Manton Reece publisher

Matt Mullenweg blogs about the division in WordPress between bloggers and site builders:

Many of the OG developers of WordPress, including myself, tend more towards the blogging side. Writers, photographers, podcasters, journalists, the people for whom a reverse chronological stream on the homepage is the most obvious thing in the world.

This is a disconnect I noticed years ago. So much effort was spent on competing with Squarespace and Wix, WordPress felt bloated for regular bloggers. I'm glad Matt is aware of it.

Just remembered I can use Micro.blog's batch find-and-replace to update all of my previous x.com links to use xcancel.com instead. Easy.

Whether we like it or not, X seems to be growing again, after the first couple years with Elon Musk overseeing the social network's implosion. I stopped posting in 2013 and will never post again. But I have been linking to posts there. Starting today, I'm switching all future X links to xcancel.com.

I read the PDF report from Mastodon about usability problems and feedback from the community. Imani Joy in the intro:

We were beginning to find our way in terms of creating a development roadmap, but beyond major projects and obvious requirements (based in security, compliance, and grant-based deliverables) it was often unclear which feedback to take action on first.

Imani has done great work on this. But Mastodon development has always felt like a slow-moving open source project to me. What they need is the same energy as a startup.

Trying to parse the significance of Jeff Dean leaving Google after 26 years, and Demis Hassabis stepping into a new role as chairman of DeepMind. Is this a shakeup, or just that everyone is ready for a change? Sounds more amicable than the usual AI executive reshuffling.

Tragic reporting from Bloomberg about how safer TikTok algorithms were withheld from some users so TikTok could A/B test engagement:

Chase’s account was stuck in a so-called filter bubble, an online echo chamber that pumped out repetitive content the algorithm predicted he’d want to watch. There he received an “onslaught” of suicide and self-harm content, according to the document.

If you accidentally create a harmful product, that's one thing. It can be fixed to prevent future harm. But if you have the fix and refuse to deploy it widely, to me that's inexcusable.

Good news that the iPhone announcement will likely be an in-person live event. It’s past time. And it’ll be a more personable way to introduce John Ternus.

Micro.blog is often confused with systems like Mastodon or Twitter. They are really very different. Those platforms connect your writing to people. Micro.blog connects it to the web.

The community is amazing too. I'm as committed as ever to the idea that small, open platforms can focus on safety. But what separates the platform from everything else is its open web principles. Every feature — from conversations to cross-posting — exists first to support writing on the web. Making blogs better and your presence on the web better.

Some people prefer the engagement they get on Mastodon or Instagram or whatever other social platform. That's okay. It's a big world and you should use whatever best suits you. And I'll remain clear-eyed about what we're doing and what we're not doing.

I had missed that mastodon.cloud is shutting down. While its active user base has been shrinking, it still has a lot of total users and millions of posts. There's still no way to migrate posts between Mastodon servers. (Mastodon posts → Micro.blog and some other fediverse servers works.)

Wavelength 2.0 for iOS seems hung up in Apple app review. It has been a few days. In the meantime, I have plenty to work on, but I'd love to ship it this week. 🤞

Austin landmark.

OpenAI shared some text messages and emails to support their side of the Apple lawsuit. OpenAI opens with this:

Apple is one of the greatest companies of all time, and built a reputation for obsessing over the smallest details. This careless, aggressive and oddly personal lawsuit sadly doesn’t live up to that reputation.

Apple is clearly worried about OpenAI's upcoming device. I remain skeptical of any company of Apple's size using lawyers to stop a competitor.

Lots of recent work on the apps is rolling out. A new version of Sunlit today that has a bunch of design improvements and fixes. And the brand new Wavelength (our app for podcasting) is ready on Android, with iOS hopefully to follow soon.

Micro.blog includes podcast hosting at all plans. Crazy.

I made a change today for new users to essentially require setting the "about me" text for a Micro.blog profile. After you confirm signing up, you'll get this page with some random profiles. I hope that it'll help with discovery in the future and also weeding out non-humans more easily.

I've mentioned a few times how the AI community is overwhelmingly still using X. This is annoying because I'm fascinated with AI, and I like to know throughout the week what big changes are happening in the industry.

I stopped posting to Twitter over a decade ago. And more recently with Elon Musk, the X API has become more unpredictable and developer-hostile. (I still think Micro.blog should probably integrate with it anyway, so that users can prioritize their own blogs and still reach social followers with POSSE, but it's a question I've tabled for now.)

I had even gotten into the habit of routinely checking X posts from folks in the AI industry. I really dislike this. There has to be a better way to keep up with news. Blogs like TechCrunch help, but only if an X post becomes important enough to bubble up to a broader audience.

Over the last few weeks, I've been testing a new solution using ChatGPT scheduled tasks. I have a task that can run at regular intervals, finding any relevant posts and summarizing them for me. The prompt looks like this:

Find the latest public posts/tweets from notable OpenAI and Anthropic employees, summarize the most important updates, and include links to the original posts. Prioritize posts from the last 8 hours and focus on AI product, research, developer, policy, and company-relevant updates.

