I thought of a few questions about Micro.blog usage that will help us prioritize features over the coming weeks. If you have a minute, fill out this form. It’s very short.

There’s not necessarily any new info in this article in The New Yorker about AI data centers, but it does illustrate the scale. Also enjoyed the anecdote about a farmer using Claude.

Behind a fence, and past several vehicle checkpoints, the campus was a spacious expanse of nothing, except for one corner, which was populated by a row of numbered sheds. The sheds were white, narrow, tall, and several football fields in length; they reminded me of the livestock barns I visited as a child at the Minnesota State Fair.

I’m still using ChatGPT Pulse. It is remarkable how good it is sometimes. Some folks will find this too creepy, but this morning it delivered a mashup of one of my favorite book series (Stormlight Archive) and principles of Micro.blog. Here’s the transcript. To be clear, I did not prompt this.

We’ve been going through old photos this week. I always smile looking at this one of me and my mom, from around 1980. I look so funny.

Thanks everyone for the kind words on the blog post yesterday about my mom. Means a lot to me.

Crossing over the Lamar bridge.

Last weekend, my mom passed away. I had blogged once or twice that in recent months I found myself at the hospital often, as she declined in health and was in and out of the hospital and rehab. It was what inspired me to make Micro.blog free for nurses and teachers. My mom w...

In a post about safety improvements, OpenAI reveals that a stunning number of people (0.15% out of hundreds of millions of active users) discuss suicide with the chatbot. This is obviously an urgent issue and the company needs to redouble their efforts. Some people will not seek out real counselors.

Needed to get away today. Last-minute decision to drive down to San Antonio with my daughter. 🏀

Watching the Longhorns game with family today was a nice distraction from everything else going on for me right now. Great comeback win. Hopefully Arch Manning is okay. 🏈

I tried Atlas again to go find something for me on the web, and it worked, but the UI doesn’t feel right to me. Dia is lighter, more streamlined. I think Atlas tries to do a lot and doesn’t quite have a vision for how all the pieces should fit together. It’s 1.0, though.

Automattic has filed counterclaims against WP Engine. I’ve read the first few pages of the PDF and I find it compelling, although I am biased to support Matt Mullenweg for everything he’s done for the open web. It’s just hard (but not impossible!) to earn back trust after you’ve lost the narrative.

Great Spurs win last night in the season opener. I went to bed in the 3rd quarter and caught up on the rest of the game this morning. In other NBA news, craziness with Chauncey Billups arrested for a poker operation tied to the Mafia. 🏀

Nick Heer blogging about Atlas:

OpenAI wants to be everywhere, and it wants to know everything about you to an even greater extent than Google or Meta have been able to accomplish. Why should I trust it? What makes the future of OpenAI look different than the trajectories of the information-hungry businesses before it?

One word: ads. Google and Meta are ad-supported and so will always be misaligned with users, prioritizing engagement above all else. OpenAI (for now) is supported by paid subscriptions. If their business changes, it will be cause for concern for sure.

Barely any time to work or blog the last couple of weeks because of family stuff that maybe I’ll write about later when I can get my head together. I’ve enjoyed shipping the movie and TV show features. They are a nice distraction. The video improvements are close… Need some space to ship them.

Great blog post about why people like 37signals:

They write books, give talks, maintain strong Twitter presences, and share their opinions on everything from work culture to F1. I don’t always agree with their opinions. I might disagree with a good deal more than 50% of them. But I know where they stand, and I know why.

37signals has created a unique business over 20+ years, and I think this post explains why it will persist even as there is controversy from time to time, such as recent disappointment with DHH’s political posts.

A few initial thoughts on ChatGPT Atlas… Good name. I thought about naming a product Atlas recently. Dia still feels like a more complete design, but Atlas can be more tightly integrated with ChatGPT history. I don’t use Dia’s AI features mostly because it feels too separate from other tools.

Turned on the TV this morning and they were covering the AWS outage. It doesn’t appear to have affected Micro.blog from what I can tell. I could use the small wins this week.

Cal Newport blogs about what Sora might mean for a business model shift at OpenAI:

A company that still believes that its technology was imminently going to run large swathes of the economy, and would be so powerful as to reconfigure our experience of the world as we know it, wouldn’t be seeking to make a quick buck selling ads against deep fake videos of historical figures wrestling.

Sora is a gimmick. OpenAI should build more tools like ChatGPT Pulse, which is one of the most amazing products I’ve ever used. Truly new and useful.

Wasn’t expecting anything new in UI design from Twitter / X, but this in-app browser UI actually looks pretty good. It keeps some context for the followed link (like reply and favorite buttons) visible while reading an article. Reduces the “cost” of clicking out of the timeline.

From Matt Mullenweg’s talk at WordCamp Canada:

Day One is a fully encrypted synchronized blogging and journaling app, that runs on every device and the web, and you can have shared journals with others. It’s the first place I go to draft an idea, or for example, to write this talk.

This was a little surprising to me. In a way, it matches the workflow I sometimes use in Micro.blog. I use our private, encrypted notes feature to jot down ideas or write a draft, then move it into a blog post. But most of the time I just start right with a draft post.

Long day. This was breakfast, feels like forever ago. Funny book at Phoebe’s Diner. 🥞

Some really good thoughts in this post by Paul Frazee about Bluesky’s approach to open protocols and platform bias:

On the one level, we created a neutral protocol to solve the systemic absence of neutrality and choice. On another level, we created a platform to drive an opinionated take on social. They go hand in hand: the killer app of a neutral protocol is an opinionated but interchangeable platform.

I should update my chapter on open gardens to quote this.

I’m the guest on the latest Software Defined Interviews! We cover so many things on this episode, from journaling to Micro.blog’s philosophy and features. Might be the longest interview I’ve ever done, actually.

Lights.

Reading Simon Willison’s write-up of NVIDIA’s little AI box, my first thought was how much Mac you could get for the same $4k. Quite a lot! Mac Studio with 96 GB. Enough to run gpt-oss-120b and many other models.

I try never to miss an opportunity to catch a train crossing.

Dave Winer getting ready for his talk at WordCamp:

Twitter comes online, we try to work with it. Unless your ideas fit in 140 chars, don’t use links, or style, and you never make mistakes that need correction, it just doesn’t work.

The ideal is to write in our blog space, and publish everywhere.

Quick update on today’s TV show rollout in Micro.blog, added a new button to make it easy to link to the entire season, not just one episode. Here’s a screenshot.

John Gruber blogging about the end of Apple’s Clips:

Edits, Meta’s new-this-year video editing app for mobile, has a clear use case: it’s meant for editing videos destined for Meta’s popular social media networks. Clips had no clear target destination. It could have, but never did.