Expectations for WWDC haven't changed much, except this odd rumor from Mark Gurman:
One standout feature will bring generative AI to emojis. The company is developing software that can create custom emojis on the fly, based on what users are texting. That means you’ll suddenly have an all-new emoji for any occasion, beyond the catalog of options that Apple currently offers on the iPhone and other devices.
This sounds like emoji in the same way that a random audio file without an RSS feed is a podcast. The technical bits matter. Emoji is special because it's just text and portable everywhere.
Has social media now devolved back to the same tone as Twitter X? Outrage, memes, extremism. Thinking more about this post from Paul Robert Lloyd last week and whether Micro.blog needs a setting if someone wants to keep blogging but get a temporary break from the social web. It's all intertwined.
Molly White, previewing an upcoming blog post:
i firmly believe that if you're going to spend money on one thing online it should be a domain, particularly as online identity gets more fragmented. as platforms come and go, you can always find me there.
A little more about adding audio
Last week I blogged about adding audio narration to blog posts. For years we've also had full podcast hosting, which overlaps with this narration feature but is focused on podcast episodes and feeds. In this post I'll show how to add narration to an existing blog post, hopefully in the process revealing more about how this works in Micro.blog.
First, record yourself reading the blog post. There are a dozen ways to do this. Make sure to save the file as an MP3.
Upload the MP3 to Micro.blog. You can do this on the web in the Uploads section, or one of the native apps. All the apps also have some form of Copy HTML button to get an HTML audio tag for the upload. It will look something like this:
<audio src="…" controls="controls"> Before we paste this into the edited blog post, we actually want to hide the default audio player that would appear in web browsers. To do this, add a style attribute:
<audio src="…" controls="controls" style="display: none"> If the audio player is hidden, what's the point? Micro.blog sees the tag anyway. It also knows the duration of the audio, so it can make a guess as to whether this is a narrated version of the blog post. If it is, it skips some features such as adding a link to the transcript of the audio. (Because the blog post text you wrote is already the best transcript.)
Note that to turn a blog post into a podcast episode or narrated post, all that's needed is the audio tag. This is because Micro.blog natively thinks about posts as HTML. Photo posts have an img tag, audio posts have an audio tag, and so on. When Micro.blog publishes your blog post, it parses the HTML and sets up any metadata that is needed, for example to access from within Hugo.
When you write a new post and include audio at the time of posting, not later, Micro.blog handles managing the audio tag for you, including the CSS to hide posts that are audio narration. Later, we plan to improve the editing interface so this is more seamless too.
Missed last night's Celtics game, so a belated congrats to them. They're a great team. Mavs/Timberwolves tonight! No team has come back down 0-3 but eventually it'll probably happen, even if usually there's a good reason you lost the first few games. 🏀
“The name of the game was concealment, and all roads lead to the man who benefited the most, Donald Trump.” — prosecutor Joshua Steinglass 🇺🇸
Weak opinions, strongly held
Manu Moreale writes about the ratio between consuming content and creating it:
I believe people should consume less content and produce more. Finding an output for creativity is important. But it's unreasonable to expect people to stop consuming content and replace that consumption with creation because the ratio will always be inevitably skewed towards consumption.
It's a good post and while I've never tried to measure this ratio for myself, I like the way Manu blogs about it. I'm going to take that topic and expand it in a slightly different direction.
It also matters what we consume. If we read too much social media, what happens is that most of the consumption is headlines and opinions, not the facts behind the headlines. It's retweets, short quotes, and TikToks, not longer blog posts and stories.
It's usually obvious when reading all the takes on the internet who actually knows something and has formed their own opinion, and who has been influenced by whatever the current consensus is on social media. Starting with other peoples' opinions is like reading a newspaper's op-ed first and then the front page. Everything we read afterwards will be influenced by those opinions.
When I quit Twitter in 2012, I essentially threw away any audience I had built and started over. I could feel the loss of community. But I also began to notice that my ideas felt just a tiny bit more unique. Not earth-shatteringly original, but definitely my own.
Today I learned from slash pages by Robb Knight that there's a /chipotle to note your favorite Chipotle order. Love it. 🌯
After reading that the Gaza pier was damaged by weather, I read a bit more to try to understand how much aid was getting in before the war and recently. 50 trucks or 1000 tons is so opaque to non-experts like most of us. The pier was still a good idea and can work when repaired. Sort of like increased bandwidth and redundancy in a network, except instead of bytes it's getting food where it can save lives even when some channels are disrupted.
Helpful post from The Fediverse Report about Farcaster and they're wild $1 billion valuable. They're as valuable as Instagram when bought by Facebook, really? Some neat ideas buried in there, like the frame mini apps, but I'm having trouble seeing where this goes.
My cross-posting to Threads has been sporadic. Decided last week to pause it until the API is ready, and might not even continue after that. I post multiple times a day to my blog.
MarsEdit 5.2 is out with a whole bunch of improvements, including a couple for Micro.blog. Congrats @danielpunkass! The duplicate post feature reminds me of classic Mac "stationary" documents... which I just noticed is still in the Finder.
