I tend to write about whatever is most fascinating at the time. In the 2000s, that was blogging itself and the transition to Mac OS X, in the 2010s that was the rise of closed platforms, and now it’s indie blogging and AI. If our robot overlords don’t destroy us, the 2030s will be something else. 🤪

A heads-up to Mastodon folks, I’m disabling the fediverse posting from my blog for a couple weeks. You can always follow me on Micro.blog or via RSS. This feature can help quiet the timeline, great for traveling and thinking and working.

Changing my profile photo on Micro.blog for the first time in forever. The last one was a selfie from Disneyland years ago, and the bad cropping always annoyed me a little.

Great post from David Smith about his latest hiking trip:

What I kept coming back to was that in order to have a true “Adventure”, there has to be a high degree of likelihood that you won’t complete it as planned. If the outcome is all but a foregone conclusion when you begin, then you aren’t exploring, you aren’t finding the edges of your abilities.

I also love what has become his yearly routine of taking time away to reflect in the weeks leading up to WWDC.

Speaking of spam, I’m starting to get a lot more emails from people wanting to invest in or buy Micro.blog. Not sure what changed or whether these are sincere. I used to respond to these kind of emails, now have to ignore them.

Junk phone calls have been out of control the last week. I’ve re-enabled “silence unknown callers” on my phone. ☎️

For day 2 of the Micro.blog photo challenge: curve. A shot from when I was walking through the Texas Capitol a few days ago.

Congrats to Kagi on 3 years! They also announce their upcoming email product in this post. I’m enjoying Kagi more and more, and loved talking to founder Vlad Prelovac on my podcast Timetable last week.

For a web browser that has been abandoned, Arc sure has a lot of new updates. 🤪 I think its demise is overstated.

ActivityPub in Ghost has been in beta for a while, with plans to officially ship to everyone in the summer. I started my own test ghost.io blog to troubleshoot compatibility problems. Until now, Micro.blog and Ghost hadn’t played well together on the fediverse. Here are some...

Molly White is documenting the very problematic Looksmaxxing GPT. Now she reports that OpenAI is not going to do anything about it.

I was already thinking that the GPTs experiment is mostly clutter in the ChatGPT sidebar. If OpenAI is not willing to curate it, I wish they’d scrap the whole feature.

Thanks to everyone who has participated in the Micro.blog photoblogging challenge so far! It is so fun to see the photos. I’ll be catching up today to make sure the photos grid is current, but there’s a lot there already.

Red oak tree, for day 1 of the new Micro.blog photo challenge.

AI haters, you can skip this post. I installed Codex CLI to explain the Ghost ActivityPub implementation to me. I can ask it questions about how it parses JSON-LD and handles various fields. Learning a lot!

Build the wall. First time in northwest Austin in a while, more work on the 183 toll road construction.

I’ve posted the first week of prompts for the June photo challenge. 📷

I’m now at the point in ActivityPub debugging where I’m just reading the Ghost source code, trying to understand what it needs. This is always the problem: you get an HTTP 202 for Create activities, then have no idea why nothing happens when the request is later processed.

Just found out from my son that the latest Playdate SDK has networking! This opens up so many things. Looks like a nice API for HTTP from either Lua or C.

As I fix compatibility with Ghost, there are some surprises. For example, Ghost notes don’t appear to exist on the web. No url in ActivityPub, no permalink in the Ghost dashboard. Maybe a temporary limitation.

It’s always been a strength of Micro.blog that short and long posts are the same thing.

The redactions in this internal OpenAI document are hilarious to me. You could turn it into a Mad Libs:

Our long-term growth depends on [something surprising]. For H1, our top focus is [a dramatic goal], but we’re also pursuing [a fun side quest].

Enjoying the reporting from The Verge’s Adi Robertson on the Google antitrust trial, covering potential remedies:

Mehta points out a contradiction: the government wanted to exclude a bunch of other search-engine-like services to establish Google had no meaningful search competitors during the liability trial, and now it wants to add new ones during remedies.

In my conversation with Vladimir Prelovac on yesterday’s episode of Timetable, we also talked about whether a remedy could be sharing the search index with other search engines like Kagi.

I wrote a draft post about billionaires and the open web a couple months ago, and the couple folks I mentioned it too have told me not to post it. Good advice. So instead I’m working on a long blog post about Sam Altman, a topic which can’t be at all controversial. 🤪

Tickets are available to The Talk Show Live from WWDC. No Apple execs as guests this year. John Gruber:

This year I again extended my usual invitation to Apple, but, for the first time since 2015, they declined.

I’m excited about this. It’s good to mix it up and get some different perspectives.

From yesterday, at the Texas State Capitol.

Looked at Threads for the first time in months. I haven’t missed it. I’m glad we have automatic cross-posting to Threads from Micro.blog, but I don’t personally need it and I rarely hear from people who use it. Maybe it works perfectly, or maybe other folks have lost interest in Threads too.

Steve Klabnik blogs about how AI views online have become extreme and frustrating to read:

What is breaking my brain a little bit is that all of the discussion online around AI is so incredibly polarized. This isn’t a “the middle is always right” sort of thing either, to be clear. It’s more that both the pro-AI and anti-AI sides are loudly proclaiming things that are pretty trivially verifiable as not true.

My interview with Kagi founder Vladimir Prelovac is now up! You can listen on the web or subscribe to Timetable wherever you get your podcasts.

In many ways I’m a terrible sys admin. For the last couple years I’ve been dealing with ballooning memory usage in Redis, confused, and only now have finally taken some time to understand it. I’ve been running a cleanup script for the last week that has trimmed memory from 45 GB to 16 GB. Whew!

Manu Moreale has some thoughts and skepticism about how AI and web browsers are going to mix: We all yelled and screamed because the web has too many gatekeepers, we all lamented Google search results going to shit, and we all celebrated when new search engines were coming ...

In an interview with Axios today, Dario Amodei warns about the jobs that will be lost because of AI: Amodei said AI companies and government need to stop “sugar-coating” what’s coming: the possible mass elimination of jobs across technology, finance, law, consulting and oth...