I got some great feature and bug fix suggestions on Friday. Over the weekend I’ve implemented several of them (some shipped already, some need client app updates).

Against my better judgement, considering writing a very streamlined Git app for Mac. No apps are quite right for me anymore. The most important thing now is a big, readable diff view for reviewing AI changes. Commit and push in one step.

Android folks, check out the beta of @gregmorris’s Micro Social app for Micro.blog. Google is picky about requiring testers before releasing an app, so even a quick download and poking around helps.

Seems clear from people’s fancy demos and my own testing that computer use and spacial reasoning in Astra are big steps forward. It can control Acorn and use selection tools to crop out complex areas, for example, very quickly. Mind-boggling.

Had a dream last night that I went to Best Buy to buy an extra Jaz disk. They didn’t have any, but I was able to get one from Amazon that arrived to the store within minutes. Not sure what it means… Maybe I’m worried about backups.

Thinking about the OpenAI industry’s PR problem, I’m reminded of Anthropic’s ad during the Super Bowl. People said it was clever, but it reinforced the idea that AI companies are just like other big tech: tracking you and selling your data. For next year’s ads, we will see a more optimistic vision.

Relocated to work at the Laura Bush library. The view is just as beautiful as I remember when I was visiting 30 libraries in Austin. Can’t believe that was 10 years ago.

I was confused for a minute why the coffee shop / bar got so crowded as the morning went on, then noticed that everyone was wearing burnt orange shirts. Hook ’em. 🏈

Developers of popular open source projects are inundated with pull requests. What about a solution somewhere in between a user feature request and a code diff? User writes a feature request, AI checks the project code and turns the idea into a summary that highlights pros/cons based on the codebase.

A couple times over the last year, I’ve turned off fediverse posting from my blog. This is another one of those times. I may keep fediverse posting disabled until Trump is out of office, when I hope it’ll be easier to lower the temperature in online discourse.

Marco Arment blogs about his old neighbors and the divisive nature of our current political environment:

If I learn today that my neighbors have political views that my “side” considers unacceptable and unforgivable, should I be able to have dinner at their house, shovel their snow, or even greet them outside?

Really good post.

I’ve got access to Astra now and have no idea what to build, as if I suddenly have writer’s block. Anyone have a feature request or bug that we’ve overlooked?

I think my best essays have short titles that really undersell the scope of the blog post. No clickbait, no tl;dr headers to skim through. I hope people read them, but I’m not going to jump through hoops to make that happen.

In a call with reporters announcing GPT-6 Astra, Greg Brockman talked about whether Astra qualifies as AGI: I do leave it up to the reader to decide for themselves if this qualifies for them. For me personally, I do think we’re there. As we reach AGI, whether it’s with Ast...

The GPT-6 Astra announcement yesterday was a bit anticlimactic because most people don’t have access to it yet. That’s fine, plenty of things to work on with the old-and-busted GPT-5.7 Sol.

Also listening to the interview with Greg Brockman on Stratechery this morning.

I’ve been working on Micro.blog for about a decade and only now does it feel like it’s really starting to get good.

James Talarico is a special candidate. Just watched this video of his rally in Plano. Feeling optimistic seeing that crowd in the Dallas suburbs. 🇺🇸

I don’t usually repeat all the little deploy notes from news.micro.blog, but I’m especially happy about fixed video playback in the timeline. It has bugged me for a while that the aspect ratio or dimensions get wonky briefly when clicking play. Much better now!

Catching up on the foldable iPhone rumors ahead of next week’s announcement… Kind of bummed it’s called Ultra. Fold or Duo could’ve been great. Maybe at $2k, they needed a more serious name.

I didn’t see Apple’s Knowledge Navigator video until the early 1990s, a few years after it was produced. I was pretty struck by it. It has taken a few decades, but we’re basically there now: OpenAI’s Astra intro video.

Bernie Sanders is pretty freaked out about the Hugging Face hack. From a quote on Politico:

Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results.

Uh, cataclysmic? An earthquake is cataclysmic. The hack on Hugging Face, while quite bad, didn’t hurt anyone. Working on stronger safety measures is the right response and that appears to be what OpenAI has done.

Fun teaser from OpenAI on X (sigh) about Astra’s presumably imminent release. I guess it’s going to be called GPT-6. I’m working on Micro.blog improvements today, like always, but have my eyes on the wider social web for this release, so my posts will probably be a bit AI-heavy today. Apologies. 🤖

Part of Kawhi’s statement after the NBA investigation into the Clippers. Sort of a non-apology apology:

Integrity and respect for this game are fundamental to who I am. I accept full responsibility for lapses in judgment by people within my inner circle…

I feel like the punishment is very lopsided against the Clippers. No first-round picks for 5 years. 🏀

Firefox adds a global AI opt-out checkbox:

Opting out of upcoming and current AI features on your browser should not require endless navigation through multiple Settings pages. That’s why Firefox offers an AI controls section within its General Settings panel. A single, easily located place where you can block current and future AI features and related pop-ups with the swipe of a toggle.

Kind of similar to Micro.blog’s AI checkbox, but the Firefox version is more complicated, allowing control of various AI-related features.

Weird AI ordering system at the Panda Express drive-thru. I’d love to know what model they use. It was a little flaky (“please review the order on this screen…” but the screen showed an ad).

People always say they don’t want AI shoved everywhere. I think that’s partly because it’s used so poorly.

From an article about George W. Bush in The New Yorker:

For Bush, painting is a way to say what he can’t say, to express feelings that include rejection, frustration, and anger, even as he abides by his official discipline of silence.

I couldn’t have been more against George W. Bush in the late 1990s and 2000s. In the Trump world, I’ve become more sympathetic to him — as a human being, at least, if not on policy. He has also become quite a good painter.

Released a new Mac update, version 4.0.8. Really happy with the changes in this one. Lots of little improvements.

One of my favorite things about blogging is when I have to learn something entirely new just to write the post.

Fable 5.1 was released this week. Astra might be coming as soon as tomorrow. Sam Altman, in a long post on X that should really be a blog post: We have been living with the tension between being excited and anxious about progress for some time, and it is still discordant fo...

The downside of running a tiny business is the “CEO” sometimes doesn’t have enough time for the big picture. I was thinking about this yesterday as I focused for hours on Mac development. With AI, code feels free but it’s not really free. Everything takes time away from something else.