Daniel Jalkut and I had hoped to record a bonus post-WWDC podcast, even scheduled it, but now it has been weeks… There’s always something going on. Amazing that we used to record a weekly show for a decade or more!

JA Westenberg:

The smartphone is the enemy of deep thought. Deep thinking needs sustained attention, incubation, and boredom. Boredom is the soil where creativity grows.

One of the minor disappointments with getting piled on a year ago is that I now tend to second-guess many of my blog posts. Will someone run with the worst interpretation, ready to repost without context? This leads to watering down drafts, sometimes editing them into vague pointlessness.

Finished reading: The Passing of the Dragon by Ken Liu. Beautiful short story. Also includes a surprise commentary on the mess that is social media. 📚

Good write-up of fediverse blogging apps including Micro.blog at Federated Mind.

We shipped Micro.blog 3.0 for Android today. See the full release notes here. I think this is the first time that both iOS and Android have had exact feature parity. We previously had some code on iOS that was only written in Obj-C.

Finished reading: Homebound by Portia Elan. Good concept, but the separate timelines didn’t really come together in a big way at the end as I was hoping. Still enjoyed it. 📚

Anthropic published research on what patterns inside Claude — patterns they’re calling the J-space — reveal about how it might be thinking while it processes a prompt: If you’ve heard of language models having a “scratchpad” or “chain of thought”—text they write to themselv...

While watching the game last week, the announcers were clearly very skeptical of the red card. If the suspension had been reversed without Trump getting involved, I think it would’ve been the right call. But now the whole thing is tainted with the appearance of corruption. Not good. ⚽️

John Gruber with another blog post on native Mac apps:

What keeps me using ChatGPT and keeps me away from using Claude is not that ChatGPT happens to be written using native APIs like AppKit. It’s that it looks and feels like a Mac app — you know, with a Settings window that is … a window.

🙂

On the Codex side, unfortunately the app is at least partly Electron. OpenAI has hired great Mac and iOS developers, though, and Codex has some of the best Mac integration I’ve ever seen — the Computer Use feature especially, which uses Apple accessibility APIs. ChatGPT iOS also has a lot of SwiftUI.

This is cool, via @dave, how the HyperTexting app is using blogrolls to help with the “web as a social graph” interface. Automatically works with Micro.blog’s recommendations feature.

Sounds like GPT-5.6 will be this week. If I were OpenAI, I wouldn’t overhype this. Let it speak for itself. With Mythos and Fable, the hype is exhausting.

Putting the final touches on an Android update for Micro.blog. We had some changes ready a month ago that somehow I forgot to actually release. ☹️ This will be 3.0, getting us closer to syncing up both mobile platform versions too.

Google Play approvals are so fast now, must be largely automated.

Unexpectedly, my favorite part of Micro.blog’s email newsletters is that I get an email with all my posts from the last week. It would be useful even if I was the only subscriber. Monday morning is a great time to quickly reflect on what was happening last week before moving on.

Finished reading: Tower of Dawn by Sarah J. Maas. Dipped back into romantasy. Some of this series I’ve read and some I’ve listened to the audiobooks. Personally works better as a book for me, not narrated. 📚

Tim Sweeney, fighting for openness in the App Store and protecting forests in North Carolina:

Sweeney strives to protect large swaths of land with high conservation value before developers get possession. In 2016, he donated 7,000 acres of forest east of Asheville to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In 2021, he gifted 7,500 acres near the Avery-Mitchell county border to the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy. That year, he also teamed with conservation groups to preserve a two-mile coastal barrier south of Topsail Island.

Reviewing the new SF Symbols for iOS / macOS 27. Still no robot icon. 🤖

Perfect day to buy a new grill. We haven’t had one since we moved. Also some frustration and hilarity as it wouldn’t fit in the car and we had to go back home to get my Honda Element. 🙂

Good story on NPR about Born in the USA:

The 1984 hit by Bruce Springsteen describes a Vietnam War veteran who returns home to desperate circumstances and few options. Listen only to its surging refrain, though, and you could mistake it for an uncomplicated celebration of patriotism.

🇺🇸

This country has a lot of problems. But think how people in 1776 would view today’s society. Now imagine 2276. What will it take to build the kind of future that everyone can be proud of? 🇺🇸

Also: screenshot of me searching for previous July 4th blog posts in Micro.blog.

Simon Willison blogged about letting Fable decide when to use cheaper models:

Jesse Vincent just gave me a related tip to help avoid burning too many of those valuable Fable tokens in the few days we have left before the prices go up. Tell Fable to use other models for smaller tasks, applying its own judgement about which model to use.

Fable pricing is nutty. I’m happy to just run GPT-5.5 with fast and xhigh for everything and not worry about it.

American flag with 28 stars, on display at the Texas State Library. Wasn’t expecting it to be so big! Texas joined in 1845 and it was only another year until the flag needed 29 stars. 🇺🇸

In Europe we use Hetzner, and I’ve always been bewildered about how it’s a fraction of the cost of Linode. But lately we’ve had a number of server crashes over there. Spreading servers across multiple providers is probably still the way to go.

Thanks Bob Wertz for the kind words in this blog post about Micro.blog’s support for Bluesky and every other open API we can get our hands on:

…Micro.Blog is the perfect solution for people who want to experiment with different platforms, but maintain a centralized web presence. Manton’s built something amazing at Micro.Blog and I’m still surprised how few people know about it.

Here’s a fun screenshot from Mastodon. Micro.blog posts that are federated to Mastodon look better than posts actually created from Mastodon. Markdown → your blog → everywhere.

I’m expanding Micro.blog’s support for Standard.site to include the content field too. It looks like this now:

"content": {
  "$type": "blog.micro.content",
  "markdown": "Hello _world_...",
  "html": "Hello <i>world</i>..."
}

Simple. I’ll publish an official lexicon later.

I did some testing with Standard.site this morning and posted a screenshot over in the help forums. Fascinating to see it in action. I signed into Leaflet and it knows about the long-form blog posts I created in Micro.blog.

Tempted to order another Iconfactory shirt. I have one from years ago, the simple logo. Love the dogcow too.

Watched: House of the Dragon S3E2, Queen’s Landing. Whew. This series is one tragedy after another. 📺

A little bummed that OpenAI is retiring Pulse. It felt like magic. But also it must’ve been burning through tokens way beyond the benefit, and personally I went from reading it every day to only skimming it every couple days. Maybe ChatGPT scheduled tasks can be good enough.