I'm excited that Texas is in the playoffs, but only picking four teams is always going to leave someone out who should have a shot at it. College rankings have always felt subjective to me so I don't give it much thought. The Longhorns barely lost that game anyway. 🏈
La La Land Kind Cafe. ☕️
Starting to see “included in Premium” free audiobooks in Spotify. This is going to be great.
Went to the early IMAX screening for Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron tonight. Managed to avoid seeing any trailer, plot summary, or review, so everything was a surprise. Still thinking about it so won't say more for now. Subtitled, and I'd like to see the dubbed version later. 🍿
Apple Pay has made me lazy about credit cards and it finally came back to bite me. Drove to Dallas yesterday and forgot my wallet in Austin. Generally hasn't been a problem... restaurants, gas, movie, coffee, all fine. Until the hotel where they assume you're a criminal if you don't have an ID.
The future of Nostr might not actually be for microblogging but instead as a cross-platform generic sync API for any type of small data. I know this was baked into the original idea, but the more I think about it, the more it feels like a unique solution to several things.
Tweet Marker's whole purpose was for cross-platform, cross-app timeline sync. There was never anything like it because it's not actually a profitable idea on its own. But there are many apps that could benefit from something like this. Imagine note sync across Ulysses, iA Writer, Bear, and Obsidian.
Can't believe I'm still working on the book. Just a few final end-of-year updates. New excerpt:
Even the name itself and the bird branding are gone. The letter X feels like an appropriate placeholder for the platform’s grave. Here lies a dying platform. X marks the spot where it used to be.
Finished reading: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. Absolutely wonderful. 📚
Matt Haughey in a blog post about renting a Tesla:
I wish other EVs could be this good. I will never own a Tesla, but I can see the appeal now. It was easy to drive, even easier to recharge, and was quite comfortable and made every other car I’ve driven feel like a relic from a past era of personal travel.
As a side note, seems a trend where execs are becoming more public characters — with their random dumb thoughts posted online — at the same time that everything is becoming political. So now we buy products based on our values instead of quality. Sometimes good, sometimes taken too far.
I've been putting off an infrastructure upgrade because 💰, going to bring online another new server today. This would be a great time for everyone to upgrade to Micro.blog Premium. 🙂 Seriously though, you'll get a major new feature launching next month.
Made a little architecture diagram for Micro.blog that reflects the recent server upgrades. A couple simplifications but it's pretty close to how things work.
Beeper Mini looks like an impressive feat of reverse-engineering. Apple will surely try to break this in the future, but if doing so requires an iOS update for iMessage API tweaks, it may take years before they can realistically cut off Beeper along with very old iPhones.
Congrats to @cheesemaker and the Silverpine team for announcing the beta of Evergreen.ink, an interactive fiction authoring tool. Think: "choose your own adventure" stories. I've been helping with this behind the scenes too, and the upcoming iOS app... Really cool to see it come together.
I love these robots. We've seen more of them but it's not clear if they are actually going anywhere or just practicing for deliveries.
Watching a few clips from last night's GOP debate. Chris Christie still fighting the good fight against Trump when no one else will. From Christie's closing statement:
...picture in your mind election day. You'll all be heading to the polls to vote. And that is something Donald Trump will not be able to do. Because he will be convicted of felonies before then and his right to vote will be taken away.
🇺🇸
Interesting juxtaposition of releases today... The new Ivory with Mastodon hashtags support and the Threads update with hashtags for the first time, limited to one tag per post. Also major Mammoth release, with open source on the way.
Testing new in-progress features and everything is kind of working. Maybe at this point in my career I shouldn't be surprised when my code actually works, but it's still a nice feeling.
It's been a couple weeks since we got our first Roomba, so here's my review: it's great. Took a day for us to settle into how best to use it, what to pick up from the floor or block, and when to run it... Now it just does its thing every day. Surprisingly good with dog hair too.
Noticed load averages briefly jumping up to 10.0 so it's going to be that kind of day. There's always something to optimize! Looking okay now, though.
Threads launching in the EU next week. My earlier theory was they were waiting for ActivityPub (and so better account portability) before going live. Guess I was wrong.
Sometimes the choices we don’t mean to make end up perfect. When I was traveling this year my shoes fell apart and I stopped at a random shoe store in Boulder. They had one pair of shoes in my size, a brand I’d never heard of, bought them, and they are now some of my favorites. Wear them everyday.
Love developing for the web and learning how to do something new for the first time. Processing a ZIP file fully within JavaScript in the browser instead of server-side? Never really considered doing it but it works great.
I'm using ChatGPT more and more for coding help. Sometimes I don't fully trust the answer and double check with Google or Stack Overflow. Today the AI produced some code that I thought it must have completely hallucinated… Does this even work technically? But it ran perfectly.
Thinking about what Mosseri said introducing Threads search:
...having a comprehensive list of every post with a specific word in chronological order inevitably means spammers and other bad actors pummel the view with content by simply adding the relevant words or tags. And before you ask why we don't take down that bad content, understand there's a lot more content that people don't want to see than we can or should take down.
This is what we've always thought at Micro.blog too. Meta solves it with algorithmic timelines. We don't do that, so we've been admittedly slow to improve here.
Link previews or ads
Sometimes people ask for link preview cards in the Micro.blog timeline. Maybe eventually we'll add them, controlled with a preference. But so often they are in your face, cluttering the timeline, overshadowing perfectly good content. Here's yesterday's post on my blog, displayed as intended:
There's a subtle link on the text "a brand" because I thought people might be curious about the shoes. But that wasn't the point of the post. I almost didn't include the link at all.
And now here's how the same post looks on Mastodon:
What the...? Did I write a short post about serendipity, or did I post an ad for a shoe company?
(Now there is a secondary issue, especially on mobile, where inline links can be confusing or even abused with spam links. There are other ways to solve that.)
So much of social media feels like a show, where everyone is outraged or promoting their own content, the timeline itself just a collection of billboards along the highway, one after another getting your attention. I don't want that experience. Not having ads is a strength we should lean into.
Speaking of self-promotion... 🙂 There's a new Core Intuition out. On episode 579 we talked AI, Google Gemini, Apple's MLX, Beeper, iMessage, and all the tech and ethical implications of the above. Recorded before Beeper Mini broke yesterday, so we'll see how that shakes out.
Finished reading: Age of Legend by Michael J. Sullivan. Didn’t expect this one to end so suddenly because the last 15% left on Kindle was actually an excerpt from another book. 📚
