Yet more views from the train, earlier today going across a bay on the Hudson River. 🚂
Stopped for a while in Albany. 🚂
Mohawk River in Schenectady. 🚂
A few more details in this Fortune story about the short-lived coup against Matt Mullenweg, but still no real explanation for why it happened:
A remarkable level of secrecy surrounded the drama. None of the board members have publicly explained why they suddenly wanted him out of the company. Mullenweg has declined to describe why he was all but fired, or how he quickly got back control of the company.
You come at the mad king, you best not miss.
Matthias Pfefferle blogs about a clever way to render OPML in browsers using JavaScript, via @jlelse. I'm going to look into doing this for Micro.blog's OPML too.
Working on more layout fixes for the iPhone Duo. I'm not sure Apple made the right trade-offs with the design of this thing. Vertical nav controls still feel weird. And with the device backordered for months, hard to justify the time to rethink everything.
Last morning on the train, along Lake Erie. 🚂
Chicago Union Station. 🚂
In other Anthropic news today, I’ve been thinking about this bill that Anthropic proposed where it’s not a show-stopper if only 50 people might be killed or seriously injured:
The bill would let the government block a model's release or use only if it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages, or of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people, according to the report.
It's weird to even put a number on this. But also, if gun manufacturers had to meet a similar standard before putting semi-automatic rifles on the market, the world would be a better place.
Anthropic announces a new public benefit fund, beyond what the existing b-corp can do:
The Anthropic Public Benefit Fund will have increased flexibility and scale, enabling us to pursue our mission in new ways: for example, we might explore large donations to traditional nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations.
A little mysterious. I wonder what they have in mind (or if they know).
There's a fun site that keeps track of Codex resets. OpenAI is in the middle of a nutty 28-day challenge to ship new features every day or give resets. Feels like a "bank error in your favor" every few days.
Crossing into Wisconsin. 🚂
Mark Gurman is pretty down on the iPhone Duo launch:
Apple has dealt with launch shortages before, but a three-month wait for a new iPhone is practically unprecedented.
Doesn't bother me, but I know some developers are annoyed that they can't test their apps for months.
Along the Mississippi River as we head out of Minneapolis. 🚂
I'm feeling so lucky that I get to build software for people like @patrickrhone. We were able to catch up this morning as my train stopped just long enough at the Minneapolis - St. Paul station.
Looking over stats for the Mac app. 90% of users on macOS 26 or 27. 98% on Apple Silicon. Only thing I'd like to change going forward is to check for new versions a little more aggressively, so people don't miss out on improvements. I'm not sure the 2006-era Sparkle UI is the best in 2026.
I took this shot of the stars from Puget Sound a few days ago, then didn't even look at the result on my phone because I just assumed it would be blurry. Actually it turned out pretty neat. If I had known, I'd have tried again and fiddled with the exposure.
In John Gruber's initial thoughts on the HomeView, he wonders about the odd $300 pricing for both the regular HomeView and the wall-mounted version:
So the wall-mounted version, when you include a mount, costs more but sounds worse? This doesn’t make sense.
I was thinking about this too. All I can come up with is that Apple doesn't want you to buy the wall-mounted version unless you're really sure that's what you need. If the wall-mounted version was cheaper, some people might buy it based on price, then be unhappy because it's too much trouble to install.
No wi-fi and intermittent cell coverage for this trip, as expected. Somehow I managed to upload a video when we got back near a town. I used the offline time to write some code by hand (gasp!) and do yet more editing on the book.
Morning in Montana. 🚂
On the Empire Builder. Starting to turn east, with the moon in the sky. 🚂
Seattle light rail.
John Gruber blogging about the Duo pre-orders:
...pre-orders always start before reviews appear. People are left to guess whether they’re going to like it without any word from people who’ve used it.
At least Apple is generous with returns. $2k is a lot to put down on faith, though.
At the hotel lobby, a bunch of LEGOs to play with.
Happy iPhone Duo pre-order day. I'm skipping it, and looks like serious delays anyway. Current expected delivery is well into January. I'll be updating the Micro.blog suite of apps with very basic folding screen support in the next minor updates.
Hood Canal.
Automattic has a clever and touching memorial to Eric Binnion, hidden in the HTTP response from WordPress.com.
Interesting to see Meta working directly with Apple to run Muse Spark Open on Macs efficiently. John Voorhees has a good summary at MacStories. But the cost is still pretty insane... Spending well over $10k to get "only" an 800-billion parameter model when the frontier is still a ways ahead of that.
Reading more details in the story of an OpenAI engineer getting arrested after bugging a conference room:
Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national, was arrested Friday and charged with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications. He made his initial appearance in federal court Tuesday and remains in custody.
