Finished reading: The Crown Tower by Michael J. Sullivan. Listened to the dramatized version with voice actors and sound effects. 📚

One minute I’m writing code, then working on a blog post, and then the next thing I know I’ve downloaded the Rushmore screenplay to check something. I’m all over the place today.

A letter from NVIDIA about open weight models:

Open weights let every organization match the right model to the right job at the right cost, reserving frontier-scale capability for genuine frontier problems and running efficient, specialized models everywhere else.

Jensen Huang had avoided social media until today, when he posted to X for the first time to share this. Hmm.

Substack tries to be too clever with its dickovers and even basic HTML and images. It means that a blog on Substack is unlikely to be indexed properly by the Wayback Machine. A real problem considering how much writing is on Substack.

Well, well, well… LeBron James will finish his career with the 76ers. This is going to be fun. 🏀

Resubmitted my request to Google to approve us for YouTube upload. It has been rejected twice already, who knows why. I wrote the code almost a year ago, so very disappointing that customers can’t use it.

Good thoughts by Dustin Bluck about the decline of indie podcast apps. While I was reading, I kept thinking “we need to do video!” and then I got to that part:

Video podcasts should be embraced yesterday. There’s absolutely nothing about RSS that demands it be audio-only. Podcasts have never even been audio-only. There’s at least some evidence that video time is replacing audio. This is only going to get worse.

Grain.social is a photo social network built on the AT Protocol. Today I’ve added following users and cross-posting from your blog to Grain. When you follow a Bluesky user in Micro.blog by searching for their handle, like username.bsky.social, we now aggregate both their Blu...

John Gruber blogging about why there’s no way to disable Apple ads:

Apple doesn’t offer ad-free tiers for the App Store or (soon) Apple Maps because, I think, they can’t bring themselves to admit that by adding ads to these services they have made them worse.

Also, me in 2010: I hope iAd fails.

A few random phrases that are currently annoying me: “step change”, “hill climbing”, “first principles”. I can’t even really pinpoint why.

I don’t like Meta, and as a Spurs fan I don’t like that they included a Knicks celebration in this… 🙂 But the ad is pretty good.

Let’s consider where the open web has the greatest opportunity over the next decade, starting with these rough numbers: Blogs: 600 million total blogs X: 550 million monthly users Threads: 500 million monthly users Bluesky: 44 million total users Mastodon: 10 million t...

Inspired by this blog post from Nick Heer, I took a closer look at Grain and also Flashes. I’ve prototyped support for Grain in Micro.blog and will ship it today. Flashes mostly piggybacks on existing Bluesky lexicon, so doesn’t really need special support from what I can tell.

Had fun experimenting with some new integration for RSS.chat today, to roll out sometime this week. Give me a new feed or API and I’ll happily start writing code.

Big update to MicroSphere, a third-party iOS app for Micro.blog. Its bookmarks feature can now track read or unread status. So cool to tap around in new apps like this and see a different take on the UI.

Dan Moren reviews the Xteink X3 at Six Colors:

…it’s well positioned as an impulse buy. And while I don’t want to dissuade you, I have to note the biggest caveat of all: the world.

Amazon still dominates e-books too much. If Kindle was DRM-free, I would’ve ordered an X3 already.

Ben Thompson today, writing about the OpenAI security incident and more:

The fact that models do what humans say is cold comfort if the models are in the hands of bad actors. That, though, simply emphasizes the point that the best defense against powerful models is equipping defenders with powerful models of their own.

There may need to be multiple tiers of model access. ChatGPT and Claude should be well-aligned with many guardrails to prevent casual, mainstream users from getting led astray. But powerful models need to exist too, for researchers and security experts.

Trying to find the humor in people lecturing me about X, as if I don’t know after joining Twitter 20 years ago and working directly with all the major Twitter client app developers whose products were destroyed… But in fairness, my about page also glossed over this. I’ve added an extra sentence to it that helps:

But there were frustrations with Twitter too, a period that is documented at length in my book Indie Microblogging. I quit Twitter in 2012 as a statement of principle against closed, developer-hostile platforms.

