FeedCity

Always a good day to be able to release some app updates, even on the weekend. Happy to get Micro.blog 2.5 for Android and 3.5.4 for Mac out the door. Currently have some downtime while waiting for laundry, fixing a couple more things for an iOS app updates this week.

Craig Hockenberry blogging on the eve of WWDC. I expect many developers will agree with his points about App Intents… It’s a lot of work that ultimately puts all the UX control in Apple’s hands:

Instead of building our own ideas on top of a LLM, we’re supposed to provide the internal details of our apps to Apple so they can do it on our behalf.

Picked up a new hoodie while in Berkeley. Despite knowing exactly what the weather’s like in the Bay Area, I packed only short-sleeved shirts. 🤪

I wasn’t planning to give money to this woman holding up a cardboard sign with her kid, on the corner of the grocery store parking lot, until some guy walked by and started yelling at her. Shockingly hateful. And as backdrop we have what’s going on in LA. 😞

Sunk cost fallacy strikes again. I spent way too much time on my local LLM experiments, finally went back to the main branch to ship a new version. Micro.blog 3.5.4 for Mac is available with some fixes.

Top of Jason Becker’s wish list for WWDC is a package manager for users. It often feels like I’m drowning in package managers, especially with React Native development which somehow requires like 3-4 different package managers. If Apple could somehow step in and simplify all of this, could be nice.

Quiet, cool morning walking through downtown Berkeley. Last time I was here was when I took this photo. That was an amazing trip.

This was unexpected. Walking back to my hotel tonight, I noticed that some of the traffic lights were out. Turns out the power is out at the hotel too, and they gave everyone little glow sticks to help navigate the stairs and rooms.

Finished reading: The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future by Keach Hagey. Listened to the last part as I was wandering around Lake Merritt in Oakland today. Some great details in this book, and perfect leading up to WWDC. 📚

Days before WWDC, where Apple us rumored to open up their models to developers, I must be the only one hitting my head against the wall trying to get image analysis to work with an embedded Gemma 3 model inside my Mac app. I started down this path a month ago, keep chipping away at it, keep failing.

I ended up having to completely skip FediForum. With travel and coding, just too much going on. I’ve also retreated from the fediverse for a bit, so I can focus on my blog and the Micro.blog community. Hope there will be some blog post write-ups of the conference sessions I can read later.

Really enjoying everyone’s photos for this month’s Micro.blog photoblogging challenge. Thanks for sharing! I’ll post the next week of prompts later today. Any word suggestions?

Rest in peace, Bill Atkinson. From John Gruber:

One of the great heroes in not just Apple history, but computer history. If you want to cheer yourself up, go to Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore.org site and (re-)read all the entries about Atkinson. Here’s just one, with Steve Jobs inspiring Atkinson to invent the roundrect.

I was actually thinking of old QuickDraw a week ago while I was mowing the yard. No joke, my mind wandered into realizing that the most efficient mowing path is a roundrect.

Day 6 of the photo challenge, contrast. Jack London Square / C. L. Dellums Station in Oakland.

For a minute I got really excited about this headline of a LoveFrom-designed electric bike from Rivian. But… a screen and it’s “bike-like”? I’ve been eyeing a new electric bike and always prefer something that looks like an actual, old-fashioned bike. No need to reinvent everything for this.

More jacaranda trees in bloom.

Reviewing my short post last night about the NYT vs. OpenAI data retention, maybe “wild” overreach was an unnecessary adjective. I also hadn’t seen OpenAI’s response:

As part of their baseless lawsuit, they’ve recently asked the court to force us to retain all user content indefinitely going forward, based on speculation that they might find something that supports their case.

There are very real fair-use questions for training, but I’m not sure they can be resolved by this lawsuit, and probably not without updating copyright law.

Joanne Jang who works at OpenAI has a blog post on human-AI relationships:

…many people say “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT not because they’re confused about how it works, but because being kind matters to them.

I read this last night and ever since I’ve been trying to figure out why I usually type to an AI chatbot with proper spelling and punctuation, even correcting my chat text when I make a typo. It doesn’t matter, the robots don’t care. But it’s almost like if I skip that step, if I’m careless, I’ve somehow compromised all of my writing.

A couple photos heading up the coast, from each side of the train. 🚂

Congrats to Brent Simmons on his retirement! This is an impressive list of apps to have been a part of. I’ve actively used all of them over the years, and a few I still do:

Along the way I worked on, among other apps, Userland Frontier, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, Glassboard, Vesper, OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, and Audible.

I did a little digging, looks like I first linked to Brent in 2002, not long after starting my blog. I met him later at WWDC, back when it felt like you could meet everyone, although which year escapes me.

While walking to Groundwork Coffee this morning in Los Angeles. A jacaranda tree, I think.

Maybe I’ve become a little bitter because a decade ago I was screaming about big centralized platforms and a return to indie microblogging, and now that everyone else is excited, my voice is still hoarse, and I have less to say. Onward.

Dave Winer blogs about what he’d say in a keynote about new web standards. Keep it simple and don’t reinvent the wheel:

Mastodon and Bluesky should support inbound and outbound RSS, and do it really well. Right now they do outbound only, and the implementations are incomplete at covering the functionality they have now, and there needs to be more

Inbound RSS means letting people’s accounts be configured so that their posts are automatically pulled from a location external to the platform. As far as I know, Micro.blog is the only platform that can do this.

I submitted the latest Micro.blog for Android to Google this morning. Hopefully goes through review and will be available later today or this weekend. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can also install directly by downloading the latest .apk file.

Ghost is weeks away from shipping 6.0 with fediverse support. Excellent!

We have a real opportunity, now, to create the web we want – but the most tempting mistake is to wait for everyone else to join, before getting involved.

No one is waiting. People have been using the fediverse for years. Micro.blog has supported it since 2018. Welcome to the party, Ghost. 🤪

Rolled into Los Angeles super early. Found a coffee shop that I could walk to that was open at 6am. Still forming some thoughts about this Amtrak trip… It was disappointing, and I think I’m done with Amtrak for a few years, which is unfortunate because I love trains. Just too many weird problems.

Seth Godin on burning bridges:

While it’s tempting to imagine that we’re always racing forward, it’s far more likely we’ll benefit from traveling over this bridge again one day soon.

Put another way, some people can be so caught in what’s happening now that they aren’t thinking about the future.

Wow, Pacers. I tuned in just at the right time toward the end. Glad to have some cell coverage tonight! 🏀

Flaky internet today, so just catching up on the new levels of chaos with Trump and Elon Musk. Trump will eventually turn against anyone who supported him, lashing out selfishly, no matter the cost to people or country. This devolved shockingly quickly. 🇺🇸

Vise Coffee in Alpine. I had just finished a cold brew I brought with me, so got a sticker and postcard instead of actual coffee.