Not going to come close to hitting my reading goal this year. This year has been too much. Hoping to finish one or two more books before the end of the year, though… With the holidays approaching, great time to disconnect with a book.

When I was trying to simplify the Design page in Micro.blog earlier this year, I think I went too far, burying the CSS functionality inside of custom themes. I’ve reversed course today and elevated the button to a new section.

Watched the first half of Spurs/Lakers NBA cup game last night, too tired to stay up for the whole thing. West coast games always get me now. Caught up on the final quarter this morning. Spurs have such a complete team. Bench was great. 🏀

Usually when I think of something new to work on, I add a note in Micro.blog notes. Lately I’ve been trying something new: I’ll type the idea into Codex (cloud) and ask it to plan the basics, but to not write code yet. Then I can come back later to work on it and have some tips to keep in mind.

From a Bloomberg story about Tim Cook in Washington:

…Cook urged lawmakers not to require app store operators to check documentation of users’ ages and instead rely on parents to provide the age of their child when creating a child’s account…

While requiring Apple to check ages seems like an overreach, it’s better than requiring every app and website to do the same. I’ve lost faith in Tim’s leadership of the App Store, going back a few years to when he suggested in court that developers would have to pay Apple for sales outside the store, and continuing through his meetings with Trump.

I added a help page with an intro to using Pagefind in Micro.blog. Leon Mika also has a good post about it.

Andreas Deja has been sharing some drawings from the cancelled Disney feature My Peoples. Beautiful work. I would’ve loved to see this get made. There is more artwork over on this Disney wiki.

Submitted an iOS update to Apple for Micro.blog, hopefully will be approved in the next day. I think this is the best version of our app yet. Lots of little tweaks. Android will be submitted this week too.

Cory Doctorow has posted the text of a speech he gave about AI. It is very long, but absolutely worth setting aside some time to read, whether you’re an AI skeptic or enthusiast or somewhere in between. I was actually a little nervous to read it. Cory is an incredible writer...

Pebble is launching a ring called Index 01 for voice recording. The design looks a little more clunky than the upcoming ring from Sandbar, but the Pebble ring is less than half the price, with an open architecture. Pre-orders are going to fly off the shelves at $75.

Ben Werdmuller blogging about the enduring strength of RSS and ideas for the future:

Feeds have always been powerful for consumption. But the internet is a conversation, and the next generation of RSS-powered applications should unlock its potential for creation and collaboration.

Cold morning at Blanco State Park.

Updated my parks page. This wraps up the second year with 28 parks. Well below what I had hoped for. At this pace, it will take me over 4 more years.

Blanco County Courthouse.

Today I added support for Pagefind to Micro.blog. Pagefind is a search library for static sites. Because Micro.blog uses Hugo underneath, Pagefind fits nicely into our architecture. You can see it in action on my own blog’s search page. Along the way to adding this, I realiz...

I like this blog post about not becoming a connoisseur by Joan Westenberg:

Simply: the aspiring coffee connoisseur who spends 200 hours learning to distinguish processing methods could have spent those 200 hours just drinking coffee and enjoying the hell out of it.

I love coffee shops. My blog currently has 150 posts with something about coffee. But maybe surprisingly, I’m not actually picky about coffee! I’m happy with any coffee beans put through any espresso machine with a splash of any kind of milk.

I like this ELECTRIC. It’s not something that most people would even see while walking by and it doesn’t really matter, but someone spent some time making it look cool anyway.

I’m sorry for some of the flakiness in Micro.blog-hosted blogs today. Long story short, we seemed to have an influx of random traffic — bots or hackers? who knows — and to ease the pressure I enabled some extra rate limiting, which can sometimes interfere with the automatic HTTPS setup.

One of these days, gonna need to sit down and come up with a more universal way to add sidebars to Micro.blog themes that works everywhere. There’s so much flexibility in Hugo, but every theme can have a completely different structure. Feel like microhooks are the way.

For Brandon Sanderson fans, he read the first two chapters of a new Cosmere novel last week. I finished listening to it last night. The livestream was very long, so here’s a link on YouTube to the reading spot. 📚

I’ve tried to have a thoughtful approach to AI-based features in Micro.blog, like the opt-out checkbox to disable everything. I’m still open to reevaluating models too. I’ve tried my own servers, but it’s more expensive and would actually use more energy running 24/7 instead of on-demand.

Good morning, Austin. 🏙️

Sometimes when I rewrite a blog post or email multiple times, it becomes hard to tell if it’s actually better, or if it lost whatever spark was in that first quick draft.

Micro.blog iPhone and iPad folks, the latest TestFlight beta has several bug fixes to text editing layout, keyboard, and the share sheet nav bar. Think I’ve finally got some of those glitches under control. If you’re not on the beta, you can join here.

The obvious downside to AI creating answers and software we might not need is it feels wasteful. There is a cost. There is not enough energy and infrastructure. This is the OpenAI bet: that when they scale up, no one else will be able to do what they can do. Except Google.

ChatGPT Pulse still blows my mind. This morning it built a custom HTML app for visualizing train seating. I didn’t ask it for this, it just knew I had been looking at trains, so it churned on it overnight. In the future you can imagine software is more adaptable to each user.

Die Hard at Cosmic. ☕️

Huge deal with Netflix buying Warner Bros. for $83 billion including HBO Max. If it goes through, will be in the top 10 largest acquisitions of all time. From The Verge, no immediate hope of combining subscriptions:

In its announcement Netflix suggests it has no immediate plans for drastic change at Warner Bros., describing HBO and HBO Max as a “compelling, complementary offering” alongside its own streaming service, and saying it will maintain the studio’s current operations “including theatrical releases for films.”

I assume they’ll have a bundle, similar to early Disney+ and Hulu.

Ghost founder John O’Nolan is working on a new RSS reader called Alcove:

I wish it were just all in one place. Without all the noise and engagement farming. Just a quiet little spot where I could catch up with things I care about.

I wonder which existing RSS reader he’s using that has noise and engagement farming? Anyhoo, we should probably accelerate our plans for a Micro.blog-based RSS reader. You can follow blogs in Micro.blog, but a full reader outside the social timeline has been a missing piece.

Watching some of the Nexus livestream. Brandon and Emily Sanderson are announcing a free coin for people struggling with depression, as a physical reminder to keep going and get help. Seems really well thought out, with resources and a letter from Brandon:

I challenge you to recognize that the experience you have gained through your struggles with mental health is also a strength. The stronger person is not the one who has never struggled; it is the person who has developed, step by step, the power to keep walking.