John Gruber blogging about the AI-enhanced photos in Google Pixel 9:
Everyone alive today has grown up in a world where you can’t believe everything you read. Now we need to adapt to a world where that applies just as equally to photos and videos. Trusting the sources of what we believe is becoming more important than ever.
This is it. If we want authenticity, we have to be intentional in what we read and watch. "For you" is a trap.
We're starting to know more about Telegram CEO Pavel Durov's arrest:
Durov was being temporarily detained on suspicion of involvement with distributing child sex abuse material and drugs, money laundering and working with organized crime, according to a press statement released by French prosecutor Laure Beccuau.
When news broke yesterday, I noticed several bloggers write that we didn't know enough yet to really judge, a restrained take that I appreciate. I figured this might come down to refusal to honor search warrants, but could be deeper too.
New AI-based Alexa set to launch in October, possibly as a $10 subscription:
The revamp of the voice assistant, which documents say will include a daily AI-generated news summary, would come just weeks before the U.S. presidential election.
I think this price will be a tough sell, but running AI does cost money. It’s just that Alexa is not a productivity tool in the way ChatGPT Plus can be.
Molly White after speaking at XOXO:
I mentioned that I’ve been feeling this a lot over the last few years, even as I too am witnessing what many of us think about as “the web” rotting right in front of our eyes. Working outside of that rot pile, and perhaps motivated by it, there are so many people who are excited about the potential for a better web.
A small, probably unfair, book rant… When I start a fantasy book and discover it's written in first person, I groan a little. It takes a unique story or very good author to pull it off. (Thinking of Robin Hobb.) Even great books would be a little better in third person, with multiple perspectives. 📚
Craig Hockenberry's slop is good pairs well with John Gruber's post I linked to yesterday about trusting sources in a web filled with AI-generated content. Craig:
Search engines you can’t trust because they are cesspools of slop is hard to imagine. But that end feels inevitable at this point. We will need a new web.
We're going to see more and more Google alternatives, maybe some paid like Kagi. And some will even need to use AI just to get rid of all the AI-generated content. 🤪
Rainy morning at Lazarus on Airport. The sun is starting to come out now and I want the rain back. ☕️
Doug Jones has a roundup of several XOXO blog posts.
Good news from The Verge, the Biden administration is providing $521 million to states to expand EV charging. Houston's getting a bunch of cash. Also interesting: grants for tribes in Washington and Florida to install charging stations on reservations. But not New Mexico? I-40 could use something.
Claude's Artifacts feature is really well done. I asked it to create a web page with various info, and it previews the page right next to the chat, with a toggle to go from HTML to rendered. ChatGPT is still my go-to AI helper but this is impressive.
Submitted on app update to Apple and now feel kind of in limbo, like I can’t do anything else until they approve it. Checking email… reload, reload. It’s not even a major update.
Jack Smith knows what he’s doing. January 6th indictment reworked to accommodate the Supreme Court’s ruling:
Prosecutors have not dropped any of the four charges that they initially brought against the former president. However, the newly retooled indictment has carved out some of Trump’s alleged conduct, including allegations about the attempts to use the Justice Department to promote his false claims of election fraud.
Epilogue 1.8.2
We've got a new minor update to Epilogue for iOS ready. This release focuses on the context menu in the book details screen. Many people didn’t know the menu was there. Now there's an ellipsis button to make it more discoverable, plus a couple other additions to the menu.
Working in Android and Google Play a bunch this week. It's just similar enough to the Apple ecosystem to feel like I know what I'm doing, even when I get lost in the weeds of compiler errors and dependencies changing out from under me.
Nice write-up from Chris Enns on using Micro.blog for hosting short podcasts and adding stats with OP3.
Wow, has it really been a full year since the last Epilogue release for Android? Today I've gathered up all the recent changes and shipped them on Android, available at Google Play here. Screenshots still out of date, but it's got the new icon and mostly the same features as iOS.
I was hoping the new iPhone Pro would have 12 GB of RAM. Sticking with 8 GB is enough for small AI models, but doesn't seem as future-proof as the new Google Pixel at 16 GB. Apples to oranges? Dunno, that's a really big difference.
Years ago, mostly by accident, I started using green for block quotes in Markdown. Screenshot below. It's weird because I never use green in actual published blog themes or Micro.blog on the web. I did a quick survey of other Markdown apps for inspiration and can't really find a better style.
Tumblr's getting started on porting the backend to WordPress:
We acquired Tumblr to benefit from its differences and strengths, not to water it down. We love Tumblr’s streamlined posting experience and its current product direction. We’re not changing that. We’re talking about running Tumblr’s backend on WordPress. You won’t even notice a difference from the outside.
I hope they blog about the process… Should be interesting.
You get an AI! You get an AI! Starting to enable automatic photo keywords and search for all paid customers, no longer requiring Micro.blog Premium. Check out the video on YouTube here, recorded a few months ago. Now available to everyone. (I reserve the right to tweak this if it bankrupts me.)
