FeedCity

Jamie Zawinski on the 30-year anniversary of the Netscape 0.9 release:

According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the “What’s Cool” button in the toolbar.

Tuned in to the SpaceX livestream in time to see the Starship splashdown. Watched the recap of catching the booster too. Incredible. Looks like something that might be an AI-generated video, but it’s real. 🚀

Bennu Coffee might be too serious about their wi-fi passwords. ☕️

It’s time for another update in my Honda Element blog post series. After my last road trip, I decided to scrap the rooftop box. Even though the extra storage was great, I was suspicious it was dragging too much on the highway and killing my gas milage. In its place I’ve moun...

The Internet Archive is still down after an attack. A backup of the web is too important to only have one copy of. This is why we do so much archiving inside Micro.blog (for Premium). Everything you link to in a blog post is archived, with images and CSS. Helps distribute the work just a little.

Considering a radical redesign of the Micro.blog home page. The current design by @vincent has served us well for nearly two years now. Maybe time to shake things up.

Now that we’ve got Threads cross-posting for everyone, it was time to clean up a few related things. Today I added some better styling for showing categories and cross-post services. Plus, you can finally edit the cross-posting for a draft!

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has written a long essay about powerful AI. I haven’t even finished reading it and it has already blown my mind a few times over: To summarize the above, my basic prediction is that AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the pro...

When we recorded the latest Core Int, I hadn’t yet watched Money Electric on HBO. Just watched it tonight and it was excellent. I still have mixed feelings about digging up Satoshi’s identity, but it was very convincing.

We were late with the last episode of Core Int, so it’s basically two episodes this week. On the new show today, we talk about Daniel’s latest updates to Black Ink, version numbers, doing things the right way, tracking down Bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto, and AI energy use.

I’ve decided to give Arc for Mac a real shot, going all-in as my default browser. I usually use Safari and have no complaints with it. Nice to see Arc trying some new things, though. Also liked Chris Messina’s post about where Arc 2.0 might be going.

As soon as Threads released their early documentation for the Threads API months ago, we dropped everything we were doing and prototyped it in Micro.blog. We had a slow road to getting approved by Meta, but I’m happy to announce that automatic cross-posting from your blog to...

NPR has reviewed internal documents from TikTok:

For the first time, internal TikTok communications have been made public that show a company unconcerned with the harms the app poses for American teenagers. This is despite its own research validating many child safety concerns.

We’ve known for a long time that the addictive nature of the infinite timeline pioneered by TikTok was causing problems for teenagers. But this is a whole new thing:

One internal report that analyzed TikTok’s main video feed saw “a high volume of … not attractive subjects” were filling everyone’s app. In response, Kentucky investigators found that TikTok retooled its algorithm to amplify users the company viewed as beautiful.

Shut it down. ByteDance has until January to divest the app and I have no sympathy for a delay. It needs new leadership.

Trying a new coffee place. Cafe at the Loren with a nice view across Riverside. Where I’m sitting used to be a Taco Cabana. ☕️

Don’t sleep on the “Custom home page” plug-in for Micro.blog if you need something simple for an extra site. I use it for standalone, single-page websites with a little HTML and CSS (or even JS).

Slack can sometimes be overwhelming. I make it work by limiting myself to about 3 channels in the Mac and iOS apps. Others can be viewed on the web as needed. Also, I mute almost everything, even channels I care about. The only flaw is that @here bypasses mutes, which I don’t think it should.

Threads cross-posting is finally rolling out more broadly for Micro.blog folks. Sorry if I didn’t get to your request for the beta earlier. I’m catching up and replying to everyone who asked about it in email.

I’m not interested in a Tesla, or any new car, but I watched the robotaxi event because it felt like it was going to be a spectacle. I do think self-driving will be safer than human drivers. I’m not on board with humanoid robots, though. AI should be confined to software and small gadgets only.

Get your 🎃 and 👻 emoji ready. I’m brewing up something fun for Halloween.

Thinking more about this blog post from Nick Radcliffe about effectively rebranding Micro.blog. I want to turn Micro.blog into a sort of bundle (think Apple One) because it does several things. But I don’t know if I can give up the “micro” name as much as redefine it. Small name. Big features. 🙂

It’s less than a month until election day. I believe Kamala Harris is going to win. Knock on wood, many things are breaking her way in the final weeks of the campaign, in a way that they did not for Hillary Clinton when she was also on her way to winning the presidency. Howe...

Making progress on enabling Threads cross-posting for everyone in Micro.blog. Meta approved the app this week, now waiting for them to approve the business account. It has been slow going because after each rejection I have to work on something else to clear my head.

It will always be valuable to know a programming language inside and out, but AI is erasing old headaches of context switching between platforms. Code in your favorite language, have AI port it to another language, review and tweak the results. In the future, we may develop largely in pseudo code.

Nice update to Mimi for Micro.blog to batch generate alt text for a bunch of photos at once.

Most mornings while eating breakfast at home, I flip between Morning Joe and CNN. Today, too many ads, so watched some of Good Morning America and they really got me with that story about a teacher. Eyes might be watering a little. The show producers know their craft.

New Core Int just published. We talk about Meta’s Orion prototype, Daniel trying to remember his Apple Vision Pro password, and more about the future of computers that we put on our face.

Old steps to nowhere in east Austin. Someone’s house used to be here.

As usual I’m working on a few different things in parallel. Server bug fixes, mobile app updates, and something new… Sneak peek in this screenshot. Can’t share more for now, it’s too early! But I love the potential.

Upgraded to macOS Sequoia. iPhone Mirroring is fascinating. It’s better and more native-y for clicks and scrolling than using the iOS simulator.

Interesting heads-up from Gareth Edwards that .io might be going away:

Once this treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist. Various international bodies will update their records. In particular, the International Standard for Organization (ISO) will remove country code “IO” from its specification.

I will be surprised if there isn’t a special case for .io renewals because of how widespread it is. I have a few registrations myself.