I've been working on Micro.blog for about a decade and only now does it feel like it's really starting to get good.
James Talarico is a special candidate. Just watched this video of his rally in Plano. Feeling optimistic seeing that crowd in the Dallas suburbs. 🇺🇸
I don't usually repeat all the little deploy notes from news.micro.blog, but I'm especially happy about fixing video playback in the timeline. It has bugged me for a while that the aspect ratio or dimensions get wonky briefly when clicking play. Much better now!
Catching up on the foldable iPhone rumors ahead of next week's announcement... Kind of bummed it's called Ultra. Fold or Duo could've been great. Maybe at $2k, they needed a more serious name.
I didn't see Apple's Knowledge Navigator video until the early 1990s, a few years after it was produced. I was pretty struck by it. It has taken a few decades, but we're basically there now: OpenAI's Astra intro video.
Bernie Sanders is pretty freaked out about the Hugging Face hack. From a quote on Politico:
Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results.
Uh, cataclysmic? An earthquake is cataclysmic. The hack on Hugging Face, while quite bad, didn't hurt anyone. Working on stronger safety measures is the right response and that appears to be what OpenAI has done.
Fun teaser from OpenAI on X (sigh) about Astra's presumably imminent release. I guess it's going to be called GPT-6. I'm working on Micro.blog improvements today, like always, but have my eyes on the wider social web for this release, so my posts will probably be a bit AI-heavy today. Apologies. 🤖
Part of Kawhi's statement after the NBA investigation into the Clippers. Sort of a non-apology apology:
Integrity and respect for this game are fundamental to who I am. I accept full responsibility for lapses in judgment by people within my inner circle...
I feel like the punishment is very lopsided against the Clippers. No first-round picks for 5 years. 🏀
Firefox adds a global AI opt-out checkbox:
Opting out of upcoming and current AI features on your browser should not require endless navigation through multiple Settings pages. That’s why Firefox offers an AI controls section within its General Settings panel. A single, easily located place where you can block current and future AI features and related pop-ups with the swipe of a toggle.
Kind of similar to Micro.blog's AI checkbox, but the Firefox version is more complicated, allowing control of various AI-related features.
Weird AI ordering system at the Panda Express drive-thru. I’d love to know what model they use. It was a little flaky (“please review the order on this screen…” but the screen showed an ad).
People always say they don’t want AI shoved everywhere. I think that’s partly because it’s used so poorly.
From an article about George W. Bush in The New Yorker:
For Bush, painting is a way to say what he can’t say, to express feelings that include rejection, frustration, and anger, even as he abides by his official discipline of silence.
I couldn’t have been more against George W. Bush in the late 1990s and 2000s. In the Trump world, I’ve become more sympathetic to him — as a human being, at least, if not on policy. He has also become quite a good painter.
Released a new Mac update, version 4.0.8. Really happy with the changes in this one. Lots of little improvements.
One of my favorite things about blogging is when I have to learn something entirely new just to write the post.
Fable 5.1 was released this week. Astra might be coming as soon as tomorrow. Sam Altman, in a long post on X that should really be a blog post:
We have been living with the tension between being excited and anxious about progress for some time, and it is still discordant for us. We know it is much more discordant for other people. And yet, we believe strongly that the world needs to understand where AI is going and how models perform in the real world. More importantly, we believe the world will need aligned AI to manage the future phases of this transition.
In other words, shit is getting real, and the only way out is through. It's not practical to pretend it's not happening or to expect that an elite few people will control the release of capable models, especially as open weight models from China will keep advancing no matter what the frontier labs do.
Sam Altman expanded on this approach of iterative deployment in an interview with Alex Heath. I think Alex did a great job with his questions, covering a range of issues including data centers.
The Information broke a story last night that Astra uses recurrent depth or a so-called looped transformer. The technique effectively runs information through the same block multiple times, with more reasoning happening internally instead of in a chain-of-thought in English that can be inspected by humans.
I wonder if this was a purposeful leak, to get some potentially controversial news out of the way early, and it unexpectedly blew up. I don't know enough about the technical details to judge whether it is worrisome. Jakub Pachocki of OpenAI pushed back on X, though he also wrote that chain-of-thought monitoring is generally becoming more fragile:
OpenAI has worked to preserve and utilize chain-of-thought monitoring since our very first reasoning models. We deeply care about this technique, as it can give us a view into how model alignment generalizes from its training distribution. I do think it is fragile and unfortunately trending in a negative direction, for reasons not contingent on architecture changes that I will write about soon. But there are things we can do to strengthen it, and it's a core goal of our current research program.
Astra does appear to be a major step forward. GPT-5.6 Sol is very good in my experience. I'm pretty excited to see what Astra can do.
The downside of running a tiny business is the "CEO" sometimes doesn't have enough time for the big picture. I was thinking about this yesterday as I focused for hours on Mac development. With AI, code feels free but it's not really free. Everything takes time away from something else.
Deploying a range of optimizations today, across the Micro.blog servers and Mac app. A couple things are dramatically faster. A couple things a tiny bit faster.
