Funny that SF Symbols now has a “robotic vacuum” icon but not just a robot. Wonder if it’s an oversight or because of Android. 🤖

Sometimes the debugging is all in the wrong place. Spent a couple hours trying to find a bug in JavaScript — lots of printf-style debugging, element inspection, random code changes — only to eventually track it down to a single line of CSS.

Thinking about the Wii yesterday thanks to Sven’s post, I re-read my old blog post from 2007 about when I gave away a Wii in a contest. Wonder what happened to that console and whether the new owners had fun with it. If any kids played it, they would be adults now.

Some of my really old blog posts are still in Textile format instead of Markdown. Whenever I find one, I just manually edit it to fix the links. No memory now of why I didn’t batch convert them years ago.

Apple updates a couple iPads. From Dan Moren at Six Colors:

The base iPad’s update is perhaps somewhat more disappointing, as that model was introduced in 2022 and its A16 processor will make it one of the few current main-line Apple devices—perhaps only—not to support Apple Intelligence.

Apple’s AI strategy is a sort of paradox. All in on marketing, but on-device models are limited and Apple resists using private cloud compute where it could help older devices.

Staple! is coming up next month, April 12-13, at St. Edward’s in Austin. Special guests Kazu Kibuishi and more! Amazing that the show started 20 years ago.

Great list of folks to follow on Micro.blog. Thanks for the reminder @Miraz!

We used to have Micro Monday around here, to help community members be discovered. Here are a dozen of the many Micro.Bloggers I enjoy…

M.G. Siegler: Apple Should Swap Out Siri with ChatGPT.

Apple won’t do this, and some users might not want it either, but it’s a legitimate idea. Generative AI provides a very rare moment of disruption. If a good Siri is two years away at best, that’s a long time to risk on something so important.

I like the naming on this collaborative Git system based on AT Proto: Tangled. The servers are “knots”. Just the right amount of clever.

Even when it seems the news is all bad, there is something incredible. James Harrison’s blood donations saved two million babies’ lives:

Harrison donated blood and plasma a whopping 1,173 times, according to Lifeblood, every two weeks between 1954 and 2018. […] Harrison’s plasma contained a rare and precious antibody called anti-D, which was discovered in the mid-1960s. It is used in medications to prevent haemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn

I never thought I needed a “leafless tree” emoji but it’s a nice addition. Still hoping for “iced coffee” one day.

Great interview with Dario Amodei on the Hard Fork podcast. About his disappointment at the AI Action Summit conference in Paris:

If you’re a public official, if you’re a leader at a company… People are going to look back, they’re going to look back in 2026 and 2027. […] Be careful what you say. Don’t look like a fool in retrospect. A lot of my thinking is just driven by — aside from just wanting the right outcome — I don’t want to look like a fool. And I think at that conference, some people are going to look like fools.

Dario always seems the most level-headed of all the AI company CEOs.

Sideloading on Android has improved since I last used it. It’s a pretty smooth user experience now, while still warning enough that you’re outside the usual “safe” app install flow. Good balance that we’ve wanted Apple to adopt for a decade.

Good morning so far, deployed a few server bug fixes, submitted a new Android release to Google. Lots to do. SXSW coming up toward the end of the week.

Being nominated once and winning once is great, congrats. But nominated a bunch of times and never winning is worth a lot. Edward Norton: 4 nominations. Ralph Fiennes: 3. Like how LeBron with 10 trips to the NBA finals and “only” 4 championships is still the greatest of all time. (Wait, what?!) 🤪

There is nothing like a live performance of Defying Gravity. Even on TV, I still get chills when they nail it. Great way to start the Oscars. 🍿

Looking forward to the Oscars tonight. I’ve only seen 4 out of 10 of the best picture nominees — A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Dune 2, and Wicked. Wanted to catch The Brutalist but never got to it. For best animated feature, I like either Flow or The Wild Robot. 🍿

Ben Werdmuller has a good post today about returning to the distributed publishing roots of the web and thinking about how technology should redistribute wealth and power to many people: It starts with software designed for people rather than for capital. The web once thriv...

We can all see it. It is beyond political parties. Beyond ideology. Beyond whether he is corrupt or competent. David Brooks, on the PBS NewsHour after the Trump and Zelenskyy meeting at the White House: All my life, I’ve had a certain idea about America. That we’re a flawed...

Watched Away We Go and really enjoyed it. Totally missed this when it first came out in 2009. 📺

OpenAI released GPT-4.5 this week to Pro subscribers and via the API, but it’s not what I was expecting. It is much more expensive, about 15-30 times the cost of GPT-4o. For my simple needs, like figuring out the keywords in a photo or summarizing a web page, older models ar...

Earth is our only home.

Watched some of the video with Trump, Vance, and Zelenskyy. We are in a very dark place with American foreign policy. Europe will have to take the lead. We have lost our way here, led by a narcissist whose selfishness and cruelty is almost beyond belief. 🇺🇸

New version of Micro Social is coming out, from Greg Morris:

Apple have approved a new version of Micro Social that includes posting to multiple blogs, managing and updating existing posts as well as a few other improvements.

I also fixed an issue on the Micro.blog side with push notifications.

There’s such an increase in distrust of tech companies, we now have to be more explicit about super obvious things that we would never do. Users expect the worst because they’ve been burned. So it goes.

Skimming through some of the negative reaction to Mozilla’s new terms. I took a minute to update Micro.blog’s own privacy policy so that it’s current. Our terms of service has always said you own your data. Never even crossed my mind to sell data it’s such a foreign idea and counter to our mission.

iOS will have new APIs for getting the age of a user. Sarah Perez writing at TechCrunch:

It puts Apple in the position of collecting kids’ ages via parental input but still puts the onus on the third-party developer to extract and use this information to craft age-appropriate experiences in their own apps.

Seems helpful to me. It doesn’t appear to address the flip side of age verification, making sure someone is an adult, but Apple could add that later.

Love an old train station getting a new life. Bloomberg article from a couple months ago, about the station in Detroit with new office space and green space:

But the main attraction is still the 18-story tower, designed by the same architects who worked on Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal, Reed and Stem with Warren and Wetmore. Just like its New York sibling, Michigan Central features terrazzo and marble flooring, Doric columns and Guastavino tiles — all restored to their original glory.

Adding to my list to visit one day. 🚂

Nick Heer is impressed with Alexa+, except:

But there is no part of me that would ever want Alexa or any other voice-controlled assistant buying tickets to a show, or booking a vacation rental, or even buying groceries.

I also don’t trust AI for this. And yet, in 1995 a lot of people didn’t trust entering credit cards on the web. I’m open to the possibility that in 10 years, AI buying things for us will be normal.

If you’re in town around SXSW, check out Fediverse House, a 2-day event hosted by Flipboard and Surf. Amazing lineup of folks including Mike McCue, Molly White, Evan Prodromou, and Paul Frazee. I’ll also be giving a short presentation during the developer meetup about Micro.blog and the fediverse.