IndieWeb
Stunning, tragic photos out of Kerr County. Devastating especially for the kids at camp, some missing. Austin Monthly has links for how to help.
Last weekend I checked the weather because I was considering camping. I don’t even remember rain in the forecast. Now it’s the worst flooding in decades.
This will be shocking to my Kickstarter backers from 8 years ago: I did some more edits on the book this week. Updated some old things, new thoughts on Mastodon and Bluesky, added a new chapter. Print run will happen this year.
Minor nitpick in macOS Tahoe, the selected tab in Terminal is very subtle. Seems a usability step back from previous macOS releases. I might need to switch to a third-party terminal app again.
Rewatching the opening of the original Jurassic Park up through the Brachiosaurus. It really is an incredibly good sequence. Greatest dinosaur movie… after Land Before Time. 🙂
I like how in Jurassic World when they say, “we had to make the dinosaurs bigger and crazier because people were bored with regular dinosaurs,” they aren’t talking about the people in the movie. They’re talking about us, in the audience. Actually some beautiful scenes in this one, though. 🍿
iOS folks, if you’ve noticed that annoying Micro.blog app problem where the new reply pane isn’t tall enough, you may want to grab the latest TestFlight beta where we’re testing the fix. This is also in review for Android already. No risk to using TestFlight, it’s just sometimes a step ahead.
It’s a solemn July 4th. We’re on the wrong path. Yet if you have time off or are spending the weekend with family, enjoy it. We can choose to celebrate the good, such as the chance to correct some mistakes in 2026. 🇺🇸
We can never really know what people are going through on the internet, because so few people share their full selves online. In a sad way, it’s best to assume that not everything is okay. That way we can show true empathy, not attacks, not even a performance of fake kindness.
Submitted the latest round of Android improvements to Google for approval. There’s one fix that hasn’t even made it into an iOS release yet. Depending on review timing, this might be the first time that we’ve shipped bug fixes for Android before iOS!
Found via Loura, A Small Web July, spending time away from big social media:
Beefing up my RSS feed with content I want to see, both big-and-small web. YouTube isn’t a problem for me until I go onto the website itself and get sucked into a hole, but subscribing to a channel on RSS isn’t a problem for me.
We are still planning an Android update soon. I worked on a couple minor tweaks this morning, to go along with other recent improvements brought over from iOS. Actually feels good to tinker in Android Studio again since my world is mostly Xcode.
Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.
This analogy works in a couple different ways. You can ignore the table saw if you love the craft of creating with hand tools. You can use the table saw where it saves time and still be proud of the end result.
Racist videos that appear to be created with Google’s AI video generation tool Veo 3 have raked in millions of views across TikTok, according to findings from the nonprofit media watchdog Media Matters.
The full report from Media Matters is very disturbing. It’s not just a couple videos that fell through the moderation cracks. It’s many videos and millions of views. TikTok is designed for this.
Infinite content plus viral social platforms is a bad combination. Curation will be nearly impossible as long as social media is designed around likes, reposts, and algorithms. AI is the accelerant to garbage abundance. The best way to stop the spread of hateful content or misinformation is for platform developers to consider that virality is as much a bug as it is a feature.
Saw something today that reminded me of MyEdit.com, which was a little web app I built in 2002, for editing notes. That was back when I only had a couple domain names, not dozens. Never released it publicly. The notes in Micro.blog are worlds better, so I guess all ideas eventually come back around.
As voicemail transcripts get better, I hope we eventually get muting. Maybe with keywords (matching “you’ve been approved”) or even an AI-based approach (“auto-delete any future calls like this one”).
There are many possible paths. Our path was our path paved with our opportunities and our choices. Your path is and always will be your path paved by your choices.
Joanna Stern’s latest video about AI energy use is informative and fun. Folks on either side of the AI debate will probably enjoy it.
Maybe you’re a fantasy book fan and need some good news? Brandon Sanderson’s Isles of the Emberdark shipped to Kickstarter backers today, everyone else in about a week. I’m planning to start it tonight. I thought it was going to be a novella… Excited to see it’s a full novel. 📚
Just sad and deflated about the senate passing Trump’s bill. It’s going to hurt a lot of people, including many people who voted for Trump. Today was mostly inevitable after the election, but there are still some positive, more narrowly targeted things we can focus on, while we wait for 2026.
Amazon’s scale is mind-boggling to me. They now have a million robots for their fulfillment warehouses.
Fascinating post from Allen Pike about spending $1000 as a trial with AI coding agents. I can’t justify nearly that much money. (See: bootstrapped, no investors.) But when working with CSS changes a few days ago, I dropped about $5 using Codex CLI. For me, in small bursts like that it’s worth it.
Cloudflare dropped a big change today in a series of blog posts about AI bots. I was about to post a quick take, but I’m taking more time to read all the posts first. There’s a lot there.
Walked to the coffee shop this morning, but when I got there and opened my laptop, it appears to be updating to the latest macOS Tahoe beta. Sigh. Must’ve clicked an OK button yesterday by accident.
There are several good segments in today’s interview with Matt Mullenweg. My favorite might be the exchange with Nilay Patel around whether Tumblr is profitable yet. It actually lines up well with my post from last year, I support the mad king.
Nilay: Is Tumblr sustainable today?
Matt: It is still not profitable. So we’re still supporting it and subsidizing it with our other products at Automattic.
Nilay: How much runway do you want to give it?
Matt: Everything. [laughing] Obviously we’ve invested a ton in Tumblr. I’m a believer in its future. So that’s part of why I want to make it sustainable, because that means it doesn’t have to go off the benevolence of myself or anyone else. It can stand on its own.
Huge news from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg. Apple is considering partnering with Anthropic or OpenAI for Siri:
After multiple rounds of testing, Rockwell and other executives concluded that Anthropic’s technology is most promising for Siri’s needs, the people said. That led Adrian Perica, the company’s vice president of corporate development, to start discussions with Anthropic about using Claude, the people said.
This is probably the right move, and there’s still plenty for in-house AI researches to work on. If they go ahead with it, delaying Siri was justified, and worth taking the heat for.
Project Hail Mary trailer is out! Loved the book. Perfect choice of directors for the movie, I think they’ve got this.
