Multiple confirmations from folks that the black screen crashes (reboots?) are an 18.1 beta problem. Without evidence, my gut says this is Apple Intelligence hitting the 8 GB RAM ceiling for local models. It again makes me question Apple not moving more AI to the cloud.

John Gruber on the news that Starlink will offer free service to Hurricane Helene disaster areas:

It’s hard to overstate how differently Elon Musk would be perceived if he weren’t a whackjob on political and cultural issues.

If Elon had never bought Twitter, never tweeted even, he’d still be considered a visionary leader comparable to Steve Jobs, maybe over time even greater. Instead he destroyed his reputation for nothing.

Overall the iPhone 16 Pro Max is amazing. A couple minor gripes:

• Camera button is a little hard to get used to because it’s not raised. Too easy to accidentally change the zoom.
• Apps will randomly crash to a black screen and spinner. I’ve never seen this on iOS before. Maybe 18.1 beta eating RAM?

I don’t like captchas and will never force them on my customers. With AI, captchas will become increasingly useless anyway. See also, John Mulaney: “I’ve devised a question no robot could ever answer…Which of these pictures does not have a stop sign in it?”

Here’s what the new prompt for email newsletter subscriptions looks like for your blog. The extra step lets us generate some random values hidden from real users, inspired by this post from Jeremy Keith, to make it a tiny bit harder for bots. Could do more later now that this is in place.

Think I figured out my high bounce and complaint rate for email sending. Spammers are trying to (probably accidentally) sign up to customer’s newsletters with fake email addresses. Working on making it harder for bots to navigate this.

We just shipped an update to Strata for iOS, our private notes app for Micro.blog, with Android to follow later in the week. This adds a QR code scanning option to get your secret key moved over from another platform. For Apple folks, it also syncs the key via iCloud, but nice to have options.

Thinking about the difference between companies who use AI to make existing features better and companies who try to rethink everything. I’ve been using the iOS 18.1 beta for a while. I don’t think Apple really believes in AI the way OpenAI, Anthropic, or Microsoft do. See Microsoft’s memo from Mustafa Suleyman:

This is a new era of technology that doesn’t just “solve problems”, it’s there to support you, teach you, help you. In this sense, Copilots really are different to that last wave of the web and mobile. This is the beginning of a fundamental shift in what’s possible for all of us.

Just in case folks missed the other notices about this, I’m running a big server upgrade in 30 minutes. Wish I could keep Micro.blog fully up during the upgrade but it’s going to be smoother and hopefully faster to just rip the bandaid off. Seeya on the other side.

If I could give advice to Tim Walz for tonight’s debate: just be yourself. Don’t stress about scoring points. Don’t debate as if you went to Yale Law School. Remind people how unhinged Trump has become, and show that you’re competent, empathetic, and ready. 🇺🇸

Spent a bunch of time in encryption land, debugging an issue with the next Strata update. Almost shocked that I eventually solved it. I was starting to lose my mind watching scrambled bytes of data go back and forth between platforms.

There was a trailer for Flow before The Wild Robot. It looks fantastic. The release is coming in December according to Cartoon Brew.

Croissant is getting some great press. Just a few I’ve noticed: Six Colors, MacStories, TechCrunch. I don’t need it because Micro.blog cross-posts to everything from my blog, but would be cool if the app could post to blogs in the future too.

Happy birthday to Jimmy Carter. 100 years! Amazing. Hope he gets his wish to vote for Kamala Harris. Early voting is soon. 🇺🇸

Decided a few weeks back to stop Wordle at 1200. It’s fitting that I did terribly on this last one.

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Relay has raised $1 million for St. Jude this year. Incredible.

Interesting note in the latest fediverse blog post update for Ghost: Will members who use ActivityPub (rather than email) count toward Ghost(Pro) billing? And so far the answer is yes, because ActivityPub is (quite significantly) more expensive to support than email. But, t...

We posted a new episode of Core Intuition, this time talking all about the controversy in the WordPress community over WP Engine. Still very fascinated by this story and following as much of the news as I can, including a new interview with Matt Mullenweg over the weekend.

I posted this to @news a week ago. Quoting it here as a reminder:

An early heads-up: we are planning a major server upgrade for October 1st, 10pm central time / 3pm GMT. While we hope to limit downtime, Micro.blog will be unavailable for a little while during the upgrade. Your blogs hosted on Micro.blog will remain online.

While we’ve had sporadic downtime this year, I don’t think we’ve had planned downtime in several years, and I don’t take it lightly. It’s a database upgrade and worth the time to do it right.

I think the new “finished” pane turned out well. This has been a much-needed improvement to Micro.blog. Because we fire off publishing and Hugo-ing in the background, it was irritating to keep an eye on the status and find the new blog post link.

House shopping during election season is great. There are so many political yard signs, you can tell a lot about what your future neighbors are like.

Last night’s SNL was great. Maya Rudolph, Andy Samberg, Dana Carvey, Jean Smart… That’s the way to start the 50th season. 📺

Really enjoyed seeing The Wild Robot. Beautiful. Glad I read the book first too… The movie follows the story closely but some characters, dialogue, and details were bound to change. 🍿

I ended up disabling Type to Siri. Kept accidentally triggering it with impatient double-taps on the tab bar.

Austin forever. New mural on 51st.

Molly White blogs about POSSE:

The next time a new social media site comes along, you can plug it in to your existing system. And the next time a social media site dies or becomes untenable, you just disconnect it. With this model, even when a platform goes under, you lose relatively little: your posts still remain live and under your control on your site, even if the copies of them on the disconnected website are abandoned or deleted.

Cherrywood Coffeehouse. ☕️

Thinking about what a modern AppleScript would look like powered by LLMs. The human language-like syntax of AppleScript was the right idea, but there were syntax quirks that made it frustrating. LLMs could fix that. Free idea! I’m tempted but it’s too far outside the scope of Micro.blog’s mission.

Rest in peace, Maggie Smith.

Sort of an all-Zuckerberg podcast week. Good interview with Mark on Decoder but can’t disagree more strongly with Mark’s vision of AI-generated content showing up in your feed. This is the terrible end-game of algorithmic timelines.