It's such a good feeling to have the Biden reelection campaign drama behind us. It was going to be a slog, and I'm sure Joe knew it. No rush to pick a VP for Kamala Harris. Let's take a deep breath. And Joe can focus on doing the job, and hopefully get a well-deserved break from the chaos too. 🇺🇸
Back down the rabbit hole of HTTP signatures + ActivityPub today. Fixed an issue, and reviewed the new community group draft. Don't feel great that my code mostly resembles the make friends and verify requests blog post from 6 years ago rather than newer docs.
Following politics sort of obsessively, senate races, the 2020 primaries, I thought I knew a few things about Kamala Harris, but I'm still learning. Just read this essay by her from Elle in 2019, on being a stepmom — "Momala".
Llama 3.1
Mark Zuckerberg writes about Llama 3.1 in a Threads post using images of text instead of a blog. He makes a point that he's mentioned in recent interviews too, about not wanting to be locked in by platform vendors like Apple:
One of my formative experiences has been building our services constrained by what Apple will let us build on their platforms. Between the way they tax developers, the arbitrary rules they apply, and all the product innovations they block from shipping, it's clear that Meta and many other companies would be freed up to build much better services for people if we could build the best versions of our products and competitors were not able to constrain what we could build. On a philosophical level, this is a major reason why I believe so strongly in building open ecosystems in Al and AR/VR for the next generation of computing.
I certainly have my gripes about Meta — I don't like ad-supported services and I still partially blame Facebook for exacerbating societal and political problems — but I do respect that Mark is good at his job. He's uniquely technical compared to most CEOs. He's the only founder left running his own company at the scale of Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Today's release of Llama 3.1 and Mark's general pitch about AI seems pretty good.
What would the world look like if he led a different company, one focused only on paid products and not ads? We'll never know, but I sometimes wonder about it.
There are some wild numbers in this report at Bloomberg about Apple's spending on TV+ content. Reaffirms my belief that Apple has lost their focus. Too much attention on services, sometimes to the detriment of core platforms, developers, and users.
I've tinkered with smaller Llama models, on my Mac and Linux servers, so I thought I'd try Llama 3.1. No surprise the 405-billion parameter model is huge, a 200+ GB download. But even the 70b model seems too much for my M3 with 48 GB RAM. Going to stick with cloud models for the foreseeable future.
Playing around with the new dataset from Overture Maps, a project started a couple years go between Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and others. I can download and query the data, but doesn't seem like it can really be used if you don't bring a lot of cash with you.
A great new theme for Micro.blog: Sumo by Matt Langford. There's a lot in here that is really well thought out.
Nice work from Apple on the web version of Maps. Native apps are great, but some apps really should be on the web, especially apps that you want to link into.
Federico Viticci on how wired EarPods are still great:
I don’t have to worry about battery life, pairing, or latency. Sure, there’s a wire, and there’s no noise cancelling when using them – but these are my “downtime earbuds” anyway, so I don’t care.
I find myself using my AirPods Pro less and less, actually. For some reason I misplace them when I don't misplace anything else. They're amazing, but there's always that brief moment when I question whether the wireless is actually working, and they still don't feel as comfortable to me as EarPods.
Set the presidential address to record while out tonight so we could watch it fully, without all the noise of news and social media. He hit it just right. Moving. “…one day sit behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office as president of the United States. But here I am.” Thank you, Joe Biden. 🇺🇸
Micro.blog 3.3 for Mac
Today we've released a new version of Micro.blog for macOS. This update adds two new features: import from Glass and better support for showing auto-generated summaries of bookmarked web pages. Most of the advanced bookmark features in Micro.blog — like summaries, highlights, and tags — require Micro.blog Premium.
Glass recently updated their photos export. The archive now includes all your photos and the date they were posted. It does not include the caption of the photo, so we can't import that to your blog yet.
When you download the Glass archive to your Mac and unzip it, you can select it in Micro.blog and get a preview of the photos that will be imported. Select a few photos or all of them. Micro.blog will copy the photos and also create blog posts referencing the photos, each with the correct posted date.
