Less than a month until election day. The deadline to register to vote in Texas is today. Similar for other states, so now is the time for folks who have been procrastinating. 🇺🇸
One year since the Hamas attack on Israel. Hostages still not released. Peace still far off. Gaza still in ruin. At the height of the protests, I wrote this blog post. I stand by it, but of course I have new thoughts today. Not gonna blog, so the old post will have to serve as a snapshot of 2024.
Dave Winer celebrating 30 years of blogging today:
Every time you post something you're proud of on a social media site, how about taking a moment and posting it to your blog too. And while there, if appropriate, link to something from some part of your post, even though the social media sites don't support linking, the web is still there and it still does.
This ruling for Epic vs. Google goes way further than the concessions Apple has had to make for the EU. From The Verge:
Google will have to distribute rival third-party app stores within Google Play, and it must give rival third-party app stores access to the full catalog of Google Play apps, unless developers opt out individually.
Perfect example of how Apple and Google not opening up app distribution years ago will ultimately cost them much more now.
Dusted off my Rabbit R1 after listening to the latest interview with Jesse Lyu on Decoder. It needed a bunch of software updates. Even though I haven't used it in a while, no regrets buying it… It's a neat device and their vision for AI still has potential.
Odd dream last night. I wrote an April Fool's press release for Micro.blog announcing full-length blog posts, note taking, audio transcripts, newsletters, reading goals, and bookmarks… Everyone was like "Ha, would be funny if Micro.blog did all of that" and I was like "No, it does, that's the joke."
Happy to get Micro.blog for iOS version 3.3 released. Includes the under-the-hood navigation rewrite that @vincent worked on, new icons for iOS 18, and several other improvements. Much better in lots of small ways.
Microblogging, a fable
This is an only slightly exaggerated story that I see play out again and again from customers:
- "Micro.blog looks like a good idea. I'm sick of social media and want to blog more."
- Blog, blog, blog, microblog, microblog, reply, blog.
- "Not getting enough engagement. Let's try Mastodon or Threads or Bluesky."
Two years later.:
- "Just realized I haven't blogged in forever. Do I have anything to show for the years of typing into text boxes online?"
- Re-joins Micro.blog.
We're here when you're ready. 🤪
I'm making light of it, but this does actually happen, and it points to how misunderstood Micro.blog is. The point is not to replace Twitter, but to have a space that is rooted in the open web, with just the right balance between blogging at your own domain name and being social with others. Everything we do is to encourage both microblogging and long-form writing to be interwoven, so you can move between different formats without losing the good parts about having your own blog.
It is not for everyone. That's fine! But I'm confident there are many people who want this. Micro.blog is still the only platform of its kind.
There are stories about both Trump and Biden in this overview of Bob Woodward’s new book War, but the headline is definitely this Covid intro:
As the coronavirus tore through the world in 2020, and the United States and other countries confronted a shortage of tests designed to detect the illness, then-President Donald Trump secretly sent coveted tests to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his personal use.
Again and again Trump shows that he’s not on our side. And yet the election is close. 🇺🇸
Interesting heads-up from Gareth Edwards that .io might be going away:
Once this treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist. Various international bodies will update their records. In particular, the International Standard for Organization (ISO) will remove country code “IO” from its specification.
I will be surprised if there isn't a special case for .io renewals because of how widespread it is. I have a few registrations myself.
Upgraded to macOS Sequoia. iPhone Mirroring is fascinating. It's better and more native-y for clicks and scrolling than using the iOS simulator.
As usual I'm working on a few different things in parallel. Server bug fixes, mobile app updates, and something new… Sneak peek in this screenshot. Can't share more for now, it's too early! But I love the potential.
Old steps to nowhere in east Austin. Someone's house used to be here.
New Core Int just published. We talk about Meta’s Orion prototype, Daniel trying to remember his Apple Vision Pro password, and more about the future of computers that we put on our face.
Most mornings while eating breakfast at home, I flip between Morning Joe and CNN. Today, too many ads, so watched some of Good Morning America and they really got me with that story about a teacher. Eyes might be watering a little. The show producers know their craft.
Nice update to Mimi for Micro.blog to batch generate alt text for a bunch of photos at once.
