More jacaranda trees in bloom.

Reviewing my short post last night about the NYT vs. OpenAI data retention, maybe “wild” overreach was an unnecessary adjective. I also hadn’t seen OpenAI’s response:

As part of their baseless lawsuit, they’ve recently asked the court to force us to retain all user content indefinitely going forward, based on speculation that they might find something that supports their case.

There are very real fair-use questions for training, but I’m not sure they can be resolved by this lawsuit, and probably not without updating copyright law.

Joanne Jang who works at OpenAI has a blog post on human-AI relationships:

…many people say “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT not because they’re confused about how it works, but because being kind matters to them.

I read this last night and ever since I’ve been trying to figure out why I usually type to an AI chatbot with proper spelling and punctuation, even correcting my chat text when I make a typo. It doesn’t matter, the robots don’t care. But it’s almost like if I skip that step, if I’m careless, I’ve somehow compromised all of my writing.

A couple photos heading up the coast, from each side of the train. 🚂

Congrats to Brent Simmons on his retirement! This is an impressive list of apps to have been a part of. I’ve actively used all of them over the years, and a few I still do:

Along the way I worked on, among other apps, Userland Frontier, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, Glassboard, Vesper, OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, and Audible.

I did a little digging, looks like I first linked to Brent in 2002, not long after starting my blog. I met him later at WWDC, back when it felt like you could meet everyone, although which year escapes me.

While walking to Groundwork Coffee this morning in Los Angeles. A jacaranda tree, I think.

Maybe I’ve become a little bitter because a decade ago I was screaming about big centralized platforms and a return to indie microblogging, and now that everyone else is excited, my voice is still hoarse, and I have less to say. Onward.

Dave Winer blogs about what he’d say in a keynote about new web standards. Keep it simple and don’t reinvent the wheel:

Mastodon and Bluesky should support inbound and outbound RSS, and do it really well. Right now they do outbound only, and the implementations are incomplete at covering the functionality they have now, and there needs to be more

Inbound RSS means letting people’s accounts be configured so that their posts are automatically pulled from a location external to the platform. As far as I know, Micro.blog is the only platform that can do this.

I submitted the latest Micro.blog for Android to Google this morning. Hopefully goes through review and will be available later today or this weekend. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can also install directly by downloading the latest .apk file.

Ghost is weeks away from shipping 6.0 with fediverse support. Excellent!

We have a real opportunity, now, to create the web we want – but the most tempting mistake is to wait for everyone else to join, before getting involved.

No one is waiting. People have been using the fediverse for years. Micro.blog has supported it since 2018. Welcome to the party, Ghost. 🤪

Rolled into Los Angeles super early. Found a coffee shop that I could walk to that was open at 6am. Still forming some thoughts about this Amtrak trip… It was disappointing, and I think I’m done with Amtrak for a few years, which is unfortunate because I love trains. Just too many weird problems.

Seth Godin on burning bridges:

While it’s tempting to imagine that we’re always racing forward, it’s far more likely we’ll benefit from traveling over this bridge again one day soon.

Put another way, some people can be so caught in what’s happening now that they aren’t thinking about the future.

Wow, Pacers. I tuned in just at the right time toward the end. Glad to have some cell coverage tonight! 🏀

Flaky internet today, so just catching up on the new levels of chaos with Trump and Elon Musk. Trump will eventually turn against anyone who supported him, lashing out selfishly, no matter the cost to people or country. This devolved shockingly quickly. 🇺🇸

Vise Coffee in Alpine. I had just finished a cold brew I brought with me, so got a sticker and postcard instead of actual coffee.

I continue to doubt that Apple can roll back external payment links now that the genie is out of the bottle. The appeals court was not persuaded that they should block the order. So we’ll have months of users using external links and the world not ending.

Congrats to A New Social on announcing Bounce, a way to move followers between Bluesky and the fediverse. I like how they’re previewing what followers (and follows) will move. Migrating accounts currently feels very blind, as you cross your fingers and hope everything works across fediverse servers.

Just a tiny bit of reflection, outside Alpine.

This court order is a wild overreach, undermining the privacy of OpenAI users and developers. This would do far more damage than whatever harm The New York Times is alleging about copyright.

On my way to California, the slow route. 🚂

This might be a bit dark, but for day 4 of the photo challenge, I was stuck in traffic and looked to my left at this cemetery off MLK. So many stories here.

Eugen Rochko on the phased rollout for Mastodon quote posts:

When we released post editing for #Mastodon, we first released a version that supported processing and displaying edits incoming from other servers, before releasing a version that flipped a switch allowing anyone to make edits. We’re taking an identical approach with quote posts, as the upcoming 4.4 version of Mastodon will begin displaying quote posts from other servers and software. Once this is widely deployed on the network, 4.5 will bring the long awaited ability to quote posts.

I blogged about the Mastodon proposal earlier.

I can’t remember exactly how I felt when I was watching the original Aqua demo for Mac OS X, but I’m sure I was excited. Now we’re on the verge of another major redesign for Tahoe, and I guess I’m old, because I’m sort of dreading it. It’s going to create a lot of work for developers.

This is a great point on Tao of Mac:

Spotlight has been a complete mess for years, and Apple has done nothing to effectively fix it on any of its platforms–and it would be a perfect place to start integrating AI in a way that would actually make sense and be useful to users.

Spotlight has needed attention for a while. Sometimes works great, sometimes feels like it lags or gets confused about its search index. Finder search is also clunky, could be scrapped and unified with Spotlight.

After I drafted this blog post, the part that follows the horizontal rule in a moment, I wasn’t sure I would publish it. Then I read this post by Thomas Ptacek. This line resonated with me: Extraordinarily talented people are doing work that LLMs already do better, out of s...

Screenshot of a couple blog post drafts I might publish this week. You can tell I primarily wrote these on my Mac, because whenever I compulsively hit command-S, Micro.blog saves another version. Every few months I need this feature to restore some deleted sentence.

I tend to write about whatever is most fascinating at the time. In the 2000s, that was blogging itself and the transition to Mac OS X, in the 2010s that was the rise of closed platforms, and now it’s indie blogging and AI. If our robot overlords don’t destroy us, the 2030s will be something else. 🤪

A heads-up to Mastodon folks, I’m disabling the fediverse posting from my blog for a couple weeks. You can always follow me on Micro.blog or via RSS. This feature can help quiet the timeline, great for traveling and thinking and working.

Changing my profile photo on Micro.blog for the first time in forever. The last one was a selfie from Disneyland years ago, and the bad cropping always annoyed me a little.

Great post from David Smith about his latest hiking trip:

What I kept coming back to was that in order to have a true “Adventure”, there has to be a high degree of likelihood that you won’t complete it as planned. If the outcome is all but a foregone conclusion when you begin, then you aren’t exploring, you aren’t finding the edges of your abilities.

I also love what has become his yearly routine of taking time away to reflect in the weeks leading up to WWDC.