When we launched Micro.blog, we got pushback on the lack of likes and reposts and follower lists and trends and global firehouse. Now eight years later I’m confident our approach is an important niche on the social web.

We absolutely do lose customers who drift away because of lack of engagement. So be it. If you want the dopamine hit of notifications and a more active timeline, pulling you back in, there are other platforms like… well, literally all of the other ones!

Mark Zuckerberg posting to Threads:

For our superintelligence effort, I’m focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry. We’re also going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence. We have the capital from our business to do this.

Mark has moved extremely quickly on this. He can do that because he runs the whole show. But Meta is the last company I want with this power. Ad-based businesses will always be misaligned with human needs.

I enjoyed this essay by Windsor Johnston at NPR about a date with a chatbot:

The date started with a boat ride from Georgetown in Washington, D.C., across the Potomac River to Old Town Alexandria in Virginia. I wore a little black dress and ballet flats. The sun was shining, the breeze was warm, and I was texting a chatbot.

Most articles like this are alarmist and depressing. This one is balanced and funny, and ultimately gets more at a truth about what all of this means.

This is cool. Classic Web, via John Gruber who blogs:

Curator Richard MacManus posts half a dozen or so screenshots per day of, well, classic websites from the late 1990s and 2000s. Makes me feel old and young at the same time.

I worked on a new Micro.blog for Mac update over the weekend, but then my Sunday afternoon got turned upside down. I’ll probably ship it this week. The notes interface is going to be much more solid.

Raining. Little mushrooms have sprouted up.

Rewatched some old movies last week, including Back to the Future parts 1, 2, 3. They are still great. The hoverboard and flying cars got so much attention when I was a kid, but 1 and 3 are my favorites. Yes, part 3 too. The old west setting and characters hold up much better. 🍿

Superman was a lot of fun. They did a few smart things with it, like not retelling the whole origin story again. Casting also seemed just right. 🍿

I mostly like the super-rounded windows in macOS Tahoe, but it does create new problems for UI elements that are near the edge. It seems clearly designed for windows with toolbars. The worst conflict is for sheets, which don’t even have a title bar.

Sean Heber of the Iconfactory:

ChatGPT and other AI services are basically killing Iconfactory and I’m not exaggerating or being hyperbolical.

Sad to read this. More people also need to discover Tapestry. Micro.blog has been sponsoring it for a couple months, and I plan to continue to, but I expect ads are a small fraction of needed revenue.

Sports can be amazing and heartbreaking. I didn’t watch the Wimbledon final, but listened to Amanda Anisimova’s remarks at the end. Happy for her to have made it so far. And later today, we’ve got Mavs vs. Spurs at the Summer League. We’ve seen Cooper Flagg, now hopefully Dylan Harper can play. 🎾🏀

SwiftUI has been out for years, yet I’m still here creating new XIBs and Objective-C code like it’s 2005. AppKit is good at its job. SwiftUI is great for starting new apps. AppKit is best for finishing them.

Alexander Kucera blogs about supporting multiple export formats in Links:

Digital preservation isn’t just about saving content. It’s about maintaining access and control.

The photo search in Micro.blog for Mac has gotten really good. I don’t think there’s anything like this in other blogging platforms. Screenshot of “coffee” search for my blog. (Similar interface on the web too. Works best with AI enabled so we can generate keywords for everything.)

The pattern of coffee and people. Overhead light looks like a halo.

I’ve finished a significant improvement to editing blog posts that include photos. Let’s say you want to add a photo to an existing blog post. Before, you could upload a new photo in Uploads, then copy and paste the <img> tag HTML into an edited blog post. Now there’s ...

In the Grok fallout, Mike Masnick makes the case for moving away from large, centralized AI. He asks a range of great questions about bias in AI: After a similar incident two months or so ago where Grok became obsessed with linking everything to white genocide, the company ...

Swarm changed their app icon from orange to gray (in a generic “bug fixes” update with no release notes) so I had to move it on my home screen. It used to be in between Overcast and Audible. Bottom dock hasn’t changed in a while: Hey, Epilogue, Strata, Micro.blog.

Rewriting a bunch of my old Micropub code for the web today. Long overdue, and needed to keep adding features.

Dia is coming along nicely. They’ve fixed the custom text selection that was bugging me. Split view is interesting too. Overall, the tabs and UI look cleaner than most web browsers.

I’m good with the explosion of new browsers. Orion, Comet, supposedly an OpenAI browser soon.

Leo Laporte, linking to a webcomic about RSS:

…and here’s the good news, Spotify wasn’t able to co-opt podcasting, RSS podcasts still live and thrive. And I, for one, intend to keep it that way.

King of the Hill is returning (YouTube trailer), and the world has changed a little. “I don’t know how to kick someone’s ass over Zoom, but I’ll figure it out.” 🙂

Seeing random Grok screenshots — not just the racist tweets, all the other craziness too — makes me appreciate how much that serious companies like OpenAI and Anthropic must actually work on alignment and guardrails. Grok seems imbued with a “personality” that is out of control.

Useful report from the Social Web Foundation after a privacy forum in Norway. From the first bullet point of next actions:

Create standard metadata fields within ActivityPub to indicate content visibility, consent preferences, and sharing restrictions across servers.

There is a tension in the fediverse between consent and the open web. It’s difficult to balance both ideals without over-complicating everything. Look at how confusing private mentions in Mastodon are.

Fantastic article at The New Yorker about how far we’ve come with solar energy in just the last few years. I’m only halfway through but it’s already hitting on so much progress. I was feeling this last year when I bought solar panels for camping. When the costs finally work, it changes everything.

Vandalism at the Apple Store for climate change. While I’m very disappointed with Tim Cook’s support for Trump, I’m filing this one under “we attack our friends because our true enemies won’t listen”. Apple is more environmentally conscious than any other big tech company.

Linda Yaccarino steps down as CEO of Twitter / X. No hint of ill will in her goodbye tweet, but Grok losing its mind this week probably wasn’t the ideal backdrop for a graceful exit. I can only imagine how frustrating this role was with Elon Musk micromanaging it.

Stephen Hackett blogs about FireWire’s history and importance. It reminds me that I first used FireWire with a third-party PCI card, right before Macs had FireWire… or before I could afford a new Mac? Doing hobby animation and video editing, I used it with a MiniDV deck, and then from that to VHS.

Usually I avoid quoting something from the end of an article, but this line is a great summary from John Gruber’s latest on Daring Fireball about Jeff Williams retiring:

Six years after Jony Ive’s departure, today’s announcements leave it less clear than ever whose taste, ultimately, is steering the work of the company into the future.

Good rundown today by Ben Thompson on Apple’s dilemma of whether to outsource a next generation Siri to OpenAI or Anthropic. I’m curious about private cloud compute. Will they limit it to only Apple chips, or port the private cloud to architectures that are already running bigger frontier models?