Lots of good quotes from Alex Heath reporting on a dinner with OpenAI execs and others. Sam Altman:
I do think people will go to fewer websites. I think people will care more about human-crafted content than ever. My directional bet would be that human-created, human-endorsed, human-curated content all goes up in value dramatically.
This mirrors something I’ve blogged about. In a time of abundant AI slop, we will seek out human-created content and to feel a connection with other creators.
I never want ads in the software I use to get things done, so this interview with Nick Turley of OpenAI was reassuring. Between what he said and what Sam Altman has said, their company seems very aware of aligning their business with users’ needs. Something Meta will never be able to get right.
Safari on iOS 26 is bugging me enough — especially the extra taps for tab bar items like closing a tab — that I’m switching over to Kagi’s Orion for a little while. I’ve been meaning to try it.
Jason Snell on how long it’s taken for Apple to bring back the blood oxygen feature:
I’m still surprised that it’s gone this long and this far, but Apple seems to be a company that will leave no legal stone unturned and will fight to the end when it feels it’s in the right.
So true. It feels like increasingly they aren’t right, but I’m on Apple’s side for this one, because it was holding back a legitimate health feature.
I made a change today that seemed right, but something about it was nagging at the back of my head. So before I deployed it, I asked our robot overlords… It correctly pointed out that I had forgotten the old code worked that way for a reason! A snippet from its analysis:
Original behavior likely intentional: archive_site previously only ran prepare_plugins(…, full_themes: false) so “small” plugins could contribute assets/includes, but it avoided full theme overrides and didn’t layer the user’s theme on top of “archive”.
As part of fixing the Mac app on Sequoia, I’ve switched builds over to Xcode Cloud. Gotta admit, it’s better than my old workflow. Maybe one day I’ll automate the appcast RSS feed. (I’ve been editing it by hand since 1.0 shipped in 2017.)
Great news for Apple Watch fans: blood oxygen feature coming back to recent watches. Sounds like they’ve worked around the patent by doing more processing on the iPhone.
I always try to avoid new preferences in Micro.blog because it can add a lot of clutter to the UI. Harder to use, harder to maintain. But adding better date and time formats this week, might be unavoidable. The “just do the right thing” defaults only get us about halfway there.
Long-time users of Micro.blog won’t believe this… We are rolling out 24-hour time and more localized date formats today, many years after it was first requested. Visit the Micro.blog timeline on the web and it should detect your settings, then start applying them everywhere.
Nice reminder from @jim that Micro.blog t-shirts are available on Cotton Bureau. I think these look really good.
Working on a fix to the latest Micro.blog crashing on Sequoia. This is what I get for developing with the latest macOS beta… Apple changed something.
I always like reading Cal Newport’s essays. In his latest for The New Yorker, he pulls us back a little from the AI scaling hype.
John Gruber blogging about the Perplexity stunt to buy Chrome:
I think what’s happening is that the LLM chatbot field is maturing (exemplified by OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT 5 last week), and Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas is getting increasingly desperate.
Unless Apple does somehow acquire Perplexity, I doubt Perplexity is going to succeed in the long run. Some people think the AI bubble will pop, bringing down all of these companies. But OpenAI and Anthropic are here to stay. The thing about bubbles… Webvan didn’t make it out of the dot-com bubble, but we all order groceries online now.
Elon Must complaining about Apple not featuring his apps. But as Stephen Hackett points out, if anything Apple should be demoting Grok even more:
Currently, the Grok app has a 12+ age rating. Given the sexual content that is so easily accessible through the chatbot, that sure seems low to me.
Really happy with this change we rolled out today for the Micro.blog Family subscription plan:
Micro.blog Family now allows you to transfer “ownership” of a blog to someone else in your family (or small team). So you can manage payment for up to 5 blogs, but another member can post to their own blog and control the blog’s settings.
Micro.blog News https://news.micro.blog/2025/08/12/microblog-family-now-allows-you.html
Under the “People” section, there’s a new “Make Owner” button for each member of the blog. This makes the Family plan more flexible for a variety of setups.
Cards theme now updated with support for the new category intro text we introduced in Micro.blog this week.
Installed the iOS 26 beta. Liquid Glass is much weirder and more bubbly on iOS than on macOS. Don’t feel too strongly about it except that old and new apps now feel like they are from different operating systems.
Flowers.
Maurice Parker blogs that his outliner Zavala will always be free. I also think there’s a good parallel in here to what people might do if they didn’t have to work as much. They would still do something! Creating or helping people will always be rewarding.
Reddit blocking the Internet Archive is another step back for the open web, but maybe not too surprising after they shut down API access last year.
…we’re limiting some of their access to Reddit data to protect redditors.
Protect users, or protect Reddit monetizing user data by selling it to AI companies?
Thanks @jim for the quick update to the mnml theme for Micro.blog, adding support for the category intro text feature. I’ve updated a couple more plug-ins (like Marfa and Alpine) and others will be updated later.
GitHub CEO resigns to go back to doing his own thing:
…my startup roots have begun tugging on me and I’ve decided to leave GitHub to become a founder again. GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon. I’ll be staying through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition and am leaving with a deep sense of pride in everything we’ve built as a remote-first organization spread around the world.
GitHub is a unique product that deserves to be run independently. But also, I’m not too worried about this change.
Listening to Decoder with Notion CEO Ivan Zhao. Stunning to me that Notion has 900+ employees. I can’t even imagine what I would do that many people. Wouldn’t mind 9 employees for Micro.blog, though.
Kev Quirk has gone back and forth between Micro.blog and Mastodon, now back on Micro.blog. It really can’t be overstated how great it is to move followers between platforms. One of the most important features of the fediverse.
Parker Ortolani blogs some initial thoughts about GPT-5:
I’ve been saying for about a year now that I believe the future of computing is software on demand. GPT-5 might just have made that a reality. It’s certainly at least the first glance at a future where that’s the case.
I’m not completely bought into this vision, where apps and UIs can be adapted on the fly, but I wouldn’t rule it out either. The screenshots from Parker are super impressive.
Thinking about how I use AI for coding, I prefer to automate a lot of the JavaScript work, more than HTML or CSS. Feels right to have as much control over anything that touches the design. It’s hard to imagine a world where I’m not going to want to tweak the UI.
This is fun: The Bluesky Dictionary, tracking when all the words in the English dictionary have been mentioned in a Bluesky post. Currently about halfway there.
Meandering research for something new led me to Bashō, and this form of poetry I had never heard of before:
Around 1682, Bashō began the months-long journeys on foot that would become the material for a new poetic form he created, called haibun. Haibun is a hybrid form alternating fragments of prose and haiku to trace a journey. Haibun imagery follows two paths: the external images observed en route, and the internal images that move through the traveler’s mind during the journey.