Eating my own dog food, just imported 2800 notes into Micro.blog. Overall went really well. A couple things could be improved for large archives, like better search on the web.
It's wild to imagine that in the future, to be competitive with AI you might need your own nuclear power plant. I could also see a company like Apple buying half of Arizona for solar farms. On the one hand, yes, maybe we've lost our minds… But on the other, a massive investment in clean energy.
Decided to install the iOS 18.1 beta. AI summarization features mostly work as advertised. For the writing tools, I hesitate using it mostly because if I need help, why not jump straight to ChatGPT? Otherwise I’d wonder if I’m getting the best results, even if it seems fine.
Sam Altman’s The Intelligence Age
No surprise that Sam Altman is quite the AI optimist:
It won’t happen all at once, but we’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI; eventually we can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine. Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. We can imagine similar ideas for better healthcare, the ability to create any kind of software someone can imagine, and much more.
I’ve been thinking about personalized education too, ever since re-reading The Diamond Age this year. There’s no question that some of that will come true. Many people who struggle today will have children and grandchildren who are better educated, with more opportunities to get ahead.
But in Neil Stephenson’s book there was a significant human element too. Miranda cared so much that she rearranged her life to help raise Nell. AI is nothing without parents, teachers, doctors, coders, and artists to guide it.
Listening to the latest Decoder podcast with The Browser Company's Josh Miller and enjoying it so far. I haven't completely bought in to Arc, but we should be exploring new browser ideas. A little shocked that they have 80 employees and zero revenue, though. Not confident they can last.
Going to restart the public beta for Micro.blog on iOS. Just waiting for Apple to approve the beta, because Micro.blog has only been around for 7 years with dozens of public releases, so we must be devious hackers trying to exploit the App Store. So tired of Apple as a babysitter.
Not in a good mood this morning, so all of my blog posts are going to be tinged with a little bit of unwarranted frustration. Apologies in advance. 🙂
The Social Web Foundation works to grow this new ecosystem in an open, healthy, and sustainable way—working with technologists and the public to build a new global town square that works for everyone.
This looks very interesting. I'm going to be honest, though, even though I know this is petty: I'm insulted that Micro.blog wasn't given a heads-up about this before launch. We've only supported ActivityPub since 2018. 🤪
Molly White is doing something on her blog that I don't think I've seen before. When linking some people's names, she will include tiny links to Wikipedia or social web profiles. Here's a screenshot with the links highlighted, in this case Wikipedia, Mastodon, and Bluesky:
Can't shake the feeling today that I'm going to have to do this all on my own.
During the pandemic I accidentally let my P.O. Box expire. I almost never checked it anyway, but I felt bad that there was a chance of letters being returned or lost into the void. Today I finally fixed it. Was able to go in person and restore the same number which luckily wasn't being used yet.
Good post at WP Tavern highlighting the major plot points of the ongoing WordPress drama. I also listened to the Twitter X space (ugh) where Matt Mullenweg answers questions on the fallout from his WordCamp talk. I don't envy folks trying to navigate this... Such a big community and lots of money.
Finished watching the first season of Shōgun. Fantastic. 📺
Sarah Perez reporting on the financial backing of the new Social Web Foundation. This is an impressive start:
The Ford Foundation has also offered the organization a large grant to get the project started. In total, SWF is closing in on $1 million in financial support.
Effectively no one knows how good Micro.blog is for blogging. I alternate between being bummed out by this and optimistic that there is so much room for growth. Might take a few more years for overnight success to hit.
Automattic vs. WP Engine will have a chilling effect on WordPress hosting. When I decided to use Hugo in Micro.blog, I considered using WordPress under the hood instead. It would've brought significant benefits, but at the cost of bloat and web hosting monoculture. Glad to have avoided this drama.
Just uploaded a new TestFlight beta with support for iOS 18 dark and tinted icons. Looks way better now for folks who've customized their home screen icons.
Mira Murati is leaving OpenAI. If things had gone differently after the board shakeup, she would've been the CEO and Sam Altman would be at Microsoft. But it didn't appear that she had been sidelined either. She led the live OpenAI announcements for GPT-4o instead of Sam just a few months ago.
Meta Connect 2024
Let's start with this: Meta Connect was more interesting and fun than Apple's iPhone event or WWDC keynote. Live demos are better. Even when Mark Zuckerberg was kind of goofy, or when he said "hell yes" and "live demos sometimes work"... Maybe it it wasn't as polished, with demos that could fail, but it was also more real.
One justification for Apple's pre-recorded events is that they are tighter and can fit more content (and more diversity of speakers) into a shorter amount of time. There's no downtime to switch presenters or wait for applause. But in Apple events there is a bunch of wasted time too — time spent on pure marketing, or drone camera shots, instead of substance.
From the time Mark went on stage to revealing the Meta Quest 3S and its price was 1 minute. Another 45 minutes in, they had already demoed or talked about nearly everything: the Quest, Horizon Worlds, Llama 3.2, Ray-Bans with live translation, and Orion. For an event that didn't feel that well-rehearsed, they covered a lot of ground.
The biggest news of the show was Orion, a prototype for holographic AR glasses. Rewind to earlier this year, when Mark casually dropped this into a video:
For typing or complex tasks, you're going to want things like hands, or a keyboard, or controllers, or eventually a neural interface...
