.

Trying to find the humor in people lecturing me about X, as if I don’t know after joining Twitter 20 years ago and working directly with all the major Twitter client app developers whose products were destroyed… But in fairness, my about page also glossed over this. I’ve added an extra sentence to it that helps:

But there were frustrations with Twitter too, a period that is documented at length in my book Indie Microblogging. I quit Twitter in 2012 as a statement of principle against closed, developer-hostile platforms.

When Bluesky launched, I loved the domain names for usernames and the PDS approach, but I don’t think I fully appreciated storage and lexicons until there were more different platforms using it. Spent a lot of time today thinking about how Micro.blog could better interoperate with all of this.

I don’t need any new Slack-like things, but Buzz is actually pretty interesting. It’s built on a Nostr relay and has a whole page about domain names and identity:

myproject.com is your workspace. Not a GitHub org page that happens to have your name on it. Not a Discord server that Discord could delete tomorrow. Your domain. Your relay. One thing.

I’m getting a little maybe written by AI vibe from some of the docs… But regardless, it makes a good (if verbose) case for the architecture.

Pckt, a blogging app built on top of AT Proto, has added notes. Notes are like microblog posts or blog comments, but with their own lexicon outside of the normal Bluesky namespace:

Think quick thoughts, or live blogging, or small updates throughout your day. Notes can be shared, quoted, or re-blogged, and they can either stand on their own or become part of the conversation around a longer blog post.

Timely with some of my own posts, Firefox posted on X for the first time since Jan 2025:

We took time off of X, but we’re back. The internet is changing again, so we’re here as an independent voice for our users and the open internet.

Mozilla never stopped posting on their own separate account. I feel like “the internet is changing again” could use a link to a longer blog post. I assume that’s partly about AI, and most AI people are still only on X.

Nice surprise today to see a pair of new Stormlight novellas, outlined by Brandon Sanderson and then written by his pals. From the preface:

A mini-novel about Jasnah surviving in Shadesmar while everyone tried to figure out what was going on with Szeth and the Ghostbloods in the Physical Realm. I eventually decided that the novel worked better without Jasnah distracting us, as I wanted Shadesmar to be a big part of Oathbringer—and it would be better reserved for there.

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