FeedCity

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.

Tapbots is working on a Bluesky client, called Phoenix. On making it a separate app, they say:

While there may be some conveniences of an app that supports multiple social media protocols, we believe the experience will be much better overall if we keep them separate. We do plan to provide a way to cross-post between them so you don’t have to write duplicate posts.

This is fine, but I think eventually more people will just post to their own blogs and not have to manage separate apps or accounts.

Very quick video of the latest Micro.blog for Mac with new blog post summary field. You can type your own summary that will be used in the timeline and cross-posting, or have it generate one for you.

Reminder for folks in Austin, Fediverse House is this weekend, Sunday and Monday. I’ll be there. In a happy coincidence, Sunday is also the anniversary of the first post to my blog. 23 years.

Worked a bunch on the Mac app today, one of my favorite things to work on. Almost done with the next update, so I’ll wrap it up tomorrow morning and release it. Also finally solved that ridiculous “41 new posts” bug.

I like this post from @devilgate about not being discouraged to write, even when we know that doing more than writing could have a better impact:

But not everyone can do more, or give more. And even those who can, or could or should: for some of us, writing is not just what we do, it’s what we are. We need to write.

With politics there’s also an opposite problem, avoiding blogging about something just because it’s a controversial topic. The web is a big place with room to explore a lot of ideas, we probably shouldn’t second-guess ourselves as much as we sometimes do.

Funny that SF Symbols now has a “robotic vacuum” icon but not just a robot. Wonder if it’s an oversight or because of Android. 🤖

Sometimes the debugging is all in the wrong place. Spent a couple hours trying to find a bug in JavaScript — lots of printf-style debugging, element inspection, random code changes — only to eventually track it down to a single line of CSS.

Thinking about the Wii yesterday thanks to Sven’s post, I re-read my old blog post from 2007 about when I gave away a Wii in a contest. Wonder what happened to that console and whether the new owners had fun with it. If any kids played it, they would be adults now.

Some of my really old blog posts are still in Textile format instead of Markdown. Whenever I find one, I just manually edit it to fix the links. No memory now of why I didn’t batch convert them years ago.

Apple updates a couple iPads. From Dan Moren at Six Colors:

The base iPad’s update is perhaps somewhat more disappointing, as that model was introduced in 2022 and its A16 processor will make it one of the few current main-line Apple devices—perhaps only—not to support Apple Intelligence.

Apple’s AI strategy is a sort of paradox. All in on marketing, but on-device models are limited and Apple resists using private cloud compute where it could help older devices.

Staple! is coming up next month, April 12-13, at St. Edward’s in Austin. Special guests Kazu Kibuishi and more! Amazing that the show started 20 years ago.

Great list of folks to follow on Micro.blog. Thanks for the reminder @Miraz!

We used to have Micro Monday around here, to help community members be discovered. Here are a dozen of the many Micro.Bloggers I enjoy…

M.G. Siegler: Apple Should Swap Out Siri with ChatGPT.

Apple won’t do this, and some users might not want it either, but it’s a legitimate idea. Generative AI provides a very rare moment of disruption. If a good Siri is two years away at best, that’s a long time to risk on something so important.

I like the naming on this collaborative Git system based on AT Proto: Tangled. The servers are “knots”. Just the right amount of clever.

Even when it seems the news is all bad, there is something incredible. James Harrison’s blood donations saved two million babies’ lives:

Harrison donated blood and plasma a whopping 1,173 times, according to Lifeblood, every two weeks between 1954 and 2018. […] Harrison’s plasma contained a rare and precious antibody called anti-D, which was discovered in the mid-1960s. It is used in medications to prevent haemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn

I never thought I needed a “leafless tree” emoji but it’s a nice addition. Still hoping for “iced coffee” one day.

Great interview with Dario Amodei on the Hard Fork podcast. About his disappointment at the AI Action Summit conference in Paris:

If you’re a public official, if you’re a leader at a company… People are going to look back, they’re going to look back in 2026 and 2027. […] Be careful what you say. Don’t look like a fool in retrospect. A lot of my thinking is just driven by — aside from just wanting the right outcome — I don’t want to look like a fool. And I think at that conference, some people are going to look like fools.

Dario always seems the most level-headed of all the AI company CEOs.

Sideloading on Android has improved since I last used it. It’s a pretty smooth user experience now, while still warning enough that you’re outside the usual “safe” app install flow. Good balance that we’ve wanted Apple to adopt for a decade.

Good morning so far, deployed a few server bug fixes, submitted a new Android release to Google. Lots to do. SXSW coming up toward the end of the week.

Being nominated once and winning once is great, congrats. But nominated a bunch of times and never winning is worth a lot. Edward Norton: 4 nominations. Ralph Fiennes: 3. Like how LeBron with 10 trips to the NBA finals and “only” 4 championships is still the greatest of all time. (Wait, what?!) 🤪

There is nothing like a live performance of Defying Gravity. Even on TV, I still get chills when they nail it. Great way to start the Oscars. 🍿

Looking forward to the Oscars tonight. I’ve only seen 4 out of 10 of the best picture nominees — A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Dune 2, and Wicked. Wanted to catch The Brutalist but never got to it. For best animated feature, I like either Flow or The Wild Robot. 🍿

Ben Werdmuller has a good post today about returning to the distributed publishing roots of the web and thinking about how technology should redistribute wealth and power to many people: It starts with software designed for people rather than for capital. The web once thriv...

We can all see it. It is beyond political parties. Beyond ideology. Beyond whether he is corrupt or competent. David Brooks, on the PBS NewsHour after the Trump and Zelenskyy meeting at the White House: All my life, I’ve had a certain idea about America. That we’re a flawed...

Watched Away We Go and really enjoyed it. Totally missed this when it first came out in 2009. 📺

OpenAI released GPT-4.5 this week to Pro subscribers and via the API, but it’s not what I was expecting. It is much more expensive, about 15-30 times the cost of GPT-4o. For my simple needs, like figuring out the keywords in a photo or summarizing a web page, older models ar...

Earth is our only home.

Watched some of the video with Trump, Vance, and Zelenskyy. We are in a very dark place with American foreign policy. Europe will have to take the lead. We have lost our way here, led by a narcissist whose selfishness and cruelty is almost beyond belief. 🇺🇸

New version of Micro Social is coming out, from Greg Morris:

Apple have approved a new version of Micro Social that includes posting to multiple blogs, managing and updating existing posts as well as a few other improvements.

I also fixed an issue on the Micro.blog side with push notifications.