When he said this, it sounded like science fiction. I sort of thought he had lost his mind. It feels significant to jump a handful of months forward and have a working prototype where I now need to consider "wrist-based neural interface" and read about electromyography. Mark closed the Orion segment with:
The right way to look at Orion is as a time machine. These glasses exist, they are awesome, and they are a glimpse of a future that I think is going to be pretty exciting.
This is the closest anyone has come to an AR design that is a natural evolution of traditional glasses. Most people do not want to strap a computer to their face. Apple's Vision Pro prioritizes incredible visuals, but it needs to become much cheaper, lighter, and eventually have no opaque screens at all. Meta's Orion makes different trade-offs. I think it's already farther down the right path.
I'm not exactly rooting for Meta. I dedicated major sections of my book to the problems with massive, ad-based social networking, with Facebook and Instagram as prominent players. But nevertheless I'm caught up in some of the excitement of new technology at Connect. There's a refreshing change of pace and tone compared to decades of Apple keynotes.
“Orion makes every other VR or AR device I have tried feel like a mistake — including the Apple Vision Pro.” — Ben Thompson, who interviews Meta’s CTO
Pushed another TestFlight beta of Micro.blog with lots of little tweaks that had been bugging me. Still a few bugs in this version, plus the work of replacing the old text editor.
No-training Creative Commons
Tantek Çelik proposes a "CC-NT" license, for "no-training":
This seems like an obvious thing to me. If you can write a license that forbids “commercial use”, then you should be able to write a license that forbids use in “training models”, which respectful / well-written crawlers should (hopefully) respect, in as much as they respect existing CC licenses.
I like this. There are fair use and copyright issues to sort out in the courts, but in the meantime we should be using robots.txt and Creative Commons wherever possible. On my blog, I allow any crawling and any use with attribution. Others might prefer to block AI bots and restrict to non-commercial use, or even allow commercial use but not for AI training.
There was a great episode of Decoder last week with The Browser Company's Josh Miller. Nilay Patel and Josh talk about the open web, browsers of course, and AI. One comment near the end from Nilay stood out to me, where he said AI training gives "nothing" back to writers on the web.
Wait, nothing? Integrating my blog posts into a model with essentially all the world's information, so that people can ask it questions and have my writing also included with the answers… That's "nothing"? Personally, I don't make money directly from my blog. There are countless benefits to blogging. In the age of AI, one of those benefits is now letting me contribute in a small way to something bigger, in the same way that someone finds an answer in one of my blog posts when they search on Google.
The trade-off is different for everyone. Subscription and ad-based publishers are rightly concerned. They should make deals with AI companies, or in some cases block bots outright. Some people will block or use CC-NT on principle alone. No problem. For me, I hope my writing reaches as far as it can, and so letting it get slurped up by our future AI overlords is not just acceptable, I want it to happen. It's not nothing.
I'm still interested in Meta's Ray-Ban glasses, but maybe I'm not the market because I can barely tell the difference between the Wayfarer, Headliner, and Skyler styles. Also I buy new glasses about once every 10 years.
Sort of an all-Zuckerberg podcast week. Good interview with Mark on Decoder but can't disagree more strongly with Mark's vision of AI-generated content showing up in your feed. This is the terrible end-game of algorithmic timelines.
Rest in peace, Maggie Smith.
Thinking about what a modern AppleScript would look like powered by LLMs. The human language-like syntax of AppleScript was the right idea, but there were syntax quirks that made it frustrating. LLMs could fix that. Free idea! I'm tempted but it's too far outside the scope of Micro.blog's mission.
Cherrywood Coffeehouse. ☕️
Molly White blogs about POSSE:
The next time a new social media site comes along, you can plug it in to your existing system. And the next time a social media site dies or becomes untenable, you just disconnect it. With this model, even when a platform goes under, you lose relatively little: your posts still remain live and under your control on your site, even if the copies of them on the disconnected website are abandoned or deleted.
Austin forever. New mural on 51st.
I ended up disabling Type to Siri. Kept accidentally triggering it with impatient double-taps on the tab bar.
Really enjoyed seeing The Wild Robot. Beautiful. Glad I read the book first too... The movie follows the story closely but some characters, dialogue, and details were bound to change. 🍿
Last night's SNL was great. Maya Rudolph, Andy Samberg, Dana Carvey, Jean Smart… That's the way to start the 50th season. 📺
House shopping during election season is great. There are so many political yard signs, you can tell a lot about what your future neighbors are like.
I think the new "finished" pane turned out well. This has been a much-needed improvement to Micro.blog. Because we fire off publishing and Hugo-ing in the background, it was irritating to keep an eye on the status and find the new blog post link.
I posted this to @news a week ago. Quoting it here as a reminder:
An early heads-up: we are planning a major server upgrade for October 1st, 10pm central time / 3pm GMT. While we hope to limit downtime, Micro.blog will be unavailable for a little while during the upgrade. Your blogs hosted on Micro.blog will remain online.
While we've had sporadic downtime this year, I don't think we've had planned downtime in several years, and I don't take it lightly. It's a database upgrade and worth the time to do it right.
