Follow buttons here act as you, not as @admin.
| Label | Kind | State | Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| @ricardo | local | — | |
| @rmdes | local | — | |
| @paul | local | — | |
| news.rss.chat | source | — | — |
| scripting.com | source | — | — |
| euwatch.micro.blog | source | — | — |
| www.techdirt.com | source | — | — |
| simonwillison.net | source | — | — |
| www.manton.org | source | — | — |
| feeds.kottke.org | source | — | — |
| rss.beehiiv.com | source | — | — |
| www.404media.co | source | — | — |
| brilliantmaps.com | source | — | — |
| shellsharks.com | source | — | — |
| www.platformer.news | source | — | — |
| podstandards.org | source | — | — |
| zacharykai.net | source | — | — |
I'm still amazed that AI prompts like this work. We've barely scratched the surface of what is possible.
More Fucked Today than Yesterday. “I keep wanting to write a post showing off my latest graphics along with the latest data and forecasts, because the picture they paint is one of a truly fucked planet.”
I take storing photos very seriously. Even with the EU outage this morning, there won't be data loss. We put photos in a couple places in case something like this happens. For Mac users, I also love the Backup tab in our Micro.blog app. Full blog posts and photos backup in a single local file.
Micro.blog hosting is spread across Linode, AWS, and Hetzner. I've posted a couple of times asking how Hetzner can be so inexpensive... Today I found out. Major outage with their S3-compatible storage.
Looking over the specs for the new Mac mini and Mac Studio. Not sure the Mac mini is a good box to put in the corner of your house running AI anymore. $900 base price. Would've been cool to have a stripped down MacBook Neo as a low-cost mini. I pay $14/month right now for my little OpenClaw server.
Flock banned Benn Jordan from their recent convention (they even emailed his hotel to cancel his room) but, taking a page from law enforcement & Flock itself, he electronically surveilled the whole thing from outside, sniffing Wifi, Bluetooth, mics, etc.
New podcast. Hear how my Frontier project is working out. Not entirely smooth sailing, but I'm pretty sure we're going all the way. By then I will have forgotten what a heavy lift it was. This is meant to preserve some of that feeling. Don't worry I don't cry. 😄
Target’s now-pulled children’s Halloween costume is so unbelievably racist that it had to, on some level, be purposely done by someone in the decision chain and everyone else was like, “seems ok to me”.
Maybe one day we'll have a better way to verify humans on the web. CAPTCHAs are too user-hostile (and will become ineffective). Scanning eyeballs with an orb is too dystopian. Requiring a credit card or drivers license is clunky and risks privacy. Dunno.
I got access to W Social, so I can now test cross-posting from Micro.blog and tweak any Bluesky-only assumptions in my code. But the verification process is pretty complicated. QR codes, mobile app, scanning passports! This is a lot of friction.
Homing pigeons may sense the Earth’s magnetic field using superparamagnetic macrophages in their livers. So metal! 🤘
Just quickly reupping this post to remind you things might be slower than usual around here for the next few weeks…moving crunch time is here. (I’ll still be posting though…it’s nice to sit down and flow state through some links occasionally.)
Meat proxy (noun): “A person who forwards AI-generated text, code, or other output without reading, understanding, or validating it. The person acts only as a relay between the AI system and the intended recipient.”
Years ago, the principal at my kids' school would always remind students that when given the choice between being right and being kind, choose kind. This was a line in the book Wonder, adapted by author R.J. Palacio from a similar phrase by self-help author Wayne Dyer.
Being right matters, but it's not always the most important thing. Some people are so sure they're right that they justify treating people harshly. Worse, they might still be wrong! Let me illustrate this with a table:
| Right | Kind | |
|---|---|---|
| ✅ | ✅ | 🙂 |
| ❌ | ✅ | 🙂 |
| ✅ | ❌ | 🙁 |
| ❌ | ❌ | 😡 |
The best thing about "choose kind" is that it protects you from being wrong and an asshole at the same time.
Why Are Rivers So Mathematical? “Any stream, from the littlest brook to the mightiest river, has a length that’s proportional to its drainage area raised to the power of 0.6.”
Learned something yesterday. Couldn't believe how stupid Claude had become, as I've been writing about here, and then I noticed that I was using Opus 5 and not Fable 5. So I switched back and all of a sudden Claude is smart again. So I conclude that there's a very substantial difference between the two. It's overnight jobs were done more carefully and the report it produced is literate, understandable, and tracks what we had agreed to.
Opinion columnist Karen Attiah won her arbitration against the Washington Post. They are ordered to reinstate her and pay full back pay. The Post fired her almost a year ago for her remarks in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder.
AI coding can be so thorough that it creates a mountain of code to review and maintain, even for simple features. I'm still trying to find the right way to balance this superpower with my pre-AI instinct to write the least code possible. It's about deciding which edge cases matter.
Finally took another look at rewriting my Libby sync to account for changes in the Libby app. Early testing works, so I'll deploy it tonight. It'll be nice to have my book loans in Micro.blog again.
