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Matt Mullenweg blogged about the surprising twist with Midjourney Medical:
David Holz, one of the most underrated pioneers in AI, has taken money from making cat pictures to build a full-body ultrasound scanner that can give you incredible visibility in 60 seconds.
Watched: The Truman Show. So good. Haven’t seen it in years and it holds up perfectly. 🍿
Finished reading: The Last Contract of Isako by Fonda Lee. Fantastic. Great world-building, viewpoint switch, and just the right plot surprises. 📚
Love the detail of using these bricks instead of just white paint. The workers put a lot of extra time into cutting everything just right.
Daveigh Chase has passed away. She was Lilo in Lilo & Stitch, Chihiro in Spirited Away, and also in Donnie Darko. Andreas Deja blogged about working with her:
Working on the character of Lilo was a profoundly moving experience for me as an animator. Daveigh’s voice performance was utterly unique and inspired, presenting a brand-new challenge and the perfect opportunity to bring an unorthodox Disney girl to life.
It’s hard to imagine how someone went from that experience — a movie that will be remembered for a hundred years — to such a low point of personal struggles, even homelessness.
Kevin Roose blogged today about his history with The New York Times and the decision to end the Hard Fork podcast:
The Times has been a great home for Hard Fork — and a great home for me, for many years before that — but as Casey and I discussed the future of the show, we realized that what we really wanted was to start a company together, and build something we would own.
Looking forward to what they do next!
Cloudy and breezy evening on the gulf.
Thinking about the new Mastodon collections, it reminded me that we have blogrolls on Micro.blog that don’t get enough attention. Today I improved a few things with adding blog recommendations, including a search across other platforms if you don’t have the URL for someone handy.
A rare selfie for the blog… Enjoying some time with family in Rosemary Beach, Florida. Found this Eadweard Muybridge shirt randomly last month at a Goodwill and had to get it.
Flowers growing through the fence.
Apple opens up app distribution for Brazil:
Beginning with iOS 26.5, developers can distribute apps on alternative app marketplaces, operate alternative app marketplaces, process app payments for digital goods and services outside of Apple In-App Purchase in iOS, and more.
So we’ve got the EU, Japan, Brazil, and partially South Korea. Slow progress, but still progress.
I’m curious what model Codex cloud (that can automatically check GitHub PRs) is using. It often catches bugs that regular GPT-5.5 misses. Perhaps just a different, more comprehensive prompt.
AI researches are in such demand, they shuffle between companies often, and it’s hard to tell which hires are meaningful. Anthropic likes to say that none of their founders have left. Now Noam Shazeer is leaving Google for OpenAI. He was the co-author of the transformer architecture. A big deal.
Josh Baer has died in a plane crash. Tragic. He founded Capital Factory and was a huge part of the Austin startup scene. Thinking of his family and friends, and so many people whose lives he must’ve impacted. Rest in peace.
Mastodon 4.6 is out with featured user collections, similar to Bluesky starter packs. I’m exploring the best way to support this in Micro.blog. The API is similar to quote posts in how it’s built around opting in, so there’s more chatter between servers via ActivityPub.
The new Google Home Speaker looks pretty good, but I don’t think I’m bought in enough to the Google ecosystem for it to be for me. Eventually someone is going to nail the voice assistant speaker. Not sure Alexa+ is it either.
Thanks to Jim Krenz for the kind words in this blog post. I never prompt for app ratings or reviews, but I do love seeing posts like this. I’m always encouraged to keep going. Micro.blog is the best today that it has ever been.
Details still coming out about the Fable shutdown… It’s more nuanced than I was expecting. From the Washington Post:
Senior officials began to consider using export controls to claw back the technology after the company did not identify the new recipients for days.
When Anthropic finally turned over the names, the administration discovered that one recipient was a South Korean telecommunications company the administration suspected of having ties to China, the officials said.
Anthropic quickly revoked the firm’s access to Mythos…
Seems in large part a breakdown in communication.
The problem with stats is you start obsessing over them and get distracted. This is why I don’t even look at website analytics or referrers anymore. But now that we have a little more data on RAM for Mac customers, it is interesting… 56% at 24 GB or more.
This is just people who have already updated to Micro.blog 4.0.
Not sure what to make of Snap’s new Specs. First impression is that they sit in between Meta’s Display glasses and the Vision Pro, both technically and because of the $2200 price. So many young people use Snapchat, wouldn’t a cheaper / less capable / more fun product make sense?
Stephen Hackett has a rundown of some of the xAI data center news:
SpaceX and the NAACP are in a legal battle over the use of turbines in Southaven, Mississippi for powering the Colossus II data center in Memphis. This week, the Department of Justice got involved…
DOJ says Grok, but Anthropic is also now using Colossus II.
I’m still slowly getting over the Spurs losing in the finals. What an amazing season and playoff run that was. 82 games is hard, no guarantee a team can get back there, but can’t wait to see what this team does next year. 🏀
The valuation of SpaceX is wild. When it comes back down to earth, what impact will it have on the market? I don’t worry too much about an AI bubble, but I do worry about the market imploding because so much of the S&P 500 is concentrated in a small number of tech companies.
Finally watched Hoppers last night. Really fun. Used to be that I would see every animated feature opening weekend… So many movies now and it’s harder to keep up. 🪵
Simon Willison blogged more on the Fable shutdown drama:
This whole situation is such a mess. Non-technical decision-makers have been hearing that models that can “craft cyber attacks” are uniquely dangerous for months. Now they look ready to ban any model that can help us secure our code.
Anthropic spent months telling everyone that their model is dangerous. Now they’re annoyed that we believed them. Maybe this is an argument for open weights. Less centralized control, more transparent development.
The first Day One journal turned out so well that I ordered another one. They make it so easy.
Brent Simmons blogs about what he’s been up to with NetNewsWire over the last year. I also created a PR for Inkwell sync in NNW, but the work stalled because I wasn’t confident enough in the codebase to definitely say it’s ready to ship. Need to dust that off and try to get it into an update.
Animated feature The Violinist looks special. A couple moments in the trailer reminded me a bit of Grave of the Fireflies, although on balance it probably doesn’t go that far into tragedy. Hopefully gets an American release.