He seems to have had a fairly normal career, so what caused this flip to espionage? Strange. Not the obvious "he was a Chinese spy" that people might guess.
Sometimes a business has to make difficult decisions to stay profitable. But I can't accept that major layoffs are needed at companies that make literal billions of dollars in revenue. Often these companies are still hiring even as layoffs are announced. 📺
Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
Lots of travel this week. Hoping to fix some bugs and read a bunch. Packed a print book and my Kindle.
Watched: A Few Good Men. This movie is still so good. 🍿
Jason Snell blogs about Siri AI from the HomeView, which is better than what I assumed earlier. Is this going to be fast enough, though?
Apple does say that if you make a Siri AI query for your personal content, it will search everything on your iPhone or iPad—and that includes apps that aren’t the HomeView. So you should be able to query your iPhone apps, but not actually run them.
I added a new plug-in to Micro.blog’s plug-in directory that implements the about.md and contact.vcf parts of SocialSpec. It’s an experiment, we’ll see where it goes!
Caleb Hailey has announced socialspec.org, a suite of recommendations for making websites more social. Following lists, about pages, and contact info. "The future of social media is websites."
Love the great feedback about Micro.blog's new Blog Audit feature. Today I updated it with a couple more improvements: an option to download and copy archived images instead of just fixing the img tag, and a better way for us to stop bot hits from showing up in the missing paths section.
Looking forward to this documentary about Don Bluth. From Cartoon Brew:
Directed by Dave LaMattina and Chad Walker of Copper Pot Pictures, the feature chronicles Bluth’s extraordinary career, from his early years at Disney and his dramatic 1979 departure to the creation of an independent animation empire that, for a time, rivaled the studio he left behind.
The idea that AI might be conscious falls apart pretty quickly when you consider ChatGPT Images. It’s also built on the same underlying AI technology, but no one would consider image generation to be conscious.
I have a test blog on WordPress.com, so I temporarily upgraded it to test Jetpack in ChatGPT. Here's a transcript. Do people want this? I've avoided building this because I don't think we should encourage non-human writing on Micro.blog. It could be useful in some cases, though, for dictation.
Dan Moren blogging at Six Colors on the new Apple TV announcements:
In an announcement sure to shock the very foundations of the world, Apple rolled out a new Apple Siri Remote with support for Find My...
🤣
HomeView is not available in the EU because Siri AI isn't available there. I think Europe should hold the line on this, or find a compromise that will allow limited third-party voice assistants. Talking to my OpenAI dot on a HomeView is exactly what I want.
The video introducing HomeView isn't making me feel the way Apple probably intended. Now I'm just sad for when my kids were all living at home. Note to parents with younger kids: try to appreciate even the crazy mornings.
Jon Hays makes the case that not only will AI not wipe out software developers, in several years we might have more available jobs than people:
By then, I suspect we’ll have discovered that AI hasn’t eliminated the need for good software engineers. It’s simply changed what those engineers are capable of producing. We’ll also have spent years discouraging young people from entering the profession, leaving us with a much smaller pipeline of new talent just as the demand for software continues to grow.
Gruber is right. The only way for the others to compete with Twitter is to start innovating.
To make the web better, we need to move beyond this "Mastodon vs. X" debate. It has become a distraction, consuming all of our energy with fights that barely make a dent in open web progress.
Related to Blog Audit, I also wanted to give a quick shout-out to the plug-in Wayback Link Preserver by @g, which takes a different approach of using JavaScript to intercept link clicks and tries to resolve them to archived copies. You can find that in Micro.blog's plug-in directory.
Today I'm rolling out a new feature in Micro.blog called Blog Audit. You can find it under Posts → "..." → Blog Audit. It will go through all of your blog posts looking for broken links, missing images, and other problems that tend to pop up after blogging for a while, especially if you've migrated from another platform.
I made this short video where I show the feature on my own blog:
Learn more about Blog Audit on the help page. Note that we do require a Micro.blog Premium subscription for this feature. There are new costs for us running the background work, and Blog Audit also pairs nicely with Premium's other feature of saving a copy of every link you blog about.
Happy blogging!
Catching up on the news of Corpus Christi’s failed desalination plant project in this lengthy story on KUT. Each time I visit, I have more doubts about the city’s future. Investing in new infrastructure seems very much needed.
Dave Winer blogs a lot about Chrome deprecating regular HTTP without the HTTPS. Equally annoying is how fragile HTTPS is on older computers. We dusted off an ancient MacBook the other day, unused in a box for years, and it complained visiting modern websites because of an old root certificate.
A year ago Meta scrapped Llama and their AI work and started rebuilding, now they’ve announced Muse Wonder, competitive with frontier models. It’s annoying how effective Mark Zuckerberg can be sometimes.