ByteDance was been trying so hard to sell TikTok and they just ran out of time. Thankfully, Trump is going to extend the deadline, giving TikTok more time to find a buyer! Whew. I’m sure TikTok will be sold real soon now. 🤪

I’ve optimized a few things with our Twitter / X import. If you never imported your tweets, now is a great time! Micro.one and Micro.blog copy all your tweets and photos (minus RTs and videos) to a space you can control. Full API access to the data, easy to embed on your blog.

Molly White:

The TikTok ban, the Musk Twitter takeover, the Facebook moderation policy changes, the Republicans’ rapidly intensifying crackdowns on speech… let these be the proof you needed to move anything you care about online to a space you control.

Get your own domain name. If you don’t know where, Micro.one hosting is $1/month.

TikTok’s “not available” message is blatantly manipulative… So a fitting end to the app, for now.

Last week when ChatGPT added scheduled tasks, I set a task to write a haiku for me each morning based on Hayao Miyazaki movies. It has been a fun experiment. Whenever I get one of the haikus, I smile, which was what I hoped would happen.

Here are the first four:

Through forest winds soar,
A catbus hums in the night,
Magic fills the air.

Beneath soft moonlight,
Spirits dance on quiet hills,
Dreams take gentle flight.

Sky castles arise,
Whispers of the wind bring tales,
Nature’s heart beats strong.

Howl’s voice on the breeze,
A lone castle seeks the stars,
Love breaks every curse.

I also like that even for a business-y “scheduled tasks” feature, we can squeeze a little creativity out of it.

Another shot of downtown and the sky with fewer clouds, from across the river.

Custom printing code for Mac apps is a lost art. Nice work by @danielpunkass in the latest Black Ink.

I’ve never had a problem with Mac app notarization until today. Usually it takes just a minute. This new build is stuck “processing” for 20 minutes now. Not as bad as human review taking days, but on principle I don’t like that Apple is the bottleneck.

Lady Bird Lake and downtown Austin from the pedestrian bridge.

My cookies and sessions are all out of whack now serving both micro.one and micro.blog from essentially the same web application. Separate load balancers, but I think I need to split things out even further to fix a couple issues.

Great lineup of social web talks at FOSDEM next month. Wish I could be there. Good luck everyone!

New updates to the mnml theme for Micro.blog. Looks really nice @jimmitchell! Remember you can preview new themes now without having to switch your blog.

I’ve been ignoring most podcasts over the last month. This morning, listened to the latest Dithering on my walk. It’s got everything you need to know about the TikTok ban and new interest in Xiaohongshu (RedNote).

I haven’t installed the latest iOS 18.3 beta yet, but just from screenshots I like this italicized change for notification summaries.

We posted a new Core Intuition today, catching up on all the WordPress drama from the last month or so.

Very small example of a Siri paper cut and why I avoid using it. This morning I got a text while driving asking “what time” something was. I responded with “ten thirty”, and Siri sent “1030” instead of “10:30”. Not a big deal, but there are countless scenarios like this.

TikTok threatening to shut down completely on Sunday — which is more than is required by the law — is such a transparent attempt to influence the supreme court and others. Good riddance. It’s not great if everyone just joins Reels, but we need a shake-up.

If you only build a new skyscraper every year or so, downtown Austin doesn’t seem like it’s changing much. Looking at the skyline, it’s familiar — hey there’s the capitol, and the Frost tower, and… — but when I think about the full scope of changes over decades, it’s almost unrecognizable.

History is going to view Joe Biden very favorably. He accomplished a lot that we’re only just starting to see results from. Competent management of the pandemic and a peace deal for Gaza are bookends. Thanks Joe. 🇺🇸

Looking for a headshot-style photo, it’s surprisingly hard to find something good in my photo library that doesn’t have other people in the photo. Maybe I need to take more selfies.

Was SwiftUI a mistake? Steve Troughton-Smith writes on Mastodon:

Boy do I wish Apple had built a real Apple-quality next-gen UIKit/AppKit-like first-party cross-[Apple]-platform UI framework instead of SwiftUI. The closest thing Apple makes is still Catalyst, but they completely squandered their opportunity to make something better than what came before. Going all-in on SwiftUI is the kind of mistake that will hurt for decades to come

This is a frequent topic on Core Intuition. For the Mac, there are pros and cons for choosing AppKit, Catalyst, or SwiftUI. It shouldn’t be that way.

Micro.blog’s tweets import sometimes struggles, and it needed a few kicks before we finally got Romit Mehta’s tweet archive of over 140k tweets imported. But it works! The cool thing about the architecture is that after import it makes everything available on a separate blog and via an API.

Good article by Jason Snell at Macworld about how Apple’s previous playback is in conflict with recent products like the Vision Pro and Apple Intelligence. Also this bit about how Apple’s culture is still in the 1990s despite their massive success:

Today’s Apple is a titan, but it still behaves like it’s a put-upon underdog in danger of being taken advantage of by the cold, cruel world.

I’m sure I’ve blogged the same thing. I still think we hit peak Apple about a year ago.

ChatGPT scheduled tasks are interesting. I’ve tried a few things — sending me a news summary or programming tip at a certain time — and it works as advertised. Not sure I have a good use case right now, so for fun I’m having it send me a haiku.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bug related to == vs. === in JavaScript. Half the time we’re comparing strings anyway and it just doesn’t matter, so why ugly up your code with an extra =? Also while I’m being controversial, real tabs are great. 🤪

Sara Dietschy’s latest video about AI voice and video clones is really good. Both the technical side and also finding the right balance: using AI sparingly where it fits, recognizing that most content should be created the old-fashioned way. People want to feel a connection with a real human.

Revisiting my tweet import code (see this post) to see what can be optimized. I really hope Twitter / X doesn’t change their export file format anytime soon. May not be worth updating my code again for major changes.

I plan to ignore Trump for most of the next few years, and I’m not even ready to read the special counsel report yet. But John Gruber’s post rings true to me. We needed a trial to educate voters, to cut through the disinformation. It was a major failure that they didn’t happen. 🇺🇸

Dave Winer in a longer post collecting thoughts on Matt Mullenweg and other things:

I don’t like that people have called him things like the Mad King. People used to say stuff like that about me. It’s a substitute for trying to understand where someone is coming from.

I’ve adopted the “mad king” phrasing in recent posts about Matt and about Automattic. I just find it amusing, a way to poke fun at the whole drama. I don’t actually think he’s crazy.

Starting up a new TestFlight beta for Micro.blog for iOS. This release will include support for photo collections. You can tap a photo to add it to a collection, or create a new collection in the app.