We can never really know what people are going through on the internet, because so few people share their full selves online. In a sad way, it’s best to assume that not everything is okay. That way we can show true empathy, not attacks, not even a performance of fake kindness.

Submitted the latest round of Android improvements to Google for approval. There’s one fix that hasn’t even made it into an iOS release yet. Depending on review timing, this might be the first time that we’ve shipped bug fixes for Android before iOS!

Found via Loura, A Small Web July, spending time away from big social media:

Beefing up my RSS feed with content I want to see, both big-and-small web. YouTube isn’t a problem for me until I go onto the website itself and get sucked into a hole, but subscribing to a channel on RSS isn’t a problem for me.

We are still planning an Android update soon. I worked on a couple minor tweaks this morning, to go along with other recent improvements brought over from iOS. Actually feels good to tinker in Android Studio again since my world is mostly Xcode.

Simon Willison:

Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.

This analogy works in a couple different ways. You can ignore the table saw if you love the craft of creating with hand tools. You can use the table saw where it saves time and still be proud of the end result.

The Verge:

Racist videos that appear to be created with Google’s AI video generation tool Veo 3 have raked in millions of views across TikTok, according to findings from the nonprofit media watchdog Media Matters.

The full report from Media Matters is very disturbing. It’s not just a couple videos that fell through the moderation cracks. It’s many videos and millions of views. TikTok is designed for this.

Infinite content plus viral social platforms is a bad combination. Curation will be nearly impossible as long as social media is designed around likes, reposts, and algorithms. AI is the accelerant to garbage abundance. The best way to stop the spread of hateful content or misinformation is for platform developers to consider that virality is as much a bug as it is a feature.

Saw something today that reminded me of MyEdit.com, which was a little web app I built in 2002, for editing notes. That was back when I only had a couple domain names, not dozens. Never released it publicly. The notes in Micro.blog are worlds better, so I guess all ideas eventually come back around.

As voicemail transcripts get better, I hope we eventually get muting. Maybe with keywords (matching “you’ve been approved”) or even an AI-based approach (“auto-delete any future calls like this one”).

I’m considering some improvements to our Bluesky and AT Protocol implementation in Micro.blog. Currently we can cross-post blog posts to Bluesky, either manually or automatically whenever you post to your blog. You can also follow Bluesky users directly in Micro.blog. You ca...

Patrick Rhone:

There are many possible paths. Our path was our path paved with our opportunities and our choices. Your path is and always will be your path paved by your choices.

Joanna Stern’s latest video about AI energy use is informative and fun. Folks on either side of the AI debate will probably enjoy it.

Maybe you’re a fantasy book fan and need some good news? Brandon Sanderson’s Isles of the Emberdark shipped to Kickstarter backers today, everyone else in about a week. I’m planning to start it tonight. I thought it was going to be a novella… Excited to see it’s a full novel. 📚

Just sad and deflated about the senate passing Trump’s bill. It’s going to hurt a lot of people, including many people who voted for Trump. Today was mostly inevitable after the election, but there are still some positive, more narrowly targeted things we can focus on, while we wait for 2026.

Amazon’s scale is mind-boggling to me. They now have a million robots for their fulfillment warehouses.

Matthew Prince announcing a major new effort at Cloudflare to block AI crawlers: Cloudflare, along with a majority of the world’s leading publishers and AI companies, is changing the default to block AI crawlers unless they pay creators for their content. I’m concerned tha...

Fascinating post from Allen Pike about spending $1000 as a trial with AI coding agents. I can’t justify nearly that much money. (See: bootstrapped, no investors.) But when working with CSS changes a few days ago, I dropped about $5 using Codex CLI. For me, in small bursts like that it’s worth it.

Cloudflare dropped a big change today in a series of blog posts about AI bots. I was about to post a quick take, but I’m taking more time to read all the posts first. There’s a lot there.

Walked to the coffee shop this morning, but when I got there and opened my laptop, it appears to be updating to the latest macOS Tahoe beta. Sigh. Must’ve clicked an OK button yesterday by accident.

There are several good segments in today’s interview with Matt Mullenweg. My favorite might be the exchange with Nilay Patel around whether Tumblr is profitable yet. It actually lines up well with my post from last year, I support the mad king.

Nilay: Is Tumblr sustainable today?

Matt: It is still not profitable. So we’re still supporting it and subsidizing it with our other products at Automattic.

Nilay: How much runway do you want to give it?

Matt: Everything. [laughing] Obviously we’ve invested a ton in Tumblr. I’m a believer in its future. So that’s part of why I want to make it sustainable, because that means it doesn’t have to go off the benevolence of myself or anyone else. It can stand on its own.

Huge news from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg. Apple is considering partnering with Anthropic or OpenAI for Siri:

After multiple rounds of testing, Rockwell and other executives concluded that Anthropic’s technology is most promising for Siri’s needs, the people said. That led Adrian Perica, the company’s vice president of corporate development, to start discussions with Anthropic about using Claude, the people said.

This is probably the right move, and there’s still plenty for in-house AI researches to work on. If they go ahead with it, delaying Siri was justified, and worth taking the heat for.

Every year since I blogged about fixing exclusive app distribution way back in 2011, there have been little cracks appearing in Apple’s monopoly wall. Growing developer resentment. The lawsuit from Epic Games. New laws like the EU’s Digital Markets Act. Change is clearly acc...

Project Hail Mary trailer is out! Loved the book. Perfect choice of directors for the movie, I think they’ve got this.

One question for AT Proto as a blog backend is whether users will want a single record in their PDS that works across Bluesky clients and custom platforms. In that case, a custom “full-length post” embed inside Bluesky’s own lexicon seems to make the most sense. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel.

Bluesky folks, I’ve been thinking about adding WhiteWind cross-posting to Micro.blog. The lexicon looks straightforward. There’s also Leaflet, which is trying to do a little more with its document structure. Any early adopter “blogging with AT Protocol” users have thoughts?

I started listening to the latest Decoder podcast with guest Matt Mullenweg, but I’m not yet to the part about Tumblr. Not hugely surprising, they have paused the (monumental) task of moving Tumblr’s backend to WordPress:

The company announced the plan to move over the more than half a billion blogs on Tumblr last year, saying that the change would “make it easier to share our work across platforms.” But Mullenweg says on Decoder that, “what we decided is that we want to focus as much on the things that are going to be noticeable to users and that users are asking for.”

Final day of the photo challenge. After a busy weekend, I needed a little solitude. Houndstooth Coffee on MLK. ☕️

Some people dread Mondays. Not me. You have the whole week ahead, and anything is possible.

Starting to roll out some improvements to the Micro.blog “marketing” home page, for new users or when you’re signed out. The content isn’t really different yet. I’m sticking with the full-screen paintings, and several layout and link problems are fixed, especially on mobile. Still work to do.

Rumors from Ming-Chi Kuo have Apple smart glasses about two years out, mixed reality glasses three years. I assume there is nothing set with dates that far away. Looking forward to seeing what Apple can do with glasses, but it’s all pinned on Siri getting much better.

Andreas Deja blogs about the upcoming 40th anniversary of The Black Cauldron:

…our inexperience as young film makers really shows in the film. Many of us were straight out of art school with little experience in animation. But…I keep meeting young people who are very fond of The Black Cauldron.

Here’s a story from the dark ages of video releases. I really wanted to watch it, but the VHS version wasn’t released here until years later. Someone from Europe sent me a copy in exchange for another video release from the US. I brought the tape to a local company to convert from PAL to NTSC. 🤯