Got an email today for a class action lawsuit about chicken that I thought must be a phishing scam or a joke, but it appears real. The lawyers are going to make bank on this one! I don’t remember overpaying for chicken 5 years ago… I do wonder how they got my email address.

xAI buying Twitter / X seems pretty sketchy. In practice, I guess it means the platform will live on for a while. I would not bet on xAI’s long-term success, though… OpenAI has billions of dollars of real revenue. xAI has effectively none, I think, outside of Twitter itself.

To be a blogger, you have to be okay with writing into the void. Some posts will resonate with people. Some posts will get comments. Most won’t.

Sometimes I’ll write a post and I’ll think to myself, “This is pretty good! This is the blog post that people are gonna talk about and link to. I’ve really captured something unique in this post.”

And then crickets. No one cares. 🦗

That’s okay. The act of writing itself helps us think, helps us learn, helps us discover how we feel about a topic. It’s creative and has value even if no one is reading. It’s a snapshot in time to look back on later.

And then the post is out there on the internet, making the web a little better. And maybe one day someone will pick it up and see it, at just the right time, and it will matter to them.

I’m drawn to blogging about divisive topics, but it would probably be healthier to avoid it. People can be so tribal now that everything is either good or bad. Our views have become extreme caricatures of the truth.

The pond at The Village, walking back to the mechanic to pick up my car after getting coffee.

I’m cracking up at the images in this Severance + Lego post on Daring Fireball. Who is that red minifigure? 🤣

Wow, just watched the final minute of Lakers / Bulls from last night. Love basketball. 🏀

ChatGPT’s new image generation is incredibly good. Too good. You can see it in the thousands of Ghibli-ified photos all over the social web. Hayao Miyazaki is going to come out of retirement again to tell us how we’ve all lost the plot on creativity. When we look back on thi...

This is a helpful post from Paul Frazee about ATProto lexicons. One of the challenges for making Micro.blog a PDS is what to do with longer blog posts with titles that don’t fit cleanly into Bluesky’s lexicon. Don’t really want to reinvent the wheel here.

A fun experiment in between bug fixing… I added a films page to Micro.blog, with posters for Letterboxd links people have recently included in blog posts. Might evolve into a more complete feature later.

Worked on some book-related improvements in Micro.blog this morning. We try to integrate with all sorts of things — Google Books, Open Library, Libby — but a lot of it is not exactly officially sanctioned. Added more Goodreads scraping today. In for a penny, in for a pound!

Simon Willison has added notes (a.k.a. microblog posts) to his blog. I’ve really been enjoying his takes on AI. He’s usually the first I see jump in to explore a new model’s capabilities.

I’ve blogged about apologies before. They carry a lot of weight with me. We’re human, we make mistakes, we learn.

Just as I don’t trust people who can’t apologize, I’m also wary of people who can’t accept a heartfelt apology. It says more about you if nothing short of perfection is enough.

But her emails! The Signal leak is an amazing contrast with Hillary’s server. There was nothing this consequential in her emails, only a handful maybe classified. But more than that, she apologized. Trump and his team will never apologize for anything, ever. Don’t trust people who can’t admit fault.

Sometimes in the debate about federation, we miss that open APIs are still very valuable alone. Bluesky’s API has so many nice touches including many requests that do not need authorization at all. I’d like to see Mastodon ease off some of its more strict requirements for e.g. HTTP signatures.

Seeing an increase in security proxies like Cloudflare interfering with legitimate Micro.blog requests to other services. Likely not related to the new AI Labyrinth, but along the same lines: when you try to catch “misbehaving bots”, you’re going to affect real users too.

Today we’re rolling out a big improvement to our new EU-based servers. Along with the option to host your web pages in Europe, Micro.blog will now also copy your photos and other uploads. It will copy your data the first time the feature is enabled, and then going forward wi...

The page for WWDC 2025 is vague enough that Apple could still do a live keynote. Not holding my breath. But it feels out of touch to not bring back a couple live demos. OpenAI is doing live streams every couple weeks (there was one today). It shows faith in your product.

Zac Hall blogs at 9to5Mac that Apple should acquire Mira Murati’s new company, Thinking Machines Labs:

Let Rockwell make all the repairs and changes needed to allow Siri to meet the baseline performance that Apple should expect. Tap Murati to focus not on the baggage but instead on the future.

Watching a couple of the videos from ATmosphereConf. The videos are up on YouTube in this playlist.

Putting the final touches on a nice improvement for our blogging friends across the pond… I’ll announce in a blog post later today.

Pete Docter:

AI takes something and sands the edges down, so it makes the blob average. And that could be very useful in a lot of ways. But if you really want to do something brand new and really insightful and speak from a personal angle, that’s not going to come from AI fully.

Got my copy of Dragonsteel Prime in the mail from the last crowdfunding. 📚

Federico Viticci on mobile app development becoming more accessible to many more people, just as blogging opened up web publishing:

Those who wanted to have an online writing space 30 years ago had to know some of the basics of hosting and HTML if they wanted to publish something for other people to read. Then Blogger came along and allowed anyone – regardless of their skill level – to be read. What if the same happened to mobile software?

Great historical data for WWDC dates from David Smith. Should be announced soon!

Generative AI can be both good and bad, just like us. We’re capable of kindness and cruelty. Society, government, and even companies should amplify the best in what we create and do.

Not sure why I didn’t think of this earlier, but there is now a simple weekly email newsletter for all the posts on news.micro.blog. You can subscribe here. We post small and big changes throughout the week that are easy to miss.

Nice profile of the Internet Archive on NPR:

The Internet Archive is among the few efforts that exist to catch the stuff that falls through the digital cracks, while also making that information accessible to the public. Six weeks into the new administration, Wayback Machine director Graham said, the Internet Archive had cataloged some 73,000 web pages that had existed on U.S. government websites that were expunged after Trump’s inauguration.

I didn’t realize that the Internet Archive did public tours. I’d love to visit the office someday. Amazing building.

Sounds like ATmosphereConf went really well in Seattle this weekend. So cool to see community events spring up around the social web.

Finished reading: Queen of Shadows by Sarah J. Maas. Slowly working my way through the series with breaks to read other books in between. 📚