Manton Reece

Vandalism at the Apple Store for climate change. While I’m very disappointed with Tim Cook’s support for Trump, I’m filing this one under “we attack our friends because our true enemies won’t listen”. Apple is more environmentally conscious than any other big tech company.

→ 2:00 PM, Jul 9
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Linda Yaccarino steps down as CEO of Twitter / X. No hint of ill will in her goodbye tweet, but Grok losing its mind this week probably wasn’t the ideal backdrop for a graceful exit. I can only imagine how frustrating this role was with Elon Musk micromanaging it.

→ 10:38 AM, Jul 9
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Stephen Hackett blogs about FireWire’s history and importance. It reminds me that I first used FireWire with a third-party PCI card, right before Macs had FireWire… or before I could afford a new Mac? Doing hobby animation and video editing, I used it with a MiniDV deck, and then from that to VHS.

→ 9:28 AM, Jul 9
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Usually I avoid quoting something from the end of an article, but this line is a great summary from John Gruber’s latest on Daring Fireball about Jeff Williams retiring:

Six years after Jony Ive’s departure, today’s announcements leave it less clear than ever whose taste, ultimately, is steering the work of the company into the future.

→ 9:19 AM, Jul 9
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Good rundown today by Ben Thompson on Apple’s dilemma of whether to outsource a next generation Siri to OpenAI or Anthropic. I’m curious about private cloud compute. Will they limit it to only Apple chips, or port the private cloud to architectures that are already running bigger frontier models?

→ 8:24 AM, Jul 9
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Wonder if there’s any chance the lack of FireWire in macOS Tahoe is a bug or temporary limitation for the beta. I still have some old MiniDV tapes that I haven’t copied, and that is going to be much harder over time if FireWire goes away.

→ 5:52 PM, Jul 8
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An update on Mastodon quote posts

With Mastodon now rolling out phase one of their quote posts plan, I’ve reviewed my own blog post from February on this. My opinion hasn’t changed. I’ll make sure Micro.blog displays quote posts nicely when Mastodon finishes phase two, in the upcoming Mastodon 4.5 release.

I’ll also be watching what the real-word consequence will be for letting Mastodon users “withdraw” consent for a quoted post. It will probably be fine, but if it becomes commonplace, there’s a chance that more people will resort to using screenshots of quotes, because those can’t be withdrawn. If that happens, maybe the good intentions for this feature will have backfired.

That risk is small, though. There’s just much less friction in clicking a repost button. Most people will do what’s easiest.

While I don’t currently have plans for a repost button in Micro.blog, it’s worth noting that third-party clients are free to build their own interface for this. That’s exactly what developer Greg Morris did with Micro Social. It has a reblog menu option that creates an editable <blockquote> for you.

→ 1:51 PM, Jul 8
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Improving GitHub backup for blogs
For the last couple of days I’ve been rewriting Micro.blog’s GitHub backup feature. It’s looking good, and sets the foundation for doing much more in the future. The backup will also now run automatically every day instead of once a week!

What’s this feature about? Here’s an example of how I use it for my blog.

Click on Design, you’ll see a “GitHub repository” field. I first went to GitHub and created a new public repository called “manton.org”. It can be called anything. Make sure to click the “initialize this repo with a README” checkbox so the repo is ready for Micro.blog to use.

GitHub might feel a little technical and overwhelming, but don’t let it scare you off. You don’t need any programming knowledge whatsoever to use this. It’s effectively just a free, external archive of files, supported by a company that isn’t going away.

Now back on Design, enter the repository name. Micro.blog will redirect you over to GitHub to approve access to your account. That’s it! From now on, about once a day, if you’ve added any new blog posts or photos to your blog, Micro.blog will commit and push them up to GitHub in these files:
- index.html — not just your home page, this includes every blog post with Microformats markup
- feed.json — also includes your whole blog in JSON Feed format
- uploads — a folder with all your photos, videos, podcasts, and other files
This structure follows the Blog Archive Format.

The old implementation of this only used the GitHub API. The new version does still depend on GitHub for signing in, but most of the plumbing has been rewritten with standard Git commands, meaning we can adapt it for other services like GitLab or Codeberg in the future. It also more efficiently wraps up commits into batches of 10 files each to simplify large pushes.

There’s also a change in whether files are ever deleted from a repository. Now if you delete an upload, like a photo, Micro.blog will also delete that file on GitHub.

I’m always sad to see people leave Micro.blog if they choose to take their files elsewhere, but I am not sad when everyone has good backups of their blog. We have exports in multiple formats, an open API for building tools, automattic ping to the Internet Archive, and this updated GitHub backup. Happy blogging!
→ 12:16 PM, Jul 8
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Listening to Quiet Town by the Killers on repeat this morning. Great song. Haunting. When I travel, I sometimes think about the disconnect between rural and urban America, and what it’s cost us politically too.

→ 11:13 AM, Jul 8
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Superficially, maybe it’s a win for Meta to have hired all these researchers away from Anthropic, OpenAI, and even Apple. I’m not so sure. The money is nice, but I expect most people doubt that Mark Zuckerberg cares deeply about AGI. Also it’ll take time for a team to gel after such disruption.