When Bluesky launched, I loved the domain names for usernames and the PDS approach, but I don’t think I fully appreciated storage and lexicons until there were more different platforms using it. Spent a lot of time today thinking about how Micro.blog could better interoperate with all of this.

I don’t need any new Slack-like things, but Buzz is actually pretty interesting. It’s built on a Nostr relay and has a whole page about domain names and identity:

myproject.com is your workspace. Not a GitHub org page that happens to have your name on it. Not a Discord server that Discord could delete tomorrow. Your domain. Your relay. One thing.

I’m getting a little maybe written by AI vibe from some of the docs… But regardless, it makes a good (if verbose) case for the architecture.

Pckt, a blogging app built on top of AT Proto, has added notes. Notes are like microblog posts or blog comments, but with their own lexicon outside of the normal Bluesky namespace:

Think quick thoughts, or live blogging, or small updates throughout your day. Notes can be shared, quoted, or re-blogged, and they can either stand on their own or become part of the conversation around a longer blog post.

Timely with some of my own posts, Firefox posted on X for the first time since Jan 2025:

We took time off of X, but we’re back. The internet is changing again, so we’re here as an independent voice for our users and the open internet.

Mozilla never stopped posting on their own separate account. I feel like “the internet is changing again” could use a link to a longer blog post. I assume that’s partly about AI, and most AI people are still only on X.

Nice surprise today to see a pair of new Stormlight novellas, outlined by Brandon Sanderson and then written by his pals. From the preface:

A mini-novel about Jasnah surviving in Shadesmar while everyone tried to figure out what was going on with Szeth and the Ghostbloods in the Physical Realm. I eventually decided that the novel worked better without Jasnah distracting us, as I wanted Shadesmar to be a big part of Oathbringer—and it would be better reserved for there.

📚

“I don’t think about you at all.” — Don Draper

If only it were that easy. Over the last year I’ve been reflecting on why negative, overly-personal complaints have affected me so much. I think it’s two things:

• I have never needed to grow thick skin. Over a 30+ year career, I’ve been lucky to get along with just about everyone I’ve worked with. I’ve also made a lot of friends in the Mac, iOS, and IndieWeb communities. Can’t really think of anyone being seriously upset with me before.
• I tend to fixate on things. So if I’m worried about something, I won’t be able to shake it for days or weeks. Negativity doesn’t get brushed off. It lingers for a long time and shapes my thinking on new situations I encounter.

Both of these get better with time. But neither is completely fixable without becoming a different person.

Thinking about the new debate on AI model distillation, I re-read my long-ish post from two years ago about fair use. There was a lot of AI training backlash at the time. I still like the post. Fair use and open web principles are intertwined.

OpenAI continues to fix design issues with ChatGPT for Mac. It almost works the way I want if you click on the ChatGPT mode and then choose “…” → “Organize sidebar” → “In one list” so the coding projects don’t get in the way.

This week we’ve started adding a special discovery interface for Bluesky starter packs. It’s live now on the web. The way I’m thinking about it: we’ll feature a selection of starter packs that change over time, but we also index many other starter packs you can search for. This will expand. 🦋

Last week as I was reevaluating the X API, I said I’d pause for a week. I’m now going to hold it indefinitely. It’s a distraction we don’t need, and in my attempt to make it easy to use, I didn’t appreciate how confusing the money part of this would be.

As I said in a follow-up post:

The mission has never changed: post short posts (and everything else!) to your own blog, which makes the web better, and also opens opportunities for smaller, safer communities.

I still believe in POSSE. It also inspired this post over the weekend about politics and open web principles.

Another thought about Rocky: it’s a great movie, and I think its Oscar is defensible, but All the President’s Men is really something special. I’ve watched it dozens of times. If the Academy were to redo the 1977 vote today, I wonder if they’d pick Rocky again.

Watched: Rocky. About 15 minutes into “rewatching” Rocky, I realized… I’ve never actually seen this movie. Looking forward to I Play Rocky too. 🍿