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“I think the most powerful thing that the new Alexa+ has done for me is it has made me forgive Apple for not shipping anything with the new Siri.” — Casey Newton on Hard Fork

Find My has always been too slow for me. It feels like Apple sometimes caches a user’s last location on their servers, but either for not very long or just infrequently. So you fire up the app, and it appears to ping each phone to get the latest location. Gotta be a better way that is still private.

Updated to Tahoe beta 5. No problems, pretty much the same for me as beta 4. I don’t actually use many of Apple’s built-in apps, so until more third-party apps are updated for Liquid Glass, it’s not a very jarring upgrade. I use Xcode, Terminal, Photos, and then all other Apple apps only rarely.

This interview of Sam Altman by Cleo Abram is excellent. I know there are some Sam haters out there. I received some shit for my blog post about him. But there are deep questions here about the future, some interesting speculation, and figuring out how to anticipate potential future harm too.

Just noticed this new Micro.blog theme: Bothy. Looks good!

One of those mornings. Working from the hospital lobby, with the GPT-5 announcement video on in the background but I forgot my headphones at home, so just glancing at the subtitles every once in a while. Please see: Micro.blog free for nurses. Also just deployed a cross-posting checkbox fix.

Added a new reading goals bar to the top of Bookshelves in the Mac app. Love the way it turned out, with little progress indicators for the goal progress. Here’s a video:

Dia adds $20/month subscription, with plans for other tiers later. I like Dia even without the AI features. Most people are not going to pay for either ChatGPT or Claude and a web browser. Wishing them luck because it is a nice browser.

Odd to see a Tim Hortons in Texas. ☕️

Feels important to mark today’s gift from Apple to Trump. Tim Cook continues to hurt his legacy, in almost an Elon Musk-like way, between the direction of the App Store and dealing with Trump. Just sad. He was the right person to lead Apple for a time. I still think peak Apple was a year or two ago.

Good post from A New Social about the difference between bridging and cross-posting. The illustrations really help too.

This is how I think about the UK’s Online Safety Act, and similar laws in Texas that introduce new rules for checking a website visitor’s age before showing adult content. Most people agree that it’s reasonable for someone working behind the counter at an old-fashioned adult...

Speaking of age-gating, I filled out Apple’s new age questionnaire for apps last week. Micro.blog’s apps are 16+. I think by design our platform is better protected than many in exposing harmful content, but to be safe for kids requires much more work with automated tools and a staff of curators.

Ghost 6.0 shipped this week with ActivityPub support, a major advancement for the popular blogging and email newsletter app. You can now follow Ghost blogs from the fediverse, bringing Ghost more in line with ActivityPub-based functionality in Micro.blog, WordPress, and Writ...

Nick Heer blogging about the Ghost 6.0 release:

If Ghost added MarsEdit support, I would be awful tempted to switch from WordPress.

Probably not going to happen. People have asked for it. Ghost has oddly never cared about open APIs until recently, with ActivityPub, and even that was years after everyone else added support for it.

If you want the most support for lots of APIs and publishing from different apps, there are only two suitable platforms: WordPress and Micro.blog.

This is a helpful table from Molly White, breaking down the costs for hosting a newsletter with Ghost, Substack, and other popular platforms. I had missed in the initial Ghost 6.0 announcement that in addition to the price increase, paid newsletters required at a minimum the $29/month plan.

Sam Altman posting about the release in a Twitter / X post: We believe in individual empowerment. Although we believe most people will want to use a convenient service like ChatGPT, people should be able to directly control and modify their own AI when they need to, and the...

Shipped a couple new things this morning: Micro.blog for iOS bug fixes, and a slight redesign to how the automatic accessibility description works when adding a photo on the web. Much smoother workflow.

Learned on Hard Fork’s interview with Matthew Prince that Cloudflare may take a 20-30% cut when creating their marketplace between websites and AI crawlers. This supports the concerns I raised in a blog post last month.

Dave Rupert blogs about the difference between Alamo Drafthouse and all other movie theaters:

The best place to see movies in Austin is at the Alamo Drafthouse. If you’ve never been to an Alamo, I’m sorry. It’s a movie theater for people who love movies by people who love movies.

I think the last time we went to a non-Alamo was for Oppenheimer in IMAX. Great screen, great movie. Not a good theater experience.

Neat story about Patrick Schlott, an engineer who repurposed old pay phones for people to make calls where cell coverage is poor:

Schlott has taken old pay phones, modified them to make free calls, and set them up in three different towns across the county. He buys the phones secondhand from sites like eBay and Craigslist and restores them in his home workshop.

I’d love to hear more about the technical bits behind this.

Parker Ortolani blogs about the new Ollama app that provides a chat window for the first time, making local models easy to use:

Anyone that has used the official ChatGPT Mac app will feel right at home, but they will quickly notice that the model names are quite different. The app makes it easy to install various versions of Gemma 3, Deepseek R1, and Qwen 3. Instead of having to use a command line for installation, you can simply type a prompt, select a model, and it will download it for you.

Rumors point to OpenAI shipping something this week. I’m going to guess the open weights model, with GPT-5 a little further off, but who knows. Say what you want about their leadership, but that company knows how to ship.

Ghost 6.0 has been released, adding ActivityPub. Big update. It’s interesting how Ghost now talks about Bluesky compatibility, which works via Bridgy Fed, but they don’t mention Bridgy Fed. This feels slightly wrong to me since I’ve spent so much time working on AT Protocol.

Finished reading: Empire of Storms by Sarah J. Maas. Apparently the thing to do is read this and the next book at the same time, but I have other things to read so just took this one straight through. Easily the best in the series so far, seemed much better structured. 📚

Really happy with the response to our new discount to make Micro.blog free for teachers and nurses. We’ve had some people take us up on the offer already.

Mark Gurman reports on a new team inside Apple developing a search engine and world knowledge model:

While still in early stages, the team is building what it calls an “answer engine” — a system capable of crawling the web to respond to general-knowledge questions. A standalone app is currently under exploration, alongside new back-end infrastructure meant to power search capabilities in future versions of Siri, Spotlight and Safari.

Catching up on some posts from FediCon, which was held over the last couple of days in Vancouver. @bmann.ca has his talk slides and notes online.

Reminder that we are improving things with Micro.blog all the time. You can see recent changes on news.micro.blog. If there’s a bug that needs attention, send us an email. The best way for us to prioritize what to work on is what we hear about.

Created a new plug-in “Photos with months” that adds some date grouping to the default Photos page. May need additional changes, because it will conflict with some other photos page plug-ins. You can see it on my photos page.