At a memorial service my mind drifted to what makes us human. I believe in AI as a tool to help us, to learn, to create. But AI cannot feel. Focus on that. The sound of our voice, imperfect. The stories, from life we have experienced. The art, with meaning because it comes from a place only we know.

Carolina Jessamine… I think.

While out walking today, listened to this great interview on Stratechery with Sam Altman, going over early time at OpenAI and where things might be headed. I know Sam can be a divisive figure, but if you’re fascinated with AI there’s a lot of interesting background here.

This shakeup of Siri leadership is surprisingly close to WWDC. Makes me think we won’t see major changes this year, just a refinement of last year’s strategy with Siri and AI.

Had a good run for a few months on uptime until today. I’ve upgraded one of our servers to prevent this particular meltdown from happening again.

Bad timing, had a major server failure this morning. Micro.blog is back online and I’m restoring a few things now. 😔

Really positive reaction to my post about adding European web servers for Micro.blog. Thanks everyone! This is the first step, excited to explore more.

Starting today there is a new option for customers who want more flexibility for where their blog is hosted. When Micro.blog publishes your blog, it runs your blog posts through Hugo, creating static HTML files that are hosted outside of the main Micro.blog platform. Those f...

I avoid deploying new code to servers in the evening. It’s better to make changes when I’m awake for hours and can monitor for problems. But it’s kind of a bummer for Europe and the rest of the world because new features always go live while they’re asleep. Might break that rule tonight! 🇪🇺

Dave Rupert on ads, enshittification, and taste:

I can feel it in my bones when an app or website has prioritized revenue over user experience. A person without taste or high emotional intelligence broke the unspoken contract we had built on mutual respect.

Simon Willison attempts to clarify vibe coding:

I’m seeing people apply the term “vibe coding” to all forms of code written with the assistance of AI. I think that both dilutes the term and gives a false impression of what’s possible with responsible AI-assisted programming.

If you ran into a problem sharing photos from Google Photos to Micro.blog on iOS, check out the latest TestFlight beta. Still have another fix to editing to finish, then will release to everyone.

Wow, the Swarm app has been completely redesigned. I don’t think it changed a single pixel in the last 5 years. Looks pretty good, now combining some of the explore functionality previously in Foursquare.

Mac apps and web apps:

• Make code change.
• Release to customers.

iOS apps:

• Make code change.
• Wait for Apple to approve TestFlight beta.
• Wait even longer if the build is stuck “processing” for unknown reasons.
• Wait for Apple to approve final version.
• Release to customers.

Just a stark difference. ☹️

Welcome back to earth, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore. 🚀

Bluesky’s a world without caesars shirt is back in stock. Ordered. I don’t impulse buy clothing very often but this one captures the moment.

My workflow:

• Program a new feature.
• Draft a blog post announcing the feature.
• Realize while writing the post that it would sound better if it also did this other cool thing, add that to the announcement post.
• Go back and add that thing in code.
• Ship it!

Today we try for the third time to get an appointment for AT&T Fiber installation to work. It’ll help that they know have my correct phone number. 🤞

Coffee (and booze). Houndstooth. ☕️

Politics is bleeding into everything. Tech headlines, podcasts that aren’t usually political. For 2025, I like to box my politics into narrow parts of the day, not everywhere all the time. Soon we’ll need mute filters in all apps, from RSS readers to Overcast.

Nice new logo, board members, and others news for the founding of A New Social.

This video of LiDAR vs. Tesla self-driving is great. Ever since seeing all the sensors on a Waymo, I was convinced that the Tesla approach wasn’t going to cut it. Also love the Space Mountain and Haunted Mansion scans!

I added a new feature to Micro.blog Premium today called domain name aliases. Often when people host their blog on Micro.blog, they later change their mind about the primary domain name for their blog. Now you can more easily redirect multiple domain names to the same blog so no previous links break.

For example, maybe you start with the subdomain micro.yourdomain.com but later want it to just be the root domain yourdomain.com. Micro.blog handles HTTPS and redirecting any path in the URL between domain names.

Here’s a screenshot with a couple test examples for my blog. You can find this feature under Account → New Domain Alias:

This option is available for Micro.blog Premium subscribers. Micro.blog Premium also includes support for up to 5 separate hosted blogs and any number of single-page websites.

Depressing anecdote from Gabe Kangas about going off into the weeds with Reddit’s algorithm:

Now I understand how men online can get indoctrinated so easily. You can go from reading about turntable slip mats to hating women in less than an hour.

Algorithmic timelines are designed to increase engagement for ads, not user happiness, not truth.

Good update from Ben Thompson today linking the lack of Vision Pro content to the miss on AI:

…Apple is finding itself paralyzed by its need for control. The company can’t just stick a camera at a game and stream the video without any production or play-by-play commentary: what if people are bored? The company can’t just film a concert: what if people are underwhelmed?

Totoro. 🌳

Fog from liquid nitrogen ice cream.

Hmm, my last post is poorly truncated on Bluesky because I hadn’t considered the title, link, and new summary taking up more than 300 characters. Going to keep my extra summary text shorter in the future.

This is an excellent post by Molly White about the potential conflict between making the world’s knowledge more accessible through AI and the risk of destroying the foundations for open content on the web: The true threat from AI models training on open access material is n...

Since writing more about delayed AI + Siri yesterday, I was thinking about this Bloomberg story of a meeting inside Apple admitting that the new Siri works at best 80% of the time, but they want to “get those percentages up”. After a year of development? They need to seriously rethink their plan.