Turquoise Coffee Stop. Neat little coffee shop in the very small town of Chillicothe, with a sort of museum inside that reflects the memorabilia and politics of its owners.

Sunrise at Copper Breaks State Park.

Old and new energy capture in Texas.

My plan for not losing my mind as we head into election day:

1. Travel this week.
2. Watch basketball instead of the news.
3. Call voters on election day.

🇺🇸

On the road this week. Stopped for a quick lunch and coffee at 8th Street Coffee House in Wichita Falls.

Bluesky comes up in the latest ActivityPub newsletter update from Ghost:

Another cool thing that happened last week was that we enabled a bridge to BlueSky — an alternative decentralized social network which doesn’t use ActivityPub, but instead uses its own alternative protocol.

I was confused on my first reading of this. They’ve enabled Brid.gy, not built anything specific for Ghost. Also, I’m sorry this is so nitpicky, but no one in the fediverse seems to be able to spell Bluesky correctly.

On the latest episode of Core Int, we talk about updates we might see to MacBooks, the recent funding and growth of Bluesky, and what it means to be rich.

At first I wasn’t going to cancel my Washington Post subscription… but I did. There’s not really a better way to send a message to Jeff Bezos that this was a bad call so close to the election. It’s not like a small company where you can send an email and have your voice heard. 🇺🇸

I voted today. Triple-checked my ballot. Still nervous but feels good to have the end of the election in sight. This is one for the history books. 🇺🇸

Buzz Mill Coffee. ☕️

From an article and discussion with the Humane founders, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, from Om Malik’s new site Crazy Stupid Tech:

“We had to stand up and accept the critique and feedback in front of our team, in front of the public, and just continue to push forward every single day,” Bongiorno said. “And it was really hard. Hard and painful. You’re right, it is really hard to get a second chance.”

I still think the Ai Pin was too ambitious for 1.0. I’d like to see a slimmed down version, no laser, just solve a couple small problems with voice.

Got a really nice response to our quick one-day sale, 25% off for a year if you upgrade to Micro.blog Premium or Micro.blog Family. I’m going to keep the sale for another 24 hours for folks in other time zones who missed it. 🏷️

Micro.blog will not endorse a candidate for president. But I will, because these are the kind of things I post on my blog. Kamala Harris, for the people. 🇺🇸

I don’t know what’s going on over at The Washington Post but the timing is terrible. We do not need any last-minute distractions. 📰

Ben Thompson’s interview with Marc Benioff is kind of wild. I had mostly ignored Salesforce until now. Worth a listen.

Not sure what to think about this video from Josh Miller about Arc not going anywhere. I just started using it a couple weeks ago! Confused messaging because now the app feels obsoleted, which I don’t think is their intention.

Sale! Today only, upgrade to the Micro.blog Premium or Family plan and get 25% off for the next year. Create up to 5 blogs, video hosting, and more. 🏷️

It’s odd how many developers in the fediverse don’t know how Bluesky works. I’ve made it my business to understand a little bit about all platforms, going back 30 years of building for the web. Product design is then finding the right way to put the pieces together.

OpenAI’s Orion model may be released before the end of the year, according to The Verge:

Unlike the release of OpenAI’s last two models, GPT-4o and o1, Orion won’t initially be released widely through ChatGPT. Instead, OpenAI is planning to grant access first to companies it works closely with in order for them to build their own products and features, according to a source familiar with the plan.

My first reading of this is that the model is too powerful to just let anyone use right now. But maybe it’s also too expensive. I wonder if it’ll be available from the API.

Added a help page to describe how configuring Bluesky handles in Micro.blog works. Super easy, almost nothing to do.

It’s probably not well known that when you enable Bluesky in Micro.blog, it also enables your blog domain name to be used as your Bluesky handle. In fact it’s so hidden a feature that I forgot if I had ever implemented this and had to double-check today.

Train crossing at Cherrywood.

We rolled out a new zoom for photos on the web. Thanks @vincent for working on this! It turned out really well. Here’s a quick demo video.

Last night from Mattie’s at Green Pastures.

As AI gets better at helping with coding, I think it’s going to feel similar to the productivity boost going from assembly language to Pascal or C. Or maybe from C to Ruby. Development becomes more about orchestrating lots of modules that AI handles the busywork implementation for.