Finished upgrading a server. Some things should be faster! (And some won’t be.) I’ll continue to look for places to optimize.

Coffee yesterday at Lazarus. ☕️

Now that I’m using Hetzner in the EU, I’m having difficulty understanding Linode pricing. For example, dedicated 16 CPUs on both hosts:

Linode: $288
Hetzner: $110

This is a massive difference. Is Linode that much better? I feel like a fool for paying this.

Micro.blog for Mac continues to improve. Just released version 3.5. A new feature I like in this release: paste a photo from the clipboard directly into the Uploads section to upload it.

Also added a Preview button. I use this with command-shift-P but I’m sure some people didn’t know it was there.

I’ve switched my coding questions over to o4-mini. It’s very good and fast enough.

At this point, for me personally, not using AI for coding help would be like not using Stack Overflow or Google. I could go back to the 1990s when I had a printed reference open in front of me while coding, but why?

The Sam Altman interview at TED is worth a watch. Awkward and full of tension. But some good thoughts in it, probably the most I’ve seen Sam pressed on the big issues.

Didn’t sleep enough. Nightmare that I was arguing with the Subaru mechanics. Too close to reality. 🚙

Sad to hear there were two deaths in the FSU shooting. When news broke that it was a handgun, it gave me a small bit of hope that it wouldn’t be as terrible as it could’ve been. Imagine an AR-15 instead. That is why they should be banned.

Great post from The Fediverse Report about Bluesky complying with requests from the Turkish government and how a labeling service can be used to hide accounts:

Such a moderation layer allows Bluesky (the app) to apply moderation decisions that are only experienced by people currently geolocated in a specific country, more on that below. A few days ago, the Turkish moderation labeler became active, and the labeler started hiding accounts, making the accounts invisible for people in Turkey.

Taria & Como looks like a clever, crank-friendly platformer, part of the upcoming season 2 on Playdate. There’s a trailer on YouTube.

The Internet Archive is asking for help to defend against lawsuits:

A coalition of major record labels has filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive—demanding $700 million for our work preserving and providing access to historical 78rpm records. These fragile, obsolete discs hold some of the earliest recordings of a vanishing American culture.

The Internet Archive is a unique force for good. Sad that they have to waste any time on this.

Matt Mullenweg blogs about the WordPress 6.8 release, how WordPress might use AI in the future, and the experience of being deposed at the WP Engine trial:

I really appreciated the due process and decorum of the rule of law, and just like code, law has a million little quirks, global variables, loaded libraries, and esoteric terminology. But wow, after a full day of that, I’m mentally exhausted.

I like the way Tony Stubblebine is running Medium. On sticking with diversity, equity, and inclusion:

Medium was built by and is run by a diverse group of people. This diversity is a raise-the-bar strategy. As a CEO, I feel confident that embracing diversity as a strategy increases the business, cultural, and intellectual capabilities of our company.

Unfortunately the acronym DEI has been poisoned. I think it’s fine to abandon the letters, while keeping to the principles.

Some interesting data here in the MIT Technology Review about energy use for AI data centers:

Electricity demand is on the rise from a whole host of sources: Electric vehicles, air-conditioning, and appliances will each drive more electricity demand than data centers between now and the end of the decade. In total, data centers make up a little over 8% of electricity demand expected between now and 2030.

There is so much noise around AI that it’s increasingly difficult to tell what is misinformation or just outdated.

Dave Winer has more thoughts on the “Twitterlike is a bad shape” post:

Each decision we make in developing our means of discourse shapes the discourse. And with the character limit and the inability to edit, and the incentives are all wrong (I can tap into your follower flow without your permision just by posting a reply) and makes almost all discourse spam or abusive or both. I’m planning a different structure for discourse in the World of WordLand.

I’m not a Gmail user or Notion user, but gotta say the UI and interactions in Notion Mail look quite good. I’ve watched a few videos for inspiration.

This is a great post outlining many of the problems with Twitter-inspired social networks: Twitter and its imitators have adopted a structural design that is fundamentally bad for people. This isn’t just a matter of who’s in charge; it’s a problem with the thing itself. I’...

Parker Ortolani blogging about whatever new device Jony Ive is working on and its potential as part of OpenAI:

OpenAI has been spitting out incredible new products at a ridiculously fast pace over the past several months and I do not see Sam Altman wasting anyone’s time. The fact that he wants to pull the project into OpenAI says as much. That suggests it might end up being close to a new kind of phone—perhaps familiar in shape, but powered by something so fundamentally different.

I’m following a few Bluesky custom feeds, but I hadn’t paid close attention to Graze until today. I wonder how users will react to seeing ads? It’s an interesting approach because the money here goes mostly to feed creators. Lots of new questions about who should monetize the network.

Inspired by this post from John Gruber about ChatGPT’s memory, I also asked it to “describe me based on all our chats”. Here’s the response: You’re a deeply thoughtful, independent-minded developer and writer who cares about doing things the right way—even if it’s harder. Y...

Great post from Ben Werdmuller about the future of Bluesky. Many people can’t get past comparing the technical differences of ATProto and ActivityPub. Surprise, they’re not the same thing. They have different goals. Ben’s post skips that and focuses on how the business fits with an open protocol.

I’ve been using top for what, 30 years? But honestly my eyes still sometimes glaze over. Realized I can keep a ChatGPT log running and just paste in top results and it can tell me how the utilization is going, if it’s better, worse, where to look for problems.

This week is mostly about bug fixes and performance for me. Got the new Mac app update out and lots of server work. But got a preview of something @vincent has been cooking up and it’s going to be so nice. Just needs a few more days to fully bake.

Another big update to Micro Social:

Release version on V1.7 pushed to TestFlight.

• Support for drafts
• Redesigned posting & editing screen
• Support for cross posting options
• Option to open links in external browser
• Location default map provider and opening app

Micro Social https://microsocial.micro.blog/2025/04/16/release-version-on-v-pushed.html

Worked a little on archiving all the Core Intuition episodes in one place. We’ve used a few hosts over the years — DreamHost, S3, Libsyn — and things are bound to break eventually if all 600+ episodes aren’t together.

Gutter.

Upcoming video social app Neptune will allow hiding follower and like counts:

A key distinguishing feature of Neptune is that it lets creators hide their total followers and likes. This “ghost metrics” feature is optional, however, and is designed to help users avoid the pressures associated with follower count, yet still caters to creators who may want to showcase their metrics.

Good. Might as well go all the way and hide counts by default.

TechCrunch: OpenAI ships GPT-4.1 without a safety report. I don’t want to overreact to this, but as an OpenAI customer it is a little concerning. System cards are fascinating and even if they don’t paint a perfect picture, the transparency is good.

OpenAI working on a social app? From The Verge:

Entering the social media market also puts OpenAI on more of a collision course with Meta, which we’re told is planning to add a social feed to its coming standalone app for its AI assistant. When reports of Meta building a rival to the ChatGPT app first surfaced a couple of months ago, Altman shot back on X again by saying, “ok fine maybe we’ll do a social app.”

Stay in your lane, OpenAI! 🤪 But I think OpenAI and Sam Altman work on a lot of different things, so who knows whether a social app would actually ship.

Meta is a problematic business and more people should move to open platforms, but I have to agree with Ben Thompson’s take on the trial. It’s too late and too complicated to try to unwind the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions:

…both of those businesses were what they were in 2020 because of the investments that Facebook made in the intervening years; I think it is just fundamentally wrong to be re-litigating regulatory decisions of this nature years after the fact — and that certainly applies to 2025.

My last post to Instagram was 2017. My photos are now on my own blog where they belong.