Fountain at Cosmic on 4th. I should go here more often. ☕️
I joked yesterday that enabling the AI features in Micro.blog for everyone might bankrupt me. I didn't seriously think that it would be out of control, but API usage is sometimes hard to predict, and bills usually only trend in one direction: up. Now with 24 hours usage, seems totally fine.
I like this post from Marty McGuire about the IndieWeb and how the indieweb.org wiki can sometimes be overwhelming for new users:
That’s because indieweb.org is not a presciption or a cookbook or an exercise plan. It doesn’t tell you how to “be IndieWeb”. It’s a collective memory of experiments, some successful and some not, from a group of experimenters that has changed greatly over time.
Also some nice words for Micro.blog in there. The wiki is an incredible resource, but just start with your own web site and don't worry about the rest unless you want to dig deeper.
There are some interesting things going on with the new Patreon-like Sub Club for the fediverse. Presumably it can send members-only posts via ActivityPub because it knows which followers are paid subscribers. I'm puzzled by the payment inside third-party apps, though… I wonder how that works.
From The Wall Street Journal: Apple, Nvidia Are in Talks to Invest in OpenAI. This makes sense to me. Apple is obviously developing their own AI models, but I don't think they care about AI as much as OpenAI, Anthropic, and others who live and breathe it. See more commentary from M.G. Siegler.
I have a few upcoming camping reservations, part of my quest to visit all 88 state parks in Texas. Got this email the other day about one of the reservations:
Select sites at Abilene State Park are closed due to hazardous trees.
Hazardous trees! Luckily the park changed their mind and will allow camping anyway. I'm more amused by the notice than worried, but still gonna try to avoid camping underneath any branches that look ready to fall.
Setting up some more customer support email filters. It's gotten to where I have so much spam waiting for me, I hate to check support email, which is really bad for everyone. 🙁
Tantek Çelik blogged about IndieWebCamp Portland:
We wrapped up with our usual Create Day Demos session, live streamed for remote attendees to see as well. Lots of great demos of things people built, designed, removed, cleaned-up, documented, and blogged! Everyone still at the camp showed something on their personal site!
I miss IndieWebCamp. Don't think I've attended one since we hosted in Austin a couple weeks before COVID hit.
An update on Strata for Android. Getting closer to a release. We had a rejection, resubmitted. Pretty confident it'll be approved and out today or early next week.
Still a few months away, but the Wind and Truth cover reveal makes the book feel like it’s even closer. Michael Whelan has had an incredible career. Love this “semi-retired” bit about the artist:
Fifteen years ago, Whelan was semi-retired and considering a return to science fiction when he received the manuscript for The Way of Kings.
This story and art from Christine Mi for The Washington Post makes me want to book a train trip again. I’ve done Austin to Los Angeles, Austin to Chicago… So much more to see.
Ramping up the search for our next home. For old neighborhoods, love doing a little background research on who developed the neighborhood. Doesn't actually matter, but it's fun to discover where it came from... Sometimes land originally granted by the Republic of Texas to veterans and settlers.
Ghost in their weekly update, joking about likes:
Descartes famously said "I think, therefore I am" — but it wasn't until several years later when we started getting likes on Instagram that we collectively came to the realization that the meaning of life, in fact, revolves around a consistent stream of dopamine hits from the internet.
Micro.blog doesn't have likes and for better or worse, I'm standing by that decision.
Just posted a new episode of Core Int: Reinventing the 90s. We use two new software releases (the Overcast rewrite and my own new Micro.blog text editor) to talk about how customers react to software changes and bugs. Also, is SwiftUI now the best way to start Mac apps? Spoiler: not sure.
Ollie inspecting a new package, the SolarSaga 100 Prime. This is going to go on my car.
Bluesky has added 1 million users in the past few days, largely from the Twitter X in Brazil fallout. Congrats to the team. Really impressive to keep servers humming along.
Just sad hearing about the news of 6 more hostages dead in Gaza. The closer we get to 1 year since the attack by Hamas, the more heartbreaking that there's no deal.
Manuel Moreale blogs about a more intentional, personal web:
I’m talking about liberating yourself from all sorts of algorithmic grouping and filtering and getting back to experiencing and using the web in a much more deliberate and mindful way.
I think it's okay that "social web" or IndieWeb mean slightly different things to different people. All of those definitions still share in common a goal of openness and standards, not silos.
There’s a good analysis in Last Week in Fediverse about Twitter X, Bluesky, and Mastodon. Just a small part:
…if the goal is to build ActivityPub into the default protocol for the social web, it is worth paying attention to what is happening right now in the Brazilian ATmosphere.
Drove by a couple fire trucks protecting the shoulder for a car and a Cybertruck stopped on the side of the road. Probably a fender bender, didn't look serious. But… two fire trucks? Maybe drama follows all Cybertrucks.
I often only finally get into a book at the end of a loan in Libby, hopelessly nowhere near finished with it. Wish there was a “just give me one extra day” button. For Kindle, turning off wifi works, but no good option for audiobooks.
