Brian Schrader mentions the A Very Short Introduction books in a blog post about learning:

The books are, as expected, very short (~100 pages) and cover a quick survey of the topic at hand and its various sub-disciplines. They’re approachable, quick to read, and the chapters are organized by discipline.

I’ve seen these little books many times and sometimes flip through them in a bookstore. I think I will pick up a couple of them. Great idea to have approachable books that are longer than a blog post or AI prompt, but not as long or dry as a textbook.

I settled on once a week backups for the new Mac app because it seems the best balance of usefulness and manageable strain on our servers. Downloading a large blog with tens of thousands of photos introduces a little extra load and bandwidth use.

It’s enabled by default because good backups are a perfect fit for our emphasis on domain names and content portability. When you use Micro.blog, you should never have to opt in or pay extra for something that is a core part of our mission.

Added a new backup feature to Micro.blog for Mac. I think it’ll help folks who don’t routinely backup their blog. Once a week it automatically downloads all posts, photos, and other uploads to a .bar file. On by default and keeps the last 5 backups.

Gonna have to get a good night of sleep before I can properly articulate how I feel about this Spurs loss to the Timberwolves tonight. But just to say Wemby is being fouled all the time and no calls. 🏀

I keep up with AI by clicking around on X sometimes — sigh 🙁 — and it’s wild how many people still gripe in replies that OpenAI discontinued 4o. OpenAI is never bringing that model back. The overly empathetic, sycophantic tuning was the problem, especially for users struggling with mental health.

Watched: Remarkably Bright Creatures. Beautiful. 📺

Watched: The Sheep Detectives. Actually really nice. 🍿

Got lost in videos and research for a backyard garden model railroad. This short video on YouTube provides a glimpse. We had an N scale but gave it away in the move last year. Would be fun to explore something larger and build a garden around it.

Spurs win a hard-fought game 3 in Minneapolis. Refs seem largely okay with ignoring many fouls, so who knows what’s going to happen. Almost thought that overturned out of bounds with 2 minutes left was going to sink the game… Whew. Everyone played really well. 🏀

I’m not going to worry about Hantavirus until Trump says that the cases “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” 😷

Having trouble squaring the Cloudflare layoffs today (because of AI) with how aggressive they were last year going after AI bots. It’s like the company has gotten so big they aren’t internally consistent anymore.

WWDC is only a month away. How’d that happen? I booked travel a while ago, will be there for a few days. Sadly just flying in, no elaborate train or car camping plans this time.

Apple called me back about Inkwell rejections. Still rejected, but we were able to talk through the issues and resolve one of them. Progress. It’s fascinating to me how they handle these calls… In all my years of shipping apps, I’ve never had to actually talk to app review outside of a web form.

Mark Gurman with an update this week on the AirPods with cameras:

The cameras essentially act as eyes for the Siri digital assistant and aren’t designed to take photos or video. These components — located in both the right and left earbuds — allow the device to capture visual information in low resolution.

Despite the privacy problems with cameras in any product, glasses at least feel like a more natural place than AirPods. Very curious about this product.

Working on security this morning. Just realized I’ve been scammed out of hundreds of dollars because someone used a stolen credit card to register a bunch of domain names. For a very small business, this hurts a lot.

On the Canvas hack, Alan Jacobs blogs that universities have become dependent on big platforms which are then appealing targets for hackers:

But universities that deploy these big platforms should realize that our data — that of professors and students — as only as safe as the companies’ security practices are sound. And companies like Instructure are so deeply embedded in American university life now that they think they can’t be rejected — no matter how gross their failure to maintain security. An exploit like this is therefore easily predictable.

Yesterday I said there should be courtroom sketches from the Elon Musk vs. OpenAI trail. I did find a few, by artist Vicki Behringer. They’re not all in one place — and I wish I could legally just post them on my blog — but you can find them on Reuters pages like this one, this one, and this one.

Fun video on YouTube from Steve Wallis trying to make a huge swamp cooler. Actual portable A/C units are getting a little smaller… I check Amazon every few months for the latest and will eventually get one.

I was clicking around in App Store Connect as I wait for Inkwell to be approved. The long list of submissions and rejections is unusual for me, so thought I’d capture the table here as a blog post. Hopefully this is just about the end of it. 🤞 Status ...

I’m still listening to the OpenAI case, off and on as I work. It’s fascinating. I do wish there were courtroom sketches, though! So much money flowing through this trial — we just learned that the expert witness for Elon Musk is making 6 figures for his time — yet no one can hire an artist?

Had a great meeting with @BonnieRue this week to catch up on a bunch of ideas for the Micro.blog community and long-form blog post discovery. Also learned about The Brautigan Library. I had missed that Dario Amodei’s Machines of Loving Grace essay title was surely inspired by Richard’s 1960s poem.

Testing the next version of Micro.blog for iOS with Liquid Glass enabled. It’s looking good. Great work @vincent.

I tried not to overreact to Spurs vs. Timberwolves game 1, so not going to overreact to the game 2 blowout. But this is what I’ll say… This team has played seven playoff games so far. They’ve lost two games: by 3 points and by 2 points. None of the wins were close. 🏀

Wish I was in San Antonio tonight. Game 2, let’s go. 🏀

Amazing line from Helen Toner’s testimony while describing the ousting of Sam Altman, about Mira Murati:

She was waiting to see which way the wind would blow, and she didn’t realize that she was the wind.

I’ve recorded a short video on YouTube to demo the new features in Inkwell for Mac, especially the new post window.

Stephen Hackett blogs about the Anthropic + SpaceX / xAI news, with more questions:

Colossus 2 is believed to be up and running, at least to some degree, and xAI may no longer need the first site. Has xAI moved Grok there, leaving the original data center and its yet-to-be-built water treatment plant open for lease? How much is Anthropic paying xAI for the site? Was this a move to help bring some sanity to xAI’s books as SpaceX plans to go public?

Also with the OpenAI trial on my mind, there’s a certain perspective to the story where both Elon Musk and Dario Amodei were frustrated at OpenAI and left, at different times and for different reasons, and now they’re partners.

Michael Tsai blogging on the Siri delays settlement:

If you really did buy an $800+ iPhone because of advertised features that never shipped, getting back $25 doesn’t seem like much consolation.

Right, because tech company class action lawsuits are now rarely about the customers. They’re about the lawyers skimming some of the money. The settlement doesn’t appear to outline the fee yet, but 25% for these things is common — and matches the Apple battery lawsuit a few years ago — which would be $62.5 million here.

Anthropic has announced a major deal with SpaceX to help relieve pressure on Claude’s current infrastructure:

We’ve signed an agreement with SpaceX to use all of the compute capacity at their Colossus 1 data center. This gives us access to more than 300 megawatts of new capacity (over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs) within the month.

Colossus 1 was famously used to train Grok. My reading of this is that Anthropic now has access to essentially all of the GPUs, since 200k GPUs had been previously announced for the data center. Maybe they’ve left a handful for Twitter / X.

There’s a good discussion on the latest AppStories podcast about Codex for Mac and related tools. Federico Viticci:

I was very skeptical of the idea of a super app. But it turns out, a super app for productivity makes a lot of sense.

It also need to experiment with skills and automations more.