It will always be valuable to know a programming language inside and out, but AI is erasing old headaches of context switching between platforms. Code in your favorite language, have AI port it to another language, review and tweak the results. In the future, we may develop largely in pseudo code.
Making progress on enabling Threads cross-posting for everyone in Micro.blog. Meta approved the app this week, now waiting for them to approve the business account. It has been slow going because after each rejection I have to work on something else to clear my head.
Turnout 🇺🇸
It's less than a month until election day. I believe Kamala Harris is going to win. Knock on wood, many things are breaking her way in the final weeks of the campaign, in a way that they did not for Hillary Clinton when she was also on her way to winning the presidency.
However, this assumes that we get out and vote. It assumes we don't trip at the finish line over nitpicky perfect is the enemy of the good complaints that discourage Democrats and keep them home on election day. Let's remember: Donald Trump's base is still massive.
Every once in a while, Trump says something that is true. During one of the debates and at his otherwise incoherent rally speeches, he said that he received millions of more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, more votes than any incumbent president has before. That's accurate. Even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016, Trump's vote total in 2020 (74 million votes!) easily surpassed that too.
Trump leaves out of his speeches that someone else received even more votes. That's why Joe Biden is president.
But getting 74 million votes is no small thing. Despite felony convictions, impeachments, and general incompetence, Trump will have widespread support again. Misinformation online might be worse now than ever. He could win. Democratic turnout must be up to the challenge.
Thinking more about this blog post from Nick Radcliffe about effectively rebranding Micro.blog. I want to turn Micro.blog into a sort of bundle (think Apple One) because it does several things. But I don't know if I can give up the "micro" name as much as redefine it. Small name. Big features. 🙂
Get your 🎃 and 👻 emoji ready. I'm brewing up something fun for Halloween.
I’m not interested in a Tesla, or any new car, but I watched the robotaxi event because it felt like it was going to be a spectacle. I do think self-driving will be safer than human drivers. I’m not on board with humanoid robots, though. AI should be confined to software and small gadgets only.
Threads cross-posting is finally rolling out more broadly for Micro.blog folks. Sorry if I didn't get to your request for the beta earlier. I'm catching up and replying to everyone who asked about it in email.
Slack can sometimes be overwhelming. I make it work by limiting myself to about 3 channels in the Mac and iOS apps. Others can be viewed on the web as needed. Also, I mute almost everything, even channels I care about. The only flaw is that @here bypasses mutes, which I don't think it should.
Don't sleep on the "Custom home page" plug-in for Micro.blog if you need something simple for an extra site. I use it for standalone, single-page websites with a little HTML and CSS (or even JS).
Trying a new coffee place. Cafe at the Loren with a nice view across Riverside. Where I’m sitting used to be a Taco Cabana. ☕️
TikTok even worse than we thought
NPR has reviewed internal documents from TikTok:
For the first time, internal TikTok communications have been made public that show a company unconcerned with the harms the app poses for American teenagers. This is despite its own research validating many child safety concerns.
We've known for a long time that the addictive nature of the infinite timeline pioneered by TikTok was causing problems for teenagers. But this is a whole new thing:
One internal report that analyzed TikTok’s main video feed saw “a high volume of … not attractive subjects” were filling everyone’s app. In response, Kentucky investigators found that TikTok retooled its algorithm to amplify users the company viewed as beautiful.
Shut it down. ByteDance has until January to divest the app and I have no sympathy for a delay. It needs new leadership.
Threads cross-posting from Micro.blog
As soon as Threads released their early documentation for the Threads API months ago, we dropped everything we were doing and prototyped it in Micro.blog. We had a slow road to getting approved by Meta, but I'm happy to announce that automatic cross-posting from your blog to Threads is now enabled for everyone on Micro.blog. Thanks to all the many Micro.blog users who tried this in beta form before we could officially roll it out.
To enable it, click on Sources in Micro.blog on the web, then click Add Threads. Whenever you post to your blog, a copy of your post will be formatted and sent to Threads too. There's nothing extra to do while posting. You can optionally disable Threads for a specific blog post if you want to skip cross-posting it, or if you want to manually post it.
