Teen Accounts on Instagram sounds like a very good change. Of course those of us with kids who were teens years ago were just guinea pigs for social media that prioritized ads over safety, but better late than never.

I mentioned recently that I was considering removing trial accounts on Micro.blog until after the election, to minimize auto-created junk accounts. I’ve rolled out the first phase of that with some internal changes, and adjusted the 30-day trial down to 10 days for new accounts.

Love this metaphor from Dave Winer about how Micro.blog handles feeds and cross-posting:

It’s sort of a Grand Central station for moving stuff around among the twitter-like systems.

John Gruber’s article about last week’s iPhone event also compares Tim Cook’s Apple with what might’ve been. I agree with this part:

I feel confident that if Steve Jobs were alive and still leading Apple product development, there would have been no iPhone-like mind-blown-the-moment-you-first-saw-it new product in the intervening years.

What we would have is a more interesting Apple. As John says, products that are more quirky, more risky. It’s also a bit tragic that we’ll never know what Steve Jobs would’ve made of AI.

Not sure I have a favorite iOS 18 feature yet, but tapbacks with emoji are near the top of the list. Only problem is the fallback experience for iOS 17 and earlier users is bad enough that I don’t want to actually send any emoji reactions for a while.

I don’t really understand how OpenAI’s o1 works, but I found today’s Stratechery update helpful, contrasting the approach of o1 compared to other LLMs which can sometimes blindly follow the wrong path:

In summary, there are two important things happening: first, o1 is explicitly trained on how to solve problems, and second, o1 is designed to generate multiple problem-solving streams at inference time, choose the best one, and iterate through each step in the process when it realizes it made a mistake.

Jason Snell reflects on 10 years since starting Six Colors:

Ten years ago I took a leap into working for myself, not working in corporate media. For most days since, I’ve worked in my garage, writing articles for my site, recording podcasts, and writing the occasional piece for other places (including my former employer, which I couldn’t ever have predicted).

Federico Viticci reviews iOS 18 and also writes about how to balance his love of Apple tech and dislike of generative AI:

Technology without people behind it is just an empty chat box. I want to write about the fun, flexible, frequently flawed things humans do with tech, and I want to be remembered for having left something useful behind me.

I love the illustrations by Scout Wilkinson for the review. For me, I don’t think AI has to be an all-or-nothing choice. It’s a useful tool, but we can also embrace what humans are uniquely good at. This was the thinking behind M.b’s audio narration too.

We’ve got a new episode of Core Intuition out today, longer than usual to talk about which iPhones we pre-ordered, thoughts on new features like the camera button, and a discussion of whether the AirPods 4 with noice cancellation are effectively a software unlock.

Happy for Hacks finally winning. Love that show. It has been tough competition going up against hilarious comedy show The Bear. 🤪

Watching the Emmy’s. It shouldn’t bother me so much but folks The Bear still isn’t a comedy. 📺

As a quick follow-up to my post today about posting APIs, I should have linked to the latest Micropub specification. There is also a long list of clients on the IndieWeb wiki. I just added Epilogue there, which also uses Micropub to blog about books you’re reading.

We’ve visited Dallas a lot recently. It sort of amazes me that Dallas has been able to develop extensive new light rail, and repurpose old rail corridors into great walking trails. Comparatively it feels like Austin has done almost nothing. Looking at the old Missouri-Kansas-Texas line, unused.

Dave Winer blogs about interoperability for Twitter-like systems: We had that for the blogging layer of this onion, something called the MetaWeblog API. All the popular blogging software supported it. And that meant you could write once and publish to many places. I’ve bee...

Sean Tilley has a great live blog of FediForum over at We Distribute. Also includes my demo if you scroll back to yesterday’s coverage.

I got a lot out of FediForum this week. Mostly lurking this morning, can’t really participate. Some fantastic sessions yesterday. I helped lead a discussion on adapting client APIs for different platforms, with great points from folks on ActivityPub C2S and how to go beyond the Mastodon API.

I hadn’t checked out Lillihub in a while. It’s so nice. Some unique ideas around conversations in Micro.blog.

For something completely new today, I’m revisiting Nostr support in Micro.blog. Making a few tweaks, and support for custom relays.

I still think there’s potentially a space for these dedicated AI-based voice recorders, but none of them are quite right yet. From David Pierce’s review of the NotePin: In my time testing the NotePin, I’ve mostly had it around my neck, and I’ve used it to note reminders whi...

Learning about Fediverse Discovery Providers at FediForum. Interesting solution to get search and discovery across instances.

Hello! This is a quick demo of Micro.blog at FediForum.

Great post from Molly White on the Hachette vs. Internet Archive decision on controlled digital lending:

In fact, by fighting CDL, publishers are seeking to overstep the established boundaries of intellectual property law to exert continued control over an item that has already been purchased from them. And they are seeking to diminish the critical rights of readers to read the books they want without being subjected to censorship and surveillance.

I’m a big user of Libby but I don’t like that we have fewer rights with e-books than physical books. Open Library’s approach seemed fair to me.

I watched Oprah Winfrey’s AI special. There was some concern before it aired about whether it would represent both sides of the debate, and it’s true it wasn’t comprehensive, but I thought it was actually pretty good. She has a thoughtful, deliberate style, not too sensational or hyped up.

FediForum starts today and runs for a few days. It’s inspiring to see what everyone is working on. Luckily I don’t demo until tomorrow because I’m not 100% together this morning. Covid shot interfered with my sleep… 💉 (Don’t let that discourage you! I got unlucky this time, but glad to have it.)

Finished reading: The Wild Robot by Peter Brown. Mostly for kids, but I had already been looking forward to the upcoming movie and kept running across the book, so I bought it. Wonderful story. 📚

Got my updated Covid shot. Going to lie low for the afternoon, just poke around a little with blogging and email. 💉

Adrian Vila blogging about the lens choices on the iPhone 16:

I said it a year ago, and I still think Apple made a mistake with the 120mm lens. The current lineup of 13mm, 24mm, and 120mm leaves a huge gap between the main and telephoto lenses, missing out on key and very useful focal lengths for everyday situations. I’d rather see a 75mm lens on a 48MP sensor, with the ability to reach 120mm using the fancy cropping the main sensor has.

The camera is such an important part of the iPhone, at what point will we get four separate lenses, or the ability to pop a lens out and replace it? 🤪

“I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.” — Taylor Swift 🇺🇸

Nice job by the ABC moderators for some quick fact-checking and generally keeping things on track, with a little room for back and forth replies. No need for another debate, other than the VP debate. We’ve all seen enough. 🇺🇸

Kamala Harris has a really clever approach to some answers where she talks about the actual question but then in the middle she inserts a quick jab at Trump — your father gave you money, or the world is laughing at you — and he can’t help but respond and get completely derailed into nonsense. 🇺🇸