FeedCity

Ben Thompson’s interview with Marc Benioff is kind of wild. I had mostly ignored Salesforce until now. Worth a listen.

Not sure what to think about this video from Josh Miller about Arc not going anywhere. I just started using it a couple weeks ago! Confused messaging because now the app feels obsoleted, which I don’t think is their intention.

Sale! Today only, upgrade to the Micro.blog Premium or Family plan and get 25% off for the next year. Create up to 5 blogs, video hosting, and more. 🏷️

It’s odd how many developers in the fediverse don’t know how Bluesky works. I’ve made it my business to understand a little bit about all platforms, going back 30 years of building for the web. Product design is then finding the right way to put the pieces together.

OpenAI’s Orion model may be released before the end of the year, according to The Verge:

Unlike the release of OpenAI’s last two models, GPT-4o and o1, Orion won’t initially be released widely through ChatGPT. Instead, OpenAI is planning to grant access first to companies it works closely with in order for them to build their own products and features, according to a source familiar with the plan.

My first reading of this is that the model is too powerful to just let anyone use right now. But maybe it’s also too expensive. I wonder if it’ll be available from the API.

Added a help page to describe how configuring Bluesky handles in Micro.blog works. Super easy, almost nothing to do.

It’s probably not well known that when you enable Bluesky in Micro.blog, it also enables your blog domain name to be used as your Bluesky handle. In fact it’s so hidden a feature that I forgot if I had ever implemented this and had to double-check today.

Train crossing at Cherrywood.

Interesting contrast today in how two newspapers have covered the same story. I cancelled my NYT subscription this year, but I happen to see the news item pop up in my timeline. The New York Times: Biden Administration Outlines Government ‘Guardrails’ for A.I. Tools A natio...

We rolled out a new zoom for photos on the web. Thanks @vincent for working on this! It turned out really well. Here’s a quick demo video.

Last night from Mattie’s at Green Pastures.

As AI gets better at helping with coding, I think it’s going to feel similar to the productivity boost going from assembly language to Pascal or C. Or maybe from C to Ruby. Development becomes more about orchestrating lots of modules that AI handles the busywork implementation for.

I don’t really understand what consistency models are, but nice to see OpenAI sticking to their bizarre lowercase letter naming. 4o, o1, and now sCM.

Back in 1994, I would never have guessed that the computing future 30 years later would still have so many modal dialog boxes.

Jason Fried says version 1 is for you:

v1 is for us. No one else. Others will use it, many will resonate with it, but ultimately, v1 is ours. It’s sacred ground. There’s an eternity to change, tweak, modify, grow, expand, and adjust for everyone else, but there’s only a fixed amount of time to make that perfect version 1 for us.

The only thing I’d add is that sometimes v2 and v3 are just for us too. Micro.blog does a lot of things and the only way it works is that I don’t add features I won’t use myself.

Glass houses, throwing stones, etc. I gripe about ActivityPub’s chattiness but just fixed a bug that caused way too many activities to be sent out for some posts in external feeds, as if they had been edited. Need better tools to peer into the system to see what it’s actually doing.

Whenever I search for recipes and get back so much search-optimized filler text and ads, explaining the background of every ingredient instead of just showing me the recipe, I want to start my own recipe blog. Today I actually registered a domain for this. Have a recipe to share? I can invite you.

The weakest link in Micro.blog’s server infrastructure remains our two Redis servers, which often get up to the breaking point of memory usage. That blew up today and I just finished restoring it. 48 GB memory is not enough, but I’m hesitant to do another upgrade… Need to trim the bloat instead.

The background queue for ActivityPub-related tasks in Micro.blog seems to have accumulated 5 million jobs overnight. Some replies to the fediverse will be delayed until I sort out what happened or it eventually catches up.

Good interview from Joanna Stern with Craig Federighi. I’ve got nitpicks with Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.1, but listening to Craig it’s pretty easy to nod along with Apple’s strategy.

I would pay for a third-party API that works like Apple’s private cloud compute. For the foreseeable future, AI is just going to be better in the cloud. Would be great to take advantage of that with fewer privacy trade-offs.

I may have to visit this massive solar farm next time I’m in the area, about an hour outside Austin. 1.3 million solar panels. Made in America so there’s a tax credit too under the Inflation Reduction Act. (Thanks Biden!)

Really good point from Tim Walz in this clip today:

Donald Trump has already promised that he’d put Elon in charge of government regulations that oversee the businesses that Elon runs. […] Donald Trump, in front of the eyes of the American public, is promising corruption.

Because Strata notes are end-to-end encrypted, I’ve gotta rethink how I might build features that are usually server-based. Even simple things like search have to be on the client. If we ship any features that temporarily store data in plaintext, going to make this opt-in and as clear as possible.

Everyone is confused by OpenAI’s product names — GPT 4o and o1 — but I’m also amused that Anthropic’s upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet is still called 3.5, not 3.6. Why even have version numbers? 🤪 Also very interesting Rabbit-esque “computer use” feature.

Thanks Aaron Ross Powell for the blog post about Micro.blog! On cross-posting:

But the magic, and the reason Micro.blog and services like it are the way the social web ought to work, comes in what it calls “Sources.” These are other platforms, including many social media platforms, Micro.blog can automatically syndicate everything you write to. And for many of them, it can pull back in replies so you can have a conversation without leaving the Micro.blog interface.

Something very significant is happening in Texas with reviewing death row inmate Robert Roberson’s trial. He was supposed to be executed last week. Abbot and Paxton are of course useless, but the legislature is trying to make it right. This article in the Texas Tribune is a good place to start.

Early voting started today! We went to our location but the line was insanely long. Gonna try again tomorrow. Hopefully a good sign for turnout. 🇺🇸

I’m using iOS App Intents for the first time as a developer. My gut feeling when this was all introduced was that it was way too limited to create an extensible, universal Siri that works in lots of contexts. I still believe that. Some cool things are possible, though.

When I get a questionable notification summary in the iOS 18.1 beta, I run the original text through OpenAI to compare. It’s usually better. Certainly not a deal-breaker, but the thing about AI is it needs to actually be good or you lose the illusion.