Ghost 6.0 has been released, adding ActivityPub. Big update. It’s interesting how Ghost now talks about Bluesky compatibility, which works via Bridgy Fed, but they don’t mention Bridgy Fed. This feels slightly wrong to me since I’ve spent so much time working on AT Protocol.

Finished reading: Empire of Storms by Sarah J. Maas. Apparently the thing to do is read this and the next book at the same time, but I have other things to read so just took this one straight through. Easily the best in the series so far, seemed much better structured. 📚

Really happy with the response to our new discount to make Micro.blog free for teachers and nurses. We’ve had some people take us up on the offer already.

Mark Gurman reports on a new team inside Apple developing a search engine and world knowledge model:

While still in early stages, the team is building what it calls an “answer engine” — a system capable of crawling the web to respond to general-knowledge questions. A standalone app is currently under exploration, alongside new back-end infrastructure meant to power search capabilities in future versions of Siri, Spotlight and Safari.

Catching up on some posts from FediCon, which was held over the last couple of days in Vancouver. @bmann.ca has his talk slides and notes online.

Reminder that we are improving things with Micro.blog all the time. You can see recent changes on news.micro.blog. If there’s a bug that needs attention, send us an email. The best way for us to prioritize what to work on is what we hear about.

Created a new plug-in “Photos with months” that adds some date grouping to the default Photos page. May need additional changes, because it will conflict with some other photos page plug-ins. You can see it on my photos page.

Seems like we got some breaking news out of Bloomberg’s reporting on the Apple internal meeting. Apple had tried to update Siri with both the existing commands plus LLM-based functionality as a hybrid system, but it didn’t work well. The new Siri will be unified under a single new architecture.

The new Naked Gun is hilarious. So many gags. Very much in the same spirit as the originals. 🍿

Released a new version of the Mac app this morning, fixing several problems with the accessibility description window. I like updating the ridiculously long help page because I think the release notes show a commitment to steady improvements going back 8 years. Maybe at year 10 it’ll be really good.

I don’t often share personal things about my family here on the blog, but I was reflecting on something last weekend that’s also relevant to Micro.blog. My mom has been in the hospital for a week and a half. I’ve been back and forth to the hospital every day to visit her. Mo...

That Epic vs. Google decision yesterday seems big. Google Play may become more open even than the EU’s App Store. Meanwhile, Apple continues to print money with a record quarter.

Laptop stickers.

OpenAI announcing a new data center in Norway:

The facility will run entirely on renewable power and is expected to incorporate closed-loop, direct-to-chip liquid cooling to ensure maximum cooling efficiency. Additionally, excess heat from the GPU systems will be made available to support low-carbon enterprises in the region.

I’d still like to know how much of Abilene’s data center will run on solar and wind. I assume a percentage, but not “entirely” like in Norway or they would’ve said so.

Looks like the time I spent integrating with ID.me’s API was wasted. Micro.blog is too small to get approved for production access. The open web is so ingrained in me that I see an OAuth API and assume I’ll be able to use it in some form.

Nick Heer: “The Cook era is now as long as the Jobs renaissance era.”

Now that my laptop is completely full of stickers, moving on to pins on my bag. Starting with just Mickey.

Just read my credit card number, expiration, and 3-digit code to someone over the telephone in a crowded coffee shop. YOLO! 🤪

This week we’re announcing an improvement to photo storage and photo scaling for Micro.blog Premium subscribers, our $10/month plan that also includes up to 5 blogs, email newsletters, bookmark archiving, and highlights. For years now, we’ve scaled photos down to about 1800x...

Google Zero is slightly misunderstood. The problem is not that Google is nefarious in no longer sending traffic to your website. (They probably don’t care very much one way or the other.) The real problem is you’ve depended on Google for your business. You’ve been obsessed w...

Good perspective from Om Malik on Mark Zuckerberg’s superintelligence post and similar past statements:

Most CEOs defend their existing moats. Zuckerberg systematically abandons them. He understands that Facebook’s real asset isn’t the blue app. Instead, it is the graph of human attention and relationships.

As I’ve written about before, Mark is pretty good at what he does, and it’s just a shame that he’s dedicated his company to ads, attention, and AI slop.

In Mark Zuckerberg’s post today about superintelligence, I assume we’re getting a glimpse of the pitch he used to hire AI researchers away from other companies:

We believe in putting this power in people’s hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives.

This is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output.

John Gruber blogging about the app Tea that is near the top of the App Store despite security problems:

I strongly suspect that, although Google hasn’t removed Tea from the Play Store, they’ve delisted it from discovery other than by searching for it by name or following a direct link to its listing. That both jibes with what I’m seeing on the Play Store top lists, and strikes me as a thoughtful balance between the responsibilities of an app store provider.

This is a great way to handle it if true. Developers (like users on social media) are not guaranteed amplification by an algorithm.

Lobby aquarium fish.

I got out of all stocks last year. If we had money to burn, I might invest in Figma. Seems like they’ve got things figured out. But also there’s too much hype around anything in the tech industry. Established companies will be fine. OpenAI will be fine. Everyone else, who knows. 💸

The Onion: Historians Confirm Lewis And Clark Set Out On Expedition To Justify Purchase Of Expensive Camping Equipment:

You can imagine how, if you had just blown the equivalent of $80,000 in today’s money on a keelboat you didn’t need, you too might feel stupid not taking it out on the river.

🤣

This special edition of Tigana looks beautiful. I can’t justify the price, but I would like to get a hardcover version one day, to go with my old paperback. It’s a favorite I haven’t read in forever.

I’ve been pulled in different directions lately and have a lot to catch up. But I did write some code today. Also working on something that uses ID.me, which I’ll hopefully announce tomorrow if they approve my OAuth access. Argh, gatekeepers!

Maybe it’s been too long since I’ve seen Downton Abbey, but I like The Gilded Age even more. Great balance between the different characters' stories and also the train business, which I love.

I’ll start with this quote from Mike Rockwell’s blog: I’ve been a happy Linode customer for years, but they experienced an outage Sunday morning that took my Cloudron server offline, impacting my Mastodon and Pixelfed instances. As of this writing they’re still offline and ...