Trying out the new Mythos theme for Micro.blog. It’s really good!

I turned on Threads automatic cross-posting from Micro.blog today, just to test something from my account, then promptly forgot about it. Hadn’t posted in months until now. Maybe I’ll keep it on again for a little while before going back to blog + Bluesky only.

Finished reading: The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu. Very different than most modern fantasy, in pace and character viewpoints. Loved it. Truly epic. 📚

We got a nice rain this afternoon, the perfect test for the new gutters. Still landscaping and drainage to do, but this was a much-needed house upgrade.

The albums page on @birming’s photo blog is really nicely done. I’m assuming this uses separate Micro.blog pages and photo collections. Very cool because it gives the illusion of a photo albums feature that doesn’t really exist in the platform!

The term superintelligence has been bugging me. AGI hasn’t been achieved yet and some folks are already jumping ahead to AI smarter than humans? I prefer the idea of AI as a team of the most knowledgeable people in the world, each an expert in their field, working together to solve problems for you.

I’m not concerned about Bluesky’s terms of service — although I’m glad other people are concerned and checking it! — but I do love this sentence that Cory Doctorow wrote:

This is so pro-enshittificatory, it’s like a landing strip for the sole use of Enshittification Airlines, which can land a 747 full of enshittfying nonsense on Bluesky’s users every 10 minutes, around the clock, without worrying about any legal repercussions.

Great post from Kuba Suder about how all the Bluesky and AT Protocol pieces fit together.

Fascinating post by Mustafa Suleyman on the risks of achieving “seemingly conscious” AI, and how we must design systems to help real people, avoiding the illusion of consciousness:

A coherent and persistent memory, combined with a subjective experience, will give rise to a claim that an AI has a sense of itself. Going further, such a system could easily be trained to recognize itself in an image or video if it has a visual appearance. It will feel like it understands others through understanding itself. Say this is a system you have had for some time. How would it feel to delete it?

Skimming over the new Google products. I’m still not in the market for an expensive foldable phone, but I could be interested in a simpler design, without a front screen, more like a foldable iPad.

Continuing to feel better today, so pushed out an email newsletter improvement for Micro.blog Premium folks. I had mostly coded this a couple days ago, was waiting to make sure I could be around to test and monitor it.

Spent most of the day resting, listening to the audiobook for The Grace of Kings, and trying to avoid working. My body was exhausted and Covid was the non-negotiable reminder to slow down. Feeling better. 😷

Liquid Glass has (deservedly) received plenty of criticism. But there are some areas that are clearly better, like these buttons in iOS alerts.

MSNBC → MS NOW. In fairness to the designers, any new logo is going to be worse than the peacock.

During the first Trump term, I thought MSNBC’s coverage was great. But this year they’ve seemed unmoored. I’ve mostly stopped watching. This rebrand was a chance for something new and they blew it.

Sitting outside at the hotel, drinking so much water and Gatorade. I always seem to get sick while traveling. 😷

Lots of good quotes from Alex Heath reporting on a dinner with OpenAI execs and others. Sam Altman:

I do think people will go to fewer websites. I think people will care more about human-crafted content than ever. My directional bet would be that human-created, human-endorsed, human-curated content all goes up in value dramatically.

This mirrors something I’ve blogged about. In a time of abundant AI slop, we will seek out human-created content and to feel a connection with other creators.

I never want ads in the software I use to get things done, so this interview with Nick Turley of OpenAI was reassuring. Between what he said and what Sam Altman has said, their company seems very aware of aligning their business with users’ needs. Something Meta will never be able to get right.

Safari on iOS 26 is bugging me enough — especially the extra taps for tab bar items like closing a tab — that I’m switching over to Kagi’s Orion for a little while. I’ve been meaning to try it.

Jason Snell on how long it’s taken for Apple to bring back the blood oxygen feature:

I’m still surprised that it’s gone this long and this far, but Apple seems to be a company that will leave no legal stone unturned and will fight to the end when it feels it’s in the right.

So true. It feels like increasingly they aren’t right, but I’m on Apple’s side for this one, because it was holding back a legitimate health feature.

I made a change today that seemed right, but something about it was nagging at the back of my head. So before I deployed it, I asked our robot overlords… It correctly pointed out that I had forgotten the old code worked that way for a reason! A snippet from its analysis:

Original behavior likely intentional: archive_site previously only ran prepare_plugins(…, full_themes: false) so “small” plugins could contribute assets/includes, but it avoided full theme overrides and didn’t layer the user’s theme on top of “archive”.

As part of fixing the Mac app on Sequoia, I’ve switched builds over to Xcode Cloud. Gotta admit, it’s better than my old workflow. Maybe one day I’ll automate the appcast RSS feed. (I’ve been editing it by hand since 1.0 shipped in 2017.)

Great news for Apple Watch fans: blood oxygen feature coming back to recent watches. Sounds like they’ve worked around the patent by doing more processing on the iPhone.

I always try to avoid new preferences in Micro.blog because it can add a lot of clutter to the UI. Harder to use, harder to maintain. But adding better date and time formats this week, might be unavoidable. The “just do the right thing” defaults only get us about halfway there.

Long-time users of Micro.blog won’t believe this… We are rolling out 24-hour time and more localized date formats today, many years after it was first requested. Visit the Micro.blog timeline on the web and it should detect your settings, then start applying them everywhere.

Nice reminder from @jim that Micro.blog t-shirts are available on Cotton Bureau. I think these look really good.

Working on a fix to the latest Micro.blog crashing on Sequoia. This is what I get for developing with the latest macOS beta… Apple changed something.

I always like reading Cal Newport’s essays. In his latest for The New Yorker, he pulls us back a little from the AI scaling hype.

John Gruber blogging about the Perplexity stunt to buy Chrome:

I think what’s happening is that the LLM chatbot field is maturing (exemplified by OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT 5 last week), and Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas is getting increasingly desperate.

Unless Apple does somehow acquire Perplexity, I doubt Perplexity is going to succeed in the long run. Some people think the AI bubble will pop, bringing down all of these companies. But OpenAI and Anthropic are here to stay. The thing about bubbles… Webvan didn’t make it out of the dot-com bubble, but we all order groceries online now.

Elon Must complaining about Apple not featuring his apps. But as Stephen Hackett points out, if anything Apple should be demoting Grok even more:

Currently, the Grok app has a 12+ age rating. Given the sexual content that is so easily accessible through the chatbot, that sure seems low to me.

Really happy with this change we rolled out today for the Micro.blog Family subscription plan:

Micro.blog Family now allows you to transfer “ownership” of a blog to someone else in your family (or small team). So you can manage payment for up to 5 blogs, but another member can post to their own blog and control the blog’s settings.

Micro.blog News https://news.micro.blog/2025/08/12/microblog-family-now-allows-you.html

Under the “People” section, there’s a new “Make Owner” button for each member of the blog. This makes the Family plan more flexible for a variety of setups.