Worked on some book-related improvements in Micro.blog this morning. We try to integrate with all sorts of things — Google Books, Open Library, Libby — but a lot of it is not exactly officially sanctioned. Added more Goodreads scraping today. In for a penny, in for a pound!
Simon Willison has added notes (a.k.a. microblog posts) to his blog. I’ve really been enjoying his takes on AI. He’s usually the first I see jump in to explore a new model’s capabilities.
I’ve blogged about apologies before. They carry a lot of weight with me. We’re human, we make mistakes, we learn.
Just as I don’t trust people who can’t apologize, I’m also wary of people who can’t accept a heartfelt apology. It says more about you if nothing short of perfection is enough.
But her emails! The Signal leak is an amazing contrast with Hillary’s server. There was nothing this consequential in her emails, only a handful maybe classified. But more than that, she apologized. Trump and his team will never apologize for anything, ever. Don’t trust people who can’t admit fault.
Sometimes in the debate about federation, we miss that open APIs are still very valuable alone. Bluesky’s API has so many nice touches including many requests that do not need authorization at all. I’d like to see Mastodon ease off some of its more strict requirements for e.g. HTTP signatures.
Seeing an increase in security proxies like Cloudflare interfering with legitimate Micro.blog requests to other services. Likely not related to the new AI Labyrinth, but along the same lines: when you try to catch “misbehaving bots”, you’re going to affect real users too.
The page for WWDC 2025 is vague enough that Apple could still do a live keynote. Not holding my breath. But it feels out of touch to not bring back a couple live demos. OpenAI is doing live streams every couple weeks (there was one today). It shows faith in your product.
Zac Hall blogs at 9to5Mac that Apple should acquire Mira Murati’s new company, Thinking Machines Labs:
Let Rockwell make all the repairs and changes needed to allow Siri to meet the baseline performance that Apple should expect. Tap Murati to focus not on the baggage but instead on the future.
Watching a couple of the videos from ATmosphereConf. The videos are up on YouTube in this playlist.
Putting the final touches on a nice improvement for our blogging friends across the pond… I’ll announce in a blog post later today.
AI takes something and sands the edges down, so it makes the blob average. And that could be very useful in a lot of ways. But if you really want to do something brand new and really insightful and speak from a personal angle, that’s not going to come from AI fully.
Got my copy of Dragonsteel Prime in the mail from the last crowdfunding. 📚
Federico Viticci on mobile app development becoming more accessible to many more people, just as blogging opened up web publishing:
Those who wanted to have an online writing space 30 years ago had to know some of the basics of hosting and HTML if they wanted to publish something for other people to read. Then Blogger came along and allowed anyone – regardless of their skill level – to be read. What if the same happened to mobile software?
Great historical data for WWDC dates from David Smith. Should be announced soon!
Generative AI can be both good and bad, just like us. We’re capable of kindness and cruelty. Society, government, and even companies should amplify the best in what we create and do.
Not sure why I didn’t think of this earlier, but there is now a simple weekly email newsletter for all the posts on news.micro.blog. You can subscribe here. We post small and big changes throughout the week that are easy to miss.
Nice profile of the Internet Archive on NPR:
The Internet Archive is among the few efforts that exist to catch the stuff that falls through the digital cracks, while also making that information accessible to the public. Six weeks into the new administration, Wayback Machine director Graham said, the Internet Archive had cataloged some 73,000 web pages that had existed on U.S. government websites that were expunged after Trump’s inauguration.
I didn’t realize that the Internet Archive did public tours. I’d love to visit the office someday. Amazing building.
Sounds like ATmosphereConf went really well in Seattle this weekend. So cool to see community events spring up around the social web.
Finished reading: Queen of Shadows by Sarah J. Maas. Slowly working my way through the series with breaks to read other books in between. 📚
Since Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth was announced a few days ago I’ve been trying to figure out how I feel about it. Blocking misbehaving bots is good, but creating fake pages and hidden links reminds me of other hacks to trick crawlers that I think could be detrimental to the web. Just not sure yet.
Heading home. Texas / Louisiana border visitors center. 🤠
Durafan.
Adding another server in Europe today. 🇩🇪
At a memorial service my mind drifted to what makes us human. I believe in AI as a tool to help us, to learn, to create. But AI cannot feel. Focus on that. The sound of our voice, imperfect. The stories, from life we have experienced. The art, with meaning because it comes from a place only we know.
Carolina Jessamine… I think.
While out walking today, listened to this great interview on Stratechery with Sam Altman, going over early time at OpenAI and where things might be headed. I know Sam can be a divisive figure, but if you’re fascinated with AI there’s a lot of interesting background here.
This shakeup of Siri leadership is surprisingly close to WWDC. Makes me think we won’t see major changes this year, just a refinement of last year’s strategy with Siri and AI.
Had a good run for a few months on uptime until today. I’ve upgraded one of our servers to prevent this particular meltdown from happening again.
Bad timing, had a major server failure this morning. Micro.blog is back online and I’m restoring a few things now. 😔