Fog from liquid nitrogen ice cream.

Hmm, my last post is poorly truncated on Bluesky because I hadn’t considered the title, link, and new summary taking up more than 300 characters. Going to keep my extra summary text shorter in the future.

This is an excellent post by Molly White about the potential conflict between making the world’s knowledge more accessible through AI and the risk of destroying the foundations for open content on the web: The true threat from AI models training on open access material is n...

Since writing more about delayed AI + Siri yesterday, I was thinking about this Bloomberg story of a meeting inside Apple admitting that the new Siri works at best 80% of the time, but they want to “get those percentages up”. After a year of development? They need to seriously rethink their plan.

Bluesky has a proposal to declare user intention for things like archiving and AI training. Looks pretty good. Maybe we should mirror this in robots.txt? It stretches the original purpose of the file but it should be somewhere outside of a specific protocol. There was also CC-NT for one narrow use.

We are so used to being able to do almost anything in software. For example, today I was looking at how long it takes to load the list of your blog posts in Micro.blog. It’s a couple seconds, but I’d like it to be half a second. I know from many years of web experience that ...

Disappointed I missed the world without caesars shirt. Still catching up on SXSW happenings, including Jay Graber’s interview which I just queued up.

Had a couple funny interactions with ChatGPT this week, including when asking it for some help with a coding task. It suggested some code that was really problematic and could easily break in the future. I told it I was worried about that code, and it replied with “You’re right, that was a hack.” 🤪

I’ve been out of town for a few days and not coding much, but Vincent has been working on the mobile app. iOS folks, a new TestFlight beta is out with creating a new blog category and editing summaries, plus other fixes. A couple more tweaks and then will ship to everyone.

Overheard, single mom who took her 401k and put it into starting a new business. Not everyone should do this, but… I love it. YOLO.

Responding to John Gruber’s AI post yesterday, Om Malik blogs:

Just as Google is trapped in the 10-blue-link prison, which prevents it from doing something radical, Apple has its own golden handcuffs. It’s a company weighed down by its market capitalization and what stock market expects from it.

Chet Collins reviews my book Indie Microblogging. Most people who have checked it out have just skimmed through it a little, which is fine! Love to see a detailed look, though. I still plan to publish a final final draft with a few updates.

Ana Rodrigues blogs about how websites can be good as a playground and for others to learn from:

But deep down, all I want for my personal website is to give back to the web. I want anyone, regardless of skill level, to inspect elements, understand the structure, and learn from readable code.

Great post from John Gruber about Apple Intelligence and the Siri delays:

Leaders prove their mettle and create their legacies not by how they deal with successes but by how they deal with — how they acknowledge, understand, adapt, and solve — problems. The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn’t true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn’t true, and they set a course based on that.

WWDC is pivotal. Apple needs to have a much clearer and demo-able vision for AI.

Rêve Coffee in Lafayette, LA. ☕️

New feature for Micro.blog’s Bluesky cross-posting: preview cards. This is still off by default, but if you flip it on in Sources, Micro.blog will try to figure out the title, description, and og:image for the first link in your post and attach it. Screenshot:

Federico Viticci wonders if Apple should have their own API that could bridge to OpenAI and Anthropic, offering Apple’s own seal of approval on privacy and security. It would be a nice surprise if Apple did something like this. They could wrap together on-device models and private cloud compute too.

MarsEdit 5.3.3 is out! This release adds support for Micro.blog blog post summaries with a new “excerpt” field in MarsEdit.

Excellent Dithering today — and Upgrade yesterday for the 2-hour version 🙂 — about how the Apple Intelligence rollout missed the mark. Time for Apple to take off the rails and open up APIs and models so developers can take the lead for a while, like how Mac apps innovated with desktop publishing.

Gus Mueller thinks Apple needs to get out of the way with AI:

The crux of the issue in my mind is this: Apple has a lot of good ideas, but they don’t have a monopoly on them. I would like some other folks to come in and try their ideas out. I would like things to advance at the pace of the industry, and not Apple’s.

Good post. I included several quotes in my post this morning and would’ve added Gus’s post too. Experimenting with LLMs running locally is perfect for developers who build Mac apps. Maybe third-party developers need a convention to download and share models between apps?

After lunch I ended up having to head out of town unexpectedly to visit family, so gonna miss the afternoon SXSW and Fediverse House events. It was amazing catching up with folks who I only knew online, and meeting some people for the first time. Have a great week and safe travels!

POSSE.

Now that bookmark tags are available to all plans on Micro.blog, it’s more consistent to manage bookmarks. I’ve moved my read-later type activities to Micro.blog. Just nice to have it all in one place to bookmark posts and blog about them. Screenshot example of a bookmark with summary and tags:

Ever since Apple revealed their AI strategy to lean into on-device models, there has been a sort of tension with the approach from other companies like OpenAI, Google, and Amazon. Was Apple Intelligence going to work? There are advantages: for user privacy because more data ...

Good morning, Austin. Back downtown after a great day yesterday at Fediverse House.

“This isn’t a time for competition. It is a time for cooperation.” — Evan Prodromou in a panel on different platforms at Fediverse House

Just a few minutes in to arriving at Fediverse House and already it was super valuable. There is really nothing like meeting people face to face. It’s an exciting time for the open web and you can feel it in hearing what people are working on and thinking about.

Bastrop Abstract Company. Established 1883. Closed.

Micro Social continues to improve. The new version adds a share sheet and iPad support.

We just passed an old wagon and mules on highway 290. It was Cowboy’s Last Ride, a restored wagon from 1899, going 350 miles across central Texas to raise money for St. Jude:

At 82 years old, Larry Jollisant, has chosen to honor his life as a cowboy in the most authentic, western way possible. […] Every night, he sets up camp, cooks over an open flame, and sleeps under the stars or in the wagon, embracing the same hardships and beauty that defined the cowboy way of life.

I love this. 🤠