IndieWeb
Good article in The New Yorker about water in Texas including the failure to build a seawater desalination plant. From a hearing in Corpus Christi with residents pushing back against it:
The hearing started around noon; by midnight, it was still under way, and three women in the audience, including a former mayoral candidate and a college professor, had been arrested for disorderly conduct.
Seems like a mistake not to be working on desalination. We’re going to need this eventually.
We had to run an errand out off 620, so stopped at the park at Mansfield Dam. Short video with a few clips.
From the Financial Times via The Verge:
According to the Financial Times, Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO as early as next year.
It’s time. Tim Cook should be proud of Apple’s success, but a few things like the App Store have gone in the wrong direction. Will be good to change things up.
Made a couple careless errors this morning. I probably need to step away from the computer. Sorry for the Micro.blog flakiness. Accidentally deployed some code before a huge db migration finished.
Interesting blog post from Tim Bray comparing a recent Bluesky suspension with the Mastodon moderation UI. Mastodon has done a lot of good, but one blind spot is moderator political bias. If someone is in a bubble because of their server, they may overlook hateful posts from people they agree with.
They lost by one point, but last night’s Spurs vs. Warriors game was still so good. Both loses this week took Steph Curry having a 45+ point game. Wemby is everywhere. Great basketball. 🏀
Nikita Prokopov blogs about the neediness of apps. I can especially relate to the notifications part:
Notifications are like email: to-do items that are forced on you by another party. Hey, it’s not my job to dismiss your notifications!
I still can’t wrap my head around the Apple developer news about so-called mini apps. Is this to capture 15% from web apps instead of the 0% Apple currently gets? Or is this an actual discount that will encourage more developers to turn native apps into mini apps?
Reviewing EU servers. Can’t believe it has been over half a year since we set those up. Adding a new server today. 🇪🇺
From earlier today, McKenna Park in Denton. 🌳
Finally got my local Android build setup working again. Had to nuke everything. This has been really holding me up on testing and bug fixes.
Now that I have two whole videos of me talking to the camera, time to make a Videos page for my blog. Having a place for anything is actually an encouragement to do more of that thing.
Neat cups at Communion Coffee with the Richardson water tower and skyline.
The new Nostr-based video app Devine also includes an archive of original Vine videos. Rabble spoke to TechCrunch about it:
“So basically, I’m like, can we do something that’s kind of nostalgic?” he told TechCrunch. “Can we do something that takes us back, that lets us see those old things, but also lets us see an era of social media where you could either have control of your algorithms, or you could choose who you follow, and it’s just your feed, and where you know that it’s a real person that recorded the video?”
Music Hall at Fair Park in Dallas, for The Outsiders. Great show. First time I had seen it. 🎭
Made a short video of driving up to Dallas today, with a stop in Waco.
Michael Tsai blogging about the Apple-funded study on DMA fallout:
Now Apple is acting as though it and end users are the only parties that matter, so by implication the money must have been wasted. There’s no consideration that maybe these funds helped some developers stay in business or invest more in the products, both of which would be beneficial to the platform as a whole (including Apple).
Oh cool, Jarrod Blundy’s blog post about Micro.blog Studio made it on Hacker News.
Surprised to read that Sonder has gone bankrupt, despite the Marriott partnership. It seemed like Sonder was a good balance halfway between hotel and Airbnb. I booked one last year in Arizona… although I got the date wrong and ended up having to stay somewhere else!
Thanks @jarrod for the kind words about Micro.blog Studio. His post actually does a better job of answering the “why” of video hosting than my own announcement post!
Good move from Google for privacy, building servers similar to Apple’s private cloud compute. From The Verge:
The compromise is to ship more difficult AI requests to a cloud platform, called Private AI Compute, which it describes as a “secure, fortified space” offering the same degree of security you’d expect from on-device processing. Sensitive data is available “only to you and no one else, not even Google.”
Another great game from Wemby. Unreal. 5 blocks, 5 assists, 6 3s, a bunch of points. This season is so much fun. 🏀
Tim Berners-Lee is the guest on the latest episode of Decoder:
You want to have control of your own destiny. We call it digital sovereignty. In the old days, the early days of the web, anybody used to be able to make a website. So that feeling of sovereignty as an individual being enabled and being a peer with all the other people on the web, that is what we are still fighting for, and in fact, we need to rebuild.
Starting to roll out the new Micro.blog Studio subscription plan. I blogged last week with an overview. I just created a help page with a few more technical details.
There will be tweaks and improvements as we go, based on feedback.
Cold morning in Austin. Lots to do. Working at the coffee shop but accidentally left my headphones at home! I know, life is hard. 🤪
Started watching: The Diplomat Season 3. Good first two episodes. Also great to see both Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford on the show, gives it even more of a West Wing vibe. 📺
Watching Edge of Tomorrow. Love this movie. We put it on randomly sometimes, have seen it dozens of times. Still holding out hope for a sequel. 🍿
I didn’t know about subway surfing. Tragic. From a story in The New Yorker:
We blame the digital platforms, and deride these kids as idiot stuntmen, addicts—even as the savviest adults among us exhibit a similar dependence on platforms to tell them who to be.