Fidel & Co. A little more time in Little Rock before hitting the road again. ☕️

Simon Willison on the continual misuse of the term vibe coding:

It means “generating code with AI without caring about the code that is produced”. See Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding for my previous writing on this subject. This is a hill I am willing to die on. I fear it will be the death of me.

Fighting the good fight. Words matter.

Marc Andreessen doesn’t think AI will take his job. But venture capital is barely a real job. All money, all talk. 🤪 I would rather actually create something even with the risk that AI might obsolete part of what I do.

Micro.blog bookmarks are a significant part of my workflow now. I have over 1000 bookmarks stored, mostly web pages that Micro.blog will also archive, and enough tags to filter through them. Probably about time to import my old Pinboard and Instapaper bookmarks.

Allen Pike has a great post about user interface input design in an LLM world:

As we start to see new interfaces that support these more humane controls, it will seem increasingly inhumane that we once chose “Helvetica”, “Semibold”, and “36pt” from three separate dropdowns. It is inhumane – it’s an artifact of the past, back when computers needed us to chunk up our inputs into separate dropdowns for them, lest they be confused.

Huge new ruling by the judge in the Epic Games case. Hope to take advantage of this as soon as possible in Micro.blog to let people subscribe from the iOS app. Finally a clear voice of reason in the App Store.

It ended up being a good idea to stop overnight in Little Rock and wait out the storm. Went to a restaurant across the street and there was a jazz band playing, a bit of peace and beauty as the wind and rain picked up outside.

Watched some more highlights from last night’s Bucks / Pacers. Bucks should not have lost that game. Feel bad for them. 🏀

NPR has an article on whether the Google search remedy should include somehow crippling Google’s growth in AI:

In his opening statements last Monday, David Dahlquist, the acting deputy director of the DOJ’s antitrust civil litigation division, argued that the court should consider remedies that could nip a potential Google AI monopoly in the bud. “This court’s remedy should be forward-looking and not ignore what is on the horizon,” he said.

I’m still at a loss for what should be done. Splitting off YouTube would be good too, but it doesn’t really fit the crime.

Bookshelves at Nexus Coffee & Creative in Little Rock. ☕️

Parked at The Root Cafe in Little Rock. Lunch and plotting a change to my route stops so I don’t drive directly into a storm and tornado watch. 🌪️

Last night at the hotel, in between basketball, I tuned into some of the Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella conversation at LlamaCon. At one point, Satya said “the web was born on Windows” and it struck me. Digging a little, apparently he has said this before. Hmm… What about NeXT?

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.