Rest stop in Arizona, near Texas Canyon.
Finished reading: Age of War by Michael J. Sullivan. Another good audiobook to finish on the road. Been working through this for a little while. đź“š
Finished reading: Divergent by Veronica Roth. Wasn’t planning on getting this but it was on Libby’s no-wait list when I was queuing up books for my trip. Never saw the movie. 📚
CNN's web site is usually a mix of news headlines and dumb clickbait, but sometimes it's exactly what you need to start the day. Love this story about a pilot and his daughter. I'm a sucker for this style of photos separated by decades.
Very reasonable take by Jason Snell about AI assistants. Siri needs to be completely gutted and rebuilt with generative AI. This will take, what, 2-3 years? The question is who can build a compelling device ("pin" or otherwise) in the meantime, before Apple gets there.
Some really good thoughts here from Chuck Grimmett about preserving web sites after our death. I've also been thinking about this. There's a little in my book about it. Hope to have more concrete plans by the end of the year.
Going to record a new @coreint today. It's been a while… Traveling and getting sick didn't help the schedule.
Uncertain future for Tumblr
Kudos to Matt Mullenweg for making public the internal memo about the future of Tumblr. It seems they'll pivot to a smaller team, acknowledging that maybe Tumblr can't be competitive with other massive social networks, but could do just fine as a more niche platform:
We are shifting from the mode of “surging” on Tumblr with tons of people to get it to exciting growth, to working on how we can run Tumblr in the most smooth and efficient manner. Pretty amazing things in the social and messaging space have been accomplished with small teams, so I’m actually quite curious to see a smaller and more focused Tumblr’s performance in 2024.
I'm a little confused about what Tumblr has been up to in the four years since the acquisition. Automattic had ambitious plans both for ActivityPub and to rebuild the foundation of Tumblr on WordPress. But there are a lot of smaller things they could do, like add support for IndieWeb standards Micropub and Webmention, simple protocols that are straightforward to implement.
Even so, Automattic is a great home for Tumblr. Social networks come and go, but I expect Tumblr to be with us in some form for years. It still has a lot of potential.
Great news that Apple will be adopting RCS, via 512 Pixels. iMessage is the biggest lock-in to Apple platforms for me. RCS won't change that overnight, but if it makes Android interoperability better, I'm for it.
Good news from Bluesky that a public web interface is coming this month. They've had a "staging" web app, but it required signing in. Also:
As a reminder, Bluesky is a public social network, so your posts, likes, etc. have always been publicly accessible through the API. We designed Bluesky with the openness of the internet in mind, and you can think of your profile as a blog on the internet.
In the future, it will be easier to have actual blogs that seamlessly act as ActivityPub and AT Protocol profiles. We're halfway there with Micro.blog already.
Very positive review of Coyote vs. Acme over at Cartoon Brew. This is the film that was finished but cancelled anyway as a tax write-off. Did the Warner CEO even watch it? When money comes before art, you've lost your way. (This is even worse than when Warner botched the marketing for Iron Giant.)
Lillihub is a new Micro.blog web client by @heyloura! It's got a bunch of features and a really unique style compared to the other Micro.blog apps. Check it out if you're looking for something new or just want to try a different browsing experience.
Amazing that we're only a month and a half away from Steamboat Willie being in the public domain. Hoping animators experiment with remixing it, within the limits of copyright trademark. I think there's a lot you could do. Probably won't have time myself but maybe one day.
Friday bombshell, Sam Altman is gone from OpenAI:
Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.
Didn't see even a hint that something like this might happen. Pretty shocking.
I've been quite happy with OpenAI as a developer. We use their API to transcribe podcasts hosted on Micro.blog. It's cheap enough that we can include the feature for everyone at no extra charge. I'll admit I don't know much about Sam Altman beyond the superficial, though. Ready for leaks.
The latest Core Intuition has everything about my road trip, getting COVID, seeing U2 in Vegas, and then back to blog-related topics with the state of Tumblr under Automattic's ownership.
Om Malik on the OpenAI news:
…the big question is what this really means in the long term for the forward momentum of artificial intelligence and its impact on the broader technology ecosystem. While it might sound pessimistic, the past 24 hours have exposed a massive and obvious foundational risk in placing all bets on a single entity.
Wanted to make my blog Creative Commons licensed again, so I created a little Micro.blog plug-in that adds a rel="license" tag. Defaults to "CC BY" but can be changed to another license in the settings. Not sure yet how licenses should interact with our future AI overlords, though, if at all.
Catching up this morning on all the OpenAI and Microsoft news. Hard to overstate how dramatic a weekend this was for the tech world. As a (small) OpenAI customer, I'm not sure where this leaves me. One thing is clear: Satya Nadella is a really impactful CEO. He turned a crisis into a triumph.
