For Micro.blog this year, we want to highlight more long-form blog posts. The kind of posts that are worth setting aside a few minutes to read, not just a quick skim. Ever come across a post you love? Drop the URL in this new slow reads submission form. 🐢

The first time I saw a Waymo, I just about lost my mind, laughing. “There’s no one driving that car!” Now they’re everywhere and it’s normal. When I see one now, I just think, “There’s a safe car that is unlikely to run over a pedestrian.”

Good analysis from Laurens Hofs on ICE getting a verified badge on Bluesky and the resulting fallout. It underscores some confusion in the fediverse about what Bluesky is:

When fediverse users say they don’t want to be bridged to Bluesky, they’re applying an ActivityPub mental model to ATProto infrastructure. In one sense this is a bit of a category error, the bridge connects to networking infrastructure, not the application.

He doesn’t let Bluesky off the hook either, though. Good points on how ICE presence alone (without any posts) is a fear tactic.

I’m still excited for the Pebble Index ring because of the focus on extensibility, but I cancelled my pre-order. I kept asking myself: will I ever actually wear this thing? Nope.

Meanwhile I’ve been plotting to hack a iPod Mini into a voice recorder, ripping out the guts. Might be beyond my skills.

Rainy, misty morning in Austin. This weekend is going to be cold, with ice and maybe snow. Hopefully we’re ready for it. I’ve been mostly worried about the new tree we planted. Added new mulch to protect the roots. Going with sheets and plastic over it. 🌳

Getting the sense that what’s happening in Minnesota is about to reach a tipping point, or maybe already has, where it becomes so clearly unacceptable to everyone regardless of political party that there will be new pressure for change. This is not sustainable. 🇺🇸

Watched some of the Jack Smith hearing during lunch. What can I say that hasn’t already been said? We screwed up, took too long to bring charges. But I’d put Jack Smith in charge again if there was a way to run it back in 2029, even unlikely, given the statute of limitations. 🇺🇸

Listening to the Open AI podcast, of course it’s marketing, but something that Vinod Khosla said struck me. Essentially the AI bubble is in the stock market, not in real use. Some companies will fail, but usage is not going to go down, just as the internet kept growing through the dot-com bubble.

I usually give AI little coding tasks. Go off and fix this one thing, make this small tweak, add this one feature that I will review. Today I had it help with something bigger. I iterated on the plan, then it worked for 30 minutes. Pretty incredible.

Good discussion about the future of AI in this interview from Davos with Demis Hassabis and Dario Amodei. Although they ended on a sort of cliffhanger right as Demis started talking about the likelihood of extraterrestrial life, which now I’m curious about.

Watched: The House. An anthology in three parts about the same house, directed and animated by different teams. The style and tone from first to second part was jarring. At times beautiful, at times bonkers and creepy. 🍿

Travis Knight in the press release for Laika’s next stop-motion feature, Wildwood:

Our movie is a celebration of artistry over algorithms, and of the belief that films made by hand, with enormous care, can still feel bold, surprising, dangerous, and alive.

I’m really looking forward to this.

When I read a blog post I love, I usually find my favorite part of it to quote in a short post on my own blog. Sometimes I can’t find a single excerpt that fits, so I turn it into a full blog post and add more commentary. Such is the case with this fantastic essay by Om Mali...

Powerful email shared by Brent Simmons from family members in Minnesota.

This is a great extended ad for the new Volvo EX60. You can acknowledge the old hassle when you think you’ve solved it. 500-mile range.

Kagi has a blog post about the Google antitrust ruling and the need for a more open search index, including perhaps a government-backed service:

This layer would replace the role public libraries played for centuries - a role that effectively disappeared when commercial web search took over in the late 1990s. Our ancestors understood well the benefits that non-discriminatory, direct access to information brings to citizens, and ultimately society itself.

Manu Moreale, as usual being thoughtful on his blog:

Assuming something about someone else, based on your own worldview and without asking questions, is intellectually lazy. And it also prevents people who might have different views from engaging in conversation and exploring differences.

The upcoming Europe-based W social network seems well intentioned, but there has gotta be a better name than W. Why draw attention to Twitter / X? And W has the most syllables of any letter. Admittedly “Micro.blog” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue either. 🤪

This blog post from OpenAI about their data center buildout — called Stargate — sounds a little like a response to the mistakes xAI made in Memphis:

Stargate is a partnership with communities, and we can only achieve our mission by being good neighbors.

There’s also more on their approach to the electrical grid and water. All this new infrastructure seems to be moving along quickly.

Spurs lose a close one in Houston, but this team has been on a roll otherwise. Looking really good and fun to watch. I want to get down to San Antonio again soon. 🏀

Exactly one year since Trump was sworn in for his second term. Some things have been predictably bad and some things (Greenland?) have been nutty even for him.

I re-listened to the podcast episode I recorded two days after the 2024 election. I should listen to this every year to recenter myself.

I hinted a few times that I was adding WordPress and Ghost sync to Micro.blog. It was a big change, and I deployed it just for myself last week to test in production. It’s sort of amazing, unlike anything out there… but also it’s not good enough. Putting it aside for a couple weeks.

The best way I can explain how I work: every day, I fix a bug, I work on a new feature, I reply to a customer. The balance isn’t perfect but it’s always all of these things. Keeps things moving forward.

After Google Reader, folks asked me about building an open API for feed syncing, given my history with Tweet Marker. I didn’t work on it because I wanted to focus on indie microblogging. But it was inevitable that eventually Micro.blog would have something. Like Apple having both Pages and Numbers.

The Iconfactory is out with a new Kickstarter campaign! Nice pitch:

We all need a way to unplug from time to time - the world’s gone off the rails and no amount of doomscrolling is fixing it. That’s one of the reasons we created Ollie’s Arcade - to be a pixelated place to take refuge from the real world and enjoy some simple, fun old-school arcade games on your iPhone or iPad.

Over the last year I’ve become hyper-sensitive to extremism. The lesson from Trumpism should be to do the opposite of whatever he does. Less hate, less judgement, less bullying. More empathy. I’m hopeful that whoever picks up leadership of the Democratic party will understand this. 🇺🇸

Matt Mullenweg blogged about Scott Adams, trying to reconcile good memories of Dilbert with later racist comments:

When I was younger, I used to have a more binary view of people, but as I’ve grown, read a ton of biographies, seen the press cycles, and been lucky enough to meet some idols and villains, I’ve become much more comfortable taking everyone as a flawed human being.

Nuance here is difficult because we shouldn’t downplay hurtful comments with a “both sides”-style argument. Sometimes we must draw a line. Still, I agree we should avoid reducing people to a single moment.

My short posts tend to cut corners so they flow a little more like informal thoughts. I wonder if I’ll one day regret all the intentional comma splices. The semicolon is sitting right there yet I reserve it for only the rare sentence, like it’s sacred punctuation that will draw attention to itself.

Nice new micro app from @mattbirchler: Quick Stuff, for making App Store screenshots. If you look at any of my apps, the screenshots are always way out of date. I’d rather improve the apps than fiddle with screenshot sizes.

I enjoy visiting Apple’s home page every January to see the update for Martin Luther King Jr. They don’t reuse the same quotes and photos from last year, it’s always something a little new. Maybe I’ve lost faith in Tim Cook — see the bonus episode of Core Int — but this tribute still feels genuine.