→ 10:38 AM, Jul 8
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Chance Miller at 9to5Mac on Apple’s EU changes:

Apple says that it was the EU who dictated which features should be included in which tier. For example, the EU mandated that Apple move app discovery features to the second tier.

Something isn’t adding up here. If the EU is dictating anything, it should be a 0% fee tier in addition to the standard App Store paid tier. Why would the EU be moving features to the second tier? Either Apple isn’t communicating the full story, or negotiations between Apple and the EU are very dysfunctional.

→ 9:28 PM, Jul 7
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Were we wrong?

All the President’s Men is a great movie. Sometimes I think about one particular line from it. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are feeling so much pressure to get the story right, attacked by the Nixon administration and questioned inside the Washington Post, because of all the political ramifications of publishing an explosive story that could either bring down the presidency or destroy the paper’s reputation.

Here’s the scene:

Deep Throat: You’ve done worse than let Haldeman slip away. You’ve got people feeling sorry for him. I didn’t think that was possible. In a conspiracy like this, you build from the outer edges and you go step by step. If you shoot too high and miss, everybody feels more secure. You’ve put the investigation back months.

Bob Woodward: Yes, we know that. And if we’re wrong, we’re resigning. Were we wrong?

My blog posts and podcasts are by comparison very low stakes. No one is going to get fired. No one in the tech world is going to shift tactics because of what I wrote.

And yet I come back to that movie. Maybe I wrote something that people don’t like. Okay, but was I wrong? And am I doing what I believe is right even when it’s hard to articulate to folks whose gut feeling is to disagree? Often the posts that seem the most controversial are also the ones that are proven right, in time.

There are many great bloggers who are better writers than I am. But I’m not careless. If I wrote an essay for this blog, and probably edited it many times, it’s very likely something I put thought into and will stand by.

I don’t delete posts. They are a snapshot of how I was thinking about a topic. Sometimes the world moves on and the old posts are no longer relevant. Sometimes the world moves closer and the old posts are gold.

→ 4:26 PM, Jul 7
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I haven’t looked into the full context behind the quote in this post from @jasraj, but I do love this phrase:

when hatred presents itself as virtue, it becomes seductive

Sadly there are variations of this across ideologies. When fighting for what’s right steps over the line to extreme characterization of others, vilifying them. As regex fans know, now we’ve got two problems: the hatred in others and the hatred in ourselves.

→ 11:30 AM, Jul 7
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Ben Thompson’s back from the summer break with an excellent rundown on AI and fair use. In a nutshell, LLMs are transformative and it’s so difficult to prove they affect an existing work or even a market, fair use for training will likely stand. If we don’t want that, there will have to be new laws.

→ 10:59 AM, Jul 7
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Congrats to Stephen Hackett on 10 years indie! He’s written a great post with some of the history and priorities he brings to his work. Also love this part on the downsides:

Publishing endlessly can lead to burnout. Social media can poison your opinions. The Internet can be unforgiving when it comes to mistakes. Working virtually can become lonely. Relevance can fade.

That “poison” line is so true. When all you read is everyone else’s hot takes and a community’s growing consensus, it’s harder to have original, possibly more nuanced thoughts on popular topics.

→ 10:14 AM, Jul 7
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This blog post from Robert Birming perfectly captures what Micro.blog is trying to do by leaving some features out.

→ 10:00 AM, Jul 7
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“I know how to use a semicolon, ChatGPT. Don’t come for me.” 🤣 — from the Book Riot podcast

→ 9:29 AM, Jul 7
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I used to really love the em dash. Now that ChatGPT also loves it, I’m using it a little less often. The bar is higher for when I feel like it really belongs.

→ 8:16 AM, Jul 7
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Finished watching Long Way Home. I love these travel series with Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman. The older ones are great too.

→ 6:04 PM, Jul 6
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Fixed a couple bugs this morning and replied to a few emails. I think this is going to be a busy week. Also if anyone on Bluesky has feedback on my proposal for AT Protocol embeds, please let me know. I’ll be moving forward with it soon.

→ 1:22 PM, Jul 6
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Dave Winer:

We’ve got all these philosophically compatible platforms that are technologically unable to work with each other. But what if they all were really on the web? What could we build then? Everything.

→ 9:30 AM, Jul 6
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I’ve missed a lot of really good work on Micro.blog plug-ins from the community recently. Just a few examples: Postlist has new options for embedding lists of blog posts, Open External Links makes links in blog posts open in a new tab, and Privacy-Friendly Google Maps is a shortcode for maps.

→ 8:58 AM, Jul 6
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Just noticed this nice styling that @birming has for “notes” on his blog, for example this post. Love how they stand out when on the home page along with full-length blog posts. I assume he’s using a custom Micro.blog theme with slightly different CSS based on the category.

→ 8:47 AM, Jul 6
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Just released the latest version of Micro.blog for Android, version 2.5.2. Full release notes over on the help forums. This has a bunch of fixes, UI tweaks, and better automatic accessibility text for photos.

→ 6:58 PM, Jul 5
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Got sidetracked looking at my old tweets, which years ago I had imported to my blog with Micro.blog. I left Twitter in 2012. Then later I cross-posted some blog posts to a separate account. The last blog post there was 2022, a post about Elon’s plans for Twitter. Holds up really well.

→ 6:48 PM, Jul 5
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