FeedCity

Clouds along I-35. Day 28, ephemeral.

Passed a billboard for Basecamp on the highway somewhere outside of Austin today. That was unexpected.

This year has been a roller coaster in so many ways. Thanks everyone who has supported me and Micro.blog. I’m currently working on a slight redesign to our home page, fixing glitches and unifying the Micro.one and Micro.blog pages. I don’t usually make enough time to tell new folks what we’re about.

Winding down on the last few days of this month’s Micro.blog photo challenge. Not too late to post a photo or two if you want to join at the end! 📷

Browsing stock.adobe.com, there’s a new problem with the flood of AI-generated artwork. I’m willing to pay more for art created by a human, just as I want to read words written by a human and not a robot. AI-generated art is abundant and cheap to produce. Yet they are both priced the same by Adobe.

After road trips across the country, to California multiple times, all over Texas, through Utah, and to New York… My good luck with the Honda Element ran out this week. Fender bender in a parking lot ripped off my back bumper. It was cracked anyway, so guess it was past time to replace.

Gemini CLI continues to get hung up on fairly simple things. It’s the free version, using a lightweight model, so I don’t mean to complain too much. Sort of stuck in a loop of trying to update CSS files:

I apologize for the repeated issues with the replace tool. It seems I’m still struggling with the exact string matching. I will try a different approach to remove the old media query block. I will read the file content, manually remove the block from the content, and then write the modified content back to the file. This should bypass the strict matching issues.

Still pretty amazing, though.

Great point from Jeff Johnson on the arbitrary tier 1 / tier 2 differences in Apple’s proposed EU rules:

What I found striking about the search differences between Tier 1 and Tier 2 is that in creating this distinction, Apple clearly considers App Store search to be a developer feature rather than a user feature. In other words, the user’s interest in finding an app via search is disregarded, and Apple is willing to be less helpful to users to the extent that app developers pay a lesser commission to Apple.

I was asked this week about our policy when a subscription expires or sadly even if someone passes away. I know I’ve blogged about this, but I don’t think it was formally documented, so I wrote up a simple help page for it.

Experimenting with Gemini CLI to iterate on some web page changes. It’s free for basic usage. It does get confused sometimes, having to re-read files and apply changes multiple times, which makes it feel slow and a little wasteful.

Enjoyed listening to the copyright discussion on SharpTech this week. Copyright is not a universal truth. It’s effectively a limited monopoly given to creators. That’s helpful, but it must be balanced with the public good. Sometimes we go too far, like Mickey Mouse’s 95-year copyright.

I missed on my first reading of Apple’s new EU rules that “tier 1” developers won’t get automatic app updates. This is going to be very confusing for users. The whole thing seems unworkable to me. Small steps forward, but just barely. I’d like a “tier 0” with sideloading and a 0% commission.

As spelled out in a StoreKit addendum, Apple is replacing the Core Technology Fee in the EU with a Core Technology Commission. It’s a better deal, but on principle I’m against any fee for subscriptions outside of the App Store. Not sure this change is more compliant with the EU’s DMA, either.

Very sad to hear that Anne Sturdivant has passed away. If you were active on Micro.blog over the last couple of years, you may have read her blog or been part of conversations with her. Her username around the web was @anniegreens. I spent some time this morning browsing her...

I mostly got off lucky with the macOS Tahoe beta 1 install, so much so that I’m nervous about upgrading to beta 2. I’m going to wait a while. Don’t want to risk breaking anything else this week.

Creative Commons has proposed a new set of declarations called CC signals to help AI crawlers understand how a creator wants their content to be used in AI training. It has taken me a little while to wrap my head around this, in part because there is a lot of writing to intr...

Bernie Sanders says if AI is making companies more productive with less, people should get a 4-day workweek. Makes sense to me.

We were just rewatching Gilded Age season 2, and there’s a whole section of the plot about unions and working “only” 8-hour days. It’s about time for another advance.

Day 24 of the photo challenge, although a day late… Bloom.

I know I said I’d stop blogging about AI for a while, because it has become so divisive, but this court ruling on fair use is too fascinating to ignore. From federal judge William Alsup: …the use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly trans...

Stephen Hackett reminiscing on the Aqua introduction from 2000 and what we’ve lost without live demos:

This all makes me miss live keynotes. I know Apple likes the control it has over pre-recorded introductions, but its announcements deserve live demos, off-the-cuff remarks, and the humanity that was once more prevalent at things like WWDC or iPhone introductions.

Working on some more iOS improvements, currently waiting for Apple to review the beta. 🙄 Automated builds via Xcode Cloud are still working well. I mentioned on the special episode of Core Int (🤯) that builds are slow-ish. To be specific, took 16 minutes today. It’s fine.

We know a few new things about the OpenAI / Jony Ive partnership, because of leaks and the iyO lawsuit. I’m skeptical of a screen-free device that is not a wearable. Maybe someone should break away from the rectangle form factor. Square screen, a few inches on each side, very good voice interface.

This is a silly and inconsequential thing to rant about, but… What is the point of crushed ice? It melts too quickly. I understand it for Sonic and Chick-fil-a, but not for a coffee shop. 🤪

Yesterday my kids asked why I was snapping a photo of a construction site where a restaurant used to be, and I had to think… I like taking pictures of things that will change.

It’s going to be too easy to hate on Tesla’s robotaxi rollout. I’m a little sympathetic to a single mistake overshadowing all the rides that are fine, but this tech is clearly inferior to Waymo. It’s a very, very small area in Austin that Tesla is operating in. No excuse for being in the wrong lane.

Most people outside of Micro.blog don’t pay attention to our news blog, so quoting this here too:

Fixed an issue where mentions to Mastodon users weren’t actually sent to remote servers if Micro.blog hadn’t yet cached the ActivityPub info for that user.

If you’re on Bluesky, we also automatically mirror our bug fixes and features to the micro.blog profile over there.

Dave Winer will be keynoting WordCamp Canada in Ottawa:

I’m also not happy with the tech industry of the US. I’d like a fresh start, a return to our roots, with the assumption that the people control their destiny and the role of developers is to give them to the tools to try out new ideas.

There is still so much potential where the fediverse and blogging overlap.

Some of the problems Trump has created are fixable. They are painful for many people, and clearly so morally wrong, illegal, or just plain dumb that they will have to be reversed, with time. And then there are the disastrous, long-term mistakes like bombing Iran that we’ll be stuck with for decades.

I’ve updated the Micro.blog photo challenge page with the final list of words. Thanks everyone for the suggestions! I think I’ve got at least one or two from everyone who sent ideas in.

In hindsight, June was an incredibly busy month for me to do this, but I’m so happy to see people’s photos. 📷

I’ll be updating the photoblog challenge post today with the final set of prompts for the month. If anyone has word suggestions, let me know! The special collection of everyone’s posts is also way behind, so I hope to get that caught up this weekend.