Nice post from Allan Pike examining how AI-enabled web browsers attempt to route queries to web search or answers. I like Dia but still prefer using a dedicated chat app when I actually want AI.

Had to redo my 2025 reading post because there was a comically wrong cached book cover. Guess it’s a reminder that I need to figure out a better way to preview Hugo shortcodes.

Parker Ortolani blogs five takes on 2025. On OpenAI:

OpenAI does its best work when it focuses on the models and the core app, which I fear it is getting slightly distracted away from.

I agree they are distracted, but I think the products are just as important as the models. Pulse could be built with any model, but only OpenAI has done it.

Parker also has a defense of Alan Dye:

iOS 7, watchOS, tvOS, the iPhone X experience, the Big Sur redesign, the Dynamic Island, visionOS, Liquid Glass and so much more have all defined his time at the company.

I was short of my goal for the year, but still read a lot of books that I enjoyed. Hope to read more in 2026! Just started Ship of Magic and I got Will of the Many for Christmas to read after that.

Spurs. 🏀

Lights on the San Antonio River Walk.

Universal driving directions: Go straight. Turn left or right whenever you need to.

Seriously, I’m trying to use turn-by-turn directions less often. I can’t decide if it introduces some subconscious extra stress with or without it.

King William River Park. 🌳

A few months ago I turned off fediverse publishing for my blog. Some of my posts still trickle out to the fediverse, via conversations, which is fine. I haven’t missed it. I still get replies on Micro.blog and from Bluesky. I’m going to turn the fediverse back on and see how things are in 2026. 👋

Screenshot teaser for something I’ve been working on over the holidays, for launch next year. I think this could be a big deal. Can’t share the details yet! Perfectly fits with the Micro.blog and IndieWeb principle of pluralism: multiple protocols, platforms, anything that makes the open web better.

I’ve been testing some new features with Ghost. I can see the appeal of it, it’s robust and beautiful, but personally I could never use Ghost for my own blog. I would feel trapped in its design. Trying to articulate part of this, I wrote a new help page: Why Micro.blog uses Markdown.

Following on my post about the fediverse for next year, I’m going to be doing some work to clean out never-used or spammy accounts in Micro.blog. Micro.blog is currently 6th most popular fediverse software for total users, but will fall off after more housekeeping.

Castle to Wemby dunk. 🏀

NetNewsWire is moving away from Slack:

The switch to Discourse means conversations will be preserved and they will be able to benefit people for years to come. And we get to use an open web app that’s also open source.

Speech to text has gotten so good that the difference between “pretty good” and “perfect” is noticeable. I only use Siri when in the car. Laughing at how it transcribed “Redis set” to “red sat”. (Also, how do people use Apple Notes without good versioning? Yikes.)

Cool write-up of building a custom Micro.blog posting frontend with Claude. Next year I wonder if these kind of built on-the-fly custom pieces of software will become more common.

Finished reading: Making History by K. J. Parker. Neat idea, I was pulled into the narration. Wonder if it could’ve been an even longer full novel. 📚

Coffee and breakfast in Louisiana. Quick trip to see family, then back to Texas. ☕️

Tim Chambers has his yearly predictions post for the open web. I enjoy these posts and I agree with most of his predictions for 2026. But there is one prediction that I think is too optimistic: The ActivityPub Fediverse (excluding Threads) will cross 15 million registered u...

Finished reading: The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst. A little bit cozy fantasy, a little bit romantasy. Fairly quick read, trying one last push to finish a couple books before the new year. 📚

Merry Christmas! This present combines two of my favorite things into one shirt. 🎄

Today’s photo challenge prompt is travel. Driving by the old air traffic control tower at Mueller.

Hope everyone is having a relaxing holiday week. What a crazy year! I love this time, as things slow down, anticipating all the possibilities of the new year to come. 🎄

Jason Snell blogging at Macworld about how much the Siri delay has affected other products:

Nothing exposes the imbalance between Apple’s hardware designers and its software organization than multiple products reportedly being finished months or years in advance, forced to idle because their software isn’t up to snuff.

Apple might’ve dug a bigger hole with Siri than we realize. While balancing on-device models and private cloud is good in theory, it has fragmented Siri across devices, making it all but impossible to roll out a new assistant to HomePods, for example. They are 2+ years behind.

If you’re following the Micro.blog holiday photo challenge, there will be a special “pin” to unlock. It should be active soon, and it won’t be too strict about participation… I’m going to make it so it only requires posting in about half the holiday prompt days. Not too late to catch up! 🎄

For today’s winter wonder photo challenge prompt grinch, at the Trail of Lights. 🎄

Wemby reading Hero of Ages in French on Instagram. 📚

In addition to the Micro.blog holiday photo challenge, we also have micro.christmas, a fun domain that gathers up recent posts about the holidays.

Manu Moreale reflecting on a Mastodon post that attempted to simplify the world into effectively good and bad people: I keep thinking about this tweet because to me it embodies one of the core issues I have with general social media discourse: the lack of depth. This fits ...

My default AI for coding help is GPT-5.2 in Codex on “high”. It is very good. But just when I think they’ve mostly solved hallucinations, ChatGPT gets a couple easy fact-checks wrong. As models get more efficient and cheaper, I expect more users to be routed to longer thinking to address this.