Had a couple funny interactions with ChatGPT this week, including when asking it for some help with a coding task. It suggested some code that was really problematic and could easily break in the future. I told it I was worried about that code, and it replied with “You’re right, that was a hack.” 🤪
Manton Reece
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I’ve been out of town for a few days and not coding much, but Vincent has been working on the mobile app. iOS folks, a new TestFlight beta is out with creating a new blog category and editing summaries, plus other fixes. A couple more tweaks and then will ship to everyone.
Overheard, single mom who took her 401k and put it into starting a new business. Not everyone should do this, but… I love it. YOLO.
Responding to John Gruber’s AI post yesterday, Om Malik blogs:
Just as Google is trapped in the 10-blue-link prison, which prevents it from doing something radical, Apple has its own golden handcuffs. It’s a company weighed down by its market capitalization and what stock market expects from it.
Chet Collins reviews my book Indie Microblogging. Most people who have checked it out have just skimmed through it a little, which is fine! Love to see a detailed look, though. I still plan to publish a final final draft with a few updates.
Ana Rodrigues blogs about how websites can be good as a playground and for others to learn from:
But deep down, all I want for my personal website is to give back to the web. I want anyone, regardless of skill level, to inspect elements, understand the structure, and learn from readable code.
Great post from John Gruber about Apple Intelligence and the Siri delays:
Leaders prove their mettle and create their legacies not by how they deal with successes but by how they deal with — how they acknowledge, understand, adapt, and solve — problems. The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn’t true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn’t true, and they set a course based on that.
WWDC is pivotal. Apple needs to have a much clearer and demo-able vision for AI.
Rêve Coffee in Lafayette, LA. ☕️
New feature for Micro.blog’s Bluesky cross-posting: preview cards. This is still off by default, but if you flip it on in Sources, Micro.blog will try to figure out the title, description, and og:image for the first link in your post and attach it. Screenshot:
Federico Viticci wonders if Apple should have their own API that could bridge to OpenAI and Anthropic, offering Apple’s own seal of approval on privacy and security. It would be a nice surprise if Apple did something like this. They could wrap together on-device models and private cloud compute too.
MarsEdit 5.3.3 is out! This release adds support for Micro.blog blog post summaries with a new “excerpt” field in MarsEdit.
Gus Mueller thinks Apple needs to get out of the way with AI:
The crux of the issue in my mind is this: Apple has a lot of good ideas, but they don’t have a monopoly on them. I would like some other folks to come in and try their ideas out. I would like things to advance at the pace of the industry, and not Apple’s.
Good post. I included several quotes in my post this morning and would’ve added Gus’s post too. Experimenting with LLMs running locally is perfect for developers who build Mac apps. Maybe third-party developers need a convention to download and share models between apps?
After lunch I ended up having to head out of town unexpectedly to visit family, so gonna miss the afternoon SXSW and Fediverse House events. It was amazing catching up with folks who I only knew online, and meeting some people for the first time. Have a great week and safe travels!
POSSE.
Now that bookmark tags are available to all plans on Micro.blog, it’s more consistent to manage bookmarks. I’ve moved my read-later type activities to Micro.blog. Just nice to have it all in one place to bookmark posts and blog about them. Screenshot example of a bookmark with summary and tags:
Apple's response to AI
Ever since Apple revealed their AI strategy to lean into on-device models, there has been a sort of tension with the approach from other companies like OpenAI, Google, and Amazon. Was Apple Intelligence going to work? There are advantages: for user privacy because more data ...
Good morning, Austin. Back downtown after a great day yesterday at Fediverse House.
“This isn’t a time for competition. It is a time for cooperation.” — Evan Prodromou in a panel on different platforms at Fediverse House
Just a few minutes in to arriving at Fediverse House and already it was super valuable. There is really nothing like meeting people face to face. It’s an exciting time for the open web and you can feel it in hearing what people are working on and thinking about.
Bastrop Abstract Company. Established 1883. Closed.
Micro Social continues to improve. The new version adds a share sheet and iPad support.
We just passed an old wagon and mules on highway 290. It was Cowboy’s Last Ride, a restored wagon from 1899, going 350 miles across central Texas to raise money for St. Jude:
At 82 years old, Larry Jollisant, has chosen to honor his life as a cowboy in the most authentic, western way possible. […] Every night, he sets up camp, cooks over an open flame, and sleeps under the stars or in the wagon, embracing the same hardships and beauty that defined the cowboy way of life.
I love this. 🤠
Interesting segment on The Late Show last night with guest Reid Hoffman about AI. I’ve listened to his Masters of Scale podcast from time to time. On AI, I’ve realized recently that we are not all ever going to agree about the benefits and dangers. It’s a big shift and there will be a big schism.
Ready to plant, along Mopac. 🌱
Linkrot is always a problem for the web, but please let’s not purposefully destroy our own content when it’s easy to keep it going. John Gruber on 538 shutting everything down:
Why not keep the FiveThirtyEight site up and running — at least for a while, if not in perpetuity? It costs practically nothing to run a website serving a static/archived website. I don’t get it. It betrays a profound level of disrespect for the work that the site hosted.
Seth Godin blogs about making the most of a second chance with customers:
If a customer service call goes wrong, or if a new employee is stumbling, this is the moment to escalate and get the second impression just right. It shows that we can recover, that we’re listening, and that the relationship is worth something to us.
Listening to the Decoder episode with Panos Panay, I’m almost convinced that what Amazon is trying with Alexa+ will work. Everyone’s expectations are so low with voice assistants. If they actually pull it off, it will be impressive.
Parker Ortolani blogging about the new MacBook Air. I hadn’t even thought about the color until now:
For the first time in 24 years, since the introduction of the first white iBook, Apple has a blue laptop again. While the new MacBook Airs are most certainly a “spec bump,” they make for a pretty good one.
Interesting new post from OpenAI about safety. About humans being in control:
Our approach to alignment centers humans. We aim to develop mechanisms that empower human stakeholders to express their intent clearly and supervise AI systems effectively - even in complex situations, and as AI capabilities scale beyond human capabilities.
This is probably my biggest concern, AI agents running without human supervision and executing tasks that are beyond what we even know how to do. There are many positive benefits to AI, but there are also some things we shouldn’t attempt.