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Write.as creator Matt Baer wants to focus more on writing for 2025. I can relate to a lot of this:
Our apps have always been built to help you get your words down with nothing in the way. That’s why Write.as always opens to our editor — so you can start writing immediately, and not get distracted by notifications, comments, and superfluous things like how many “likes” you received.
Stephen Hackett throwing some cold water on the io products hype:
To be clear, the failure of the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin does not mean that there’s no room in the market for an AI-powered device with no screen. However, people really like their phones, and creating a product that will compete with the smartphone is a hill no one has successfully climbed to date.
I don’t agree that the Rabbit R1 was a failure. It fell short of expectations, but that team is still churning away. A new kind of AI-first device is still more likely to come from someone new, without the smartphone baggage.
You might’ve noticed there’s a new status line in Micro.blog’s publishing progress, providing a little more context for what the platform is doing. I’ll continue to tweak this so the progress is more useful.
Almost lost in all the OpenAI hype this week was that MCP is now supported in OpenAI’s responses API. MCP was a big part of Microsoft’s keynote and at Google I/O.
Om Malik blogging about today’s video of Jony Ive and Sam Altman:
The slick video harkens back to Ive’s glory days at Apple when he would talk about the chips, designs, and aluminum on videos extolling the iPhone, the watch, and the laptops. In a way, what he and Altman are indicating, through words, and subliminal marketing, is that we are building the next Apple.
What stood out to me in the announcement about io is that there will be a “family” of devices. Maybe one without a screen, a couple with small screens? I assume voice will be a big part of this, but also perhaps not. It could truly surprise us.
Finished watching Andor. Loved it. Now watching Rogue One. As expected, flows perfectly together with the series.
Big update out for Tapestry today, adding bookmarking for Micro.blog accounts among other features.
This is a lengthy post from Ben Werdmuller, but everyone who cares about a sustainable, vibrant ecosystem of both free and commercial products for the social web should queue it up to read. He goes over different types of funding and a lot more. Really good.
Anil Dash on the growing popularity of MCP and adopting standards:
It’s cool that other platforms adopted the same spec that Anthropic made for their system. There’s a generosity of spirit to a technology platform choosing to be the second to adopt a protocol, if they do it in a faithful fashion.
This was echoed in the interview with Microsoft’s Kevin Scott this week. Some people at Microsoft would’ve designed MCP differently, but that doesn’t matter. Just roll with it, and the compatibility across platforms makes up for any shortcomings.
John Voorhees blogging about Apple’s AI predicament:
Hardware plays to Apple’s design and supply chain strengths. In contrast, the rapid iteration of AI models and apps is the antithesis of Apple’s annual OS cycle.
I agree. A year is a lifetime right now.
Some of the news out of Microsoft Build is what developers hope Apple will do: access to AI models in the cloud, on devices, or even from web apps inside Edge. There’s also MCP everywhere. I’m reading through NLWeb, created by RV Guha, whose semantic web work for decades seems a nice fit AI search.
If you use Chrome or Arc with Micro.blog, check out the latest update to our Chrome web extension for bookmarking web pages. It improves on the last version, now better saving HTML to archive the page. Still working on making it compatible with Safari and Firefox.
Not gonna lie, I’m close to dropping $200 to try OpenAI’s Codex. But I don’t think most of my code is well suited to it. Not enough automated tests! It figures that would come back to bite me.
I mostly use AI as a machine that can generate unlimited example code. I learn best from editing examples.
Working on server memory usage, discovered a massive leak of Redis keys we use to rate-limit clients hammering the server. Hope I can reclaim tons of memory by fixing it.
Joe Biden has lived an extraordinary life — lots of success and plenty of heartbreak too. This cancer diagnosis is the latest challenge. It just feels particularly unfair to happen while a man who mocked Joe’s family and worse is still in office.
Big Thicket National Preserve.
Twice this week for different reasons, Bell Labs has come up. It’s incredible to re-read about all the things they invented. Wondering if there could be anything comparable to Bell Labs or Xerox Parc today. Maybe highly focused, like AI research.
Acadiana Park in Lafayette. 🌳
Manu Moreale blogs about how so many things feel transactional and why he highlights supporting members on blogroll.org:
We live in the world of paywalled content, unilateral contract modification, micro transactions, serialised content, upsells, and the list goes on and on and on. Everyone is trying to find a way to extract money in one way or another, and that is something I find personally draining and soul-crushing.
Finished watching videos and reading about OpenAI’s Codex. Pretty wild. The design they’ve come up with (based on pull requests) is both powerful and encourages human review. I could see using this at least for a narrow set of tasks.
Nice updates for the next FediForum: keynote by Cory Doctorow and a what’s new on the open social web session by Laurens Hof of the Fediverse Report.
Didn’t realize until this week that the RSS.app feeds support RSS and JSON Feed. Very cool. I’m starting to use it to follow a couple Twitter / X folks from the AI industry. Hate giving X any attention, though.
Sheldon Lake State Park. The ponds used to be part of a fish hatchery, then closed in 1975 and let nature take over. We saw some alligators. 🐊
With OpenAI adding 4.1, I’m having to think a little too much about which models I should be using. I generally use o4-mini for coding, 4o for simple, fast questions. What now? I expect GPT-5 will help consolidate some of these choices.
Thanks @numericcitizen for making another video about what’s new in Micro.blog! This one covers integration with Bluesky and Mastodon, and more.
Josh Miller has an update on the Dia browser, in a series of posts on Twitter / X. For a company with “browser” in its name, wouldn’t mind seeing a blog post of this instead of on X. 🤪 Some very interesting screenshots in the thread, though. I’m excited to try it.
Great post from Joan Westenberg about what has changed with Apple:
A company once defined by joyful provocation—by thinking different—is now defined by its defensiveness. Its leadership acts not like inventors but like stewards of a status quo. They protect margins like relics.
