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

Elena Rossini has a blog post walking through the compatibility between Mastodon and Pixelfed specifically, and also more generally with Mastodon API clients like Phanpy and Ivory:

The ultimate goal of The Future is Federated is to introduce the Fediverse to “regular people,” encouraging them to try out one or more of its networks, allowing them to experience social media away from the walled gardens of Big Tech

ActivityPub folks: I’ve posted FEP-eb22 to document supported features in NodeInfo, so that clients and servers can better communicate about what to show in a client UI. Would love your thoughts on it. There’s some overlap with other FEPs but those seem stalled and not quite what I need.

To be honest, the Ghost ActivityPub emails are both exciting and a little bit painful for me to read. Ghost is a popular platform and it is definitely a good thing to support an open standard. But also, I did most of this same work 6 years ago, without the jokes and pug artwork. Let’s go already! 🤪

My initial take on SearchGPT (without using it yet) is that it should be a step forward for linking to and crediting sources in a way that chat assistants aren’t. It also looks much cleaner than Google, which is a mess of ads and uneven results now. Daniel and I talk about this on the next Core Int.

Not sure what to make of Sam Altman’s op-ed in The Washington Post. When he writes about model weights and export restrictions, I keep thinking of the Llama 3.1 release this week. Feels like more between the lines that I’m missing.

Big news for AltStore to be getting Fortnite. Also from Epic, they are pulling Fortnite from Samsung’s store to protest how sideloading is now disabled by default. And in a way, they’ve sort of been protesting the same thing on iOS for the last few years.

Thinking more about Biden’s address last night and his legacy, it’s remarkable how much he accomplished. Investments in infrastructure and climate, progress on guns. All he had to do was get us through the pandemic and clean up a little of Trump’s mess. Feeling optimistic that we can build on this.

Evan Prodromou in a post on Mastodon:

If you make a Fediverse explainer, try to show some real communities as the nodes in the network, rather than using software packages and their logos. Companies, local governments, universities, families, friend groups, individuals.

I think this is a good approach. Talking about platforms is also effective, though. If Threads could talk to TikTok, people would get that, even if it’s not as distributed as showing communities. Ideally large platforms would be broken down, e.g. not just TikTok but BookTok.

Today we’ve released a new version of Micro.blog for macOS. This update adds two new features: import from Glass and better support for showing auto-generated summaries of bookmarked web pages. Most of the advanced bookmark features in Micro.blog — like summaries, highlights...

Set the presidential address to record while out tonight so we could watch it fully, without all the noise of news and social media. He hit it just right. Moving. “…one day sit behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office as president of the United States. But here I am.” Thank you, Joe Biden. 🇺🇸

Federico Viticci on how wired EarPods are still great:

I don’t have to worry about battery life, pairing, or latency. Sure, there’s a wire, and there’s no noise cancelling when using them – but these are my “downtime earbuds” anyway, so I don’t care.

I find myself using my AirPods Pro less and less, actually. For some reason I misplace them when I don’t misplace anything else. They’re amazing, but there’s always that brief moment when I question whether the wireless is actually working, and they still don’t feel as comfortable to me as EarPods.

Nice work from Apple on the web version of Maps. Native apps are great, but some apps really should be on the web, especially apps that you want to link into.

A great new theme for Micro.blog: Sumo by Matt Langford. There’s a lot in here that is really well thought out.

Playing around with the new dataset from Overture Maps, a project started a couple years go between Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and others. I can download and query the data, but doesn’t seem like it can really be used if you don’t bring a lot of cash with you.

I’ve tinkered with smaller Llama models, on my Mac and Linux servers, so I thought I’d try Llama 3.1. No surprise the 405-billion parameter model is huge, a 200+ GB download. But even the 70b model seems too much for my M3 with 48 GB RAM. Going to stick with cloud models for the foreseeable future.

There are some wild numbers in this report at Bloomberg about Apple’s spending on TV+ content. Reaffirms my belief that Apple has lost their focus. Too much attention on services, sometimes to the detriment of core platforms, developers, and users.

Mark Zuckerberg writes about Llama 3.1 in a Threads post using images of text instead of a blog. He makes a point that he’s mentioned in recent interviews too, about not wanting to be locked in by platform vendors like Apple: One of my formative experiences has been buildin...

Following politics sort of obsessively, senate races, the 2020 primaries, I thought I knew a few things about Kamala Harris, but I’m still learning. Just read this essay by her from Elle in 2019, on being a stepmom — “Momala”.

Back down the rabbit hole of HTTP signatures + ActivityPub today. Fixed an issue, and reviewed the new community group draft. Don’t feel great that my code mostly resembles the make friends and verify requests blog post from 6 years ago rather than newer docs.

It’s such a good feeling to have the Biden reelection campaign drama behind us. It was going to be a slog, and I’m sure Joe knew it. No rush to pick a VP for Kamala Harris. Let’s take a deep breath. And Joe can focus on doing the job, and hopefully get a well-deserved break from the chaos too. 🇺🇸

Micro.blog has a couple options for creating redirects, but adding pages to your blog navigation that go somewhere else hasn’t been intuitive before now. I’ve added a new option that makes this much more discoverable.

Wow. 🇺🇸

Rewatched Twister (singular) this week. It holds up! Went to see Twisters (plural) tonight and it’s also good. Sort of a remake and sort of a sequel, but it works. 🍿

With the release of GPT-4o-mini, I’m updating some of the models used in Micro.blog. It’s really nice to see the price decrease. Hopefully that is translating to more efficient, less energy use on the servers too.

I was trying some new things with Micro.blog themes and rediscovered that I had made a page that is just recent photos in the blog post category Coffee. This kind of thing is why you should have your own blog. 🙂

I don’t see myself buying a Vision Pro soon or ever, but love that a hot air balloons video is in the next batch of immersive content. Seems like a great fit. But also, maybe Apple is overthinking this… Any and all content would probably help.

Started a Micro.blog experiment that renders a snapshot of your blog post as an image, which could be used for Open Graph previews or thumbnails in the UI. Not sure the best form this should take when it’s live. Suggestions? If you could have a little thumbnail of any web page, how would you use it?

Hard to believe it’s only been 4 days since I blogged that the debate is over about the nominee. Schiff’s statement + Pelosi saying he can’t win + Biden getting COVID… At this point, it’s like swimming upstream. Might be time to call it. 🇺🇸

In Dallas for a few days. Iced latte outside at Ascension, near White Rock Lake. ☕️