FeedCity

I’ve been personally attacked a bunch today over a thread and private email that went off the rails, more personal criticism than I’ve received in the entire 8 years of running Micro.blog. A little stunned. But there have also been some amazing, thoughtful posts about what we’re doing. Thank you.

Wrote a draft post, deleted it. Trying to remind myself that I do not need to have the last word on every topic. Sometimes it’s better to just let things go.

Usually on election night and the day after, I dig into county stats, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it in November. Finally looked up my precinct here in Austin: 84% for Kamala Harris. 🇺🇸

Techdirt covers the empty promise from Mark Zuckerberg on the fact-checking team, including this comment:

Texas is, apparently, famous for its unbiased, neutral residents, as compared to California, where it is constitutionally impossible to be unbiased.

🤪

Strata 1.2 for iOS is now available. This release adds a new tab bar with bookmarks and highlights. Going forward we can do more with bookmarks in Strata without complicating Micro.one and Micro.blog.

My answer to almost any societal or political problem is: more blogs, more communities. It’s an oversimplification but a lot of great things come from this first step, to slowly pull away from centralized control and big platforms. When I don’t know what to do, I do this.

I noticed that Micro.blog was spending a lot of time dealing with files in Hugo’s static folder in custom themes, an artifact of how Micro.blog has to manage files across multiple servers. The optimization to make this faster introduced a couple new problems. Everything is resolved now. Fun morning!

Reminder that when you’re angry, lashing out at people who are not the problem is counterproductive. It sometimes feels like we’re all balancing on a knife’s edge. I get it. But I’m done with the outrage machine. It’s performative.

In all the elections I could vote in where my candidate lost, I certainly felt frustrated and disappointed. My blog captures it going back to 2004. But I never felt like giving up on America because you get another shot in the midterms. Now, I don’t know. It will take decades to fix this. 🇺🇸

I often think of this post on leaky abstractions by Joel Spolsky whenever I’m unraveling multiple layers of code, trying to debug a performance problem. As programmers we get lazy and build up complex systems that hide problems. I’m usually good at spotting this, but not always.

Cold day in Austin, might see some snow tonight. Working on server fixes and performance. We also submitted Strata 1.2 for iOS to Apple for review, so hopefully that’ll hit the App Store soon, with Android to follow later this week.

Trump’s second term — which apparently started a day early — is going to be a series of mismanaged, real crises and completely dumb, fake issues. Gonna try to ignore both. 🇺🇸

ByteDance was been trying so hard to sell TikTok and they just ran out of time. Thankfully, Trump is going to extend the deadline, giving TikTok more time to find a buyer! Whew. I’m sure TikTok will be sold real soon now. 🤪

I’ve optimized a few things with our Twitter / X import. If you never imported your tweets, now is a great time! Micro.one and Micro.blog copy all your tweets and photos (minus RTs and videos) to a space you can control. Full API access to the data, easy to embed on your blog.

Molly White:

The TikTok ban, the Musk Twitter takeover, the Facebook moderation policy changes, the Republicans’ rapidly intensifying crackdowns on speech… let these be the proof you needed to move anything you care about online to a space you control.

Get your own domain name. If you don’t know where, Micro.one hosting is $1/month.

TikTok’s “not available” message is blatantly manipulative… So a fitting end to the app, for now.

Last week when ChatGPT added scheduled tasks, I set a task to write a haiku for me each morning based on Hayao Miyazaki movies. It has been a fun experiment. Whenever I get one of the haikus, I smile, which was what I hoped would happen.

Here are the first four:

Through forest winds soar,
A catbus hums in the night,
Magic fills the air.

Beneath soft moonlight,
Spirits dance on quiet hills,
Dreams take gentle flight.

Sky castles arise,
Whispers of the wind bring tales,
Nature’s heart beats strong.

Howl’s voice on the breeze,
A lone castle seeks the stars,
Love breaks every curse.

I also like that even for a business-y “scheduled tasks” feature, we can squeeze a little creativity out of it.

Another shot of downtown and the sky with fewer clouds, from across the river.

Custom printing code for Mac apps is a lost art. Nice work by @danielpunkass in the latest Black Ink.

I’ve never had a problem with Mac app notarization until today. Usually it takes just a minute. This new build is stuck “processing” for 20 minutes now. Not as bad as human review taking days, but on principle I don’t like that Apple is the bottleneck.

Lady Bird Lake and downtown Austin from the pedestrian bridge.

My cookies and sessions are all out of whack now serving both micro.one and micro.blog from essentially the same web application. Separate load balancers, but I think I need to split things out even further to fix a couple issues.

Great lineup of social web talks at FOSDEM next month. Wish I could be there. Good luck everyone!

New updates to the mnml theme for Micro.blog. Looks really nice @jimmitchell! Remember you can preview new themes now without having to switch your blog.

I’ve been ignoring most podcasts over the last month. This morning, listened to the latest Dithering on my walk. It’s got everything you need to know about the TikTok ban and new interest in Xiaohongshu (RedNote).

I haven’t installed the latest iOS 18.3 beta yet, but just from screenshots I like this italicized change for notification summaries.

We posted a new Core Intuition today, catching up on all the WordPress drama from the last month or so.

Very small example of a Siri paper cut and why I avoid using it. This morning I got a text while driving asking “what time” something was. I responded with “ten thirty”, and Siri sent “1030” instead of “10:30”. Not a big deal, but there are countless scenarios like this.

TikTok threatening to shut down completely on Sunday — which is more than is required by the law — is such a transparent attempt to influence the supreme court and others. Good riddance. It’s not great if everyone just joins Reels, but we need a shake-up.

If you only build a new skyscraper every year or so, downtown Austin doesn’t seem like it’s changing much. Looking at the skyline, it’s familiar — hey there’s the capitol, and the Frost tower, and… — but when I think about the full scope of changes over decades, it’s almost unrecognizable.