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.

For Bluesky fans, we’re now cross-posting the Micro.blog news blog over to Bluesky at @micro.blog. Good way to stay up to date on new features or fixes.

For beta testers on iOS, there’s a new build of Micro.blog with a button to toggle just showing draft blog posts. This matches the functionality we’ve had on the web and Mac apps for a while. Useful if you manage lots of drafts.

If you’re not on the beta yet, feel free to sign up at this TestFlight link. We’ll release it to all customers in the coming week.

o4-mini is good at road trip planning. I fire off some parameters like roughly where I want to stop or how long to drive, let it come up with routes, hotels, things to see. It doesn’t take the joy out of travel… Still a lot of details to review and decide on.

Crazy finish to that Nuggets / Clippers game. Not sure I’ve ever seen a dunk so close to win it like that. 🏀

Special shout-out to @vincent for troubleshooting Micro.blog servers while I’m traveling. Driving in traffic through Brooklyn is not when I hoped to get downtime notifications! Annoying hackers trying to mess with our servers.

I read this article about AI and cancer research last night, thinking about it more this morning. It’s really well-researched. The title is misleading. There’s a lot of promise here, even if we might not get the “compressed 21st century” of medicine that Dario Amodei hopes for.

Stephen Hackett continues to have good links related to xAI energy use and gas turbines in Memphis. From what I can tell, none of the other AI companies have done anything like this. They use the existing grid or have proposed new power plants. Google considered generators for backup only. xAI is unique in seeming to not care at all about pollution.

This fits the model we’ve come to expect from Elon Musk. He cares a lot about the big picture and less about who is hurt along the way. It’s an extremist, unhealthy perspective.

I drove through Memphis a few nights ago, only stopping for dinner, but I could tell right away it was a city I’d love to explore more on a future trip. Cool place.

The view from Queens. Kind of a wild few days of driving now that I reflect on it.

My post earlier today about Bluesky seems to have spread more widely than I expected. Lots of feedback! Looking at it again, the analogy with Google was confusing, and the post title with “downtime” set the wrong expectation… It was supposed to be a more positive, hopeful post.

Bluesky was down last night and I saw a couple posts questioning how this could happen if it was really decentralized. Worth a few thoughts here. If mastodon.social went down, what would the user sentiment be? It hosts 2.7 million users, or roughly 15% of the fediverse. (Not...

Catching up on last night’s NBA scores. I watched some of Knicks / Pistons, but staying up on east coast time for west games is tough. Thunder are a force, will be difficult to get by them. 🏀

If you’re following the last few photos I’ve posted, my daughter and I have been slowly making our way to New York. Surprisingly the first time I’ve ever driven through a few states: Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Road trips are usually out west. 🚙

OpenAI wants to buy Chrome. Perplexity wants to buy Chrome. Yahoo! wants to buy Chrome. Heck, Micro.blog would also love to buy Chrome (if we had a budget). If Google has to spin it out, could be an interesting shift for the open web.

Another fantastic essay by Dario Amodei, this time about “interpretability” and the need to better understand AI:

People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own AI creations work. They are right to be concerned: this lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology. For several years, we (both Anthropic and the field at large) have been trying to solve this problem, to create the analogue of a highly precise and accurate MRI that would fully reveal the inner workings of an AI model.

Train bridge at Falling Waters, West Virginia. On the other side of the river, the Confederates were stranded for days after Gettysburg.

So with threads.net switching to .com, I was a little worried about how this might impact the fediverse support. Thankfully looks like they’re sticking with .net for handles.

Roanoke River overlook, along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Interesting proposal similar to robots.txt but for LLMs. When AI is your parser, you can have a single file that is readable by both humans and machines:

The llms.txt file is unusual in that it uses Markdown to structure the information rather than a classic structured format such as XML. The reason for this is that we expect many of these files to be read by language models and agents.

Had the Switch 2 pre-order in my cart but kept changing my mind, gonna skip it until there’s a game I really want. Hopefully won’t be too hard to get later. 🕹️

Nashville Public Library.

If you haven’t been following the latest AI models closely, you may have missed what is happening with integrating web search results into answers. It used to be that you had two options: Use the model’s built-in knowledge, usually with a training cut-off of a year ago. Tha...

Micro.blog’s backend is running so much more smoothly now after I addressed some memory issues yesterday. I often assume I know where problems are, and it takes actually digging in to discover I was wrong, the problem is fixable in a different way than I expected.

I really like this post from Ashley Willis, about doubting yourself and the fear of what loud people on the internet might think of your writing:

I don’t know exactly when that changed. There wasn’t one big moment, just a slow fade. Something dimmed. I started second-guessing myself more.

Nailed it. I’m too amused by wall outlets and light switches gone wrong, it’s surprisingly common. This one in the hotel stairway.

I’ll be speaking at EFF-Austin next month! An updated talk about blogs, social networks, the fediverse, and where I think the open web is going.

Micro.blog went off the rails today, for some reason the day I’m out of town an old memory leak decided to blow up into a much worse problem. I think I’ve got it under control now.

In the Bluesky announcement about checkmark verification is the tidbit that 270k accounts have linked their username and domain name. 270k custom domains! That is very cool and a great sign for the open web.

Speaking of Objective-C, when I see example code that looks like this:

NSMutableArray<NSString *>* paths

I simplify it to:

NSMutableArray* paths

I don’t think declaring types everywhere improved the language at all. Let a dynamic language be dynamic. 🤪

Experimenting with a special build of Micro.blog for Mac with Gemma 3 (4 billion params) running inside the app. Seems a good balance of download size and RAM, allowing me to run some AI magic on device that might be cost-prohibitive or wasteful on the server.