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Manu Moreale blogs about Apple products and the trend of distancing ourselves from problematic CEOs:

Do I need to check if the Suunto CEO is a piece of shit to make sure I can wear this watch on my wrist and still feel at peace with myself? Frankly, I think it’s an exhausting way to live a life, and I’d be better off focusing all those energies somewhere else, trying to make something good, something that has a positive impact on the people around me.

I’ve disabled ActivityPub federation for my blog posts again. Too much negativity on Mastodon. I have a lot going on and can’t deal with it. For the rest of the year, for external services just going to focus on Bluesky.

Listening to the new Revolution.Social podcast. First episode is Rabble talking to Jack Dorsey. Jack is a good example of what I was trying to say in my blog post yesterday about criticism. So much hate is directed at Jack. We can disagree with his decisions, but he’s principled and thoughtful.

I ran something through ChatGPT earlier and one if its bits of feedback was:

One small grammatical suggestion is to connect the final two sentences to improve flow…

The solution? Add an em dash, of course! 🙂 ChatGPT is nuts for em dashes. It uses them when a semicolon or period or anything else might be better. See also my post just last week.

At my mom’s house she has an old framed print of the poem Children Learn What They Live by Dorothy Nolte. There are variations of it, but the first line is essentially: If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn. I was staring at that and thinking of social med...

Big update to Micro.blog for Mac today if you use the notes feature. Everything is faster and more robust. I personally have probably a thousand notes, and it was a little flaky with so many notes before.

I’ve also added a “Versions…” option to the context menu. Micro.blog keeps a record of each edit to a note, so if you make a mistake you can go back to an older version. Now there’s an interface for browsing and restoring a previous copy of the note. (This interface will come to the web later. The third-party web client Lillihub already has something similar!)

Here’s a screenshot of the main interface. This is a test “Journal” notebook (you can have multiple notebooks) that also shows the new sharing URL pane.

Dave Winer:

We’re turning the clock back to move forward. Trying to undo the damage Twitter did to the web.

This is a theme I’ve tried to blog about too. We have to bring all the good ideas from the open web and the blogosphere forward, combined with the user experience lessons from social media.

In a difficult week with extended family health issues, I’m laughing to myself a little this morning because I ran into two extremely minor problems that are bugging me: forgot to get salsa for this breakfast taco, and left my headphones at home. Ah, to have insignificant gripes for one day is nice.

In related client API news, Dave Winer has also been hammering on this recently from his perspective working on WordLand and the long history of the MetaWeblog API:

But the web is what matters, not my product or yours. Even if your product is huge, it’s only part of the web. This is how we build, how we get back on track. Somehow we need to get a simple bridge that lets all blog content flow to Mastodon.

Lear year, I really wanted to see Mastodon adopt an open posting API. I even wrote a FEP to fix some limitations in how APIs were too hard-coded to Mastodon’s capabilities. It went nowhere.

Steve Bate has a long blog post about why ActivityPub’s client-to-server protocol has not been implemented:

Yet despite its promise, ActivityPub C2S has seen minimal real-world adoption. Most Fediverse platforms — including Mastodon, the dominant implementation — have actively avoided supporting it. Instead, they expose custom APIs that tightly couple client behavior to server internals.

More clients should use Micropub. It is also a W3C recommendation, but unlike C2S, Micropub is already widely implemented and has evolved through extensions to accommodate most real-world use cases.

NYT’s Ben Mullin posting on Bluesky: WaPo opinion section will “communicate with optimism about this country”.

When newspapers turned on Joe Biden last year, I realized opinion sections are antiquated. We have the whole web for opinions. Newspapers have lopsided reach and should stick to the news.

When we launched Micro.blog, we got pushback on the lack of likes and reposts and follower lists and trends and global firehouse. Now eight years later I’m confident our approach is an important niche on the social web.

We absolutely do lose customers who drift away because of lack of engagement. So be it. If you want the dopamine hit of notifications and a more active timeline, pulling you back in, there are other platforms like… well, literally all of the other ones!

Mark Zuckerberg posting to Threads:

For our superintelligence effort, I’m focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry. We’re also going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence. We have the capital from our business to do this.

Mark has moved extremely quickly on this. He can do that because he runs the whole show. But Meta is the last company I want with this power. Ad-based businesses will always be misaligned with human needs.

I enjoyed this essay by Windsor Johnston at NPR about a date with a chatbot:

The date started with a boat ride from Georgetown in Washington, D.C., across the Potomac River to Old Town Alexandria in Virginia. I wore a little black dress and ballet flats. The sun was shining, the breeze was warm, and I was texting a chatbot.

Most articles like this are alarmist and depressing. This one is balanced and funny, and ultimately gets more at a truth about what all of this means.

This is cool. Classic Web, via John Gruber who blogs:

Curator Richard MacManus posts half a dozen or so screenshots per day of, well, classic websites from the late 1990s and 2000s. Makes me feel old and young at the same time.

I worked on a new Micro.blog for Mac update over the weekend, but then my Sunday afternoon got turned upside down. I’ll probably ship it this week. The notes interface is going to be much more solid.

Raining. Little mushrooms have sprouted up.

Rewatched some old movies last week, including Back to the Future parts 1, 2, 3. They are still great. The hoverboard and flying cars got so much attention when I was a kid, but 1 and 3 are my favorites. Yes, part 3 too. The old west setting and characters hold up much better. 🍿

Superman was a lot of fun. They did a few smart things with it, like not retelling the whole origin story again. Casting also seemed just right. 🍿

I mostly like the super-rounded windows in macOS Tahoe, but it does create new problems for UI elements that are near the edge. It seems clearly designed for windows with toolbars. The worst conflict is for sheets, which don’t even have a title bar.

Sean Heber of the Iconfactory:

ChatGPT and other AI services are basically killing Iconfactory and I’m not exaggerating or being hyperbolical.

Sad to read this. More people also need to discover Tapestry. Micro.blog has been sponsoring it for a couple months, and I plan to continue to, but I expect ads are a small fraction of needed revenue.

Sports can be amazing and heartbreaking. I didn’t watch the Wimbledon final, but listened to Amanda Anisimova’s remarks at the end. Happy for her to have made it so far. And later today, we’ve got Mavs vs. Spurs at the Summer League. We’ve seen Cooper Flagg, now hopefully Dylan Harper can play. 🎾🏀

SwiftUI has been out for years, yet I’m still here creating new XIBs and Objective-C code like it’s 2005. AppKit is good at its job. SwiftUI is great for starting new apps. AppKit is best for finishing them.

Alexander Kucera blogs about supporting multiple export formats in Links:

Digital preservation isn’t just about saving content. It’s about maintaining access and control.

The photo search in Micro.blog for Mac has gotten really good. I don’t think there’s anything like this in other blogging platforms. Screenshot of “coffee” search for my blog. (Similar interface on the web too. Works best with AI enabled so we can generate keywords for everything.)

The pattern of coffee and people. Overhead light looks like a halo.

I’ve finished a significant improvement to editing blog posts that include photos. Let’s say you want to add a photo to an existing blog post. Before, you could upload a new photo in Uploads, then copy and paste the <img> tag HTML into an edited blog post. Now there’s ...

In the Grok fallout, Mike Masnick makes the case for moving away from large, centralized AI. He asks a range of great questions about bias in AI: After a similar incident two months or so ago where Grok became obsessed with linking everything to white genocide, the company ...

Swarm changed their app icon from orange to gray (in a generic “bug fixes” update with no release notes) so I had to move it on my home screen. It used to be in between Overcast and Audible. Bottom dock hasn’t changed in a while: Hey, Epilogue, Strata, Micro.blog.