Thanks Dave for the kind words. There’s a lot to do but I know we’re on the right path. Still digging! 🙂

Not a great time for my car’s A/C to start failing, driving back from Dallas. Way too hot out. Wish I was back at the beach.

Village Burger Bar. Ginormous onion rings.

My focus is making Micro.blog a great blogging platform. But on the social side, I also love that it’s maybe the last social network that is ambivalent to metrics and engagement. Every other platform — even Mastodon — has algorithmic feeds or trends. That’s fine for them, but not what I want to do.

I’m not much of a meme person, but this Frog and Toad + Claude is hilarious and true. “Cookies” is an all-time great story. 🍪

I loved seeing this: Why Inkwell is so useful while on vacation. Inkwell tries to have an interface that works for staying current with everything today but also for skimming through things you might have missed that are important. Good for vacations or taking breaks from the internet.

I’m a broken record on the futility of TestFlight beta approvals, but I was reminded of it again when I considered doing a new beta for Epilogue over the weekend. If it requires Apple approval, now I have another thing to manage, in addition to all these apps. Might as well just ship to everyone.

John Gruber in a comment linking to more Om Malik blog posts:

If you’re going to get into something, you ought to pursue it to its full extent. If you’re not interested enough to do that, don’t bother getting into it. Find the few things you love; don’t waste your time on the many things you merely like.

Rush. 🎸

Dave Winer puts out a call for others building tools that support RSS and especially inbound RSS:

If you’re working on a social web app that supports inbound and outbound RSS, I’d like to help, so our products can interop beautifully. That’s the reason I’m doing this work, to establish a baseline for interop in the social web. RSS is the obvious candidate. If we didn’t have it, we’d have to invent it.

I’m actually not aware of any social platforms that support inbound RSS except Micro.blog. It would be great to have more.

Another beautiful remembrance of Om Malik, highlighting his photos on Glass:

It’s not lost on us that Om’s photography, often taken in frozen lands in or around the arctic circle, was the polar opposite of his personality. While he focused on subtle shapes and hidden landscapes, he was the sun of any group he was in.

Watched the first episode of Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness. Funny. Great to have Larry David back on TV. 📺

I’m testing a Liquid Glass update for Epilogue, but I almost don’t want to ship it until iOS 27 because the translucency on the tab bar is so bad with book covers behind it. I’ll likely work around it, though, so it doesn’t hold up any other features.

Mark Gurman reporting for Bloomberg that Apple’s vice president of Vision Pro and smart glasses is leaving for OpenAI:

Paul Meade, a vice president, is set to leave Apple by next week and will then start at OpenAI’s hardware unit, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Meade will work on OpenAI’s upcoming family of AI-powered devices, said the people, who declined to be named discussing unannounced personnel moves.

Interesting that he’s leaving before the Apple smart glasses announcement. I’ll be a little surprised if we even hear about the glasses this year.

IndieWebCamp Nuremberg is happening this weekend. I’m looking over the notes for the books session.

Semafor reports that Mythos can now be released to select companies. Also:

The letter is silent on Fable 5, a weaker version of Mythos that was briefly the most powerful AI model widely available to consumers. People close to the talks said they are moving toward releasing Fable as well, though that timeline is unclear.

Presumably the company list is the same for both Mythos and GPT-5.6 announced today. Whether intended or not, the way this was handled has effectively pulled back Anthropic’s perceived lead by a couple weeks, perhaps aligning the latest frontier releases.

For all the talk of the programming jobs market on the verge of collapse, this sure feels like a great time to be a developer. Reminds me of being young when I’d stay up until 3am coding, except now I can go to bed at 9pm.

I said earlier this month that I like Anthropic’s model names. OpenAI is now trying something similar with the new names Sol, Terra, and Luna for GPT-5.6. Less descriptive but more friendly than the technical “mini” and “nano” we had previously. I like it.

A little surprised that Fable is still held up. Maybe the administration’s slant toward vindictiveness means that we’ll see GPT-5.6 generally available first.

Sad but inspired to read the many remembrances of Om Malik. I love this idea from Matt Mullenweg:

Om loved putting on a good conference, and I’d like to celebrate his life with an awesome event on September 29, 2026 (his 60th) in San Francisco, like an OmFest. I’ll find a space where every community from the many facets of Om can come together. In the spirit of Open Source and co-creation, we can have some booths, flash talks, a gallery of his photography, pen showcase, and whatever other fun ideas people want to contribute.

Took a little time this morning to customize the CSS for the Micro.blog documentation pages to strip out all the Discourse-y things that aren’t needed. For example, the Inkwell page.

Productive week for software releases:

• Micro.blog 4.0.3 for Mac
• Inkwell 1.5 for Mac
• Inkwell 1.1 for Android
• Epilogue 2.3.1 for iOS
• Epilogue 2.3.1 for Android

Not sure we’ve ever had this many updates at once. Still waiting on Apple to approve Inkwell 1.1 for iOS.

Finished reading: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy. Unfolds with an interesting island setting and mystery. I liked it, but as the layers are pulled back, there is mostly grief. 📚

Heartbreaking to hear that Om Malik has passed away. I can hardly believe it. Even just this year, it felt like he was doing some of his best writing. Very thankful for the time he gave us at Micro Camp 2023… I was so excited to talk to him. Rest in peace.

The Spurs picked up 4 new players in the draft. Lots of potential. Some folks are annoyed with De’Aaron Fox, but he was a big part of the Spurs getting 62 wins and making it so far, even if it’s weird that he’s gonna make so much more money than any other Spurs player. 🏀

Due to the rising costs of memory and storage, a standard Micro.blog subscription will remain $5 for the foreseeable future. 🙂

Settled into a perfect routine while away on vacation over the last week: walk or bike for coffee, work a couple hours, picnic at the beach with family, lots of book reading, nice dinner out. 🏖️ Working a little each day actually makes me more relaxed. Got updates to Epilogue and Inkwell ready.

Apple price increases are significant. Now that I see them, it does make sense to change the prices for all the Macs and iPads at the same time. It would feel out of balance to have e.g. the Air stay low and the Neo increase.

I have a nice M3 MacBook Pro and plan to keep it for a couple more years.

I prefer more open systems, so of course I lean toward supporting the EU’s DMA. Third-party marketplaces on iOS represent real progress that wouldn’t have happened without regulation. But what about Siri AI? It is not coming to the EU because Apple doesn’t trust other develo...

Love that this bookstore (Sundog Books) had too many books to fit properly on the shelves. 📚