Between killing third-party clients and now only allowing Google indexing, Reddit has withdrawn from the open web in a pretty significant way. Not sure what the impact of this will be. Feels almost Facebook-like, much more of a silo than before.
We're working on a few tweaks to Epilogue this week. Just merged in a change that my son worked on. 🙂 If you've never heard of the app before, it's a mashup of blogs and tracking books, like Goodreads... I recorded a video about it last year that still covers most of the major features.
I've been testing the beta of Tapestry and it's really starting to show the promise of a unified timeline across multiple services. There's even an Instagram connector from @sod to view Instagram profiles alongside Micro.blog feeds, Mastodon, and other blogs.
Thought about installing the iOS 18.1 beta today but caught myself, remembering AI won’t work on my iPhone 14 Pro. I keep forgetting because my phone still feels new.
Miss the days when you could have a $199 iPod Touch around for testing betas and other things. Getting a device to test Apple Intelligence on iOS would set me back $600 (iPad Air) or $1000 (iPhone 15 Pro). Brand new iPad Mini, regular iPad, and non-pro iPhone 15 can't run it.
Apple's strategy with on-device models is going to take 2-3 years to play out. Meanwhile everyone just uses ChatGPT.
Enjoying watching the Olympics. Some live, some delayed. Still fun even if I’ve already heard a little about the outcome.
Belatedly realizing that Reddit's robots.txt change means that Micro.blog's bookmark feature now can't archive a copy of pages, because we check robots.txt. This is the kind of trickle down effect when a site withdraws from the open web, it hurts other services and incentivizes breaking conventions.
Friend, an AI companion
There's an interview from David Pierce at The Verge with Friend founder Avi Schiffmann. Friend is an AI device companion that is trying to make you less lonely, not solve any productivity problems.
Here are my random initial thoughts about it.
It's too easy to dismiss these kind of things as dystopian, terrible, the end of human relationships. But we're already staring at our screens for many, many hours each day. We're already kind of screwed, way too isolated.
We need more human contact. Young people especially were cut off during the pandemic and now spend too much time with algorithmic, infinitely-scrolling social timelines. AI should not replace humans, but something like a personal assistant or companion is inevitable. It might even be more healthy than TikTok addiction.
I'm reading the book The Mountain in the Sea and there's a scene in it that reminds me a lot of this. On the technical side, I think the device is a little too big, which will hurt its chance of actually feeling pervasive.
From the FAQ:
Your friend and their memories are attached to the physical device. If you lose or damage your friend there is no recovery plan.
So if the device breaks, your friend "dies". This sounds like an intentional design decision. It's similar to when getting emotionally attached to a video game character who dies and can't come back, like in Fire Emblem.
I'm not going to pre-order one of these, but I am interested in following how these devices evolve, and what they say about society. The very end of the video trailer for Friend sort of makes its own statement about this. To me that shows some awareness from the creators on what the limits of their device should be.
Idina Menzel at the Paramount.
Trump picked Vance when he had all the momentum — getting shot, the convention, Biden's stumbles. With the election upended, I hope Kamala stays more rooted with her pick. This is not about exciting the Democratic base. We're already excited! Strengthen the campaign in the midwest or Arizona. 🇺🇸
Last night's Idina Menzel show was really something special. Didn't realize she is also returning to Broadway next year in Redwood. She sang a couple songs from it... I've gotta find a way to be there.
Some good replies to my post about Reddit, Micro.blog, and robots.txt yesterday. One wrinkle that may not be obvious: when the pref is enabled, we run bookmarked text through AI to summarize it. This is another reason why I feel better erring on the side of respecting robots.txt. Not sure, though.
This is a fun new series from Stephen Hackett on the Performa line. I had the Quadra 605 which I think really was just a Performa with a different name. Branding silliness in those days.
This approach from Wix to let AI write blog posts is all wrong. You know what works, though? Write your own blog post, then paste it into AI and ask it to tell you what your own post means. Then edit it yourself as needed. Really helps refine whether you’re communicating clearly enough.
Maya Rudolph returning to SNL! From CNN:
Rudolph will reprise her portrayal of Vice President Kamala Harris when the NBC show returns for its fiftieth season this fall, a source with knowledge of Rudolph’s plans told CNN. Rudolph will play Harris through the 2024 election.
This is going to be great.
AI quick scripts
Discourse's backups are SQL, but I needed a Markdown or HTML export. I asked ChatGPT to write a quick Ruby script that loops over the possible post IDs and downloads the Markdown using the special "/raw" URLs in Discourse. Reviewed it line by line and tweaked it slightly, but it was essentially correct on the first try. It took minutes from conception to running.
Maybe there was an existing Discourse solution for this. But the fact that in the time it would take to find and install another solution, I could have AI write my own custom solution… Still just amazing.
Nilay Patel in the intro to the latest Decoder:
But putting a bunch of computers in a data center and running them at full tilt is how basically everything works now. If you have a moral objection to AI based on climate concerns, you might have a moral objection to TikTok and YouTube as well, which are constantly ingesting and encoding millions of hours of video.
Sounds like a good discussion.
This list at The Washington Post of each person freed today is really good, with details on each one. Great day for the families. Joe Biden is good at his job. 🇺🇸
Great journalism from The Washington Post this morning on a suspicious $10 million withdrawal in Egypt and the investigation on whether it was linked to Trump. This should be a movie:
According to the bank records, employees assembled the money that same day, entirely in U.S. $100 bills, put it in two large bags and kept it in the bank manager’s office until two men associated with the account and two others came and took away the cash.
Hope we eventually know the truth about this.
Lots of news in Vincent's weekly update, including the end of Gluon, work on M.b, and handing off Sublime Ads... I like the new name: Shameless Plug. Good luck with it @michal!
Made a tweak to how timelines in Micro.blog are stored, especially helpful for our poor servers when there are lots of inactive accounts. Our memory usage for Redis servers continues to be out of control, gotta chip away at it.
From the M.b news blog, bookmark summarization via our future robot overlords is now available to everyone. I love this feature.
New for everyone: when you bookmark a web page, Micro.blog will automatically include a summary of the page in your bookmarks list. This was previously just for Micro.blog Premium customers. Of course it’s skipped if you disable AI in your account.
Here's an example screenshot in the Mac app of how I use bookmark summarization. I bookmark things I might blog about and get a nice summary of the story. Then later I might add tags or make highlights and use those as quotes in blog posts.
Dan Murrell blogs about how he uses ChatGPT to add features to his iOS app:
Why should I spend time writing all the code when I could instead describe what I want, and evaluate and adjust minor bits instead?
This is going to become more and more common. Importantly, you can't blindly follow AI coding advice. A human still needs to be in charge who understands the code.
Good post from Jason Snell about Apple services:
Apple is building an enormous business that’s based on Apple customers giving the company their credit cards and charging them regularly. And that business is incredibly profitable and is expected to continue growing at double-digit percentages.
Another thing that struck me about Tim Cook's comments on the earnings call: no mention that I noticed of App Store revenue. And yet that is a huge part of services. As a developer, it feels like Apple doesn't want us to think about how profitable they are based on third-party apps.
Still a little puzzled by the link handling in Threads posts. Every character in the URL counts toward the total, even though the URLs are shortened when displayed anyway. I don’t want to run a URL shortener in 2024 but it would help.
You can always count on Teslas to have fun vanity license plates.
Finished reading: The Ninth Rain by Jen Williams. Strong characters in this. The monsters creeped me out a little. There is a lot going on, maybe a little too much, but it wraps up well for the first book in a trilogy. 📚
Puttshack. ⛳️
