I haven’t looked into the full context behind the quote in this post from @jasraj, but I do love this phrase:
when hatred presents itself as virtue, it becomes seductive
Sadly there are variations of this across ideologies. When fighting for what’s right steps over the line to extreme characterization of others, vilifying them. As regex fans know, now we’ve got two problems: the hatred in others and the hatred in ourselves.
Ben Thompson’s back from the summer break with an excellent rundown on AI and fair use. In a nutshell, LLMs are transformative and it’s so difficult to prove they affect an existing work or even a market, fair use for training will likely stand. If we don’t want that, there will have to be new laws.
This blog post from Robert Birming perfectly captures what Micro.blog is trying to do by leaving some features out.
Congrats to Stephen Hackett on 10 years indie! He’s written a great post with some of the history and priorities he brings to his work. Also love this part on the downsides:
Publishing endlessly can lead to burnout. Social media can poison your opinions. The Internet can be unforgiving when it comes to mistakes. Working virtually can become lonely. Relevance can fade.
That “poison” line is so true. When all you read is everyone else’s hot takes and a community’s growing consensus, it’s harder to have original, possibly more nuanced thoughts on popular topics.
“I know how to use a semicolon, ChatGPT. Don’t come for me.” 🤣 — from the Book Riot podcast
I used to really love the em dash. Now that ChatGPT also loves it, I’m using it a little less often. The bar is higher for when I feel like it really belongs.
Finished watching Long Way Home. I love these travel series with Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman. The older ones are great too.
Fixed a couple bugs this morning and replied to a few emails. I think this is going to be a busy week. Also if anyone on Bluesky has feedback on my proposal for AT Protocol embeds, please let me know. I’ll be moving forward with it soon.
We’ve got all these philosophically compatible platforms that are technologically unable to work with each other. But what if they all were really on the web? What could we build then? Everything.
I’ve missed a lot of really good work on Micro.blog plug-ins from the community recently. Just a few examples: Postlist has new options for embedding lists of blog posts, Open External Links makes links in blog posts open in a new tab, and Privacy-Friendly Google Maps is a shortcode for maps.
Got sidetracked looking at my old tweets, which years ago I had imported to my blog with Micro.blog. I left Twitter in 2012. Then later I cross-posted some blog posts to a separate account. The last blog post there was 2022, a post about Elon’s plans for Twitter. Holds up really well.
Just released the latest version of Micro.blog for Android, version 2.5.2. Full release notes over on the help forums. This has a bunch of fixes, UI tweaks, and better automatic accessibility text for photos.
Whenever our house comes close to flooding, or does flood, I think back to the time when I was at WWDC and my wife called me that there was water in the living room. It was during the old beer bash. Captured in a tweet from 2009.
The rain was not letting up, had to spend the last hour in the downpour, digging a channel on the side of the house to help relieve flooding next to the garage. Don’t think the house will flood. Water can be difficult… So many people are worse off.
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.