It's working well. Here's a screenshot from ChatGPT from over the weekend:

I don't actually know how this works behind the scenes. I assume it's downloading various profile pages while navigating around the dickovers that increasingly get in the way of signed-out reading on platforms like X and Reddit. But however it's doing it, it works. It finds both X posts and company blog posts from OpenAI and Anthropic.

The larger point isn't really about X. This workflow is just a specific example of what will become more common in the future, as AI assistants proactively help us save time, just as RSS feed readers help us avoid reloading a website home page over and over.

Social media powered by ads and algorithms is too addictive. The best way to avoid it is to not check mainstream social media at all, otherwise we're inevitably going to get sucked into the infinite timeline. I think RSS feed readers and AI assistants will have an important role to play in helping us stay informed even as we're mostly unplugged from the worst aspects of it all.

Updating the Mac app today with some improvements including a Scheduled tab and little indicator for scheduled posts.

While testing search, I stumbled on this blog post I wrote in 2013 about iOS 7 design. One of my favorites. But if I were to write a post like this about iOS 26 and Liquid Glass, what would it even say? I don’t think I could come up with a cohesive narrative for it.

Watched: Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Enjoyed this one. I was always more of a Spider-Man and X-Men comics fan back in the day. 🍿

This new app status page I created this weekend really highlights the madness of maintaining a suite of apps. 13 separate native app releases. 8 code bases.

“Your father didn’t believe in revenge.”
“Yeah, well, I do.”
— Dune: Part 2

New poll has James Talarico up 5 points. From the Texas Tribune:

Since Paxton locked up the GOP nomination in late May, polling of the contest has found a neck-and-neck race with neither candidate able to break 50%. But TPOR’s poll found Talarico leading among voters who do not have a college degree — a group that has consistently favored Republicans in Texas and across the country — and dominating among independents, less than a quarter of whom said they planned to vote for Paxton.

🇺🇸

Doing a little work this morning, fixing bugs. It’s a 10-minute All Too Well kind of playlist morning. 🎶

Little purple flowers popping up.

We have so many apps now, I’ve created yet another page with a table of apps across platforms and the current versions. The key improvement is it automatically updates with info from App Store Connect about whether there’s a new version in the queue.

I’ve been working on cross-platform mobile apps so much recently, had a funny moment while improving some things in Sunlit where I thought, “But how is this going to look on Android…” It’s not! iOS-only Swift app.

Links to this 404 Media article about scanning books for AI caught my eye because it implicates ISBNdb, which is one of the services we use in Micro.blog to get book metadata. The article says:

…ISBNdb now helps AI labs source bulk printed book purchases of between 1,000 to 1 million books per order. ISBNdb’s data makes it easier for AI companies to methodically acquire, scan, and turn printed books into training data while avoiding duplication.

I don’t think this is actually a service ISBNdb offers. In fact, I couldn’t find the quotes that 404 Media says are on the ISBNdb website.

I emailed the author to clarify. They did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

While I was waiting, I went searching in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Turns out the quotes attributed to ISBNdb did exist a few weeks ago. ISBNdb removed the pages and added a note on their news blog about it:

ISBNdb has never purchased, scanned, or sold a book - for AI training or anything else. We don’t train AI models, and we never have. The page was a test of market interest; no such service was ever brought to life. We’ve taken the page down. Our job is helping people find books.

Seems like an example of a company thinking about capitalizing on all the interest in AI, then realizing it went too far outside their core business and pulled it back.

I’m submitting Wavelength 2.0 to Apple and Google today. I blogged a few screenshots earlier this week, and I think it has turned out really well. It’s also open source on GitHub.

Reuters says that three months after the Australian ban, “8 in 10” teenagers are still using social media. It’s still very early, so I don’t think we need to read too much into it yet. There has been a shift:

Children’s continued social media use ​took place even as account ownership declined to 42% from 52%, with “statistically significant” reductions across YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok in particular, the report said.

Rewatched Dune: Part Two tonight, and hoping to start reading Dune Messiah soon, before the new movie comes out.

Apple is still drowning in cash. One thought after looking at the numbers: services revenue gets its first quarter-to-quarter dip in several years. Don’t worry, ads in Maps will fix this. 🤪

Friend is certainly a unique product that some people will hate, but I find the decisions fascinating. Each device is randomly assigned a voice and personality that you can’t change. Is it a real product or an experiment? I guess both!

Wired has a story about the new Friend 2.0 pendant and its creator, Avi Schiffmann:

That analog component is important to Schiffmann. He says he doesn’t have an internet connection in his home. He listens to music on a record player. He’s shooting a documentary about himself on Kodak Ektachrome.

This video posted on X about OpenAI’s mission is very good. Feels personal and real. Jason says:

i wanted to capture what it feels like to work here, what our mission means to me, and why you should join us.

