When we added private, end-to-end encrypted notes to Micro.blog, I said that this would be a foundation for new features. The first feature was shared notes. Any private note can be published to your blog with a special, unguessable URL, convenient for sharing with other peo...

Whenever I’m about to launch a new feature, I feel slightly guilty… Why not improve all the other features first? But we are! I think the news blog history speaks for itself. There are improvements nearly every day, including fixes deployed all through Labor Day weekend.

Ben Thompson blogging at Stratechery about the Pixel 10’s trade-off to prioritize AI above everything:

That Google is clearly sacrificing traditional CPU and GPU performance isn’t a flaw: it’s a very rational approach to a market where it is a big underdog, particularly given it is the company best situated to delivery truly integrated AI, from chip to model to cloud.

Jeremy Keith announcing a new conference in Brighton:

Web Day Out is all about what you can do in web browsers today. You can expect talks that showcase hands-on practical uses for the latest advances in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript APIs.

Also specifically calls out that there won’t be AI talks.

Enjoyed the discussion about automation and AI tools on the latest AppStories podcast. I’m not a Notion user, but I can see the appeal of something that does so much. Just prefer Markdown everywhere and open formats.

Worked on core platform bug fixes and a new feature today, plus preparing a new version of Epilogue. I’ll probably submit to Apple tomorrow, Google later this week. Feeling pretty good about the recent improvements.

Cool update to the mnml theme for Micro.blog: pinning a blog post from a category to the top of the home page.

Herman Martinus blogs about changing the license for his Bear blogging platform from MIT to a license that disallows hosting, partly because it’s so easy for people to spin up competing services now: We’re entering a new age of AI powered coding, where creating a competing ...

I like this post from Allen Pike about pivoting from an indie business to a more VC-inspired, ambitious project. That’s not my path, but he’s going in clear-eyed and purposeful.

I can see why The Legend of Ochi didn’t get a wide theatrical release, but I loved it. Some really beautiful scenes. 🍿

Decided against Liquid Glass-ifying Epilogue for now. It’s such a huge distraction, some developers spent the whole summer dealing with this. Luckily there’s a UIDesignRequiresCompatibility opt-out.

I stopped for a minute to look at this sign, just as a flock of birds took to the sky.

Finally catching up on WWDC sessions and documentation for Liquid Glass. Took me way too long to realize that hidesSharedBackground is what I wanted. And because this is React Native, I get to swizzle UIBarButtonItem to customize things. JavaScript plus a sprinkling of Obj-C.

Revolution.Social is becoming one of my favorite new podcasts. Great episode with Chris Messina. Rabble is on a roll with this.

Interesting blog post about analytics. I think surveillance is too strong a word for simple referrer logging, but I do agree that most personal blogs don’t need this:

The other reason you might put analytics on your site is to know when someone links to your writing. Again, if the linker doesn’t intend to tell you, then you’re surveilling. You do not need to know every time your writing is mentioned.

Mural at Waterloo Park.

What more needs to be said about assault weapons? They need to be banned. Most of the worst mass shootings — including this latest at the church in Minnesota — would’ve been less terrible if the shooters could not fire off 100+ rounds quickly. I’ve blogged about this many times, including last year.

Rolling out a few improvements to Micro.blog today, including a new “trash” for deleted posts, an “x” button to hide the publish pane, Typepad import, and other tweaks. More to come!

Rough morning for the Micro.blog servers. Woke up to a major problem with hung connections tripping up a few things. I have a few nice feature improvements ready to go, though.

My current concern with iOS 26 is not any of the developer stuff, it’s the Phone app! I consistently see caching problems where the UI is out of sync with the notification badge, and missing voicemails until I force quit. Never seen this many problems in a core Apple app before.

Brent Simmons reminiscing about Frontier and why modern development environments aren’t as good:

I’m not saying apps these days need to be Frontier-like in any details. But it seems absolutely bizarre to me that we — we who write Mac and iOS apps — still have to build and run the app, make changes, build and run the app, and so on, all day long. In the year 2025.

I also used Frontier a lot during that time. It was great. Personally, instead of Swift, I would’ve loved to see RubyCocoa taken to the next level. And with React Native we do have some of the quick iteration Brent blogs about.

Threads is testing long-form text attachments on posts. Not good. It would centralized blog-like content that should be on someone’s own site.

AI might eliminate some programmer jobs. It’s also going to create new programmers, people who don’t have a traditional CS background. I’m not convinced the sky is falling on work.

The greatest challenge is not to the economy but to a fractured society, with AI becoming as divisive as politics.

John Gruber blogging on RFK vs. the CDC:

We really needed the CDC five years ago. We’re in big trouble if we need them again before the US electorate ousts these wingnuts.

There are new vaccines approved by the FDA but the guidance is really confusing. Going to differ to my doctor rather than RFK.

Dave Winer: Think Different about WordPress:

WordPress has a deep and powerful API, well designed, documented, and they don’t break it. Developers who know me know that the last part is the most important. A platform must remain unchanging.

Dave’s work is similar and well aligned with Micro.blog.

Watched The Yogurt Shop Murders on HBO, even though it’s not my kind of show. I was in high school during that time, and the shop wasn’t far away. Just sad and still a little surprising that it could not be solved.

I’ve been wanting to make this change for a while: Micro.blog’s Design page has now been split into separate “design” and “blog settings” pages. This makes more logical sense and keeps each page cleaner.

Doing an inventory of my domain names, just realized tonight that one expired. Luckily no one grabbed it, so I re-registered it. Spread across four registrars, really cumbersome to keep track of everything.

I’m always curious about other blog hosts' pricing. With Typepad shutting down, I took a screenshot of their pricing page. One of the most confusing, “why would I upgrade to Premium or Enterprise?” set of plans.

OpenAI has a long blog post about what more needs to be done to make ChatGPT safer, especially for teens:

We’re also exploring making it possible for teens (with parental oversight) to designate a trusted emergency contact. That way, in moments of acute distress, ChatGPT can do more than point to resources: it can help connect teens directly to someone who can step in.

I didn’t realize it could already escalate potential criminal behavior to human review, so that’s good. In the future will OpenAI need a team of real therapists on call? Using AI as a therapist will have many repercussions.