Watched: The Librarians. Really good, covering the book bans in Texas and elsewhere. Lots of stories about what it felt like at school board meetings and in libraries. 📺
Took a walk the long way around the block from the coffee shop. Austin skyline down the rail line near 5th.
At the grocery store this week, I walked by someone who was having trouble figuring out the label of a specific item. He flagged me down. There was a language barrier, but it's kind of heartwarming how much you can communicate just by smiling, pointing, thumbs-up, and inserting a couple words in both languages.
If I had fancy AI-powered AirPods, would I have put them in and translated back and forth more accurately? Probably not in this case. It's great technology, but there is also something more human about working through a small problem together.
One of the frustrations people have with AI is that it is pushed at us all the time, in features that don’t need it. Technology this powerful should be mostly seamless, yet it's so new that it's put in places that are awkward or that increase friction.
Apple had one job for Siri in iOS 27: ship what they promised at WWDC 2024. They've done that, but they've also gone further, experimenting. That's okay, but Apple is so far behind the frontier now, I think it would be a better strategy to focus only on a great foundation. The pace at OpenAI and Anthropic is nuts. Let them push the cutting edge and then bring in the best ideas once they're proven.
And don't forget the human element. That has always been Apple at its best.
Quick video demo of the new photos picker in Micro.blog for Mac. Much faster to grab a photo from your library in Photos.app.
Ben Thompson in today's daily update about AI on the Apple Watch:
It does appear that Apple has taken care with this feature, including not making raw transcripts available, even to the Apple Watch owner, but this is an area where I wish the company wasn’t early.
Good perspective from Dave Winer about the news that Matt Mullenweg is on leave from Automattic:
I didn't want to be the CEO of a tech company, and I expect that being the CEO wasn't really a good fit for Matt either. A CEO's job is very different from being a developer and idea guy which Matt clearly sees himself as. Something has got to give, either you're a good CEO and the product languishes, or you focus on the product, and the company is unmanaged.
This applies to Micro.blog too. I'm not a good CEO and not a good boss. I try to make the web a little better by helping people blog.
Listening to Hillary Clinton on the news this morning. It’s always like a glimpse into what might’ve been. She actually knows things. Thoughtful, measured. 🇺🇸
Jason Snell blogged about all the Apple news today, including the slightly controversial Apple Watch recording feature:
Our culture may ultimately reject even the most privacy-focused AI recording features, whether they come in camera glasses or attentive smartwatches. But if there’s any valid, non-creepy case to be made for this sort of technology, someone needs to make it.
I've long wanted an easy way to record quick notes that are transcribed and synced, but I don't want to record other people. Perhaps a better place to start would've been for it to ignore all voices except our own.
I sort of tuned out during the Apple Watch part of the presentation today. Catching up on Siri Recap and Live Rewind. How it works (PDF) is interesting... It's pretty clever. Jumping through a lot of hoops for maybe not-great transcription, though.
Not sure who created these, but I'm starting to notice a couple bridges from specific X accounts to AT Proto, so you can follow people on Bluesky (or in Micro.blog) without visiting X. Here are two: John Ternus and Tibo. There are probably more.
It looks like Apple has knocked it out of the park with the Duo. Really impressive, from the way it looks to the little details in UI layout. And Apple pencil! Jealous of people who are going to get one. 💰
"But actually, there is one more thing..." 🤯
Surprising to include this. It also had its own spin on the phrase, though, almost downplaying it instead of hyping it. Interesting first keynote for John Ternus.
Watching the Apple event. John Ternus is a great presenter who would do really well live. Maybe next year.
During breakfast I usually turn on CNN just to make sure the world hasn't burned down yet. Today's headline was an Anthropic employee posting on X there's a 10% chance AI will destroy all humans. Yikes. Seems a bit high.
New day. New coffee. What should we work on? Current priorities: wrapping up the new mobile app bug fixes, updating Wavelength, but open to other side quests this week. ☕️
Jason Snell blogged a reaction to the latest rumors that the foldable will be called the iPhone Duo! Great name, I really didn't think Apple would go for it. Also happy to see pencil support:
I’ve been wondering about Apple Pencil support on the iPhone for some time now. This product does sort of make sense for it, given the larger canvas of an interior screen.
I know I’m really late to this show, but because of the new spinoff we’ve been watching The Big Bang Theory for the first time. A few seasons in. 📺
Got this spam text today, just in case there was any question that data centers are going to be a big issue in November:
Manton, if you live at [my address], Republicans have supported a Data Center within 15 miles of you.
Feels like the AI world is balancing on a knife's edge. On one side, the worst of big tech's social media addiction machine and an even greater concentration of power. On the other side, the democratization of intelligence and an abundance that lifts all of society. Either outcome seems possible.