I've updated my feedland page with 13 aggregator and firehose feeds from Bear Blog, Pinboard, Scour, Hacker News and others.
A good way to use these is to put them all in one folder in your reader and filter for keywords based on your interests.
Full list of feeds and link on my blog:
Mark Gurman has talked to people who have used the new foldable iPhone:
People who have tried the Apple model like how it fits in a pocket, the feel and durability of the advanced hinge mechanism, and the new iPad-like app layouts that take advantage of the larger internal display. It’s going to be an ultra-premium device that provides a halo for the full Apple lineup and will be a marketing engine to get people into the company’s retail stores.
At $2k, it's just too premium for me. I still think what I'd really want is a foldable iPad mini with no outer screen.
Today's development version of Frontier is buggy and the kernel developer (Claude) keeps breaking the most basic verbs. You spin your wheels and wish you could get them to just get keep it together. I remember this from the work that led up to Frontier version 1.0 in 1991 or so. It was a miserable time. Never got to work on what I wanted to, just reported breakage, often a session-ending dealstopper. The sad part is that Claude should be able to find the things it broke on its own, far better than I can and at a much lower expense (I'm paying for its time, not the other way around). But basically every day begins optimistically, maybe today is the day I get to create something, but not yet. I did have a couple of days a week ago when I could tentatively work on building a GitHub repo, but then got distracted by verifying that the basic foundation still wasn't right. My only goal right now, and I'm single-minded about it, is to get it to move forward without breaking the essentials, then without breaking anything.
Wind turbine blade going up I-35. I'm always amazed at these, seeing them up close.
Reading a lot of replies on Mastodon, Bluesky, and even some on X to take the state of things. My blog post from last month is relevant this week. I don't expect everyone on Mastodon to agree, but I hope those who care about safety will at least consider it.
Anil Dash in a follow-up reply on Bluesky after blogging about how to move away from Big AI:
People tried to shame folks out of using Instagram, out of using Uber, out of getting into crypto. How’s that going? What if, instead, we had focused on providing credible, pro-social community-based alternatives that addressed the things people thought they would get from those platforms?
He's right that we can learn from the success of podcasting too.
Something I've been asking myself lately: what new things are possible when AI costs drop? I've been improving Micro.blog's Logs page, and this morning updated it to rewrite confusing Hugo messages in more friendly language. It even localizes if your account isn't set to English.
Love this. IndieWeb is punk:
Nobody’s waiting for permission to have a website. You don’t need a “content strategy.” You don’t need a niche. You need a place that’s yours, and the nerve to hit publish.
🎸
Jodi Ettenberg on living grief and a serendipitous discovery. “Living grief lacks the tapestry of rituals, language, and social permissions around grieving that a person is offered with death.”
Are there any other people who are blogging daily about their experiences developing software with Claude Code, Codex or somesuch. I'd like to add them to a list where we follow them. So much innovation happening underneath, I want to hear about what people are learing about creating the next layers. If you know someone doing it, please add a comment to this post. Thanks! :-)
About halfway through Ride or Die season 1 and enjoying it. Hannah Waddingham and Octavia Spencer are great together. 📺
Skimming through some junk mail, always looking for things to unsubscribe from, and this is an actual email subject line from LinkedIn: “Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, is popular in your network”. No kidding! Algorithms losing the plot. 🤪
Federico Viticci and John Voorhees have posted an explanation about returning to X:
MacStories is precious to us. It’s not just how we earn a living; it’s one of a small number of independent websites that still cover apps, Apple, and a growing list of topics, including videogame hardware and the automation and productivity side of AI. Readers shouldn’t have to think or care about the business side of MacStories, but we have to, which is why we returned to X.
I’ve seen some people post about unfollowing Federico or cancelling their Club MacStories memberships. Is that really what we want, to withdraw support from a long-time blogger who has had such a positive impact on the indie Mac and iOS ecosystem? We undermine our own cause if we do that, potentially isolating people who we otherwise have so much in common with.
Instead, let's ask why this happened. I'm concerned less about Federico's choice and more that it's a signal of new growth on X, especially around AI. I'm increasingly confident that's the case, just based on keeping an eye on X this year. There's a timely thread by Mike Masnick on Bluesky that applies here:
Multiple people I know have told me that they love the idea of Bluesky, and want it to succeed, but have abandoned it for X because the use agentic tools in their work and find them incredibly useful, and feel that any mention of their usage here leads to hate and ridicule.
Driving people away from open platforms, so that they feel they have no choice but to rejoin X, will only make things worse for the web. This same "you're not welcome here" story has played out on Mastodon too, most famously with Wil Wheaton. Our communities should try to resist divisiveness or we will be splintered into smaller and smaller groups with even less influence, at worst becoming insular or even hostile to new users.
Please keep in mind the big picture. To Federico, if we were to chat about this, I'd encourage him to mirror all his X posts to an indie microblog or Bluesky. That way he can connect with folks on X while avoiding exclusive support of a silo and, indirectly, its leadership.
The social web is at another inflection point. We can't count on another wave of X users leaving for Mastodon and Bluesky. If we want to grow the open web, we're going to have to earn it.