Enjoyed this illustrated story by Jackie Lay about the life of Victoria Woodhull, who ran for president in 1872.

Just great defense from the Longhorns. Love their midrange shooting too. I picked UConn vs. Texas for the women’s championship game, so could still happen. 🏀

Finished reading: The Bear and The Nightingale by Katherine Arden. Beautiful and haunting. 📚

Spurs / Warriors tonight. Not a close game but still fun. It has been too long since I was last in San Antonio. 🏀

Whether you’re an AI optimist or skeptic, or somewhere in between, you can probably relate to this blog post by @paulrobertlloyd. It’s going to dominate tech headlines for at least a couple more years until everyone is completely burned out on hearing about it, then (maybe) fade into the background.

Decided to subscribe to The Atlantic. There’s a certain kind of story that I miss from the NYT and WaPo after cancelling both those subscriptions last year. I still don’t want to obsess with the news, but when I dip my toes in, I want the coverage to be good.

We talk about Apple getting into trouble with Siri + LLMs, but Google has major problems too. Their search business is going to fall out from under them. Not sure they have the decisiveness to actually redesign their main product.

I’m enjoying Kagi instead of Google, but it’s still not quite right. For a paid search engine, there should be no clutter. If the query is an actual question with an answer, give me a ChatGPT-style UI, free of distractions. If the query is to find a web page, give me 10 blue links and nothing else.

Did not finish: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty. I enjoyed the first part of the book but after setting it aside just couldn’t get back into it. 📚

More details of when Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI board, from an upcoming book by Keach Hagey:

The board felt they couldn’t divulge that it had been Murati who had given them some of the most detailed evidence of Altman’s management failings. They had banked on Murati calming employees while they searched for a CEO. Instead, she was leading her colleagues in a revolt against the board.

You come at the king, you best not miss.

There seems to be a timezone bug in Siri + ChatGPT. To get better answers while driving I experimented with telling Siri to “ask ChatGPT to…”, but anything that needs the time is 5 hours off. I assume Apple is including the current time in a prompt to OpenAI, in GMT. Hopefully an easy fix. 🤖

My NCAA women’s bracket is still holding on with that Longhorns win! Great game Texas / Tennessee. 🏀

Randomly stumbled on my post from two years ago about Threads joining the fediverse. It holds up so well it could’ve been written yesterday. Still no sign of Meta completing the parts of ActivityPub like account migration that would ease up on lock-in.

Got an email today for a class action lawsuit about chicken that I thought must be a phishing scam or a joke, but it appears real. The lawyers are going to make bank on this one! I don’t remember overpaying for chicken 5 years ago… I do wonder how they got my email address.

xAI buying Twitter / X seems pretty sketchy. In practice, I guess it means the platform will live on for a while. I would not bet on xAI’s long-term success, though… OpenAI has billions of dollars of real revenue. xAI has effectively none, I think, outside of Twitter itself.

To be a blogger, you have to be okay with writing into the void. Some posts will resonate with people. Some posts will get comments. Most won’t.

Sometimes I’ll write a post and I’ll think to myself, “This is pretty good! This is the blog post that people are gonna talk about and link to. I’ve really captured something unique in this post.”

And then crickets. No one cares. 🦗

That’s okay. The act of writing itself helps us think, helps us learn, helps us discover how we feel about a topic. It’s creative and has value even if no one is reading. It’s a snapshot in time to look back on later.

And then the post is out there on the internet, making the web a little better. And maybe one day someone will pick it up and see it, at just the right time, and it will matter to them.

I’m drawn to blogging about divisive topics, but it would probably be healthier to avoid it. People can be so tribal now that everything is either good or bad. Our views have become extreme caricatures of the truth.

The pond at The Village, walking back to the mechanic to pick up my car after getting coffee.

I’m cracking up at the images in this Severance + Lego post on Daring Fireball. Who is that red minifigure? 🤣

Wow, just watched the final minute of Lakers / Bulls from last night. Love basketball. 🏀

ChatGPT’s new image generation is incredibly good. Too good. You can see it in the thousands of Ghibli-ified photos all over the social web. Hayao Miyazaki is going to come out of retirement again to tell us how we’ve all lost the plot on creativity. When we look back on thi...

This is a helpful post from Paul Frazee about ATProto lexicons. One of the challenges for making Micro.blog a PDS is what to do with longer blog posts with titles that don’t fit cleanly into Bluesky’s lexicon. Don’t really want to reinvent the wheel here.

A fun experiment in between bug fixing… I added a films page to Micro.blog, with posters for Letterboxd links people have recently included in blog posts. Might evolve into a more complete feature later.

Worked on some book-related improvements in Micro.blog this morning. We try to integrate with all sorts of things — Google Books, Open Library, Libby — but a lot of it is not exactly officially sanctioned. Added more Goodreads scraping today. In for a penny, in for a pound!

Simon Willison has added notes (a.k.a. microblog posts) to his blog. I’ve really been enjoying his takes on AI. He’s usually the first I see jump in to explore a new model’s capabilities.

I’ve blogged about apologies before. They carry a lot of weight with me. We’re human, we make mistakes, we learn.

Just as I don’t trust people who can’t apologize, I’m also wary of people who can’t accept a heartfelt apology. It says more about you if nothing short of perfection is enough.

But her emails! The Signal leak is an amazing contrast with Hillary’s server. There was nothing this consequential in her emails, only a handful maybe classified. But more than that, she apologized. Trump and his team will never apologize for anything, ever. Don’t trust people who can’t admit fault.

Sometimes in the debate about federation, we miss that open APIs are still very valuable alone. Bluesky’s API has so many nice touches including many requests that do not need authorization at all. I’d like to see Mastodon ease off some of its more strict requirements for e.g. HTTP signatures.

Seeing an increase in security proxies like Cloudflare interfering with legitimate Micro.blog requests to other services. Likely not related to the new AI Labyrinth, but along the same lines: when you try to catch “misbehaving bots”, you’re going to affect real users too.

Today we’re rolling out a big improvement to our new EU-based servers. Along with the option to host your web pages in Europe, Micro.blog will now also copy your photos and other uploads. It will copy your data the first time the feature is enabled, and then going forward wi...