Listening to Decoder with Notion CEO Ivan Zhao. Stunning to me that Notion has 900+ employees. I can’t even imagine what I would do that many people. Wouldn’t mind 9 employees for Micro.blog, though.

Kev Quirk has gone back and forth between Micro.blog and Mastodon, now back on Micro.blog. It really can’t be overstated how great it is to move followers between platforms. One of the most important features of the fediverse.

Parker Ortolani blogs some initial thoughts about GPT-5:

I’ve been saying for about a year now that I believe the future of computing is software on demand. GPT-5 might just have made that a reality. It’s certainly at least the first glance at a future where that’s the case.

I’m not completely bought into this vision, where apps and UIs can be adapted on the fly, but I wouldn’t rule it out either. The screenshots from Parker are super impressive.

Mark Gurman reporting at Bloomberg on Apple getting App Intents ready for the new Siri: The plan now is to ship the feature alongside a broader Siri infrastructure overhaul in the spring and market it heavily. But there’s some concern inside the company, I’m told. Engineers...

Thinking about how I use AI for coding, I prefer to automate a lot of the JavaScript work, more than HTML or CSS. Feels right to have as much control over anything that touches the design. It’s hard to imagine a world where I’m not going to want to tweak the UI.

This is fun: The Bluesky Dictionary, tracking when all the words in the English dictionary have been mentioned in a Bluesky post. Currently about halfway there.

Meandering research for something new led me to Bashō, and this form of poetry I had never heard of before:

Around 1682, Bashō began the months-long journeys on foot that would become the material for a new poetic form he created, called haibun. Haibun is a hybrid form alternating fragments of prose and haiku to trace a journey. Haibun imagery follows two paths: the external images observed en route, and the internal images that move through the traveler’s mind during the journey.

“I think the most powerful thing that the new Alexa+ has done for me is it has made me forgive Apple for not shipping anything with the new Siri.” — Casey Newton on Hard Fork

Find My has always been too slow for me. It feels like Apple sometimes caches a user’s last location on their servers, but either for not very long or just infrequently. So you fire up the app, and it appears to ping each phone to get the latest location. Gotta be a better way that is still private.

Updated to Tahoe beta 5. No problems, pretty much the same for me as beta 4. I don’t actually use many of Apple’s built-in apps, so until more third-party apps are updated for Liquid Glass, it’s not a very jarring upgrade. I use Xcode, Terminal, Photos, and then all other Apple apps only rarely.

This interview of Sam Altman by Cleo Abram is excellent. I know there are some Sam haters out there. I received some shit for my blog post about him. But there are deep questions here about the future, some interesting speculation, and figuring out how to anticipate potential future harm too.

Just noticed this new Micro.blog theme: Bothy. Looks good!

One of those mornings. Working from the hospital lobby, with the GPT-5 announcement video on in the background but I forgot my headphones at home, so just glancing at the subtitles every once in a while. Please see: Micro.blog free for nurses. Also just deployed a cross-posting checkbox fix.

Added a new reading goals bar to the top of Bookshelves in the Mac app. Love the way it turned out, with little progress indicators for the goal progress. Here’s a video:

Dia adds $20/month subscription, with plans for other tiers later. I like Dia even without the AI features. Most people are not going to pay for either ChatGPT or Claude and a web browser. Wishing them luck because it is a nice browser.

Odd to see a Tim Hortons in Texas. ☕️

Feels important to mark today’s gift from Apple to Trump. Tim Cook continues to hurt his legacy, in almost an Elon Musk-like way, between the direction of the App Store and dealing with Trump. Just sad. He was the right person to lead Apple for a time. I still think peak Apple was a year or two ago.

Good post from A New Social about the difference between bridging and cross-posting. The illustrations really help too.

This is how I think about the UK’s Online Safety Act, and similar laws in Texas that introduce new rules for checking a website visitor’s age before showing adult content. Most people agree that it’s reasonable for someone working behind the counter at an old-fashioned adult...

Speaking of age-gating, I filled out Apple’s new age questionnaire for apps last week. Micro.blog’s apps are 16+. I think by design our platform is better protected than many in exposing harmful content, but to be safe for kids requires much more work with automated tools and a staff of curators.

Ghost 6.0 shipped this week with ActivityPub support, a major advancement for the popular blogging and email newsletter app. You can now follow Ghost blogs from the fediverse, bringing Ghost more in line with ActivityPub-based functionality in Micro.blog, WordPress, and Writ...

Nick Heer blogging about the Ghost 6.0 release:

If Ghost added MarsEdit support, I would be awful tempted to switch from WordPress.

Probably not going to happen. People have asked for it. Ghost has oddly never cared about open APIs until recently, with ActivityPub, and even that was years after everyone else added support for it.

If you want the most support for lots of APIs and publishing from different apps, there are only two suitable platforms: WordPress and Micro.blog.

This is a helpful table from Molly White, breaking down the costs for hosting a newsletter with Ghost, Substack, and other popular platforms. I had missed in the initial Ghost 6.0 announcement that in addition to the price increase, paid newsletters required at a minimum the $29/month plan.

Sam Altman posting about the release in a Twitter / X post: We believe in individual empowerment. Although we believe most people will want to use a convenient service like ChatGPT, people should be able to directly control and modify their own AI when they need to, and the...

Shipped a couple new things this morning: Micro.blog for iOS bug fixes, and a slight redesign to how the automatic accessibility description works when adding a photo on the web. Much smoother workflow.

Learned on Hard Fork’s interview with Matthew Prince that Cloudflare may take a 20-30% cut when creating their marketplace between websites and AI crawlers. This supports the concerns I raised in a blog post last month.

Dave Rupert blogs about the difference between Alamo Drafthouse and all other movie theaters:

The best place to see movies in Austin is at the Alamo Drafthouse. If you’ve never been to an Alamo, I’m sorry. It’s a movie theater for people who love movies by people who love movies.

I think the last time we went to a non-Alamo was for Oppenheimer in IMAX. Great screen, great movie. Not a good theater experience.

Neat story about Patrick Schlott, an engineer who repurposed old pay phones for people to make calls where cell coverage is poor:

Schlott has taken old pay phones, modified them to make free calls, and set them up in three different towns across the county. He buys the phones secondhand from sites like eBay and Craigslist and restores them in his home workshop.

I’d love to hear more about the technical bits behind this.

Parker Ortolani blogs about the new Ollama app that provides a chat window for the first time, making local models easy to use:

Anyone that has used the official ChatGPT Mac app will feel right at home, but they will quickly notice that the model names are quite different. The app makes it easy to install various versions of Gemma 3, Deepseek R1, and Qwen 3. Instead of having to use a command line for installation, you can simply type a prompt, select a model, and it will download it for you.

Rumors point to OpenAI shipping something this week. I’m going to guess the open weights model, with GPT-5 a little further off, but who knows. Say what you want about their leadership, but that company knows how to ship.