It’s that time of year again when I realize I’ve let Redis memory get completely out of hand, 45+ GB, so forking to save is mostly impossible. Think I’m going to take some time to truly trim out the bloat.

I posted a new video on YouTube that shows how filters work in Micro.blog, including a brand new feature: Micro.blog can analyze your blog posts using AI magic to generate keywords and file posts into categories. This is for Micro.blog Premium subscribers. 🪄

Just caught up with Andor through episode 9. What a great show. 📺

Nice update to the mnml theme for Micro.blog. It’s cool to see all those settings.

Time for some plants for the front yard. Mother’s Day shopping at Home Depot.

Made several little design updates to Micro.blog this weekend, including a more consistent, cleaner header for pages that have some text and a “new” button. Here’s a screenshot for posterity.

OpenAI rolls out new things so often that it’s a little surprising they haven’t replicated Claude’s Artifacts. It’s such a nice workflow to generate HTML, CSS, and JS with an interactive preview right in the app.

Dave Winer blogging about how software evolves with feedback from users:

Software isn’t a thing, it isn’t finished, it’s a process as it gets invented by the users. It’s a performing art. WordLand today is like a musician performing in a small club, working out the playlist, and hoping to be playing at theaters then arenas, and finally someday, if we’re very good, stadiums.

When we launched Micro.one, I was interested in simplifying the sidebar. I moved the link to manage blog post categories to another pane for all users. I now think that was a mistake. Today along with some other minor UI tweaks, I’ve added it back.

Great blog post by John Siracusa, distilling much of Apple’s current problem balancing doing good with making money:

Apple, as embodied by its leadership’s decisions over the past decade or more, no longer seems primarily motivated by the creation of great products. Time and time again, its policies have made its products worse for customers in exchange for more power, control, and, yes, money for Apple.

While testing something this morning, I made a careless blunder with one of our servers, causing some sporadic downtime. I’m very sorry. A couple things are slow right now but will be returning to normal shortly.

I don’t think I realized that you didn’t need to be in the EU to distribute apps via AltStore PAL. If Apple relaxes their notarization review in the future, I might use this to ship early iOS builds to the EU.

There are many challenges for the web and web publishers as AI upends search, but the only way to believe that the open web itself will be destroyed is to no longer believe in web browsers. As big as AI is, it’s not as big as the web. We’ll navigate through this.

“What we make stands testament to who we are.” — Jony Ive, in an interview at Stripe Sessions

Bill Gates writes about accelerating his plan to give away his wealth, winding down the Gates Foundation in 20 years:

People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that “he died rich” will not be one of them. There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people.

Funny how people change. In the 1990s, I was a teenager learning to program the Mac while complaining about Bill Gates and Microsoft. Now I admire Bill and complain about Apple.

Reading through Apple’s motion to pause the external purchase ruling. A quick comment on this part:

A federal court cannot force Apple to permanently give away free access to its products and services, including intellectual property.

No one said that. Developers have been paying $99/year for this privilege since the beginning of the App Store.

Apple lawyers can spin this however they want. It will always come back to this: it’s absurd to take a cut of developer revenue that is not processed by Apple just for adding a website link in an app.

Realized last night while listening to music on our record player, which is connected to our Amazon Echo as a speaker… We have a couple newer Echos, but this one is the original Echo from 10 years ago. It’s the oldest gadget in our house still in regular use.

I was unexpectedly caught up in the news about a new Pope. Reading a little about him and translated bits of the inaugural address — an American, speaking of love and peace, not division.

John Voorhees blogging at MacStories:

Apple’s exploration of AI-based search is not terribly surprising either, but I do hope they cut a broader deal with Anthropic instead of Perplexity.

Should Apple acquire Anthropic? It would cost $60 billion, a ridiculous jump over the $3 billion they paid for Beats. Mix in some cash and some stock. It would set Apple up to be at the forefront of AI for the next 10 years. It sounds crazy… until the iPhone is disrupted by a new device.

Thanks to Kev Quirk for the kind words about migrating his Mastodon account to Micro.blog. Micro.blog is always a work in progress, and our fediverse support will continue to improve, but it’s gratifying to read that our approach is resonating with him: Thinking of it in th...

Two weeks on the road and then other distractions, this morning is the first day in a while that I’m back to my routine of walking to the coffee shop. Feels good. Ready to write some code. ☕️

Parker Ortolani makes a great point about potential lock-in for AI products that know a lot about you. Portability would be a good thing to work on early: Memory should be exportable and importable from every provider. We do not need a new kind of proprietary format or anyt...

Let’s do a Micro.blog photo challenge in June. It’s been a while so we’ll keep it simple… I’ll come up with a list of daily prompts and post them later this month. Feel free to send me your own words if you’ve got any! For inspiration, here’s a collection of photos from last year.

I blogged recently about experimenting with local LLMs inside the Micro.blog for Mac app. This is useful for post categorization and other things. It works, but it’s not as good as I’d like without requiring everyone to have an M4 with 48 GB of RAM. Might put it on the shelf for a bit.

There are all sorts of interesting quotes from Eddy Cue’s testimony today in the Google trial. From Mark Gurman’s reporting in Bloomberg:

“You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now as crazy as it sounds,” he said. “The only way you truly have true competition is when you have technology shifts. Technology shifts create these opportunities. AI is a new technology shift, and it’s creating new opportunities for new entrants.”

Really happy for Dan Moren to make his Jeopardy appearance today. Congrats! I’ve set it to record. ☕️

FediForum has regrouped and is coming back, June 5-7. I might be traveling those days but I’ll be joining as internet connectivity allows. They’ve also got an impressive new advisory board.

Raining at Lazarus. ☕️

A wild story in Rolling Stone: People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies. I use ChatGPT throughout the day and it’s hard to imagine it going off the rails this badly: …anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supe...

I increasingly throw my blog post drafts into ChatGPT as a check for major problems. When it comes back with nitpicky changes that I have to admit would make my writing better, I sort of get defensive. “Hey, leave me alone, it’s my writing! Who asked you?” 🤪