FeedCity

Today’s OpenAI demo is a really good showcase of Apple Intelligence’s ChatGPT integration. It’s better than I remember it being from WWDC.

404 Media quotes Matt Mullenweg, who is very frustrated with the preliminary injunction in favor of WP Engine:

I’m sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine. I hope you all get what you and WP Engine wanted.

Whatever we might think of Matt’s campaign against WP Engine, I’m skeptical of this legal decision and expect it could be reversed when there’s a trial. It’s certainly great for WordPress.org to be a community resource, but should it be required to be so? Very odd precedent if true.

Cool to see Redis creator Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) back working on Redis after several years away. Redis is a fantastic, unique tool. He shares his thoughts on the licensing drama, using AI, and new data structures that could be added to Redis.

This is a great post by Laurens Hof of the Fediverse Report on the incomplete ActivityPub rollout in Threads, why it might be going so slowly, and whether Meta is committed to the fediverse at all. It seems clear now that it will not be practical to move an account away from Threads. Empty promises.

Day One can no longer import Instagram photos because of an API change:

We regret to inform you that, starting December 4, 2024, Instagram no longer allows apps to import content through the Instagram Basic Display API. This change means that Day One users will no longer be able to connect their Instagram accounts to import photos and posts into their journals.

Related to my short post this morning. Meta just doesn’t care much if they burn developers who invest in their platform.

Seth Godin blogged recently about constructive complaining vs. whining:

Whining is communication that exasperates others, because it is complaint without benefit or action. The best traveling companions are often those that don’t whine, even when they have a very good reason to. Whining is empty commentary where no action is possible, about something we already understand.

Because we are a very small team, I’ve always been good with “use whatever coding style you want!” I try to adapt to the conventions used in other people’s projects. But lately, I just want to go all-in on mandating real tabs. I’m getting too old to deal with tabs-as-spaces.

It’s hard to take Meta’s effort with more open APIs like ActivityPub seriously when their own Threads API is so locked down, requiring frequent re-approval. Open APIs shouldn’t make developers jump through hoops, over and over. Enough with the gatekeeping already.

Coding up a new window for a Mac app, even a very simple window, just feels better than making changes to almost any other kind of app. There is something “new”-er about a unique window on macOS compared to iOS.

“Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” 🍔

This video from OpenAI with animator Lyndon Barrois answers some of my questions about whether Sora can be used as a tool to supplement hand-drawn animation and real video:

I’m an animator. I have all the patience in the world. I’m not looking for it to be immediate and quick. I’m looking for it to take that time, you know, to get it right.

AI at its best should allow humans to do more, not replace art.

Cosmic on 4th is my new favorite place for winter mornings. Fire pits outside and heaters on the deck. ☕️

Sneak peek of something new I’ve been working on. Coming along well, should be able to ship this week.

Funny how some skills don’t change. I’m sitting here typing a CREATE TABLE and it’s essentially the same thing I was doing 25 years ago.

I caved after a month and re-upgraded to ChatGPT Plus. The feature to use text in another app’s window (like Xcode) is really nice.

Also of interest for Glass users:

Updated importer RSS feeds to also download photos to your blog. For example, add a Glass profile feed and Micro.blog will copy the photos to your own domain name. This is set in Sources by adding a new feed with “import posts to blog” selected.

Testing with Glass RSS feeds today and they’ve got problems. I’ve filed a feedback item here for the Glass folks. I considered working around this in Micro.blog but I really don’t want any more hard-coded hacks for other platforms.

I have so many micro domain names that I actually have a list to remember all of them. This is a fun one that I will launch later in December: micro.christmas

This is a nice surprise from Jamie Thingelstad:

I love to see new blogs being created. In the spirit of Christmas, I’m gifting five 1-year subscriptions to micro.blog for readers of the Weekly Thing (announced in WT304). These folks can then get their blogs going and in January I’m going to share links and introduce each of them. Fun! 🤩🎁🎄

There’s a lot to do today. Started the day with something very simple: updated the profile icon for Micro.blog news. Now in color and centered so it looks nice with rounded profile icons. We post here throughout the week with platform updates.

I’ve updated our Mastodon and Bluesky cross-posting to have new options to control whether to backfeed replies to Micro.blog. It also now better respects the visibility of posts to avoid leaking semi-private posts outside of Mastodon. Screenshot of the setting:

So cold this morning, instead of walking I grabbed a Lime scooter up to the coffee shop. First time I’ve ridden a scooter since San Jose a few years ago. Working on making Micro.blog better, of course, because it’s Saturday morning.

With the success of Bluesky starter packs — which Micro.blog can browse natively! — every other social web platform is trying to invent their own similar format. But we already have blogrolls and OPML. I’d love to see some standardization around this so that there’s a shared format across platforms.

Good blog post on the ramifications of Micro.blog’s new backfeed replies from Mastodon and Bluesky:

While you could argue that publishing something on the internet means it’s fair game to use elsewhere (in a Google search result, for example) I would argue that our social media interactions at least feel limited to the context in which they take place.

This is an evolving balance between the open web and semi-private communities. More we can do here.

Most of the week was rolling out bug fixes and little improvements. Also mostly wrapped up updated iOS and macOS versions of M.b which will hopefully ship this weekend. December fully underway, good time to tie up unfinished software loose ends.

Great story at The Verge about AI companions:

Millions of people are turning to AI for companionship. They are finding the experience surprisingly meaningful, unexpectedly heartbreaking, and profoundly confusing, leaving them to wonder, ‘Is this real? And does that matter?’

It kind of snuck up on me… It’s Wind and Truth release day. Looking forward to starting it this weekend. 📚

I’m pretty confused debugging Threads fediverse interoperability. Sending new posts to Threads returns 404 not found. Even just trying to grab an actor with curl and Accept: application/activity+json fails, for any user.

IndieWeb Meetup tonight! Reminder that we switched up the venue: it’s at Radio Coffee & Beer, 7pm.

Little known fact: Micro.blog has the best photo search of any blogging platform. Great to find one of your old photos to reference, or to remember if you blogged about something. If there’s anything even close to this good, let me know.