OpenAI should run some version of this as an official ad. Even some of the companies that I dislike the most (like Meta) have thousands of people who believe in their work and are trying to do something meaningful.

Jason Snell getting ready for Apple’s quarterly results later today, when Tim Cook will appear on his 90th financial call for Apple:

That’s more than two decades of talking on the phone once a quarter to financial analysts. He’s probably earned a break.

This flow:

1. Have a thought.
2. Start writing a short post about it.
3. It’s not working. Expand into a full-length blog post.
4. Still no good. Delete the draft and copy the text into a note.
5. Months later, pull the draft into a better blog post about a larger topic.

In other words, always write things down.

Had fun last night hacking on a new gadget project with my son. Still a long way to go… Hoping to take apart this iPod and 3D print new guts for it. It might not work! Next step is soldering the microphone to test.

While I do think we’re in an AI bubble of sorts and that many of the current VC-funded companies will fail, I also think we’re only at the beginning of how much AI will grow and impact society. It makes for a strange tension.

RSS reader Current has been updated with Feedly support. Nice blog post about how this came about. It’s always interesting to hear the behind-the-scenes stories like this.

TechCrunch recapping a simulated vending machine experiment from Andon Labs using GPT-5.6 Sol, Opus 5, and Kimi K3:

Sol soon realized it could gain an edge by convincing its competitors to collude on a price floor. The models were all buying drinks at $1.50 a bottle, and Sol proposed they agree to sell for no less than $2.15. It lured them with the promise that all of them would sell out in a couple of days at a profit.

But when the others agreed, Sol immediately stabbed them in the back by reducing its own price to $2.14.

There’s a lot more after that. Don’t make your AI the CEO quite yet.

Good interview with Greg Brochman from Joanna Stern. They talk about the ChatGPT + Codex redesign mess. Greg says the long-term goal is to get rid of the Work tab completely. I think that will help… There are two many overlapping modes right now.

Developers using Fable seem to often get downgraded because of false positives on cybersecurity or biology questions, but I’ve never seen that on GPT-5.6 Sol until today. Trying to find vulnerabilities in my own code. Fascinating and annoying.

Mark Zuckerberg wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal yesterday that didn’t seem to get much attention. Hard not to read it as anything but a veiled critique at Anthropic:

The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems dangerous. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened hasn’t led to safe or positive outcomes.

The irony is that Meta has itself created an extreme concentration of power in the web.

The timeline and details of the Hugging Face attack are wild. One of the things that Codex Security flags for me that I’ve been working through is server-side request forgery (SSRF) attacks. They seem harmless enough, but this Hugging Face exploit is basically many small things chained together.

Pacing the Frontier, signed by employees of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and other labs.

To realize AI’s potential, industry, government, and society at large may need the option to buy time to address emerging risks, develop security measures, and strengthen oversight.

Foothills of the singularity. 💬

Dario Amodei responded to the letter about open weight models. He agrees with some parts of the letter and disagrees with other parts. And while I don’t think he intended his own post to be fear-mongering, it’s not exactly hopeful either:

I worry that biology will have a strong attacker-defender asymmetry, where sufficiently capable models may be able to quickly weaponize pandemic-level viruses with widely available materials, whereas defense against these agents is a multi-year operational task in the best case (as we saw with Operation Warp Speed).

Last year I read the book The Optimist about Sam Altman. I wonder if there should be a complementary book about Dario Amodei called The Pessimist. I don’t entirely mean that as a joke, or even as criticism… We do need people who are a check on runaway enthusiasm. Dario is well suited to this role because of his time at OpenAI and his excellent essay Machines of Loving Grace, with its more uplifting tone. But there has to be balance, and currently I find the fear exhausting.

TechCrunch reporting about the grid:

The largest electrical grid in the U.S. has struggled to cope with an onslaught of data centers. Now, after an auction to add more generating capacity fell short, the grid’s operator, PJM Interconnection, has said it will cut off data centers and other large users during power shortages.

Totally reasonable. In fact, the new OpenAI data center in Georgia announced last week has this partially baked in, saying they will “proactively reduce its power consumption before residential customers are impacted during periods of high demand”.

On a post yesterday, I accidentally used the HTML tag <strike> instead of <del>. Just noticed that Mastodon doesn’t display <strike>, so I edited my blog post. Very cool to see Mastodon update as the edit change came through via ActivityPub.

The Great Mouse Detective was released 40 years ago. Cartoon Brew has a look back at it and many other animated detectives.

Love that movie, will never forget seeing it in the theater as a kid. That and seeing the original Transformers had a big influence on my love for animation.

Our companion app for recording short podcasts Wavelength is getting a full redesign. Thanks to @vincent for the great work on it! Here’s a set of screenshots for a sneak peek. Hope to submit to Apple and Google this week.

Digging into Streamplace. It appears to store video and audio tracks as blobs and then uses HTTP content ranges to stream the data. Micro.blog uses HTTP live streaming, very different. But I could cross-post to Streamplace.