I haven’t read the full report in The Information yet, but just the MacRumors summary is pretty detailed. One comment on this bit:

The indecision and repeated changes in direction reportedly frustrated engineers and prompted some members of staff to leave Apple.

I assume that some of the sources for the story were people who left Apple, so that might’ve slanted the reporting, but this underscores the serious lack of vision we’ve assumed for a year. Apple was fumbling around like AI was a minor optional feature, not the potentially disruptive new foundation for assistants it likely will be.

Was looking forward to a relaxing train trip to Phoenix tonight, with time to read and work, but finally had to bail on the plan. Currently a 10-hour delay after a freight train was blocking the track, plus other random Amtrak problems. I’ll have to start plotting some other trip in the future. 🚂

Waterloo Park. 🌳

Matt Haughey blogs about the uncertainty for small businesses and how bad things might get if the world loses trust in the US dollar:

Not only were the tariffs announced and rolled out haphazardly and far too quickly, but within a few days the tariff against China doubled again. This is no way to let US-based small businesses plan for anything, and what we have today is total chaos in the aftermath.

Matt Mullenweg blogs about the new AI-powered WordPress design builder:

The long-anticipated “Big Sky” AI site builder on WordPress.com went live today. It combines several models and can create logos, site designs, typography, color schemes, and content. It’s an entirely new way to interact with and edit a brand-new or existing WordPress site.

I went through their interface to get a sense of what they’re doing. The AI will create a basic design, then you can tweak the layout, colors, and fonts by clicking around. To actually make the blog live, you have to upgrade to a paid plan.

Jeremy Keith has a good collection of links and quotes about AI crawling. On this specific part of the commentary I continue to disagree, though: If you’re using the products powered by these attacks, you’re part of the problem. Don’t pretend it’s cute to ask ChatGPT for so...

As I hinted at the other day, I’m rolling out command-S in more places in Micro.blog. From the news blog today:

Updated new posts, editing, and notes to support command-S for saving. The convention in Micro.blog on the web will be command-return to save something and close the thing, and command-S to stay where you are if you don’t want to leave the page.

Micro.blog News https://news.micro.blog/2025/04/09/updated-new-posts-editing-and.html

Vincent’s also been working on some shortcut-related stuff that I can’t wait to share. It’s really nice.

Sigh. Amtrak really needs its own tracks:

Train 21 and Train 421 are currently stopped west of Longview (LVW) due to a rail partner’s disabled trainset blocking the tracks in the area. Due to an expected lengthy delay, Train 21 and Train 421 will reverse back to Longview (LVW) to await further updates.

🚂

Greg Storey blogging about how much we’ve divided ourselves and what we’ve lost:

When we don’t talk to each other, we stop trusting each other. When we stop trusting each other, we stop trusting anything —ballots, elections, basic facts. And when we lose trust, democracy doesn’t just wobble. It collapses.

Nice write-up over at TechCrunch of the new Tapestry 1.1:

…one of the larger challenges of multi-feed aggregation apps like Tapestry is that you’re often confronted with duplicates as other users cross-post their updates to multiple services like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Micro.blog. […] The latest Tapestry update is now able to automatically filter out these duplicates, even when the posts are not written exactly the same.

Seth Godin on his 10,000th blog post:

I’d write this blog even if no one read it, but that the fact that you do, that you subscribe to it and share it, that’s my fuel.

David Brooks in The Atlantic starts by echoing what I quoted of his last month, then moves on to history lesson and how we eventually rebuild after Trump. A long, good read:

Humility, prudence, and honesty are not just nice virtues to have—they are practical tools that produce good outcomes. When you replace them with greed, lust, hypocrisy, and dishonesty, terrible things happen.

And:

When the time comes to build a new paradigm, progressives talk about economic redistribution; conservatives talk about cultural and civic repair. History shows that you need both: Recovery from national crisis demands comprehensive reinvention at all levels of society.

Watched the first season of The Rehearsal and it blew my mind a little. Hilarious and insane. 📺

Great story about Bluesky and Jay Graber in The New Yorker. I love this bit:

Then, in December, 2019, she saw a tweet thread from Jack Dorsey about a decentralized social-media project he was launching—Bluesky. Graber told me that she felt a degree of so-called nominative determinism, pulled toward the project because it shared her name. “If fate doesn’t exist, then we must create it,” she said.

I don’t delete my blog posts… even when it would be easier for me if I did. For longer posts I might add a note at the end to correct something, but most of the time I let it stand, or hope that replies on the post are enough clarification. The blog as a whole is the work.

Of all the harm I was expecting from Trump’s second term, I did not expect a market crash this soon. We basically put everything we had into the house down payment when we moved this year. I’m sure there are people who had savings and investments ready for a similar move who are now facing disaster.

Tobias Lütke, in a memo to employees at Shopify, re-posted on Twitter / X: Using Al effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance. Frankly, I don’t think it’s feasible to opt out of lea...

The Minecraft movie was a lot of fun. 🍿

Amazing story on CNN around veteran Joe Harris, who died at age 108, serving in World War II in an elite force of Black paratroopers:

As the US Army was training the Triple Nickles to disarm bombs, the men were also being taught by the US Forest Service to become the first military smokejumpers.

More history at the National Museum of the US Army.

19 miles out from Lampasas.

In today’s post, Seth Godin captures something that I’ve been thinking about but have had trouble communicating well:

When someone makes an obvious mistake, it’s tempting to label them with a term that’s dismissive or even hurtful. A label is permanent, a noun, a way to sort and divide.

Labels have a dehumanizing effect.

Rolled out some Micro.blog improvements to uploads on the web today. For example, if AI is enabled there are auto-generated accessibility descriptions for photos, and now you can edit the description without first needing to use it in a post. Plus some more UI tweaks for uploads.

My son has had the worst luck with his car. A few weeks ago, broke down driving back from Arizona… after having it checked out at a mechanic. New radiator and other work in New Mexico. Now today, a similar problem out in the Texas hill country.

All the broken pecan shells are in one spot under the tree. Must be some happy squirrels living here.

Went looking for an old tweet and then got lost in the archive. I have all my tweets (mostly 2006-2012) on my blog and it’s like a snapshot of a different life. Still me, but so many things change.

This week’s ATP has a members-only special segment about vibe coding. One snippet from John Siracusa, encapsulating much of the conversation: As programming tools have gotten better, the demand for programmers has gone up, not down. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he ga...

John Gruber blogging about whether the tariffs will impact Apple:

It’s under-remarked upon, but Apple, to a point of almost obstinance, considers pricing part of the brand for its products. They tend not to raise or lower prices with the ebbs and flows of the world economy or even the obvious constraints of simple supply and demand.

I appreciate this about Apple. Prices send a message and consistency is part of that. (Also why Micro.blog’s standard subscription has never changed from $5.)

While I’m commenting on YouTube videos today, I love that half of Casey Neistat’s video about the Switch 2 is actually about the New York subway.

Nice 9-minute edit by The Verge of the Copilot event, including a protester interrupting the presentation. I get that AI is divisive but it does actual harm to scream at another human in this way. So much outrage now is funneled into attacks when for many topics it’s not even clear what is right.

Greg Morris has been doing great work on Micro Social, and he’s got a buy me a coffee page! ☕️ Perfect way to support an indie app and help grow the Micro.blog ecosystem.