Joe Biden has lived an extraordinary life — lots of success and plenty of heartbreak too. This cancer diagnosis is the latest challenge. It just feels particularly unfair to happen while a man who mocked Joe’s family and worse is still in office.

Big Thicket National Preserve.

Twice this week for different reasons, Bell Labs has come up. It’s incredible to re-read about all the things they invented. Wondering if there could be anything comparable to Bell Labs or Xerox Parc today. Maybe highly focused, like AI research.

Acadiana Park in Lafayette. 🌳

Manu Moreale blogs about how so many things feel transactional and why he highlights supporting members on blogroll.org:

We live in the world of paywalled content, unilateral contract modification, micro transactions, serialised content, upsells, and the list goes on and on and on. Everyone is trying to find a way to extract money in one way or another, and that is something I find personally draining and soul-crushing.

Finished watching videos and reading about OpenAI’s Codex. Pretty wild. The design they’ve come up with (based on pull requests) is both powerful and encourages human review. I could see using this at least for a narrow set of tasks.

Nice updates for the next FediForum: keynote by Cory Doctorow and a what’s new on the open social web session by Laurens Hof of the Fediverse Report.

Didn’t realize until this week that the RSS.app feeds support RSS and JSON Feed. Very cool. I’m starting to use it to follow a couple Twitter / X folks from the AI industry. Hate giving X any attention, though.

Curtis Herbert is back with another Slopes Diaries post, making the argument that Apple’s 30% cut is worth it, but that external payment links will also open new opportunities. I think the perspective on this topic varies between developers partly based on whether you expect...

Sheldon Lake State Park. The ponds used to be part of a fish hatchery, then closed in 1975 and let nature take over. We saw some alligators. 🐊

With OpenAI adding 4.1, I’m having to think a little too much about which models I should be using. I generally use o4-mini for coding, 4o for simple, fast questions. What now? I expect GPT-5 will help consolidate some of these choices.

Thanks @numericcitizen for making another video about what’s new in Micro.blog! This one covers integration with Bluesky and Mastodon, and more.

Josh Miller has an update on the Dia browser, in a series of posts on Twitter / X. For a company with “browser” in its name, wouldn’t mind seeing a blog post of this instead of on X. 🤪 Some very interesting screenshots in the thread, though. I’m excited to try it.

Great post from Joan Westenberg about what has changed with Apple:

A company once defined by joyful provocation—by thinking different—is now defined by its defensiveness. Its leadership acts not like inventors but like stewards of a status quo. They protect margins like relics.

Justin Jackson on the threat to podcasts from YouTube, and why we should keep investing in RSS:

The benefit of investing in RSS is that any innovations will be shared across the entire ecosystem. When YouTube innovates, the benefits stay inside YouTube. When the podcast community innovates on RSS, everyone benefits: creators, listeners, and businesses alike.

A few years ago we were worried about Spotify locking down podcasts. YouTube feels a little different because video supplements rather than replaces audio podcasts. But Justin is right that we should be vigilant.

Before my talk at EFF Austin last night, I exported a PDF of my slides and asked ChatGPT (o4) to tell me about them. Here’s the chat transcript. It’s fascinating to me because this is without giving the speaker notes to ChatGPT, so it inferred everything from the slide conte...

I’m speaking at EFF Austin tonight! Getting coffee this morning and working on my slides. Last-minute panic that everything in my talk needs to change.

Mavs fans needed a win after losing Luka. Happy for them. And Spurs with the second pick… Amazing. Going to enjoy reading the conspiracy theories about this one. 🏀

From a “lunch with” profile of Sam Altman in the Financial Times:

I find Altman brimming with confidence as our conversation ranges from AI products to the existential question of an AI future that a handful of optimistic technologists are steadily leading us to, whether we like it or not. Radiating ambition, he sounds like a man convinced of his own destiny.

Perhaps you have to be a little overconfident to attempt this. Meanwhile most people are upset that Sam uses the wrong kind of expensive olive oil.

It’s that time of year again when I realize I’ve let Redis memory get completely out of hand, 45+ GB, so forking to save is mostly impossible. Think I’m going to take some time to truly trim out the bloat.

I posted a new video on YouTube that shows how filters work in Micro.blog, including a brand new feature: Micro.blog can analyze your blog posts using AI magic to generate keywords and file posts into categories. This is for Micro.blog Premium subscribers. 🪄

Just caught up with Andor through episode 9. What a great show. 📺

Nice update to the mnml theme for Micro.blog. It’s cool to see all those settings.

Time for some plants for the front yard. Mother’s Day shopping at Home Depot.

Made several little design updates to Micro.blog this weekend, including a more consistent, cleaner header for pages that have some text and a “new” button. Here’s a screenshot for posterity.

OpenAI rolls out new things so often that it’s a little surprising they haven’t replicated Claude’s Artifacts. It’s such a nice workflow to generate HTML, CSS, and JS with an interactive preview right in the app.

Dave Winer blogging about how software evolves with feedback from users:

Software isn’t a thing, it isn’t finished, it’s a process as it gets invented by the users. It’s a performing art. WordLand today is like a musician performing in a small club, working out the playlist, and hoping to be playing at theaters then arenas, and finally someday, if we’re very good, stadiums.

When we launched Micro.one, I was interested in simplifying the sidebar. I moved the link to manage blog post categories to another pane for all users. I now think that was a mistake. Today along with some other minor UI tweaks, I’ve added it back.

Great blog post by John Siracusa, distilling much of Apple’s current problem balancing doing good with making money:

Apple, as embodied by its leadership’s decisions over the past decade or more, no longer seems primarily motivated by the creation of great products. Time and time again, its policies have made its products worse for customers in exchange for more power, control, and, yes, money for Apple.

While testing something this morning, I made a careless blunder with one of our servers, causing some sporadic downtime. I’m very sorry. A couple things are slow right now but will be returning to normal shortly.