“I don’t think about you at all.” — Don Draper

If only it were that easy. Over the last year I’ve been reflecting on why negative, overly-personal complaints have affected me so much. I think it’s two things:

• I have never needed to grow thick skin. Over a 30+ year career, I’ve been lucky to get along with just about everyone I’ve worked with. I’ve also made a lot of friends in the Mac, iOS, and IndieWeb communities. Can’t really think of anyone being seriously upset with me before.
• I tend to fixate on things. So if I’m worried about something, I won’t be able to shake it for days or weeks. Negativity doesn’t get brushed off. It lingers for a long time and shapes my thinking on new situations I encounter.

Both of these get better with time. But neither is completely fixable without becoming a different person.

Thinking about the new debate on AI model distillation, I re-read my long-ish post from two years ago about fair use. There was a lot of AI training backlash at the time. I still like the post. Fair use and open web principles are intertwined.

OpenAI continues to fix design issues with ChatGPT for Mac. It almost works the way I want if you click on the ChatGPT mode and then choose “…” → “Organize sidebar” → “In one list” so the coding projects don’t get in the way.

This week we’ve started adding a special discovery interface for Bluesky starter packs. It’s live now on the web. The way I’m thinking about it: we’ll feature a selection of starter packs that change over time, but we also index many other starter packs you can search for. This will expand. 🦋

Last week as I was reevaluating the X API, I said I’d pause for a week. I’m now going to hold it indefinitely. It’s a distraction we don’t need, and in my attempt to make it easy to use, I didn’t appreciate how confusing the money part of this would be.

As I said in a follow-up post:

The mission has never changed: post short posts (and everything else!) to your own blog, which makes the web better, and also opens opportunities for smaller, safer communities.

I still believe in POSSE. It also inspired this post over the weekend about politics and open web principles.

Another thought about Rocky: it’s a great movie, and I think its Oscar is defensible, but All the President’s Men is really something special. I’ve watched it dozens of times. If the Academy were to redo the 1977 vote today, I wonder if they’d pick Rocky again.

Watched: Rocky. About 15 minutes into “rewatching” Rocky, I realized… I’ve never actually seen this movie. Looking forward to I Play Rocky too. 🍿

It’s a little mesmerizing watching Waymo track all the cars around an intersection.

Federico Viticci blogs in detail about Open Minis. Looks like a really impressive app that combines frontier models with a Linux shell on iOS so it can run like an agent with tools. Sort of like putting a mini OS inside a sandbox, and it can still reach out with local APIs when it needs data.

Tennessee vs. Meta trial starts this week:

The state alleges founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was repeatedly ​warned by some Meta employees about research that found a negative impact on teens, but declined to fund efforts to minimize those harms and made misleading ​public statements about the amount of harmful content on the platforms.

There’s really no fixing Meta’s business model. It is hard to take an ad-based business hell-bent on engagement and align it with users’ best interests.

Working on a new Bluesky starter pack discovery interface inside Micro.blog. It’s not comprehensive, but I think I will launch it soon as an experiment. Then later, need to figure out how to integrate it with blogrolls and (maybe) Mastodon collections.

I thought our Standard.site support was broken, but then remembered it only works when Micro.blog is configured to embed previews for links. Updated the help page of Bluesky technical bits to document this.

This morning while listening to random music on the Echo, I realized that OpenAI’s smart speaker is going to obviously need music too, even if it’s primarily a voice assistant. Maybe a partnership with Spotify.

John Gruber has a blog post covering a few angles of the Apple vs. OpenAI lawsuit, including some “What would Steve Jobs do?” questions. Really good post.

OpenAI has made some improvements to the ChatGPT + Codex mashup app, but it’s still not right. Here’s a mockup that I think fixes all of the problems. Three modes, uncluttered sidebar that works like the old app when needed.

Sometimes there’s a disconnect in the social web community between political values and open web principles. They are not the same thing. Politics can inspire us to build a better world. That’s certainly how I felt after the 2016 election, leading to the Micro.blog launch. B...

Hoping to finish reading a book or two this weekend. I probably need a short break from the internet too. Whew, it’s a lot sometimes.

Can’t decide about seeing The Odyssey this weekend at Alamo, or waiting for time to go to San Antonio for 70mm IMAX. Feel like spoilers don’t matter so we wait. Or maybe it’s just a movie and I’m seriously overthinking it. 🍿

I flipped through this book while at BookPeople the other day. Didn’t end up buying it but snapped a photo to remember. It brought back a lot of memories of going to Liberty Lunch. A special place and time in hindsight, simpler and uncorrupted. No phones, no cameras.

Love that Joanna Stern is still making these kind of videos now that she’s indie. Wearing cameras to train future robots feels demeaning and maybe not even useful.

Sharing this heads-up about downtime for Lillihub as it is migrated. If you haven’t checked out Lillihub before, it’s an alternative web interface to Micro.blog with a bunch of features. (Also look at the design of @heyloura’s blog!)

Working on an author screen in Epilogue. Our database of books is pretty cluttered, as you can see in this video, but overall I think this UI is going to work. I’ll ship it soon.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” — C.S. Lewis

I came across this quote recently, in a different context, and I keep getting drawn back to it. I think it captures something that I’ve tried to write about several times over the last year.

What do we do when we encounter someone who is so convinced of their own righteousness that they justify attacking people, even to the point of lying, painting a false picture of us and the people we work with? I honestly don’t know.

Recorded a short demo of the new book calendar interface in Micro.blog. I put the video on YouTube.

Still partly an experiment, especially the backgrounds, which I’ve already dialed back since the video. Also added a background images preference. Totally optional feature. Use if you like it!

The difference between “pretty good” transcription and “great” still matters a lot.

As an example, my daughter left me a voicemail today starting with, “Hi dad, this isn’t an emergency…” because she doesn’t want me to worry. Apple’s transcript: “Hi dad, this is an emergency.” Quite different!

Signed into Auphonic for the first time in a while. Nice minor UI cleanup here and there since I last used it. The best web apps just get a little bit better over time without dramatically changing everything.

There’s going to be a lot of work to do in this country after Trump is gone. We knew that in November 2024. But the long-term fallout from Iran is hard to predict. Potentially years or decades of backlash and terrorism. A costly blunder. 🇺🇸

I’m getting back to working on Ghost sync, similar to the WordPress support we added last month. The Ghost API is very different and there were a number of holes I had to fix in my first pass implementation.

The new ChatGPT for Mac (Codex) is updated about once a day, and each time I click the update button I expect them to have added a dedicated “Chat” section with a list of previous, searchable chats. But nope! Really hard to explain UI regression.

Governor Kathy Hochul has paused data center construction. Reporting from WXXI: The governor’s order follows a bill passed by the State Legislature last month, which also contains a one-year moratorium. Members of the governor’s team say that bill is complicated and will ta...