FeedCity

Spent a bunch of time in encryption land, debugging an issue with the next Strata update. Almost shocked that I eventually solved it. I was starting to lose my mind watching scrambled bytes of data go back and forth between platforms.

There was a trailer for Flow before The Wild Robot. It looks fantastic. The release is coming in December according to Cartoon Brew.

Croissant is getting some great press. Just a few I’ve noticed: Six Colors, MacStories, TechCrunch. I don’t need it because Micro.blog cross-posts to everything from my blog, but would be cool if the app could post to blogs in the future too.

Happy birthday to Jimmy Carter. 100 years! Amazing. Hope he gets his wish to vote for Kamala Harris. Early voting is soon. 🇺🇸

Decided a few weeks back to stop Wordle at 1200. It’s fitting that I did terribly on this last one.

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Relay has raised $1 million for St. Jude this year. Incredible.

Interesting note in the latest fediverse blog post update for Ghost: Will members who use ActivityPub (rather than email) count toward Ghost(Pro) billing? And so far the answer is yes, because ActivityPub is (quite significantly) more expensive to support than email. But, t...

We posted a new episode of Core Intuition, this time talking all about the controversy in the WordPress community over WP Engine. Still very fascinated by this story and following as much of the news as I can, including a new interview with Matt Mullenweg over the weekend.

I posted this to @news a week ago. Quoting it here as a reminder:

An early heads-up: we are planning a major server upgrade for October 1st, 10pm central time / 3pm GMT. While we hope to limit downtime, Micro.blog will be unavailable for a little while during the upgrade. Your blogs hosted on Micro.blog will remain online.

While we’ve had sporadic downtime this year, I don’t think we’ve had planned downtime in several years, and I don’t take it lightly. It’s a database upgrade and worth the time to do it right.

I think the new “finished” pane turned out well. This has been a much-needed improvement to Micro.blog. Because we fire off publishing and Hugo-ing in the background, it was irritating to keep an eye on the status and find the new blog post link.

House shopping during election season is great. There are so many political yard signs, you can tell a lot about what your future neighbors are like.

Last night’s SNL was great. Maya Rudolph, Andy Samberg, Dana Carvey, Jean Smart… That’s the way to start the 50th season. 📺

Really enjoyed seeing The Wild Robot. Beautiful. Glad I read the book first too… The movie follows the story closely but some characters, dialogue, and details were bound to change. 🍿

I ended up disabling Type to Siri. Kept accidentally triggering it with impatient double-taps on the tab bar.

Austin forever. New mural on 51st.

Molly White blogs about POSSE:

The next time a new social media site comes along, you can plug it in to your existing system. And the next time a social media site dies or becomes untenable, you just disconnect it. With this model, even when a platform goes under, you lose relatively little: your posts still remain live and under your control on your site, even if the copies of them on the disconnected website are abandoned or deleted.

Cherrywood Coffeehouse. ☕️

Thinking about what a modern AppleScript would look like powered by LLMs. The human language-like syntax of AppleScript was the right idea, but there were syntax quirks that made it frustrating. LLMs could fix that. Free idea! I’m tempted but it’s too far outside the scope of Micro.blog’s mission.

Rest in peace, Maggie Smith.

Sort of an all-Zuckerberg podcast week. Good interview with Mark on Decoder but can’t disagree more strongly with Mark’s vision of AI-generated content showing up in your feed. This is the terrible end-game of algorithmic timelines.

I’m still interested in Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, but maybe I’m not the market because I can barely tell the difference between the Wayfarer, Headliner, and Skyler styles. Also I buy new glasses about once every 10 years.

Tantek Çelik proposes a “CC-NT” license, for “no-training”: This seems like an obvious thing to me. If you can write a license that forbids “commercial use”, then you should be able to write a license that forbids use in “training models”, which respectful / well-written cr...

Pushed another TestFlight beta of Micro.blog with lots of little tweaks that had been bugging me. Still a few bugs in this version, plus the work of replacing the old text editor.

“Orion makes every other VR or AR device I have tried feel like a mistake — including the Apple Vision Pro.” — Ben Thompson, who interviews Meta’s CTO

Let’s start with this: Meta Connect was more interesting and fun than Apple’s iPhone event or WWDC keynote. Live demos are better. Even when Mark Zuckerberg was kind of goofy, or when he said “hell yes” and “live demos sometimes work”… Maybe it it wasn’t as polished, with de...

Mira Murati is leaving OpenAI. If things had gone differently after the board shakeup, she would’ve been the CEO and Sam Altman would be at Microsoft. But it didn’t appear that she had been sidelined either. She led the live OpenAI announcements for GPT-4o instead of Sam just a few months ago.

Just uploaded a new TestFlight beta with support for iOS 18 dark and tinted icons. Looks way better now for folks who’ve customized their home screen icons.

Automattic vs. WP Engine will have a chilling effect on WordPress hosting. When I decided to use Hugo in Micro.blog, I considered using WordPress under the hood instead. It would’ve brought significant benefits, but at the cost of bloat and web hosting monoculture. Glad to have avoided this drama.

Effectively no one knows how good Micro.blog is for blogging. I alternate between being bummed out by this and optimistic that there is so much room for growth. Might take a few more years for overnight success to hit.

Sarah Perez reporting on the financial backing of the new Social Web Foundation. This is an impressive start:

The Ford Foundation has also offered the organization a large grant to get the project started. In total, SWF is closing in on $1 million in financial support.