On this day 16 years ago, Daniel and I released the first episode of Core Intuition. So many things have changed since then. Listening to episode 1 is like going back in a time machine, to weeks before WWDC, on the verge of the App Store launching, a snapshot of the Mac developer community. 🎂
Now we wait for the jury. Thinking about how I will react to the verdict... Clearly there is evidence to convict Trump. But the jury could second-guess their judgement because he's a former president. The trial was fair and thorough. Whatever those dozen New Yorkers decide, we have to be good with. 🇺🇸
Really good Stratechery article today about how AI fits in the various big tech company stacks. On Microsoft:
Then, one month later, OpenAI nearly imploded and Microsoft had to face the reality that it is exceptionally risky to pin your strategy on integrating with a partner you don’t control; much of the company’s rhetoric — including the Nadella quote I opened this Article with — and actions since then has been focused on abstracting models away…
How models improve may also affect Apple's on-device strategy. Having the best models assumes some level of modularity, in the cloud, for now.
When my car repairs cost thousands of dollars, I really stick it to them by making sure to get free coffee at their cafe. 🤪
Podcast hosting for $5
Six years ago, we launched our $10/month plan with podcast hosting. Since then we've added several big features to the plan, which is now called Micro.blog Premium:
- Create up to 5 blogs, each with its own domain or subdomain
- Email newsletters, to send automatically whenever you blog
- Bookmark web pages, with archiving and content summaries
- Make highlights in web pages, to search or blog about
- Tags for bookmarks
- Notes and journals, plus our companion app Strata
- Share short videos
Today, I want to bring the podcast feature to more people, so we're moving it down to the standard $5/month plan. The new audio narration for posts and podcast feeds remind me of how much fun it can be to have your own blog, to experiment and try new forms of content at your own space on the web. Let's do more of it.
As part of the podcast pricing decrease, everyone also now gets this little segment control for filtering and searching uploads on the web:
Had an idea to expand my about page, which before was just a few snippets of text and links, to make it more of a story of how I've gotten to where I am today for people who don't know me. It's not complete, but it hits the big milestones.
Working on the Threads API and remembering what a pain it is to deal with Meta's developer dashboard and approvals... Sigh.
No matter what happens, can we give Eric Trump some credit for actually being there for his dad? Eric gets made fun of so often, but there he is.
No one is above the law. Trump guilty on all charges. A monumental moment for the country. 🇺🇸
"While this defendant may be unlike any other in American history, we arrived at this trial — and ultimately today at this verdict — in the same manner as every other case that comes through the courtroom doors: by following the facts, and the law, and doing so without fear or favor." — Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg 🇺🇸
Had some fun with the audio narration for this post. 🇺🇸
A day after the guilty verdict, seeing people worry about polls and whether this will change anything. It will, even if just a little. Who wins the election is a separate question. But doing the right thing always matters. 🇺🇸
Just posted a new Core Intuition, episode 601. We talk about the audio narration feature in Micro.blog, the MarsEdit 5.2 release, and then some thoughts on whether WWDC should have a live component again.
Listening to Trump's rambling speech today, at first I was laughing at the blatant lies and ridiculous statements... But then it became sobering, he's so dangerous. If he's reelected, we'll have essentially lost 12+ years to this chaos because he will not shut up even when he's lost.
From The Information:
In mid-2023, some employees of Apple’s system intelligence and machine learning team, which implements features like computer vision, text analysis and natural language in Apple’s software products, met with Altman and other members of OpenAI. While it’s not clear what they discussed, that same year Apple signed a deal with OpenAI to give Apple employees access to the startup’s conversational AI through application programming interfaces, or APIs, for internal tests.
If they were experimenting with the API a full year ago, we might see more at WWDC than I was expecting.
Apple Notes priorities
In a blog post about Journal, John Gruber makes a detour to highlight the lack of full import and export in Apple Notes:
I worry that import and export aren’t priorities for Apple. Apple Notes can import RTF and plain text files, but its only option for exporting is, bizarrely, PDF — which is a file format Notes can’t import. A good system for import/export would allow for full fidelity round-tripping. You should be able to export to a file or archive format that Notes can also import, without losing any formatting, metadata, or image attachments. Notes doesn’t even try.
That's a no-go for me. I'm now using Micro.blog for notes, and I wouldn't even consider anything without Markdown import and export. Of course Apple isn't going anywhere and I expect Notes to be supported essentially forever in some form, but iCloud sync is opaque. If there's ever a hiccup, I want a backup of the actual plain text files.
Just some clouds.
Ben Thompson’s interview with Casey Handmer of Terraform pretty much blew my mind. Smart, optimistic. I suddenly have the urge to go buy some solar panels.
Left late from home today, but still arrived at Caprock Canyons State Park before dark. Not pictured, there was a band playing at the visitors center, a nice welcome.
Woke to slight rain. Really bad visibility on the small Texas highway meandering back to the interstate, probably couldn't see more than 50 feet. Along the side of the road, spaced rows of hay bales fading off into the mist.
Finished reading: Slow Productivity by Cal Newport. Some good ideas in this, formalizing what we often have an instinct about with our work day but maybe haven’t put into practice. 📚
Traffic completely stopped on I-40 earlier today because of road work, and I had a view from a side street of this ridiculous line of 18-wheelers stretching seemingly forever. Hardly any normal cars, just trucks. Seemed especially inefficient as a freight train went by.