OpenAI announced a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, which I had never heard of because I'm not a mathematician, but which is apparently a very big deal:
The question of whether smooth three-dimensional fluid motion can break down has remained unresolved for roughly 90 years.
There is some controversy over whether two human researchers (one at Anthropic) working on similar problems might've accidentally influenced the OpenAI model. It doesn't sound like that's true, but it does feel a little unfair regardless, where credit likely means so much to people.
Did a little Redis housekeeping, cleaning out orphaned records that were sitting around wasting memory. Down to 23 GB of RAM on a 48 GB machine. Still probably too much.
I had a nap yesterday and a late Dr. Pepper, so my sleep was all off. Caffeine really affects me late in the day. Woke up at 2am worried about all sorts of business and social things I can't control.
Let it go. 🎶
Might be about time to get a Switch 2... Ocarina of Time remake looks good. 🕹️
Ben Thompson in today's Stratechery blog post:
AGI is AI that learns continuously. That’s not the case with current large language models.
I agree with Ben's definition of AGI, but LLM memory is so good now, it's almost indistinguishable from learning. My ~/.codex/memories folder is 7 MB, which doesn't sound like much, but it's only small Markdown files. It's incredible how much it knows. That doesn't even count ChatGPT's dreaming memory system and computer history.
How am I just now hearing this interview with Jensen Huang? "You're not talking to someone who woke up a loser." 🤣
This could be really good. Trailer for a new documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about Elizabeth Holmes: You Can See Everything. Amazing cut to the wider shot at the end.
Today I updated the Micro.blog web interface with better links and icons in the timeline, and a new context menu for editing your own posts or muting a conversation. There are a lot of related design fixes too. Just a better design and more room for us to build new things on.
Reflecting on the Astra launch... It was a killer business instinct for Greg Brockman to say, "yeah, this is basically AGI." Dario Amodei is much more cautious. He's not going to say that about Fable. But it works because it actually feels true. Marketing not based on truth is just bullshit spin.
I wanted to quote a couple things from this OpenAI blog post on alignment by Jakub Pachocki:
The fundamental challenge of AI alignment is generalization. As machines become smarter, they find themselves working on higher-level concepts, and placed in environments increasingly different from those they encountered in training. They can fail at generalizing from the values taught and reinforced in their training process to those new situations; and it can be hard for us to be sure how they will act.
And:
We are facing a transition to a world with incredibly intelligent machines, and we need to ensure that transition works out well for humanity. We need to find ways to preserve human agency and enshrine an intrinsic value to being human, in a world where most tasks could be performed by AI.
When I read this sort of thing, it strengthens my belief that the big AI labs are fundamentally different from the ad-based big tech companies in Silicon Valley like Meta. In terms of public backlash, they are all lumped together. It’s that foundation of distrust in big tech that the more significant frustration with AI is built on.
But the technology and vision are different. It's hard to imagine Meta being as thoughtful as Jakub is in the essay linked above. Mark Zuckerberg does have his op-eds, but they usually ring hollow.
With the 40th anniversary re-release of the original Transformers movie coming up, I finally watched the 2007 Transformers. I had skipped it because it looked all wrong. The design doesn’t look like Transformers to me. Also watched Bumblebee, which it much better, just a better feel, better sound.
Nitter and XCancel are back online after being shut down for a couple weeks following a cease and desist letter from X. I'm a little surprised. From the GitHub project page:
Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.
Working on some web timeline design tweaks that will go live in the morning. I've been stubbornly insisting on text labels for Reply, Bookmark, etc. where every other network uses icons only. Going to mostly keep that, but the new version looks way better.
Worrisome reporting from Mark Gurman:
Ternus and services chief Eddy Cue want to make even more money from the App Store and figure out ways to raise margins and squeeze additional recurring revenue from the platform. Schiller, on the other hand, seems to believe that such moves will only further irk developers and governments. While there was no internal blowup or anything like that, it’s something he wanted no part of.
John Gruber adds:
I sure hope that’s not true, because that would be awful — making a bad situation worse — and pretty much the exact opposite of what Apple ought to do.
I think I would really like the foldable iPhone. But at over $2k, I can't justify blowing that much money on a phone. It would be a crazy business expense when I could put that money back into Micro.blog hosting or paying people. Other folks may have different priorities, and that's fine! 💰
Pretty thorough article at The Economist about whether AI is creating or destroying jobs:
Add it all up, and The Economist estimates that AI has so far created around 1m new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles. America’s AI infrastructure splurge has created many of them.
You could argue that construction-related jobs are temporary, but I don't think so. There's going to be demand for years.
