Made a tweak to how timelines in Micro.blog are stored, especially helpful for our poor servers when there are lots of inactive accounts. Our memory usage for Redis servers continues to be out of control, gotta chip away at it.

Lots of news in Vincent’s weekly update, including the end of Gluon, work on M.b, and handing off Sublime Ads… I like the new name: Shameless Plug. Good luck with it @michal!

Great journalism from The Washington Post this morning on a suspicious $10 million withdrawal in Egypt and the investigation on whether it was linked to Trump. This should be a movie:

According to the bank records, employees assembled the money that same day, entirely in U.S. $100 bills, put it in two large bags and kept it in the bank manager’s office until two men associated with the account and two others came and took away the cash.

Hope we eventually know the truth about this.

This list at The Washington Post of each person freed today is really good, with details on each one. Great day for the families. Joe Biden is good at his job. 🇺🇸

Nilay Patel in the intro to the latest Decoder:

But putting a bunch of computers in a data center and running them at full tilt is how basically everything works now. If you have a moral objection to AI based on climate concerns, you might have a moral objection to TikTok and YouTube as well, which are constantly ingesting and encoding millions of hours of video.

Sounds like a good discussion.

Discourse’s backups are SQL, but I needed a Markdown or HTML export. I asked ChatGPT to write a quick Ruby script that loops over the possible post IDs and downloads the Markdown using the special “/raw” URLs in Discourse. Reviewed it line by line and tweaked it slightly, but it was essentially correct on the first try. It took minutes from conception to running.

Maybe there was an existing Discourse solution for this. But the fact that in the time it would take to find and install another solution, I could have AI write my own custom solution… Still just amazing.

Maya Rudolph returning to SNL! From CNN:

Rudolph will reprise her portrayal of Vice President Kamala Harris when the NBC show returns for its fiftieth season this fall, a source with knowledge of Rudolph’s plans told CNN. Rudolph will play Harris through the 2024 election.

This is going to be great.

This approach from Wix to let AI write blog posts is all wrong. You know what works, though? Write your own blog post, then paste it into AI and ask it to tell you what your own post means. Then edit it yourself as needed. Really helps refine whether you’re communicating clearly enough.

This is a fun new series from Stephen Hackett on the Performa line. I had the Quadra 605 which I think really was just a Performa with a different name. Branding silliness in those days.

Some good replies to my post about Reddit, Micro.blog, and robots.txt yesterday. One wrinkle that may not be obvious: when the pref is enabled, we run bookmarked text through AI to summarize it. This is another reason why I feel better erring on the side of respecting robots.txt. Not sure, though.

Last night’s Idina Menzel show was really something special. Didn’t realize she is also returning to Broadway next year in Redwood. She sang a couple songs from it… I’ve gotta find a way to be there.

Trump picked Vance when he had all the momentum — getting shot, the convention, Biden’s stumbles. With the election upended, I hope Kamala stays more rooted with her pick. This is not about exciting the Democratic base. We’re already excited! Strengthen the campaign in the midwest or Arizona. 🇺🇸

Idina Menzel at the Paramount.

There’s an interview from David Pierce at The Verge with Friend founder Avi Schiffmann. Friend is an AI device companion that is trying to make you less lonely, not solve any productivity problems. Here are my random initial thoughts about it. It’s too easy to dismiss these ...

Belatedly realizing that Reddit’s robots.txt change means that Micro.blog’s bookmark feature now can’t archive a copy of pages, because we check robots.txt. This is the kind of trickle down effect when a site withdraws from the open web, it hurts other services and incentivizes breaking conventions.

Enjoying watching the Olympics. Some live, some delayed. Still fun even if I’ve already heard a little about the outcome.

Miss the days when you could have a $199 iPod Touch around for testing betas and other things. Getting a device to test Apple Intelligence on iOS would set me back $600 (iPad Air) or $1000 (iPhone 15 Pro). Brand new iPad Mini, regular iPad, and non-pro iPhone 15 can’t run it.

Apple’s strategy with on-device models is going to take 2-3 years to play out. Meanwhile everyone just uses ChatGPT.

Thought about installing the iOS 18.1 beta today but caught myself, remembering AI won’t work on my iPhone 14 Pro. I keep forgetting because my phone still feels new.

I’ve been testing the beta of Tapestry and it’s really starting to show the promise of a unified timeline across multiple services. There’s even an Instagram connector from @sod to view Instagram profiles alongside Micro.blog feeds, Mastodon, and other blogs.

We’re working on a few tweaks to Epilogue this week. Just merged in a change that my son worked on. 🙂 If you’ve never heard of the app before, it’s a mashup of blogs and tracking books, like Goodreads… I recorded a video about it last year that still covers most of the major features.

Between killing third-party clients and now only allowing Google indexing, Reddit has withdrawn from the open web in a pretty significant way. Not sure what the impact of this will be. Feels almost Facebook-like, much more of a silo than before.

Finished reading: Blood on Their Hands by Mandy Matney. Wasn’t planning to read this but got into it when @traci started the audiobook. Interesting behind-the-scenes story of Mandy reporting on (and hosting a podcast about) the Murdaughs. 📚

Experimenting with WebP. I still have mixed feelings about it. The files are smaller, but even introduced 14 years ago (!) my instinct on new formats is they won’t be as universal as JPEG, MP3, and text, which will last forever.

This monolith command-line tool is neat, found via @eay. Downloads a web page and rewrites it to include all resources in a single file.

There’s a new Core Int out today! Daniel and I talk about CrowdStrike, travel, and SearchGPT.

The couch jokes about JD Vance might be funny, but it’s misinformation and not even based on anything true. Sorry to be a buzzkill. We can win without making shit up. In the long run, it hurts credibility on the real arguments against the GOP ticket. 🇺🇸

Short walk to Somerville Lake right before it started to rain. So quiet this morning.

Looking forward to Rings of Power season 2. Looks like what I blogged during season 1 is still true. They’ve put a lot into this show.

Camping at Lake Somerville State Park. Lots of dense trees and bushes around each site, makes for nice privacy if anyone was actually here except me. Not pictured: the lake.

Cheat sheet for emoji in my blog posts:

• 📚: about books I’m reading
• 🇺🇸: politics
• 🙂: friendly reply, please don’t take offense
• 🤪: usually gripes that are slightly exaggerated from how I really feel