Daniel Jalkut blogs about the Help Scout pricing changes. We use Help Scout for Micro.blog too and our costs will go up with this change. Like Daniel, I think the pricing is a mistake. I don’t like costs that are hard to predict.

I was hoping someone would write a post like this one from Andy Masley about AI energy and water use, via Simon Willison. From Andy’s post:

You can use ChatGPT as much as you like without worrying that you’re doing any harm to the planet. Worrying about your personal use of ChatGPT is wasted time that you could spend on the serious problems of climate change instead.

Models are also generally becoming more efficient and cheaper. We shouldn’t ignore the increase in demand for energy, though. It’s an opportunity to reevaluate nuclear and other clean sources of power.

City & State, morning in Memphis. Looks like there’s gonna be bad weather today heading west. ☕️

Dan Moren in his final article for Macworld:

Being a fan of Apple as a company means necessarily grappling with the reality of business itself. Apple is a moneymaking machine in a society built for and around moneymaking machines, and it is in some ways itself trapped in that system.

Model train at the Casey Jones Home & Railroad Museum. I visited the museum today, nearly perfectly timed. Tomorrow is the 125th anniversary of Casey’s death. Seeing the sign for the museum on the drive east last week, went down a deep rabbit hole of Dumbo, Disney, and Casey Jones history. 🚂

The New Yorker: The End of Children. This essay was from earlier in the year. There are some stories in it that are a little stunning to me. I knew about South Korea already, but I did not know that the average number of children in the United States had dropped recently. Not yet a crisis, maybe.

Remedy Coffee in Knoxville.

Upgrading another server today! Also a few little code optimizations.

Pigeon Forge, Tennessee is extremely strange. Should’ve done more research before stopping here. Feels like Vegas but more spread out and no gambling, I guess? Also the Great Smokey Mountains are nearby.

In used to be that I avoided using Siri except in a few specific cases while driving: Read and respond to text messages. Map driving directions. Dictate a note. If I ventured outside these tasks, the experience was unreliable and frustrating. So I just haven’t bothered to ...

Listen to the contrarians. They’re sometimes wrong, but when they’re right, they’re right years before everyone else.

Another shot from Washington, D.C. — the Carnegie Library, also probably the most beautiful Apple Store I’ve ever visited. Needed to pick up a new MacBook charger since I somehow left mine in NYC.

Loved all the greenery at Maman this morning. Got there early enough that there was lots of space, but it filled up. ☕️

Micro.blog is now sponsoring blogroll.org. We’re going to try a few new things to get the word out about Micro.blog, especially supporting small platforms and podcasts. If you haven’t checked out blogroll.org yet, consider adding your own blog there!

I hadn’t seen the new Perplexity voice mode until Federico Viticci blogged about it. Looks impressive. I also think Federico is exactly right on this: Looking at the big picture for a second, I do think Apple is in a precarious situation here. The fact that the company make...

Cool to see the POSSE photo I snapped at Fediverse House used in this blog post:

The encouraging thing about IndieWeb is that it’s presented as a series of incremental improvements. It’s not an all-or-nothing replacement and it’s possible to expand in parallel.

I’ve uploaded a copy of the photo to the IndieWeb wiki too. Public domain, CC0.

Over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge into Washington, D.C.

Things I’ve now learned driving in the two largest cities in America:

• Los Angeles: You have to run a red light to turn left.
• New York: You have to double park to do anything.

For Bluesky fans, we’re now cross-posting the Micro.blog news blog over to Bluesky at @micro.blog. Good way to stay up to date on new features or fixes.

For beta testers on iOS, there’s a new build of Micro.blog with a button to toggle just showing draft blog posts. This matches the functionality we’ve had on the web and Mac apps for a while. Useful if you manage lots of drafts.

If you’re not on the beta yet, feel free to sign up at this TestFlight link. We’ll release it to all customers in the coming week.

o4-mini is good at road trip planning. I fire off some parameters like roughly where I want to stop or how long to drive, let it come up with routes, hotels, things to see. It doesn’t take the joy out of travel… Still a lot of details to review and decide on.

Crazy finish to that Nuggets / Clippers game. Not sure I’ve ever seen a dunk so close to win it like that. 🏀

Special shout-out to @vincent for troubleshooting Micro.blog servers while I’m traveling. Driving in traffic through Brooklyn is not when I hoped to get downtime notifications! Annoying hackers trying to mess with our servers.

I read this article about AI and cancer research last night, thinking about it more this morning. It’s really well-researched. The title is misleading. There’s a lot of promise here, even if we might not get the “compressed 21st century” of medicine that Dario Amodei hopes for.

Stephen Hackett continues to have good links related to xAI energy use and gas turbines in Memphis. From what I can tell, none of the other AI companies have done anything like this. They use the existing grid or have proposed new power plants. Google considered generators for backup only. xAI is unique in seeming to not care at all about pollution.

This fits the model we’ve come to expect from Elon Musk. He cares a lot about the big picture and less about who is hurt along the way. It’s an extremist, unhealthy perspective.

I drove through Memphis a few nights ago, only stopping for dinner, but I could tell right away it was a city I’d love to explore more on a future trip. Cool place.

The view from Queens. Kind of a wild few days of driving now that I reflect on it.

My post earlier today about Bluesky seems to have spread more widely than I expected. Lots of feedback! Looking at it again, the analogy with Google was confusing, and the post title with “downtime” set the wrong expectation… It was supposed to be a more positive, hopeful post.

Bluesky was down last night and I saw a couple posts questioning how this could happen if it was really decentralized. Worth a few thoughts here. If mastodon.social went down, what would the user sentiment be? It hosts 2.7 million users, or roughly 15% of the fediverse. (Not...

Catching up on last night’s NBA scores. I watched some of Knicks / Pistons, but staying up on east coast time for west games is tough. Thunder are a force, will be difficult to get by them. 🏀

If you’re following the last few photos I’ve posted, my daughter and I have been slowly making our way to New York. Surprisingly the first time I’ve ever driven through a few states: Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Road trips are usually out west. 🚙