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“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.

Finished watching the first season of Shōgun. Fantastic. 📺

Good post at WP Tavern highlighting the major plot points of the ongoing WordPress drama. I also listened to the Twitter X space (ugh) where Matt Mullenweg answers questions on the fallout from his WordCamp talk. I don’t envy folks trying to navigate this… Such a big community and lots of money.

During the pandemic I accidentally let my P.O. Box expire. I almost never checked it anyway, but I felt bad that there was a chance of letters being returned or lost into the void. Today I finally fixed it. Was able to go in person and restore the same number which luckily wasn’t being used yet.

Can’t shake the feeling today that I’m going to have to do this all on my own.

Molly White is doing something on her blog that I don’t think I’ve seen before. When linking some people’s names, she will include tiny links to Wikipedia or social web profiles. Here’s a screenshot with the links highlighted, in this case Wikipedia, Mastodon, and Bluesky:

Social Web Foundation:

The Social Web Foundation works to grow this new ecosystem in an open, healthy, and sustainable way—working with technologists and the public to build a new global town square that works for everyone.

This looks very interesting. I’m going to be honest, though, even though I know this is petty: I’m insulted that Micro.blog wasn’t given a heads-up about this before launch. We’ve only supported ActivityPub since 2018. 🤪

Not in a good mood this morning, so all of my blog posts are going to be tinged with a little bit of unwarranted frustration. Apologies in advance. 🙂

Going to restart the public beta for Micro.blog on iOS. Just waiting for Apple to approve the beta, because Micro.blog has only been around for 7 years with dozens of public releases, so we must be devious hackers trying to exploit the App Store. So tired of Apple as a babysitter.

Listening to the latest Decoder podcast with The Browser Company’s Josh Miller and enjoying it so far. I haven’t completely bought in to Arc, but we should be exploring new browser ideas. A little shocked that they have 80 employees and zero revenue, though. Not confident they can last.

No surprise that Sam Altman is quite the AI optimist: It won’t happen all at once, but we’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI; eventually we can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different a...

Decided to install the iOS 18.1 beta. AI summarization features mostly work as advertised. For the writing tools, I hesitate using it mostly because if I need help, why not jump straight to ChatGPT? Otherwise I’d wonder if I’m getting the best results, even if it seems fine.

It’s wild to imagine that in the future, to be competitive with AI you might need your own nuclear power plant. I could also see a company like Apple buying half of Arizona for solar farms. On the one hand, yes, maybe we’ve lost our minds… But on the other, a massive investment in clean energy.

Eating my own dog food, just imported 2800 notes into Micro.blog. Overall went really well. A couple things could be improved for large archives, like better search on the web.

Following up on Three Mile Island, good point from Ben Thompson today:

…nuclear energy and data centers are a perfect match for two reasons. The most obvious one is that data centers need power 24/7, which nuclear provides. The less obvious one is that nuclear power needs to be delivering power 24/7; it doesn’t scale down. Data centers, though, are a perfectly predictable consumer of power.

After reading Matt Mullenweg’s posts about WP Engine, I looked into pricing for WP Engine and a few other popular WordPress hosting services. Most are really scammy, with deceptive intro prices and lots of upsells. Haven’t found any that are as simple and transparent as Micro.blog: $5 or $10. Easy.

From Mark Gurman’s latest, the AI rollout still feels haphazard. ChatGPT may come as soon as 18.2:

Looking further ahead, Apple is already racing to complete a major iOS 18.2 upgrade, which will include features like Genmoji, ChatGPT integration and the Image Playground app. The company is looking to get that release down to zero-bug status in early November so it can ship it by December.

But the new Siri will apparently be later, maybe spread across 18.3 and 18.4 next year.

This story about Microsoft and nuclear power underscores how big a deal AI is:

If approved by regulators, Three Mile Island would provide Microsoft with the energy equivalent it takes to power 800,000 homes, or 835 megawatts. Never before has a U.S. nuclear plant come back into service after being decommissioned, and never before has all of a single commercial nuclear power plant’s output been allocated to a single customer.

Love it or hate it, AI is not just a new feature, like a revamped Clippy. It’s going to have a profound impact on computing.

Finished watching the WordCamp Q&A from Matt Mullenweg. Very unique this year, largely dedicated to calling out WP Engine as taking more from the WordPress community than they’re giving back, based on Matt’s blog post here. I don’t have strong opinions on this, but it’ll be something to follow.

The iPhone Pro 16 Max is my first “huge” iPhone. So far I’m liking the size. It’s a little awkward but doesn’t feel too big. I wanted to try this size as a sort of very, very small iPad, for reading and (sometimes) actual work.

Special shout-out to the UPS driver who delivered my new iPhone while I was out of town for a day. Not only did they hide the box on our porch, they moved a potted plant in front of it to make it even harder to see.

Frilly’s Seafood Bayou Kitchen, in Denton.

Wayward Coffee. ☕️

Just posted Core Intuition 613 with our discussion of the iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia releases, changes that might affect our apps, and the new limitations on control key shortcuts.