There are several good segments in today’s interview with Matt Mullenweg. My favorite might be the exchange with Nilay Patel around whether Tumblr is profitable yet. It actually lines up well with my post from last year, I support the mad king.

Nilay: Is Tumblr sustainable today?

Matt: It is still not profitable. So we’re still supporting it and subsidizing it with our other products at Automattic.

Nilay: How much runway do you want to give it?

Matt: Everything. [laughing] Obviously we’ve invested a ton in Tumblr. I’m a believer in its future. So that’s part of why I want to make it sustainable, because that means it doesn’t have to go off the benevolence of myself or anyone else. It can stand on its own.

Huge news from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg. Apple is considering partnering with Anthropic or OpenAI for Siri:

After multiple rounds of testing, Rockwell and other executives concluded that Anthropic’s technology is most promising for Siri’s needs, the people said. That led Adrian Perica, the company’s vice president of corporate development, to start discussions with Anthropic about using Claude, the people said.

This is probably the right move, and there’s still plenty for in-house AI researches to work on. If they go ahead with it, delaying Siri was justified, and worth taking the heat for.

Every year since I blogged about fixing exclusive app distribution way back in 2011, there have been little cracks appearing in Apple’s monopoly wall. Growing developer resentment. The lawsuit from Epic Games. New laws like the EU’s Digital Markets Act. Change is clearly acc...

Project Hail Mary trailer is out! Loved the book. Perfect choice of directors for the movie, I think they’ve got this.

One question for AT Proto as a blog backend is whether users will want a single record in their PDS that works across Bluesky clients and custom platforms. In that case, a custom “full-length post” embed inside Bluesky’s own lexicon seems to make the most sense. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel.

Bluesky folks, I’ve been thinking about adding WhiteWind cross-posting to Micro.blog. The lexicon looks straightforward. There’s also Leaflet, which is trying to do a little more with its document structure. Any early adopter “blogging with AT Protocol” users have thoughts?

I started listening to the latest Decoder podcast with guest Matt Mullenweg, but I’m not yet to the part about Tumblr. Not hugely surprising, they have paused the (monumental) task of moving Tumblr’s backend to WordPress:

The company announced the plan to move over the more than half a billion blogs on Tumblr last year, saying that the change would “make it easier to share our work across platforms.” But Mullenweg says on Decoder that, “what we decided is that we want to focus as much on the things that are going to be noticeable to users and that users are asking for.”

Final day of the photo challenge. After a busy weekend, I needed a little solitude. Houndstooth Coffee on MLK. ☕️

Some people dread Mondays. Not me. You have the whole week ahead, and anything is possible.

Starting to roll out some improvements to the Micro.blog “marketing” home page, for new users or when you’re signed out. The content isn’t really different yet. I’m sticking with the full-screen paintings, and several layout and link problems are fixed, especially on mobile. Still work to do.

Rumors from Ming-Chi Kuo have Apple smart glasses about two years out, mixed reality glasses three years. I assume there is nothing set with dates that far away. Looking forward to seeing what Apple can do with glasses, but it’s all pinned on Siri getting much better.

Andreas Deja blogs about the upcoming 40th anniversary of The Black Cauldron:

…our inexperience as young film makers really shows in the film. Many of us were straight out of art school with little experience in animation. But…I keep meeting young people who are very fond of The Black Cauldron.

Here’s a story from the dark ages of video releases. I really wanted to watch it, but the VHS version wasn’t released here until years later. Someone from Europe sent me a copy in exchange for another video release from the US. I brought the tape to a local company to convert from PAL to NTSC. 🤯

The Internet Archive has a blog post reacting to last week’s Anthropic case and its potential effect on libraries:

This decision reinforces the idea that copying for non-commercial, transformative purposes—like making a book searchable, training an AI, or preserving web pages—can be lawful under fair use. That legal protection is essential to modern librarianship.

Speaking of Texas state parks, over the weekend I dug into confusion about the number of parks. There are two new parks in development, but not yet open:

• Albert & Bessie Kronkosky State Natural Area
• Powderhorn State Park

Going to update my list later, bumping the count from 88 to 90.

Mineral Wells State Park. The hike down to the lake and back was a little steeper and more rocky than we were expecting. Great morning but too hot.

Went to see F1 tonight. Had no expectations, but it stays engaging throughout the fairly long running time. Visually it feels like they really pulled it off. 🍿

Clouds along I-35. Day 28, ephemeral.

Passed a billboard for Basecamp on the highway somewhere outside of Austin today. That was unexpected.

This year has been a roller coaster in so many ways. Thanks everyone who has supported me and Micro.blog. I’m currently working on a slight redesign to our home page, fixing glitches and unifying the Micro.one and Micro.blog pages. I don’t usually make enough time to tell new folks what we’re about.

Winding down on the last few days of this month’s Micro.blog photo challenge. Not too late to post a photo or two if you want to join at the end! 📷

Browsing stock.adobe.com, there’s a new problem with the flood of AI-generated artwork. I’m willing to pay more for art created by a human, just as I want to read words written by a human and not a robot. AI-generated art is abundant and cheap to produce. Yet they are both priced the same by Adobe.

After road trips across the country, to California multiple times, all over Texas, through Utah, and to New York… My good luck with the Honda Element ran out this week. Fender bender in a parking lot ripped off my back bumper. It was cracked anyway, so guess it was past time to replace.

Gemini CLI continues to get hung up on fairly simple things. It’s the free version, using a lightweight model, so I don’t mean to complain too much. Sort of stuck in a loop of trying to update CSS files:

I apologize for the repeated issues with the replace tool. It seems I’m still struggling with the exact string matching. I will try a different approach to remove the old media query block. I will read the file content, manually remove the block from the content, and then write the modified content back to the file. This should bypass the strict matching issues.

Still pretty amazing, though.

Great point from Jeff Johnson on the arbitrary tier 1 / tier 2 differences in Apple’s proposed EU rules:

What I found striking about the search differences between Tier 1 and Tier 2 is that in creating this distinction, Apple clearly considers App Store search to be a developer feature rather than a user feature. In other words, the user’s interest in finding an app via search is disregarded, and Apple is willing to be less helpful to users to the extent that app developers pay a lesser commission to Apple.

I was asked this week about our policy when a subscription expires or sadly even if someone passes away. I know I’ve blogged about this, but I don’t think it was formally documented, so I wrote up a simple help page for it.

Experimenting with Gemini CLI to iterate on some web page changes. It’s free for basic usage. It does get confused sometimes, having to re-read files and apply changes multiple times, which makes it feel slow and a little wasteful.

Enjoyed listening to the copyright discussion on SharpTech this week. Copyright is not a universal truth. It’s effectively a limited monopoly given to creators. That’s helpful, but it must be balanced with the public good. Sometimes we go too far, like Mickey Mouse’s 95-year copyright.

I missed on my first reading of Apple’s new EU rules that “tier 1” developers won’t get automatic app updates. This is going to be very confusing for users. The whole thing seems unworkable to me. Small steps forward, but just barely. I’d like a “tier 0” with sideloading and a 0% commission.

As spelled out in a StoreKit addendum, Apple is replacing the Core Technology Fee in the EU with a Core Technology Commission. It’s a better deal, but on principle I’m against any fee for subscriptions outside of the App Store. Not sure this change is more compliant with the EU’s DMA, either.

Very sad to hear that Anne Sturdivant has passed away. If you were active on Micro.blog over the last couple of years, you may have read her blog or been part of conversations with her. Her username around the web was @anniegreens. I spent some time this morning browsing her...