Rewriting a bunch of my old Micropub code for the web today. Long overdue, and needed to keep adding features.

Dia is coming along nicely. They’ve fixed the custom text selection that was bugging me. Split view is interesting too. Overall, the tabs and UI look cleaner than most web browsers.

I’m good with the explosion of new browsers. Orion, Comet, supposedly an OpenAI browser soon.

Leo Laporte, linking to a webcomic about RSS:

…and here’s the good news, Spotify wasn’t able to co-opt podcasting, RSS podcasts still live and thrive. And I, for one, intend to keep it that way.

King of the Hill is returning (YouTube trailer), and the world has changed a little. “I don’t know how to kick someone’s ass over Zoom, but I’ll figure it out.” 🙂

Seeing random Grok screenshots — not just the racist tweets, all the other craziness too — makes me appreciate how much that serious companies like OpenAI and Anthropic must actually work on alignment and guardrails. Grok seems imbued with a “personality” that is out of control.

Useful report from the Social Web Foundation after a privacy forum in Norway. From the first bullet point of next actions:

Create standard metadata fields within ActivityPub to indicate content visibility, consent preferences, and sharing restrictions across servers.

There is a tension in the fediverse between consent and the open web. It’s difficult to balance both ideals without over-complicating everything. Look at how confusing private mentions in Mastodon are.

Fantastic article at The New Yorker about how far we’ve come with solar energy in just the last few years. I’m only halfway through but it’s already hitting on so much progress. I was feeling this last year when I bought solar panels for camping. When the costs finally work, it changes everything.

Vandalism at the Apple Store for climate change. While I’m very disappointed with Tim Cook’s support for Trump, I’m filing this one under “we attack our friends because our true enemies won’t listen”. Apple is more environmentally conscious than any other big tech company.

Linda Yaccarino steps down as CEO of Twitter / X. No hint of ill will in her goodbye tweet, but Grok losing its mind this week probably wasn’t the ideal backdrop for a graceful exit. I can only imagine how frustrating this role was with Elon Musk micromanaging it.

Stephen Hackett blogs about FireWire’s history and importance. It reminds me that I first used FireWire with a third-party PCI card, right before Macs had FireWire… or before I could afford a new Mac? Doing hobby animation and video editing, I used it with a MiniDV deck, and then from that to VHS.

Usually I avoid quoting something from the end of an article, but this line is a great summary from John Gruber’s latest on Daring Fireball about Jeff Williams retiring:

Six years after Jony Ive’s departure, today’s announcements leave it less clear than ever whose taste, ultimately, is steering the work of the company into the future.

Good rundown today by Ben Thompson on Apple’s dilemma of whether to outsource a next generation Siri to OpenAI or Anthropic. I’m curious about private cloud compute. Will they limit it to only Apple chips, or port the private cloud to architectures that are already running bigger frontier models?

Wonder if there’s any chance the lack of FireWire in macOS Tahoe is a bug or temporary limitation for the beta. I still have some old MiniDV tapes that I haven’t copied, and that is going to be much harder over time if FireWire goes away.

With Mastodon now rolling out phase one of their quote posts plan, I’ve reviewed my own blog post from February on this. My opinion hasn’t changed. I’ll make sure Micro.blog displays quote posts nicely when Mastodon finishes phase two, in the upcoming Mastodon 4.5 release. I...

For the last couple of days I’ve been rewriting Micro.blog’s GitHub backup feature. It’s looking good, and sets the foundation for doing much more in the future. The backup will also now run automatically every day instead of once a week! What’s this feature about? Here’s an...

Listening to Quiet Town by the Killers on repeat this morning. Great song. Haunting. When I travel, I sometimes think about the disconnect between rural and urban America, and what it’s cost us politically too.

Superficially, maybe it’s a win for Meta to have hired all these researchers away from Anthropic, OpenAI, and even Apple. I’m not so sure. The money is nice, but I expect most people doubt that Mark Zuckerberg cares deeply about AGI. Also it’ll take time for a team to gel after such disruption.

Chance Miller at 9to5Mac on Apple’s EU changes:

Apple says that it was the EU who dictated which features should be included in which tier. For example, the EU mandated that Apple move app discovery features to the second tier.

Something isn’t adding up here. If the EU is dictating anything, it should be a 0% fee tier in addition to the standard App Store paid tier. Why would the EU be moving features to the second tier? Either Apple isn’t communicating the full story, or negotiations between Apple and the EU are very dysfunctional.

All the President’s Men is a great movie. Sometimes I think about one particular line from it. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are feeling so much pressure to get the story right, attacked by the Nixon administration and questioned inside the Washington Post, because of all ...

I haven’t looked into the full context behind the quote in this post from @jasraj, but I do love this phrase:

when hatred presents itself as virtue, it becomes seductive

Sadly there are variations of this across ideologies. When fighting for what’s right steps over the line to extreme characterization of others, vilifying them. As regex fans know, now we’ve got two problems: the hatred in others and the hatred in ourselves.

Ben Thompson’s back from the summer break with an excellent rundown on AI and fair use. In a nutshell, LLMs are transformative and it’s so difficult to prove they affect an existing work or even a market, fair use for training will likely stand. If we don’t want that, there will have to be new laws.

This blog post from Robert Birming perfectly captures what Micro.blog is trying to do by leaving some features out.

Congrats to Stephen Hackett on 10 years indie! He’s written a great post with some of the history and priorities he brings to his work. Also love this part on the downsides:

Publishing endlessly can lead to burnout. Social media can poison your opinions. The Internet can be unforgiving when it comes to mistakes. Working virtually can become lonely. Relevance can fade.

That “poison” line is so true. When all you read is everyone else’s hot takes and a community’s growing consensus, it’s harder to have original, possibly more nuanced thoughts on popular topics.

“I know how to use a semicolon, ChatGPT. Don’t come for me.” 🤣 — from the Book Riot podcast

I used to really love the em dash. Now that ChatGPT also loves it, I’m using it a little less often. The bar is higher for when I feel like it really belongs.

Finished watching Long Way Home. I love these travel series with Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman. The older ones are great too.

Fixed a couple bugs this morning and replied to a few emails. I think this is going to be a busy week. Also if anyone on Bluesky has feedback on my proposal for AT Protocol embeds, please let me know. I’ll be moving forward with it soon.

Dave Winer:

We’ve got all these philosophically compatible platforms that are technologically unable to work with each other. But what if they all were really on the web? What could we build then? Everything.

Just noticed this nice styling that @birming has for “notes” on his blog, for example this post. Love how they stand out when on the home page along with full-length blog posts. I assume he’s using a custom Micro.blog theme with slightly different CSS based on the category.

I’ve missed a lot of really good work on Micro.blog plug-ins from the community recently. Just a few examples: Postlist has new options for embedding lists of blog posts, Open External Links makes links in blog posts open in a new tab, and Privacy-Friendly Google Maps is a shortcode for maps.