This upcoming book about Steve Jobs during the NeXT years sounds really good, via John Gruber:

With unprecedented access to unbroadcast footage of Jobs in NeXT meetings, private company documents, and interviews with his closest colleagues, Cain offers the definitive account of how failure transformed a brash wunderkind into a true business genius.

I got my first Mac during those years. Steve was legendary, NeXT machines felt almost mythical, and I’m not sure I ever considered that he would return to Apple. What an extraordinary life.

Sometimes when I’m walking and look up at trees or buildings moving past me, I imagine the world in layers like an old multiplane camera, or as seen through Tarzan’s deep canvas. If this programming and AI thing doesn’t pan out, I need to find my pencils. My brain is still wired for animation.

Kiki’s Delivery Service back in theaters next month:

More than three decades after it first enchanted audiences, Kiki’s Delivery Service is returning to North American cinemas in a newly remastered 4K presentation, heading exclusively to IMAX theaters on March 13.

One of my favorites. 🍿

Decided we should do a beta for the new RSS thing, starting this weekend and running about a week. If you’re interested, sign up on this form. You’ll get an email tomorrow. So excited to share this.

You can tell from the OpenClaw meetups how much this thing has captured people’s attention. There are of course a lot of dude programmers out there using it, but maybe it’s reaching more people… On the How I AI podcast, an interview with Jesse Genet who has bots helping organize her homeschool.

Thanks Jatan Mehta for reviewing my book! His post includes some quotes and commentary.

“To send my rhymes out to all the nations
Like Ma Bell, I got the ill communication”

I’ve been going back and forth about how to price the new RSS thing. It’s one of the best things I’ve built in a while. There are new costs, but it’s confusing to require Micro.blog Premium. Pretty sure the basics will he included for all Micro.blog subscribers, with one feature just for Premium.

Reading through the proposals for Growing the Open Social Web, which is on Monday. I think the best suggestions are actionable. Real ideas that can be implemented.

Greg Mania writing at The New Yorker about Waymo:

Another car cuts in front of you. The Waymo brakes. It does not then surge forward to assert dominance. It does not briefly consider engaging in Reddit-sourced novice witchcraft to place a curse on the person who has wronged you.

🙂

The view from the state library building. Attended a talk by Sam Haynes, author of Unsettled Land. 📚

Ben Werdmuller has a long post about what happens now that AI coding tools actually work. There’s a lot to think about, but I’m going to pull one quote to comment on, not even central to Ben’s points:

They’re also expensive: while open source tools are decentralized and free, it’s incredibly easy to spend large amounts on Claude. Based on my own experimentation and anecdotes from friends and peer companies, any engineer that relies on Claude Code as part of their daily work is likely to spend hundreds of dollars a week…

Developers who still use Claude are burning cash. Codex is good.

This week we flipped the switch on better truncation in the Micro.blog timeline, preserving styles and links. It’s working well. See this screenshot of a slightly too-long post that is nicely truncated with italics, em dash, and inline link still there.

Greg Knauss wrote a blog post that is wistful and at times poetic, with bits of tragic humor that can’t quite lighten the feeling that the ground is falling away beneath us: What I am talking about is being replaced, about becoming expendable, about machines gaining the abi...

We watched five minutes of the State of the Union last night, then went to bed. Glad to see the recaps this morning that it was basically a whole lot of nothing. Not even much of a spectacle. 🇺🇸

Mark Gurman reports about upcoming touchscreen Macs:

…the Mac will gain a refreshed, dynamic user interface that can shift between being optimized for touch or point-and-click input, said the people.

I hope that for developers who have already adopted Liquid Glass in some way, there won’t be major changes needed for touch in the next macOS. Apple’s yearly update schedule tends to create too much busywork for developers.

We rolled out some improvements for uploading audio in blog posts, including a new Record button for Micro.blog Studio subscribers. When a blog post has an MP3 attached, Micro.blog automatically adds it to your podcast RSS feed. Here’s a quick video showing how it works.

From MacStories: Apple announced today that it is expanding its manufacturing operations in Houston, Texas where it will make Mac minis. The company also said it will expand its AI server production and training in Houston later this year. Sounds good to me. Also perfect t...

As AI is used in more tools, I’m thinking about consent from bloggers who don’t want AI to process anything in their writing. I couldn’t find a convention for this outside of model training. Once text is out on the web, visitors are going to use web browsers and other tools ...

A new philosophy for travelers called digital silence, to avoid sharing exactly where you were, via Kottke:

We have stopped traveling to feel. We now travel to prove we were there.

Only wish this was a blog post and not a series of Instagram photos.

Finding all sorts of things as I go through my mom’s house, especially old photos and books. But also a few favorite toys. I remember having to put Optimus Prime on layaway at the store in our neighborhood.

Miloš Miljković blogging about his blog manager for Emacs:

It took me less that two hours with Google Gemini to create microblog.el, a micro.blog manager for Emacs which can edit old posts, create new ones (even with images), auto-complete tags and perform lightning-fast full text search. What a time to be alive!

This isn’t only about AI. With open platforms you don’t need permission. Just build things.

What Micro.blog traffic looks like when we see bots go crazy trying to find vulnerabilities. Very annoying.

I don’t watch much hockey but now really getting into this USA vs. Canada gold medal game. 🏒

Spurs in Austin. 🏀

Rediscovering drop shadows.

I managed to go Monday through Friday without any posts about AI. So now it’s time to catch up! The Verge:

OpenAI’s first hardware release will be a smart speaker with a camera that will probably cost between $200 and $300, according to The Information. The device will be able to recognize things like “items on a nearby table or conversations people are having in the vicinity”…

I think the key things to watch will be latency and memory. Building on ChatGPT, they don’t even need to innovate that much for the product to be better than the Echo and HomePod.

Finished reading: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. Parts of the future (particularly electricity) were distracting for me because they felt implausible. Still really enjoyed it. Wish I had read it before our actual pandemic. 📚

From an article in The New Yorker about a bookstore that only sells signed books:

Even before he learned to love to read, Reiss the retail genius recognized what every real reader knows: a book is not just its contents but also, and inseparably, a special kind of object, a portal of sorts between people and places and ideas.

I’m still surprised that Mozilla shut down Pocket. Lots of competition in the bookmarking / read-later space, but that’s because it’s such an important complement to a web browser. I think the organization should’ve refocused around 2-3 great web things that work with Firefox.