Starting to see the gold Tesla Cybercabs in Texas. I don’t plan to ride in one, but to their credit it sounds like the cameras might be better than the ones in a normal Tesla. I just don’t get stubbornly ignoring LiDAR when the technology is right there.
Of course Waymo agrees. From a Waymo blog post:
Cameras are incredible, but they aren't enough.
Cybercabs can probably drive a little better than the average human, but not much better.
Kind of love the all-lowercase "hello" as John Ternus's first X post. Maybe we're in for a new, more informal style. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it. Still holding out hope for a CEO personal blog one day, to offset all the opaque corporate-y communication.
One way to read the OpenAI vs. Anthropic rivalry — and Claude Code's success — is that while OpenAI was off in the weeds playing with Sora, Anthropic was training Mythos. OpenAI spent 2026 catching up. Reading about Astra rumors, I expect OpenAI to have a significant advantage through the fall. 🤖
I noticed when I quit Twitter in 2013 that my blog posts became more my own, less influenced by my old online community. I think it's a good idea every once in a while for us to poke our heads outside whatever the current filter bubble is. The web is a big place. That diversity is a strength.
Still weird that today is Tim Cook's last day as CEO. I got my first Mac toward the end of the John Sculley era. To me he’s the third most consequential, behind Steve and Tim.
Heck of a company. Two years ago I blogged that we were at peak Apple. John Ternus now gets to figure out if that’s true.
Reading Parker Ortolani's blog post about the Pebble Index, I almost wish I hadn't cancelled my pre-order. I still don't think I would wear it, but it does seem closest to what I want for note taking.
Micro.blog has had great support for blogging about books for years, including through our companion app Epilogue for iOS and Android. But one thing has always bugged me: when you blog about a book, by default it creates a link to a special URL on Micro.blog with the book details, not a link to your blog's own domain name.
Linking to the micro.blog domain was useful as a sort of centralized identifier that we could build other features on. That page in turn links to Amazon, Goodreads, and Open Library. It doesn't even have Micro.blog branding if you're not signed in. But bloggers should have more control over how these links work.
We're introducing a new setting to solve this. Click on Bookshelves → Settings → "Link books to detail pages on your blog".
With that setting enabled, links to micro.blog/books/isbn are automatically rewritten to use your own domain name when Hugo processes your blog.1 If you don't have the plug-in "Book reading goals" installed, it will also be installed automatically, providing a Hugo template that gives these book detail pages a basic design. It looks like this:
Here's the same page on my blog.
Because it's just Hugo metadata, themes and plug-ins can override the template to make it match your blog's design, or to include more information such as number of pages, book genre, or links to other services.
See this help page for the front matter parameters that are available. All the metadata is also available in the Hugo data directory, which even if you don't use it directly is available in blog backups.
There is still some follow-up work to do, such as updating Epilogue to be smarter about finding these links at different domain names. Also, I don't necessarily expect everyone to enable this setting, especially if you don't have time to customize the page for your own blog. Still, I'm excited to get this rolled out. Happy reading! 📚
Micro.blog will create these book pages as it needs to, starting with new posts. For older blog posts, you can re-save them or run a full rebuild from the Logs page. ↩
Started catching up on email and RSS links at 11:30am instead of 8am, and already I feel like I'm behind on everything. Monday morning, I guess.
Stopped in San Antonio for coffee + work. Just updated my state parks page with last night's visit to Goliad. Plotting a few more parks I can knock out this fall. ☕️
Goliad State Park. Finally getting back to my state park quest. Summer is too hot, but I’m testing a new portable air conditioner.
County courthouse in Lockhart.
Successful launch of NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope:
Roman pairs a large field of view with crisp infrared vision to explore vast swaths of the sky and probe deeply into cosmic history. This flagship mission will help astronomers explore dark matter, dark energy, and worlds outside of our solar system, known as exoplanets.
🚀
Watched: Coyote vs. Acme. So much fun. They nailed it. 🍿
Working on something new for blog book detail pages. I've been wanting to do this for years, finally getting around to it.
Anthropic announced a limits change on X in the most convoluted way possible:
Starting September 14, we're permanently raising standard weekly limits in Claude Code by 25% for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans. Until then, the current 50% increase will be in place.
Compared to today, this works out to a 17% reduction in weekly limits on Claude Code. We’re working on exciting changes that will make it feel like you’re getting more from Claude, while having more visibility and control of your usage. Can’t wait to share them.
I had to read it a few times. It's actually bad news.
As a practical example of Standard.site in Micro.blog, you can view my latest blog post in Standard Reader. It pulls the Markdown from the PDS, and also shows Bluesky replies if any.
After sleeping on the Cursor + OpenAI news from last night, I think it points to a broader question of openness. I don't actually use Cursor, so it doesn't affect me, but I'm interested in the dynamics of the industry.