Another change in this version of Micro.blog is how bookmark summaries are handled. When you bookmark a web page using Micro.blog Premium, if you have the AI setting enabled, Micro.blog will summarize the web page text so you can see at a glance what the bookmark is about. There's a new menu item View → Bookmark Summaries to toggle this on and off.
Enjoy! Thanks for using Micro.blog.
Evan Prodromou in a post on Mastodon:
If you make a Fediverse explainer, try to show some real communities as the nodes in the network, rather than using software packages and their logos. Companies, local governments, universities, families, friend groups, individuals.
I think this is a good approach. Talking about platforms is also effective, though. If Threads could talk to TikTok, people would get that, even if it's not as distributed as showing communities. Ideally large platforms would be broken down, e.g. not just TikTok but BookTok.
Thinking more about Biden’s address last night and his legacy, it’s remarkable how much he accomplished. Investments in infrastructure and climate, progress on guns. All he had to do was get us through the pandemic and clean up a little of Trump’s mess. Feeling optimistic that we can build on this.
Big news for AltStore to be getting Fortnite. Also from Epic, they are pulling Fortnite from Samsung’s store to protest how sideloading is now disabled by default. And in a way, they’ve sort of been protesting the same thing on iOS for the last few years.
Not sure what to make of Sam Altman’s op-ed in The Washington Post. When he writes about model weights and export restrictions, I keep thinking of the Llama 3.1 release this week. Feels like more between the lines that I’m missing.
My initial take on SearchGPT (without using it yet) is that it should be a step forward for linking to and crediting sources in a way that chat assistants aren’t. It also looks much cleaner than Google, which is a mess of ads and uneven results now. Daniel and I talk about this on the next Core Int.
To be honest, the Ghost ActivityPub emails are both exciting and a little bit painful for me to read. Ghost is a popular platform and it is definitely a good thing to support an open standard. But also, I did most of this same work 6 years ago, without the jokes and pug artwork. Let's go already! 🤪
ActivityPub folks: I've posted FEP-eb22 to document supported features in NodeInfo, so that clients and servers can better communicate about what to show in a client UI. Would love your thoughts on it. There's some overlap with other FEPs but those seem stalled and not quite what I need.
Elena Rossini has a blog post walking through the compatibility between Mastodon and Pixelfed specifically, and also more generally with Mastodon API clients like Phanpy and Ivory:
The ultimate goal of The Future is Federated is to introduce the Fediverse to "regular people," encouraging them to try out one or more of its networks, allowing them to experience social media away from the walled gardens of Big Tech
Cheat sheet for emoji in my blog posts:
- đź“š: about books I'm reading
- 🇺🇸: politics
- 🙂: friendly reply, please don't take offense
- 🤪: usually gripes that are slightly exaggerated from how I really feel
Camping at Lake Somerville State Park. Lots of dense trees and bushes around each site, makes for nice privacy if anyone was actually here except me. Not pictured: the lake.
Looking forward to Rings of Power season 2. Looks like what I blogged during season 1 is still true. They've put a lot into this show.
Short walk to Somerville Lake right before it started to rain. So quiet this morning.
The couch jokes about JD Vance might be funny, but it's misinformation and not even based on anything true. Sorry to be a buzzkill. We can win without making shit up. In the long run, it hurts credibility on the real arguments against the GOP ticket. 🇺🇸
There’s a new Core Int out today! Daniel and I talk about CrowdStrike, travel, and SearchGPT.
This monolith command-line tool is neat, found via @eay. Downloads a web page and rewrites it to include all resources in a single file.
Experimenting with WebP. I still have mixed feelings about it. The files are smaller, but even introduced 14 years ago (!) my instinct on new formats is they won't be as universal as JPEG, MP3, and text, which will last forever.
Finished reading: Blood on Their Hands by Mandy Matney. Wasn’t planning to read this but got into it when @traci started the audiobook. Interesting behind-the-scenes story of Mandy reporting on (and hosting a podcast about) the Murdaughs. 📚
