Many news sites and social networks have a headlines section for trending news. Maybe we need to take a hint from traditional newspapers and replace that with a high-profile “corrections” section that is just all the news that’s factually wrong with a summary of the truth.

The measles outbreak here in Texas is such a sad reminder of the real harm of misinformation. So many little kids are in the ICU that it seems likely more will die. Tragic and preventable.

I still want to do more with Open Library. Our app Epilogue can search and get covers from Open Library. But the database just isn’t complete enough and needs more apps to help users add and curate book metadata.

When I added tracking what books you’re reading (and blogging about) to Micro.blog, I used ISBN as the identifier. Every once in a while that’s a problem, like my post today for a short story. I added it manually using the Goodreads ID with a “G” prefix. Not great but maybe a possible convention.

There’s another lawsuit against Matt Mullenweg and Automattic, this time from a WP Engine customer. It seems to conflate the project code and the servers into a single “WordPress ecosystem”, but that’s not how open source works. The software can be totally free and companion services less free.

Finished reading: Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent by Scott Lynch. Great to have another Gentleman Bastard story. Split into two parts in Grimdark Magazine. 📚

Alexa+ pricing makes no sense. $20/month or free for Amazon Prime subscribers… Prime is $15/month. I can think of a few reasons to do it this way and none of them justify user confusion.

I’m following the Verge’s live blog for the Alexa event. Amazon really should be leading in this space since they created the Echo out of nothing 10 years ago. Fun to re-read my first blog post about the Echo.

Alexa+ will be a paid upgrade. Tim Cook is now wondering how he can charge for Siri too.

Dave Winer:

People give Matt Mullenweg a lot of shit, but do they realize how hopeless the open web would be if he and his friends hadn’t kept it going for 20+ years.

Fascinating to imagine what the web would look like if WordPress didn’t exist. What would fill the void, and would it be as open?

Trying out Flashes, a photos app for Bluesky. On the surface feels similar to our Micro.blog companion app Sunlit. Lots of potential.

Tried out ChatGPT Deep Research now that it’s on the less expensive plan. Don’t have a lot of use for it, but it’s super impressive as a tool you might take out every once in a while. I used it to dig into some background facts for a blog post.

Working on some ActivityPub tweaks today, finally added some code to handle Question objects / polls. It was confusing to not have the context for these posts from Mastodon before. They look like this in the Micro.blog timeline now:

Personally I don’t use polls. I’ll revisit doing more later.

Scott Lynch in his newsletter:

I have decided to post every short story I’ve ever written (once rights exclusivity periods or other arrangements for them expire, for those that haven’t already) on my website, for free, in perpetuity, at the same time I make them available as e-books. Many of them are available elsewhere for free already. I just want to centralize the archive.

Feels like a very IndieWeb-y statement. And more authors when self-publishing are fine with DRM-free, which is also great.

HTTP content negotiation was a mistake. The perceived wins are always overshadowed by all the new problems. I’ve long thought a slimmed down ActivityPub without content negotiation and without JSON-LD would be so much nicer. Sorry folks! Controversial hot take but it’s true. 🤪

I’m improving something I started last year, to automatically save thumbnail versions of web pages that could be used in various places. As an example, starting this week Micro.blog now makes banners suitable for Open Graph meta tags, combining the profile photo and a render...

Congrats to John Siracusa on the release of his newest Mac app, Hyperspace:

There are plenty of Mac apps that will save disk space by finding duplicate files and then deleting the duplicates. Using APFS clones, my app could reclaim disk space without removing any files! As a digital pack rat, this appealed to me immensely.

It is a dangerously clever way to save disk space. I probably wouldn’t trust this app from anyone else, but I know John has tested the heck out of it. Your files are in good hands.

I wanted to see a transcript before blogging about it but this AP story probably has enough of Phil Schiller’s testimony on the App Store: “What happens if a developer doesn’t pay and what is the process for that?” Schiller recalled about his initial reservations about requ...

A little quiet today but I got a lot done. Random debugging and wrapped up some new Open Graph plumbing which I’ll blog about tomorrow morning.

Two stories that feel loosely connected. First on NPR, highlighting a veteran in Alaska fired from the Small Business Administration. He was planning to finish his career with the government, now he’s losing sleep, worried about supporting his family, saying:

I’ve never felt more betrayed in my entire life.

Then via Political Wire, James Carville has a prediction:

I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days is in the midst of a massive collapse and particularly a collapse in public opinion.

Finished reading: Empire of Exiles by Erin M Evans. This was excellent. Starts like a murder mystery set in a fantasy world, with unique magic. 📚

The new 5G router — which we knew would be a temporary solution until Google Fiber is sorted out — has a habit of going out every afternoon around 2-3pm. Just poof, no wi-fi for a little while, time to take a walk or read a book. Maybe random but it’s feeling like a pattern.

Dave Winer is launching WordLand:

The goal is to bootstrap something new – a social network without all the problems of Twitter et al. Ultimately the limits they impose on writers are unacceptable. I’ve waited for them to fix these problems for 18 years now, and I’ve come to see, amazingly, they don’t see them as problems.

One way to think about WordLand is that it’s a posting front-end to WordPress, with its own RSS feeds outside of WordPress. The feeds have both HTML and Markdown. So you could build platforms (like Micro.blog!) that aggregate user feeds.

In addition to being a very good Micro.blog client, Micro Social also has pretty much all of the book features from our companion app Epilogue. I recorded a quick video playing around with it.

Git scraping is a clever technique from Simon Willison to track changes to web pages by adding them to a repository. He’s using this to crawl the DOGE site.

Fiddling with improved Open Graph support for hosted blogs. I’ve never liked how most social platforms use Open Graph previews. Sometimes they’re great, sometimes they’re redundant, and sometimes they’re plastered over a timeline like ads. But bloggers need more control over this.

Almost whenever I run an alter table in MySQL, I think back to a conversation with Marco Arment at SXSW 15 years ago, about how Tumblr’s database was so big it was faster to add new tables instead of changing existing columns or indexes. MySQL has improved a lot since then.

Patrick Rhone:

We are not on the verge of a constitutional crisis, we are in the aftermath of one.

Things are indeed dire. I’m focusing on the only thing I know how to contribute: helping people post on the web and discouraging the spread of misinformation, which I think is largely to blame for getting us here. To those on the front lines for democracy, please remember to be better than the other side. Everything we do must be grounded in truth and compassion.

Federico Viticci on the products after the Vision Pro: I may be stating the obvious here, but I fundamentally believe that headsets are a dead end and glasses are the ultimate form factor we should be striving for. […] There’s a real possibility we may have Apple glasses (a...

This is a variation on something I’ve mentioned in passing before. I like running draft blog posts through AI. Even for very short posts, sometimes I’ll paste the text into ChatGPT and ask it to tell me what the post means. If AI can “understand” it, humans probably can too....

Letting go of Advanced Data Protection in the UK seems a reasonable compromise from Apple. If I’m going to nitpick anything in their statement:

Enhancing the security of cloud storage with end-to-end encryption is more urgent than ever before.

Urgent? Important, yes, but urgent is something that needs immediate attention, and I hardly think encrypted cloud backups qualify. Apple’s statement doesn’t actually matter but the word choice stood out to me.