Tweaked a few things with the new “Archive with months” Micro.blog plug-in. Pretty happy with it. Might still integrate search as an option later.

ChatGPT agent looks impressive. I’m noticing a pattern when these kind of new tools come out, where initially I’m not sure what to do with them. This example from Federico Viticci is great, though: I asked ChatGPT agent to process hundreds of issues of MacStories Weekly on ...

Went to see Eddington today. Holy shit. It’s intense, somehow both unsatisfying and brilliant. Went in knowing next to nothing and left still unsure that enough time has passed since 2020 to fully appreciate it. 🍿

Finished the first pass at a new Micro.blog plug-in with the boring name “Archive with months”, which groups blog posts by year and month. It also has a setting to include the first photo thumbnail in a post if there is one. You can see this on my archive page.

I saw a Waymo with a human driver on 183 today, presumably testing for a new route. First time I’ve seen them on a highway. They expanded farther north in Austin last week too.

Ava blogs about what the IndieWeb might need right now, including some thoughts on social media and Mastodon:

…I personally don’t consider Mastodon instances to be included in the Indieweb; adjacent, for sure, as you have more control over your data in a way and escape big socials and can POSSE. But in the end, it will always remain a Twitter clone that still embodies the worst of social media and is not a personal website.

There are a lot of good thoughts in this post. And some overlap with the goals of Micro.blog too.

Waitress at Zach Scott was fantastic. What a perfect setting for it. In anticipation today we picked up Tiny Pies too.

Know your bananas. 🍌

The default Micro.blog archive page has become unmanageable for blogs like mine with a 20-year history. Experimenting with an update that groups by month and only shows one year at a time. You can see it here on my blog. Thinking of making this an optional plug-in.

I’ve been fine-tuning publishing performance again. Shaving off a second here or there. Some things including full rebuilds should be better now. More to do!

Nick Heer asking the right question about Apple suing Jon Prosser:

This multitrillion-dollar company was financially injured by a few YouTube videos showing the redesign of its operating system?

This lawsuit is clearly a threat to future leakers. Apple shouldn’t throw its weight around like this.

AI researchers are still mostly on Twitter / X, unfortunately. This thread from OpenAI’s Keren Gu shows the interesting balance between biological safety and not preventing actual biologists and chemists from getting work done. Good to err on the side of not helping people make weapons.

Just discovered a wrinkle with our setting to disable fediverse posting. If you @-mention someone in a blog post, Micro.blog sends a copy to that person, so your post will leak out to fediverse servers anyway. Not sure what to do about this.

Excited for Portland fans. Not enough players get to spend their whole career with the same team, or at least retire with it. From @cheesemaker:

There are so many terrible things going on in the world but for this one moment I am mainlining the pure joy knowing that Damian Lillard is once again a Portland Trail Blazer. 🏀

Disappointed to hear about The Late Show cancellation. I’ve been watching it (and Jimmy Kimmel) way more than I did a couple years ago. Humor can be a good way to cope with the news sometimes. 📺

I drove by this spot on Parmer Lane yesterday and was amazed. This corner used to be a gas station and McDonalds! They tore it down and now it’s a field of grass and wildflowers.

Posted a new Micro.blog for Mac with tweaks around copying links and HTML. This follows yesterday’s major release improving notes sync, search, and versioning.

I love working on the Mac app. But unless there are any bugs, I’m going to focus mostly on the core platform and mobile for now.

It took me a minute to realize “and Other Stuff” as a company name was a play on Nostr’s name. Also kind of fits the spirit of Obvious Corp from early Twitter days. They have quite a few specific goals.

🅖

Manu Moreale blogs about Apple products and the trend of distancing ourselves from problematic CEOs:

Do I need to check if the Suunto CEO is a piece of shit to make sure I can wear this watch on my wrist and still feel at peace with myself? Frankly, I think it’s an exhausting way to live a life, and I’d be better off focusing all those energies somewhere else, trying to make something good, something that has a positive impact on the people around me.

I’ve disabled ActivityPub federation for my blog posts again. Too much negativity on Mastodon. I have a lot going on and can’t deal with it. For the rest of the year, for external services just going to focus on Bluesky.

Listening to the new Revolution.Social podcast. First episode is Rabble talking to Jack Dorsey. Jack is a good example of what I was trying to say in my blog post yesterday about criticism. So much hate is directed at Jack. We can disagree with his decisions, but he’s principled and thoughtful.

I ran something through ChatGPT earlier and one if its bits of feedback was:

One small grammatical suggestion is to connect the final two sentences to improve flow…

The solution? Add an em dash, of course! 🙂 ChatGPT is nuts for em dashes. It uses them when a semicolon or period or anything else might be better. See also my post just last week.

At my mom’s house she has an old framed print of the poem Children Learn What They Live by Dorothy Nolte. There are variations of it, but the first line is essentially: If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn. I was staring at that and thinking of social med...

Big update to Micro.blog for Mac today if you use the notes feature. Everything is faster and more robust. I personally have probably a thousand notes, and it was a little flaky with so many notes before.

I’ve also added a “Versions…” option to the context menu. Micro.blog keeps a record of each edit to a note, so if you make a mistake you can go back to an older version. Now there’s an interface for browsing and restoring a previous copy of the note. (This interface will come to the web later. The third-party web client Lillihub already has something similar!)

Here’s a screenshot of the main interface. This is a test “Journal” notebook (you can have multiple notebooks) that also shows the new sharing URL pane.

Dave Winer:

We’re turning the clock back to move forward. Trying to undo the damage Twitter did to the web.

This is a theme I’ve tried to blog about too. We have to bring all the good ideas from the open web and the blogosphere forward, combined with the user experience lessons from social media.

In a difficult week with extended family health issues, I’m laughing to myself a little this morning because I ran into two extremely minor problems that are bugging me: forgot to get salsa for this breakfast taco, and left my headphones at home. Ah, to have insignificant gripes for one day is nice.

In related client API news, Dave Winer has also been hammering on this recently from his perspective working on WordLand and the long history of the MetaWeblog API:

But the web is what matters, not my product or yours. Even if your product is huge, it’s only part of the web. This is how we build, how we get back on track. Somehow we need to get a simple bridge that lets all blog content flow to Mastodon.

Lear year, I really wanted to see Mastodon adopt an open posting API. I even wrote a FEP to fix some limitations in how APIs were too hard-coded to Mastodon’s capabilities. It went nowhere.

Steve Bate has a long blog post about why ActivityPub’s client-to-server protocol has not been implemented:

Yet despite its promise, ActivityPub C2S has seen minimal real-world adoption. Most Fediverse platforms — including Mastodon, the dominant implementation — have actively avoided supporting it. Instead, they expose custom APIs that tightly couple client behavior to server internals.

More clients should use Micropub. It is also a W3C recommendation, but unlike C2S, Micropub is already widely implemented and has evolved through extensions to accommodate most real-world use cases.

NYT’s Ben Mullin posting on Bluesky: WaPo opinion section will “communicate with optimism about this country”.

When newspapers turned on Joe Biden last year, I realized opinion sections are antiquated. We have the whole web for opinions. Newspapers have lopsided reach and should stick to the news.