Om Malik blogs about the greatest invention of his lifetime, the internet:

Like all great inventions of the past—the wheel, the steam engine, and the internal combustion engine—it has compressed time and distance. It is like a time machine. It has essentially made us question every premise.

Behind the scenes in our GitHub comments.

A beta is starting for Terry Godier’s feed reader Current. I love his thinking behind this, but I’m going to resist trying the beta so I don’t get distracted or influenced on building my own RSS thing.

If you look at the news blog, we have shipped new features or bug fixes nearly every day until the last couple of weeks. It’s been unusually quiet because so much is going on in separate branches that aren’t quite ready. Two big things coming: the RSS reader and a redesigned full-screen web editor.

Spurs in Dallas. 🏀

Waiting at the 45th street crossing.

Not sure I’ve ever seen Sam Altman as upset as in this long Twitter / X post:

Our most important principle for ads says that we won’t do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that.

I get his frustration because OpenAI is trying to avoid what is shown in Anthropic’s ads. But again, the problem is perception. Anthropic is making an argument that ads will have a corrupting influence on ChatGPT. Whether that happens or not almost doesn’t matter.

Jatan Mehta on exploring where to host his fediverse presence, from Mastodon to Ghost to Micro.blog. Whenever I read something like this, it reaffirms our decision to take a quieter approach to the social web. Less counting, less noise.

Logan blogging about IndiePub, in the same spirit as IndieWeb and POSSE but expanding to self-published books and other things too:

Now we’re facing something new, with the rise of AI-generated content, these platforms are becoming saturated with noise. Human authenticity is at a premium.

WordPress’s new Link Fixer is in some ways similar to the archiving features that we’ve had baked into Micro.blog for years. But I like their option to routinely fix broken links. I’ve been thinking maybe a report that makes it easier to do this, even if it’s not automatic.

Dave Rupert wants to see more writing about making things better:

It’s cheap and easy to complain and say “[Thing] is bad”, but it’s also free to share what you think would be better.

Good post. Complaining can sometimes be valuable, but also too often we target people instead of ideas and institutions, achieving nothing. The constant negativity can be overwhelming.

🚧

There’s a fun discussion on today’s Hard Fork about Moltbook. We live in an increasingly bizarre world. I don’t want slop to overwhelm human-centered social networks, but I’m also mostly fine with AI-only networks like Sora or Moltbot because it’s segregated.

Brett Terpstra blogs about his upcoming app BlogBook:

This is a new app I’m publishing as a complement to Marked 3. It generates a “Book” from WordPress, Micro.blog, or Ghost blogs.

Sounds great. It will generate a table of contents and can export in various formats including PDF and ePub.

This Anthropic post is pretty much what I would write too, as a reaction to ads coming in OpenAI. I actually do believe OpenAI when they say they won’t let ads influence answers, but people are going to think that anyway. People still think Instagram uses the phone’s microphone to listen randomly!

Doing the math on the Cosmere books, with Mistborn era 3 locked in for releases in 2028, 2029, and 2030, maybe we’ll see Stormlight book 10 around 2043. Joking / not joking with my daughter to read a few chapters at my graveside if I don’t make it. 🪦

I love this train station photo in the snow.

Forbes has a profile of Sam Altman with some interesting quotes from him and others:

Altman knows his history. His itch to release products quickly is informed by studying Xerox PARC, the legendary Silicon Valley research lab known for inventing the modern graphical user interface, laser printers and computer mouse, yet failing to commercialize any of them. “You have to have an economic engine in the cycle,” Altman says. “I think there’s probably a lot of great innovation that has never gotten out of the lab because someone didn’t do the work to just get it into people’s hands.”

Linking to a post about Apple from Matt Gemmell, Michael Tsai blogs:

At times, the company seems like a cargo cult, repeating mantras from a previous era without actually following them and applying the same strategies as before even though they no longer make sense.