Grabbing coffee this morning before heading back to Austin, catching up on email. Still thinking about Taylor Swift last night. Incredible show. AT&T Stadium is massive... 70k people at the concert, times 3 nights here, so 210k people just for the Dallas / Fort Worth area.
2023-04-03
Deploying code to servers, on a train that has no wi-fi. Everything will be fine.
2023-04-03
Somewhere north of Meridian, TX. 🚂
Molly White has a good post covering Feedly's "protests" feature. But even ignoring all those problems, it didn't seem like this belonged in an RSS reader. Even minor features should support a product's main reason for existing, or its mission.
2023-04-04
Interesting to compare the main headlines from feed reader home pages:
Feedbin: "A nice place to read on the web" (Love it!)
Inoreader: "Take back control of your news feed" (Also good!)
Feedly: "Track insights across the web without having to read everything" (Enterprise-y!)
2023-04-04
Attempts to refill the bird feeders have resulted in squirrels taking over the backyard. They are relentless. I'm downstairs trying to work and keep getting distracted looking out the window.
2023-04-04
I'm sure a lot of Trump supporters are having a hard time processing what is going on with multiple potential charges against the former president. Doesn't seem fair, right? Why was he impeached twice and always in legal trouble? But it's simple: he was a corrupt president. 🇺🇸
2023-04-04
There's a lot going on with the S-GPT shortcut. Very clever to have trigger words in the speech that help integrate with system tasks. I also keep imagining the potential for this when voice assistants are powered by it.
2023-04-05
Did a first pass of rewriting all my Twitter API 1.1 code to 2.0. Halfway through I started to seriously question why I am bothering, given the limited lifespan of this code. It's straightforward to push through, except for one wrinkle: Twitter never finished implementing media upload in 2.0! Sigh.
2023-04-05
More post-Twitter plans
When I started building Micro.blog, I tried to limit dependencies on external platforms. The main connection is via cross-posting, which is an optional feature and not what I consider the core platform. So for example, I resisted integrating tweets into Micro.blog's timeline, even as many people asked for it.
We are seeing now with Twitter's implosion why that matters. I didn't think Twitter was going to last forever, but Elon Musk has greatly accelerated Twitter's fall beyond what I expected even when I was most pessimistic about massive, centralized platforms.
Even so, I find myself this week investing time into keeping Twitter cross-posting in Micro.blog going for a little longer. I've rewritten the API from version 1.1 to 2.0. Auth has to change to make that work, and an unfortunate side effect is that photo upload also has to change. I'm forced to simplify tweets so that they link back to your blog for photos.
Twitter's paid API rollout have been chaotic. Bridgy developer Ryan Barrett found that Bridgy's API access was shut off already, weeks ahead of the expected April 29th deadline:
The silver lining is, after all the chaos and destruction and flight to the fediverse, Twitter doesn’t feel nearly as important now as it did half a year ago.
Back in 2012 when I stopped using Twitter, I would never have guessed that 10+ years later I might be paying Twitter $100/month for the privilege of using the API. But I don't like shutting off a feature without warning. The compromise I've come up with is to continue supporting Twitter cross-posting for a limited time.
Here's where I see things going from here:
- After I finish testing the new Twitter code, I will deploy it to Micro.blog. This will happen within a few days.
- I will email every Micro.blog user who currently has Twitter cross-posting enabled, letting them know they will need to sign in to re-enable Twitter posting, and that the feature is winding down.
- We will update the documentation and provide some tips for moving away from Twitter.
- After 2-3 months, the Twitter feature will be turned off.
In a bit of "lemonade from lemons" good news, I'm working on something new for Twitter users that we can control. Tweet archive import! We had a version of this feature a few years ago in Micro.blog but had to disable it because it wasn't quite right. I'm taking those lessons and also my experience building Tweet Library to make something that will last.
2023-04-06
Blast from the past: video of my old iOS app Tweet Library. I forgot how much I loved this app. 📦
2023-04-06
Fascinating discussion on the latest The Talk Show with @gruber@mastodon.social and @danielpunkass about AI. What does it mean for humanity when more tasks can be automated and fewer people need traditional jobs? As a developer, a lot of my time isn't coding but thinking how something should work.
2023-04-06
Spurs vs. Blazers… in Austin! 🏀
The Fediverse Report continues their great summarization of recent hot topics. On trademarks, Eugen is certainly within his right to trademark Mastodon. I chose not to trademark Micro.blog because it's too close to microblog, which is a word everyone can use. I also prefer "social web" to fediverse.
2023-04-07
Wanted an illustration for an upcoming feature, and spent some time using DALL•E for the first time. Fascinating. Generated dozens of images, then drew some parts myself and put them together. I don't think these models should be trained with copyrighted works, but credit is murky to me now.
2023-04-08
Love that feeling when I realize that previous me had already written code to do exactly what I need today. There's a whole database table I forgot existed to solve this.
2023-04-08
Just posted a new Core Intuition. More on our favorite recent topics: the Twitter API shutdown and AI-generated images and text.
2023-04-09
ChatGPT continues to impress. I've started asking it programming questions just to save a few minutes here or there. For example, this question returned a detailed answer that was exactly correct:
I'm using Ruby and DataMapper with MySQL. How to get a list of unique years used in a database table "pages" with date field "posted_at"?
Went to see Air. Loved it. So hard to make dialog in a movie like this not sound fake, but they pulled it off. Felt very real. Best movie I’ve seen in years. 🏀
2023-04-09
