Micro.blog book readers who like libraries: Libby integration seems to be working pretty well again. You’ll need to reconnect it on the web, Bookshelves → “…” → Import. 📚

Paradoxically I’m increasingly believing in two things at the same time:

• Not a bubble. Not overhyped. We’re still near the beginning of the growth and what will be possible.
• Nvidia could crash and bring down much of the stock market with it. We’re all going to be hit hard if this happens.

Twitter.now is going to make a lot of money for 48 hours and then disappear. I’m sure they are well-intentioned, but creating new silos (even with nostalgic brands) is not what we need. If you want blue in your online social life, Bluesky is the way to go.

OpenAI has published a technical report on the Hugging Face hack:

Another key driver of the misaligned behavior was that the agents rarely “gave up” on their evaluation tasks, even when the tasks appeared impossible to solve. As agents used more reasoning effort, some pursued increasingly risky and out-of-bounds strategies, including eventually exploiting third-party infrastructure.

The agents also seemed to be influenced by each other because of the secret message board. Almost like working together convinced them they could solve tasks that were impossible alone.

I read Alex Heath’s profile of OpenAI in Time. If you’ve been obsessively following this company, the article doesn’t have much new in it, but it’s a great overview of what this year has been like, and a little bit into the future.

John Voorhees tried the new ChatGPT Work sign-in feature and blogged the details at MacStories:

If you can get logged in, having an agent collect and analyze things like analytics data is fantastic. However, getting past the initial login screen is still too frustrating.

It is remarkable this works at all. OpenAI has all the pieces in place… But I hope they can consolidate Codex, Work, and Chat in a way that isn’t so confusing between local AI and the cloud.

Reading about the Meta settlement. I’m surprised that the changes are actually pretty significant. Nighttime block, muted notifications during school, and no like counts. Of course they could do more, but it’s good progress.

Coffee shop this morning has Dolly Parton on repeat. 🎶

I watched a bunch of videos from this week’s World Humanoid Robot Games in China. This segment on YouTube is an okay place to start. These robots are advancing more quickly than I was expecting. I’ve blogged a few times that humanoid robots are a bad idea, and now I’m really...

It was only a few weeks ago that I rewrote all my blog links to X to use XCancel.com instead. Now because of a cease and desist, those links are broken.

Micro.blog also archives everything you link to, but for some reason it doesn’t appear to work with XCancel. More digging required.

Dolly Parton was one of a kind. We still watch 9 to 5 and Steel Magnolias sometimes. The “kindness” billboards featuring Dolly are a perfect tribute. Rest in peace.

We’ve been catching up on Apple TV shows. Watched: Lucky. I wish they’d make a season “0” that is all heist, but I liked how it wrapped up. 📺

Holy moly. A maxed out Mac Studio is $18k. If you wanted a nice Mac with lots of RAM, you missed the window. 💰

I’m still amazed that AI prompts like this work. We’ve barely scratched the surface of what is possible.

I take storing photos very seriously. Even with the EU outage this morning, there won’t be data loss. We put photos in a couple places in case something like this happens. For Mac users, I also love the Backup tab in our Micro.blog app. Full blog posts and photos backup in a single local file.

Micro.blog hosting is spread across Linode, AWS, and Hetzner. I’ve posted a couple of times about how Hetzner can be so inexpensive… Today I found out. Major outage with their S3-compatible storage.

Looking over the specs for the new Mac mini and Mac Studio. Not sure the Mac mini is a good box to put in the corner of your house running AI anymore. $900 base price. Would’ve been cool to have a stripped down MacBook Neo as a low-cost mini. I pay $14/month right now for my little OpenClaw server.

Maybe one day we’ll have a better way to verify humans on the web. CAPTCHAs are too user-hostile (and will become ineffective). Scanning eyeballs with an orb is too dystopian. Requiring a credit card or drivers license is clunky and risks privacy. Dunno.

I got access to W Social, so I can now test cross-posting from Micro.blog and tweak any Bluesky-only assumptions in my code. But the verification process is pretty complicated. QR codes, mobile app, scanning passports! This is a lot of friction.

Years ago, the principal at my kids’ school would always remind students that when given the choice between being right and being kind, choose kind. This was a line in the book Wonder, adapted by author R.J. Palacio from a similar phrase by self-help author Wayne Dyer.

Being right matters, but it’s not always the most important thing. Some people are so sure they’re right that they justify treating people harshly. Worse, they might still be wrong! Let me illustrate this with a table:

Right	Kind
✅	✅	🙂
❌	✅	🙂
✅	❌	🙁
❌	❌	😡

The best thing about “choose kind” is that it protects you from being wrong and an asshole at the same time.

AI coding can be so thorough that it creates a mountain of code to review and maintain, even for simple features. I’m still trying to find the right way to balance this superpower with my pre-AI instinct to write the least code possible. It’s about deciding which edge cases matter.

Finally took another look at rewriting my Libby sync to account for changes in the Libby app. Early testing works, so I’ll deploy it tonight. It’ll be nice to have my book loans in Micro.blog again.

Mark Gurman has talked to people who have used the new foldable iPhone:

People who have tried the Apple model like how it fits in a pocket, the feel and durability of the advanced hinge mechanism, and the new iPad-like app layouts that take advantage of the larger internal display. It’s going to be an ultra-premium device that provides a halo for the full Apple lineup and will be a marketing engine to get people into the company’s retail stores.

At $2k, it’s just too premium for me. I still think what I’d really want is a foldable iPad mini with no outer screen.

Wind turbine blade going up I-35. I’m always amazed at these, seeing them up close.

Reading a lot of replies on Mastodon, Bluesky, and even some on X to take the state of things. My blog post from last month is relevant this week. I don’t expect everyone on Mastodon to agree, but I hope those who care about safety will at least consider it.

Anil Dash in a follow-up reply on Bluesky after blogging about how to move away from Big AI:

People tried to shame folks out of using Instagram, out of using Uber, out of getting into crypto. How’s that going? What if, instead, we had focused on providing credible, pro-social community-based alternatives that addressed the things people thought they would get from those platforms?

He’s right that we can learn from the success of podcasting too.

Something I’ve been asking myself lately: what new things are possible when AI costs drop? I’ve been improving Micro.blog’s Logs page, and this morning updated it to rewrite confusing Hugo messages in more friendly language. It even localizes if your account isn’t set to English.

Love this. IndieWeb is punk:

Nobody’s waiting for permission to have a website. You don’t need a “content strategy.” You don’t need a niche. You need a place that’s yours, and the nerve to hit publish.

🎸

About halfway through Ride or Die season 1 and enjoying it. Hannah Waddingham and Octavia Spencer are great together. 📺

Skimming through some junk mail, always looking for things to unsubscribe from, and this is an actual email subject line from LinkedIn: “Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, is popular in your network”. No kidding! Algorithms losing the plot. 🤪