So happy with how well the new video hosting with Micro.blog Studio is going. I used to fumble around with video file sizes or just give up and use YouTube. Now I can post everything to my blog.

Android app review submissions have been going through very quickly. Nice work by Google. Even when Apple’s reviews are 1-2 days, I wish they were hours.

Raining finally. The new tree is getting a much-needed soak. I decided a few days ago to go camping tomorrow… Looks like it might clear up at least for a day. 🌧️

I wonder if this proposed Algorithm Accountability Act has the right idea. Instead of wiping away Section 230, we could chip away at very specific aspects of it. I feel like this could have broad support.

Some folks are addicted to refreshing social media all day. Not me, but I have noticed that I’m now sort of addicted to asking AI dumb questions and getting random ideas for how to implement things whenever I’m bored. If this was a human assistant, they would be annoyed with my endless questions.

Experimenting with a new Movies tab in our mobile app Epilogue. Feels a little weird… The app is for books. But also, I think it works here better than in the main app. I’m going to finish implementing it and use it and then decide for sure.

In today’s Stratechery interview they talk about the potential revenue that OpenAI lost by not having any ads in ChatGPT for the last three years. But there would’ve been a cost to having ads too! The product would’ve been slightly worse.

Jensen Huang on the Nvidia earnings call:

There has been a lot of talk about an AI bubble. From our vantage point, we see something very different.

I guess he would know, but this growth doesn’t seem sustainable to me. We’re not going to keep building data centers at the current pace.

Finally worked through some Epilogue for Android issues. Submitted to Google for review! 🤞

Bluesky is expanding their moderation tools and the granularity of reporting. Sounds like good changes:

Not every violation leads to immediate account suspension - this approach prioritizes user education and gradual enforcement for lower-risk violations. But repeated violations escalate consequences, ensuring patterns of harmful behavior face appropriate accountability.

Congrats to Gus Mueller on Acorn’s recognition as a finalist in the App Store Awards! I use Acorn pretty much every day, sometimes for design or mockups, and sometimes just as a scratchpad of screenshots and other graphics that need a quick crop or edit before uploading to my blog.

Love the covers on these special TikTok editions of a few of Brandon Sanderson’s books. Might’ve ordered a set for gifts. And I’ll keep The Emperor’s Soul, which I don’t have in print. 📚

This report from Matthew Prince about Cloudflare’s outage yesterday shows the mind-boggling scale of their network. The graph has 25 million HTTP 500 errors per second.

After a rocky bit early in the year, I feel that Micro.blog is in a really good place right now. New users are joining and the features are the best they’ve ever been. So now I’m nervous that something else is about to go wrong. 🤪

New trailer for Project Hail Mary! This is going to be great. I’m going to try to re-read the book before the movie comes out.

Love this blog post from Ton Zijlstra about discovering a train ticket in an old book:

While the book is in excellent condition, not at all ‘well traveled’, it does make me wonder about its path through the world. From that 1991 train trip up the valley towards the St. Gotthard massif, to a bookshop in Galway, Ireland. And now to my bookshelves.

In 1999 when my wife and I were traveling in Europe, I left a book in a hostel in Italy. I wrote a note in it for the next reader. I still wonder where that book ended up.

Good episode of Dithering today, talking about the impending Gemini 3 release and why OpenAI will probably be fine even if their models fall behind the state of the art. It’s increasingly about products, not models, because all the models are quite good now.

Last week when I announced Micro.blog Studio — our new subscription plan with improved video hosting including up to 20-minute videos — I also mentioned we would be adding more features for podcasting. Today we have the first of those new features. Exclusively for Micro...

Wow, Eugen Rochko stepping down as Mastodon CEO. Congrats to him on all the success in helping the open web move forward! This part also resonated with me:

You are to be compared with tech billionaires, with their immense wealth and layered support systems, but with none of the money or resources.

Watched: Frankenstein. I liked this more than I was expecting. Some visually great scenes… Wish I had seen it in the theater instead of Netflix. 🍿

Trail just east of I-35.

Good interview at Wired with Fidji Simo. I didn’t know she had an illness that forces her to work remotely most of the time:

I care a lot as part of my own mission about everybody realizing their full potential. I want a world where health conditions don’t get in the way. Either because we can cure them or because companies accommodate them. We can have technologies that make it easier.

I don’t think Disney live-action remakes really need to exist, but the new Moana could work well. Also, there are occasional new songs that I would love to see re-cut into the original animated versions: for Beauty and the Beast, take out Human Again and put in Evermore; for Aladdin, add Speechless.

Sometimes I drive the long way around, through old neighborhoods, imagining the people and buildings that used to be there. Time erases so much.

Great video on YouTube (via Matt Haughey) of old Pacific Electric Railway stations in Los Angeles. I would’ve loved to see some of these when they were active. 🚂

I’m excited to welcome Bonnie Rue to the Micro.blog team! She will be helping with new community-focused projects, leading curation of the Discover section, and working with me to respond to community issues.

We’ll keep improving our community guidelines and adapting to what the community needs. The social web is evolving quickly with new platforms. Micro.blog has always had a unique philosophy: content ownership through blogs, and a safe place to interact with others. As the social web becomes more connected, Micro.blog will stick to its mission while trying to balance the right set of tools to connect with people on other platforms.

I also want to thank the folks who were interested in this role at Micro.blog. I wish we could hire several people! Maybe one day we’ll be able to.

Watched: Being Eddie. Really enjoyed this. 🍿

I’ve updated Micro.blog with support for Day One journals. In the Mac app we’ve had a manual export to Day One for a while, and now the platform can automatically copy your blog posts to Day One. This uses Day One Premium’s “Email to journal” feature.

You can enable it on Micro.blog’s “Sources” page:

If you haven’t checked out our cross-posting options in a while, we have built-in support for over 10 different services, from Bluesky to PeerTube to Tumblr. I think our cross-posting features are unmatched by any other platform.

For more details about Day One, see this help page.

Good article in The New Yorker about water in Texas including the failure to build a seawater desalination plant. From a hearing in Corpus Christi with residents pushing back against it:

The hearing started around noon; by midnight, it was still under way, and three women in the audience, including a former mayoral candidate and a college professor, had been arrested for disorderly conduct.

Seems like a mistake not to be working on desalination. We’re going to need this eventually.

We had to run an errand out off 620, so stopped at the park at Mansfield Dam. Short video with a few clips.