We’re on a roll with movies this weekend. Just got back from Avatar 3. Unfortunately while I was away being overwhelmed with the beauty and spectacle of what they put on screen, the Micro.blog servers were being overwhelmed with traffic. 🍿

I always thought I was lucky to grow up in the 20th century. I didn’t even realize how poor my family was until years later. But the future is going to be much better for our grandchildren. I was born too early! It’s hard to see because the last decade has been such a setback for social progress.

Going back and forth between bug fixing and something new. So fun to start from a blank slate, yet still be able to build on all the plumbing we’ve built in Micro.blog APIs for years.

Wish I knew more about the reason for this post from Eugen Rochko, although we can guess:

I will be opting my account out of the #Bluesky bridge next week. If you follow me from Bluesky (I think there are about 3.9K of you) and want to continue seeing my posts you will need to get an account on the fediverse. Cheers.

Last year there were periods of time when I stopped sending my blog posts to the fediverse. So that’s similar, right? Maybe. Bridgy Fed is an unusual case because of how dramatic the opt-in / opt-out story unfolded.

Watched: All You Need Is Kill. We love Edge of Tomorrow so had to see this. It would be fun if there were more adaptations or spinoffs. 🍿

Went to see Marty Supreme. Wild, much different and better than I was expecting. Loved it. 🍿

Fascinating drama in Elon Musk’s court filing against OpenAI. OpenAI’s web response is well done, with color highlighting of passages from Greg Brockman’s journal.

Always good to take notes. I wouldn’t be able to remember these kind of details from 8 years ago without writing them down.

Rewrote some WebSocket code this week and it seems to have made a dramatic improvement not just for Nostr (which uses it) but general stability with hung Sidekiq processes. Reviewing Nostr, I still find it an elegant protocol. Just not sure how it fits in the modern social web.

Ads are coming to ChatGPT. OpenAI is attempting to head off some of the inherent misalignment with ads and users by outlining some ad principles:

Ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you. […] We keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers, and we never sell your data to advertisers. […] We do not optimize for time spent in ChatGPT.

The problem is once you’re making money with ads, it’s hard not to optimize for more ads. I just hope ads will remain a small part of their business compared to Plus and Pro subscriptions.

This announcement from Wikipedia seemed to spark some debate. I think it’s only good news. If a company is significantly benefiting from Wikipedia and is able to help offset hosting costs, they should. From the announcement: Tech companies that rely on Wikipedia content mus...

I blogged briefly this morning about the W3C. Connected Places has a much longer post today about the new working group and participation.

I’ve submitted my name as an invited expert. I think they will have plenty of ActivityPub experts, but I’d like to help with testing LOLA and updating Micropub.

Reviewing some of the W3C policies, kind of interesting who can be part of a working group. Small companies can be members for $2k/year. Invited experts can also participate, but:

Invited Expert status is not normally granted to individuals employed by organizations which have significant business interest in results from W3C.

If they’re too strict about this, which I think is unlikely, it might create a hole where very small companies don’t have a clear place.

A long story in The Hollywood Reporter about George R.R. Martin and all the work he is juggling. The problem with a book taking so long — I know this firsthand — is that the author’s expectations keep going up, as if it needs to be even more perfect. But it never will be. Maybe best to just ship it.

There’s never been a better time to learn a little about nearly everything in web technology. 2026 will be a year for generalists and new tools that span platforms. And yet I see folks on the fediverse who have strong opinions about Bluesky without really understanding why it exists or how it works.

We officially have a new W3C working group to advance ActivityPub and related specifications (including IndieWeb standards). There has been a lot of work in the years since the last specs were updated, so it’ll be good to see conventions formalized.

I’ve been watching some of the CNN live coverage from Minneapolis. Looks precarious. Sad and worried for a city that has already gone through so much.

Stay safe everyone.

Two co-founders of Thinking Machines are going back to OpenAI. Last July, a co-founder of Safe Superintelligence left for Meta.

Building a business is hard, even with funding. The near implosion of OpenAI and the board shakeup that led to these companies’ founding now feels like ancient history.

Reading this post on Daring Fireball today about the explosive growth of the iPhone made me curious what I had blogged about the launch. We tend to slightly reframe history when looking back, so older posts are a snapshot of how things really felt. My post in 2007 also collected some tweets.

Really unique design for Honda’s prototype camper trailer. I like it. There’s some video and commentary here on YouTube.

David Pierce writes that all the AI pieces are falling into place for Google:

Three years after being caught off guard by ChatGPT, Gemini appears to have everything it needs to take down OpenAI and everyone else.

And:

It announced an opt-in feature called “Personal Intelligence,” which connects Gemini to the vast ocean of information Google has about you in order to give you better responses.

I don’t think Gemini will ever reach the level of market share that Google search had. There’s still a lot of room for a few successful companies.

There’s a major Verizon outage, still impacting us here in Austin. My phone is currently on SOS. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something on this scale before… Despite how much we gripe about cellular service, it’s actually very reliable.

The Information report on Gemini + Siri answers most of my questions, including deployment:

To maintain Apple’s privacy pledge, the Gemini-based AI will run directly on Apple devices or its private cloud system, which is powered by Apple’s own server chips, rather than running on Google’s servers. Google put significant engineering effort into getting a version of Gemini working on Apple’s servers, according to a person familiar with the partnership talks.

No small thing for Apple to scale this up on their own. We’ll see small improvements in iOS 26.4, with the biggest changes in the fall.

John Gruber commenting on Meta’s plans to sell more glasses:

20 million units is a real number. But building the capacity for 20 million units isn’t the same as selling 20 million units, and, to my knowledge, actual sales of Meta Glasses are only Bezos Numbers.

In NYC last week, I walked by the Meta Lab store. There was a 30-minute wait to try Ray-Ban Display glasses. I don’t want to actually buy them, so I didn’t waste everyone’s time by taking up a slot. The store had real people in it, though. (Not Apple Store level crowdedness, of course.)

Caught myself writing a blog post to complain about someone else’s blog platform and API. Deleted the draft. There is plenty of complaining to go around already. “Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.”

Running database migrations! 🤞 Deploying a bunch of new things this week.

It has been forever, but we’ve finally released a new version of Sunlit for iOS! It’s simpler, faster. It’s the app for when you just want to browse and reply to photo posts. Still more we want to do with it. Needed to get this update out first as a reset.

Continuing to experiment with video. Here’s a short one from this morning, working at Lazarus while it was raining.

When I switched to the iPhone Pro Max, I gave up my iPad Mini, thinking the larger iPhone is good enough most of the time, and I’ve got the Kindle for reading. With AI-assisted coding, maybe the iPad has a new role… Jotting down ideas or firing off coding tasks to run from anywhere without a Mac.

Most features I work on are fairly small. I like to roll out improvements all the time, whenever they’re ready, rather than hold features for a big release. And I get nervous if there are Git branches sitting there, drifting away from the production code. Sometimes there rea...

Another Micro.blog tool from @timapple, this one is for blogging from the command line. The year of micro apps.