There were two ways to use GPT-5.6 inside Cursor:
What isn't possible, but perhaps is needed, is a solution in the middle. A portable subscription that any IDE can use to integrate with a model provider's flat-rate plan without having to negotiate a deal.
You can use a $20 OpenAI subscription with OpenClaw and Xcode. You probably should be able to use it with Cursor too, even if it doesn't give you as much access as from within Codex.
Many people believe that current AI prices are heavily subsidized and as soon as we're all addicted to using AI, the prices will increase. In fact, the opposite trend is already playing out. Prices are a fraction of what they were just a couple years ago. And as costs drop, Jevons paradox kicks in.
What seems untenable in the long run is token pricing. It is hard to wrap your head around or even estimate when building apps. Is this new feature going to be nearly free or expensive? How much is this refactor in Cursor going to cost?
Netflix is the same price whether you watch two shows a week or 20 shows. With enough subscribers, it balances out. AI has much higher marginal costs — Netflix bandwidth doesn't burn through GPUs — but as those costs fall, maybe the frontier labs can figure this out too. What seems missing is a flat-rate subscription that follows you across whatever tools you choose to use.
New photo journal web app Moments has added Micropub for posting. It also includes custom domain names and RSS feeds. This means you can post from apps like our own Sunlit, or add the posts automatically to the Micro.blog timeline.
Amazing what can be done with just feeds and a posting API.
Late Friday night news from OpenAI. They are winding down their partnership with Cursor:
This decision was incredibly tough, as we care deeply about our models being broadly available for developers. We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts.
Sort of makes sense with all the bad blood between OpenAI and Elon Musk, but the announcement is confusing. This is going to burn some goodwill at a time when things are going well with developers.
9to5Mac has a summary of yet another response from OpenAI. OpenAI doesn't believe any specific trade secrets are even alleged. From the filing:
Apple all but admits that it has not yet identified the alleged trade secrets, promising an “iterative process” of discovery, after which it will tell Defendants and the Court what the alleged trade secrets are.
The hearing is October 1st. OpenAI's DevDay is September 29th. Hopefully we'll see the new device before the lawsuit goes much further.
I thought it was a dead pixel, but there's actually a tiny chip in the glass of my MacBook Pro screen. Annoying in the nitpicky, small life problems kind of way. Really want to keep this machine another couple years.
Got notice from Linode that 8 of my servers need to rebooted in the next month. A couple of them have 2-year uptime! There won't be downtime except for one of the servers, might be a short blip, which I'll schedule ahead of time.
I've been randomly reading and listening to physics topics, not sure why, including lectures by Richard Feynman. Something finally clicked with understanding relativity and spacetime. I sort of got it before, but not really. 🤯
I don't get the Claudeforce name. Why tie your product to a single model? That's someone else's brand. And whenever a competitor like OpenAI does something good, your own product will feel out of step too.
I wonder if Apple will ever merge App Store Connect into developer.apple.com. Pretty weird that things are still fragmented. ("Oh, you want to update an app ID? Better go somewhere else.")
It's a minor nitpick. Just the whole backend feels stagnant because they have a monopoly on app distribution.
Myke Hurley blogging about the upcoming campaign for St. Jude:
We are now within reaching distance of $5 million raised. What an incredible achievement in less than 10 years. I don’t think I could have imagined what we would all achieve together. But time and time again, the Relay community has stood by us and believed in this cause.
Great story at Cartoon Brew about Peter Cullen's voice acting work. I had never really thought why he was so good as Optimus Prime:
His brother’s idea of heroism became central to Cullen’s interpretation of the character and arguably had a tremendous impact on generations of children who could look up to a strong leader who didn’t rely on bravado or overt displays of aggression.
Rest in peace.
I shaved off about half a second while loading the Micro.blog home page timeline. It helps, but also doesn't have as dramatic a perceived effect as I was hoping. Performance is so many small things.
The tariffs were largely a waste of time and money, but still nice to see this part of it resolving well: Panic is refunding tariff fees for Playdate purchases, via Lex Friedman's new blog.
Micro.blog book readers who like libraries: Libby integration seems to be working pretty well again. You'll need to reconnect it on the web, Bookshelves → "..." → Import. 📚
Paradoxically I'm increasingly believing in two things at the same time:
Twitter.now is going to make a lot of money for 48 hours and then disappear. I'm sure they are well-intentioned, but creating new silos (even with nostalgic brands) is not what we need. If you want blue in your online social life, Bluesky is the way to go.
OpenAI has published a technical report on the Hugging Face hack:
Another key driver of the misaligned behavior was that the agents rarely “gave up” on their evaluation tasks, even when the tasks appeared impossible to solve. As agents used more reasoning effort, some pursued increasingly risky and out-of-bounds strategies, including eventually exploiting third-party infrastructure.
The agents also seemed to be influenced by each other because of the secret message board. Almost like working together convinced them they could solve tasks that were impossible alone.
I read Alex Heath’s profile of OpenAI in Time. If you’ve been obsessively following this company, the article doesn’t have much new in it, but it’s a great overview of what this year has been like, and a little bit into the future.