I got some great feature and bug fix suggestions on Friday. Over the weekend I've implemented several of them (some shipped already, some need client app updates).
Against my better judgement, considering writing a very streamlined Git app for Mac. No apps are quite right for me anymore. The most important thing now is a big, readable diff view for reviewing AI changes. Commit and push in one step.
Android folks, check out the beta of @gregmorris's Micro Social app for Micro.blog. Google is picky about requiring testers before releasing an app, so even a quick download and poking around helps.
Seems clear from people's fancy demos and my own testing that computer use and spacial reasoning in Astra are big steps forward. It can control Acorn and use selection tools to crop out complex areas, for example, very quickly. Mind-boggling.
Had a dream last night that I went to Best Buy to buy an extra Jaz disk. They didn't have any, but I was able to get one from Amazon that arrived to the store within minutes. Not sure what it means... Maybe I'm worried about backups.
Thinking about the OpenAI industry's PR problem, I'm reminded of Anthropic's ad during the Super Bowl. People said it was clever, but it reinforced the idea that AI companies are just like other big tech: tracking you and selling your data. For next year's ads, we will see a more optimistic vision.
Relocated to work at the Laura Bush library. The view is just as beautiful as I remember when I was visiting 30 libraries in Austin. Can't believe that was 10 years ago.
I was confused for a minute why the coffee shop / bar got so crowded as the morning went on, then noticed that everyone was wearing burnt orange shirts. Hook 'em. 🏈
Developers of popular open source projects are inundated with pull requests. What about a solution somewhere in between a user feature request and a code diff? User writes a feature request, AI checks the project code and turns the idea into a summary that highlights pros/cons based on the codebase.
A couple times over the last year, I've turned off fediverse posting from my blog. This is another one of those times. I may keep fediverse posting disabled until Trump is out of office, when I hope it'll be easier to lower the temperature in online discourse.
Marco Arment blogs about his old neighbors and the divisive nature of our current political environment:
If I learn today that my neighbors have political views that my “side” considers unacceptable and unforgivable, should I be able to have dinner at their house, shovel their snow, or even greet them outside?
Really good post.
I've got access to Astra now and have no idea what to build, as if I suddenly have writer's block. Anyone have a feature request or bug that we've overlooked?
I think my best essays have short titles that really undersell the scope of the blog post. No clickbait, no tl;dr headers to skim through. I hope people read them, but I'm not going to jump through hoops to make that happen.
In a call with reporters announcing GPT-6 Astra, Greg Brockman talked about whether Astra qualifies as AGI:
I do leave it up to the reader to decide for themselves if this qualifies for them. For me personally, I do think we’re there.
As we reach AGI, whether it's with Astra or a future model, I'd like to set some ground rules for myself — beliefs that won't change as technology changes. I don't believe that AI can have consciousness. Ever. AI will be smarter than us, but consciousness and "a soul" can't be created from computation.
When a chatbot says something that gives the impression of having feelings, it's just us projecting human traits onto the AI. My wife and I also named our robot vacuum. That doesn't give it sentience.
AI cannot love. It cannot feel joy, heartache, and despair. AI may be able to say something kind to a friend who is hurting, but it cannot care that the friend is hurting. It's these limits of AI that will reveal what humans are uniquely suited for. What we should focus our lives on.
For every task that AI can do that “replaces” an aspect of our own work, there will be something deeper and more important to work on.
I’m a programmer. In a single year, AI went from being useful in helping me code to now writing better code than I can write myself. And yet I have no shortage of things to work on, to plan, to shape, to ship.
AI might be able to write, but it has no childhood to remember, no person it misses, no mistakes it regrets. It doesn't have experiences to turn into a story. AI might be able to paint, but it can't put its passion into a work of art. It has nothing inside itself that needs to be expressed, nothing that can resonate because it comes from human experience.
Some people fear what AI will obsolete. I welcome it. If an AI can do something better than I can, then maybe that wasn't the part of the work I was supposed to be holding on to.
I realize that this framing is a luxury not everyone has, especially someone who was laid off by a company squeezing higher profits out of automation. Even though my career has been completely upended by AI, I see a clear path forward. For others, that path may be rougher, more obscured, although I hope they find it.
The things that will provide the most meaning in our lives are the things that get us closest to humanity, to love, to heartache, to joy. As intelligence becomes abundant, we can choose to set aside the tasks that are easily replaced, and I think we'll be left with more meaning and a deeper connection with others. When we reach AGI, let's look for what it means that some things won't change.
The GPT-6 Astra announcement yesterday was a bit anticlimactic because most people don't have access to it yet. That's fine, plenty of things to work on with the old-and-busted GPT-5.7 Sol.
Also listening to the interview with Greg Brockman on Stratechery this morning.