IndieWeb
Belatedly realizing that Reddit’s robots.txt change means that Micro.blog’s bookmark feature now can’t archive a copy of pages, because we check robots.txt. This is the kind of trickle down effect when a site withdraws from the open web, it hurts other services and incentivizes breaking conventions.
Enjoying watching the Olympics. Some live, some delayed. Still fun even if I’ve already heard a little about the outcome.
Miss the days when you could have a $199 iPod Touch around for testing betas and other things. Getting a device to test Apple Intelligence on iOS would set me back $600 (iPad Air) or $1000 (iPhone 15 Pro). Brand new iPad Mini, regular iPad, and non-pro iPhone 15 can’t run it.
Apple’s strategy with on-device models is going to take 2-3 years to play out. Meanwhile everyone just uses ChatGPT.
Thought about installing the iOS 18.1 beta today but caught myself, remembering AI won’t work on my iPhone 14 Pro. I keep forgetting because my phone still feels new.
I’ve been testing the beta of Tapestry and it’s really starting to show the promise of a unified timeline across multiple services. There’s even an Instagram connector from @sod to view Instagram profiles alongside Micro.blog feeds, Mastodon, and other blogs.
We’re working on a few tweaks to Epilogue this week. Just merged in a change that my son worked on. 🙂 If you’ve never heard of the app before, it’s a mashup of blogs and tracking books, like Goodreads… I recorded a video about it last year that still covers most of the major features.
Between killing third-party clients and now only allowing Google indexing, Reddit has withdrawn from the open web in a pretty significant way. Not sure what the impact of this will be. Feels almost Facebook-like, much more of a silo than before.
Finished reading: Blood on Their Hands by Mandy Matney. Wasn’t planning to read this but got into it when @traci started the audiobook. Interesting behind-the-scenes story of Mandy reporting on (and hosting a podcast about) the Murdaughs. 📚
Experimenting with WebP. I still have mixed feelings about it. The files are smaller, but even introduced 14 years ago (!) my instinct on new formats is they won’t be as universal as JPEG, MP3, and text, which will last forever.
There’s a new Core Int out today! Daniel and I talk about CrowdStrike, travel, and SearchGPT.
The couch jokes about JD Vance might be funny, but it’s misinformation and not even based on anything true. Sorry to be a buzzkill. We can win without making shit up. In the long run, it hurts credibility on the real arguments against the GOP ticket. 🇺🇸
Short walk to Somerville Lake right before it started to rain. So quiet this morning.
Looking forward to Rings of Power season 2. Looks like what I blogged during season 1 is still true. They’ve put a lot into this show.
Camping at Lake Somerville State Park. Lots of dense trees and bushes around each site, makes for nice privacy if anyone was actually here except me. Not pictured: the lake.
Cheat sheet for emoji in my blog posts:
Elena Rossini has a blog post walking through the compatibility between Mastodon and Pixelfed specifically, and also more generally with Mastodon API clients like Phanpy and Ivory:
The ultimate goal of The Future is Federated is to introduce the Fediverse to “regular people,” encouraging them to try out one or more of its networks, allowing them to experience social media away from the walled gardens of Big Tech
ActivityPub folks: I’ve posted FEP-eb22 to document supported features in NodeInfo, so that clients and servers can better communicate about what to show in a client UI. Would love your thoughts on it. There’s some overlap with other FEPs but those seem stalled and not quite what I need.
To be honest, the Ghost ActivityPub emails are both exciting and a little bit painful for me to read. Ghost is a popular platform and it is definitely a good thing to support an open standard. But also, I did most of this same work 6 years ago, without the jokes and pug artwork. Let’s go already! 🤪
My initial take on SearchGPT (without using it yet) is that it should be a step forward for linking to and crediting sources in a way that chat assistants aren’t. It also looks much cleaner than Google, which is a mess of ads and uneven results now. Daniel and I talk about this on the next Core Int.
Not sure what to make of Sam Altman’s op-ed in The Washington Post. When he writes about model weights and export restrictions, I keep thinking of the Llama 3.1 release this week. Feels like more between the lines that I’m missing.
Big news for AltStore to be getting Fortnite. Also from Epic, they are pulling Fortnite from Samsung’s store to protest how sideloading is now disabled by default. And in a way, they’ve sort of been protesting the same thing on iOS for the last few years.
Thinking more about Biden’s address last night and his legacy, it’s remarkable how much he accomplished. Investments in infrastructure and climate, progress on guns. All he had to do was get us through the pandemic and clean up a little of Trump’s mess. Feeling optimistic that we can build on this.
Evan Prodromou in a post on Mastodon:
If you make a Fediverse explainer, try to show some real communities as the nodes in the network, rather than using software packages and their logos. Companies, local governments, universities, families, friend groups, individuals.
I think this is a good approach. Talking about platforms is also effective, though. If Threads could talk to TikTok, people would get that, even if it’s not as distributed as showing communities. Ideally large platforms would be broken down, e.g. not just TikTok but BookTok.
Set the presidential address to record while out tonight so we could watch it fully, without all the noise of news and social media. He hit it just right. Moving. “…one day sit behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office as president of the United States. But here I am.” Thank you, Joe Biden. 🇺🇸
Federico Viticci on how wired EarPods are still great:
I don’t have to worry about battery life, pairing, or latency. Sure, there’s a wire, and there’s no noise cancelling when using them – but these are my “downtime earbuds” anyway, so I don’t care.
I find myself using my AirPods Pro less and less, actually. For some reason I misplace them when I don’t misplace anything else. They’re amazing, but there’s always that brief moment when I question whether the wireless is actually working, and they still don’t feel as comfortable to me as EarPods.
Nice work from Apple on the web version of Maps. Native apps are great, but some apps really should be on the web, especially apps that you want to link into.
A great new theme for Micro.blog: Sumo by Matt Langford. There’s a lot in here that is really well thought out.