Micro.blog is unique among most web platforms in that the timeline and cross-posting is actually driven completely by RSS and JSON Feed. This means that cross-posting from Micro.blog to Threads works for any blog, hosted anywhere. You could enable Threads cross-posting for WordPress, Ghost, Write.as, or even a static site using Hugo.
And while you're trying it out, we also support cross-posting to Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr, and another half dozen services.
Enjoy! Happy blogging.
I've decided to give Arc for Mac a real shot, going all-in as my default browser. I usually use Safari and have no complaints with it. Nice to see Arc trying some new things, though. Also liked Chris Messina's post about where Arc 2.0 might be going.
We were late with the last episode of Core Int, so it's basically two episodes this week. On the new show today, we talk about Daniel's latest updates to Black Ink, version numbers, doing things the right way, tracking down Bitcoin's Satoshi Nakamoto, and AI energy use.
When we recorded the latest Core Int, I hadn't yet watched Money Electric on HBO. Just watched it tonight and it was excellent. I still have mixed feelings about digging up Satoshi's identity, but it was very convincing.
Dario Amodei on powerful AI
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has written a long essay about powerful AI. I haven't even finished reading it and it has already blown my mind a few times over:
To summarize the above, my basic prediction is that AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years. I’ll refer to this as the “compressed 21st century”: the idea that after powerful AI is developed, we will in a few years make all the progress in biology and medicine that we would have made in the whole 21st century.
He also addresses finding meaning in work. Many people are rightly concerned about AI replacing their work — and this concern combined with energy and climate issues fuel much of the pushback against AI — but this has never bothered me very much. There will always be tasks that only humans are best suited for.
On the question of meaning, I think it is very likely a mistake to believe that tasks you undertake are meaningless simply because an AI could do them better. Most people are not the best in the world at anything, and it doesn’t seem to bother them particularly much. Of course today they can still contribute through comparative advantage, and may derive meaning from the economic value they produce, but people also greatly enjoy activities that produce no economic value.
There is too much in the essay to even summarize. While it feels complementary to Sam Altman’s post, The Intelligence Age, Dario's essay is much more detailed. Anthropic seems in good hands.
Now that we've got Threads cross-posting for everyone, it was time to clean up a few related things. Today I added some better styling for showing categories and cross-post services. Plus, you can finally edit the cross-posting for a draft!
Considering a radical redesign of the Micro.blog home page. The current design by @vincent has served us well for nearly two years now. Maybe time to shake things up.
The Internet Archive is still down after an attack. A backup of the web is too important to only have one copy of. This is why we do so much archiving inside Micro.blog (for Premium). Everything you link to in a blog post is archived, with images and CSS. Helps distribute the work just a little.
Honda Element: roof solar
It's time for another update in my Honda Element blog post series. After my last road trip, I decided to scrap the rooftop box. Even though the extra storage was great, I was suspicious it was dragging too much on the highway and killing my gas milage. In its place I've mounted a much slimmer roof basket, which I also thought would be perfect for helping add a solar panel to the roof in a clean, non-destructive way.
So far I really like it. Here are a few photos:
I bolted the panel to the roof basket rods, and it seems mostly secure, but it's not perfect. Of the four mount points, I could only get three actually aligned in a workable way. I'm hoping to adjust how it's attached and add a few extra zip ties as insurance.
Not really shown, I'm winding the cable down into the back of the car, where I can charge one of my portable batteries. This is sort of a luxury I don't need, to be honest, but it's fun and you can never have too much electricity while traveling. Also still need to get something to stick the cable to the roof better.
The basket is the Thule Canyon XT Cargo Basket. The panel is the Jackery SolarSaga 100 Prime. It's purposefully off-center because I still need to reattach my weBoost antenna.
Bennu Coffee might be too serious about their wi-fi passwords. ☕️
Tuned in to the SpaceX livestream in time to see the Starship splashdown. Watched the recap of catching the booster too. Incredible. Looks like something that might be an AI-generated video, but it’s real. 🚀
Jamie Zawinski on the 30-year anniversary of the Netscape 0.9 release:
According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the "What's Cool" button in the toolbar.
Pure blogging is “blogging” because you have something to say. To me, that is a pure blogger. Any other explanation of blogging “is just the traditional idea of media,” meant for an audience and for reach.
