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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.
My WordPress mirror site stopped updating on August 12. It's now updating once again. I'll try to watch it more carefully.
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.
John Voorhees tried the new ChatGPT Work sign-in feature and blogged the details at MacStories:
If you can get logged in, having an agent collect and analyze things like analytics data is fantastic. However, getting past the initial login screen is still too frustrating.
It is remarkable this works at all. OpenAI has all the pieces in place... But I hope they can consolidate Codex, Work, and Chat in a way that isn't so confusing between local AI and the cloud.
Reading about the Meta settlement. I'm surprised that the changes are actually pretty significant. Nighttime block, muted notifications during school, and no like counts. Of course they could do more, but it's good progress.
Coffee shop this morning has Dolly Parton on repeat. 🎶
After reading Bill Gates' story, I concur.
I have seen bad behavior by Claude Code where it was doing tests of our S3 support, and it overwrote files that were critical to our apps, knocking at least one of them off the air.
I'm at a loss as to what I should trust it with, because this was in violation of an explicit rule I gave it and a broader one that it added itself.
On the other hand, the project I'm working on couldn't happen without the use of AI. Far too much code for one person to manage. A program that took several of us years to write, being converted in a matter of weeks to run on modern systems. I'm pretty sure that without AI this work would have been lost, and lots of innovations.
We humans are doing a fine job of wrecking everything, all on our own, denying climate change, giving into the same old tricks that lead to WWII and the Holocaust, so maybe it isn't the worst idea to turn management of everything over to the machines.
I don't recall a science fiction story in which the machines took over and they were the good guys in the end, saving us from self-destruction. Aliens, yes -- machines, no.
And when I'm working with Claude Code I recognize that it's a new form of intelligence, and may be the closest our species ever gets to First Contact. We could embrace it as such. What choice do we have?
And to Bill Gates, I wish when you were trying to own the web in the 90s, you had thought through the dangers, as you are doing now, and maybe not tried to own it, rather to foster its independence from big tech. Now we have the medium owned by the worst people possible, we exist here mostly to keep them in power, when it had so much promise when you really could have done something real to protect our freedom. I have no idea where we would be now if you had, but it has to be better than this.
On the fifth episode of her late 80s variety show Dolly, Dolly Parton was joined by Kermit the Frog for a lovely rendition of Sly and the Family Stone’s 1968 hit Everyday People.
You can also watch the clip on Instagram and Reddit. The full episode, which features special guest stars Delta Burke, Terence Trent D’Arby, and the Oak Ridge Boys (in addition to Jim Henson as Kermit), can be seen on YouTube (not very good quality unfortunately).
Tags: Dolly Parton · music · The Muppets · video
I watched a bunch of videos from this week's World Humanoid Robot Games in China. This segment on YouTube is an okay place to start.
These robots are advancing more quickly than I was expecting. I've blogged a few times that humanoid robots are a bad idea, and now I'm really convinced of the danger.
There will be helpful robots that fold your clothes. There will also be robots working in factories. And at the other extreme, there will be military strike teams of a dozen robots led by a single human. I'm not an AI doomer — quite the opposite! — but it's easy to imagine the worst case here.
I think small, special-purpose robots would've been a better path. R2-D2, not C-3PO. We imbue human traits in anything that looks humanoid, blurring our perception of the line between machine and sentient being. When these humanoid robots crashed out in China, I almost felt for them, even though they are designed purely for movement with no consciousness.
The future is going to be wild, and it appears too late to change the trajectory of robotics except with small, incremental corrections.
It was only a few weeks ago that I rewrote all my blog links to X to use XCancel.com instead. Now because of a cease and desist, those links are broken.
Micro.blog also archives everything you link to, but for some reason it doesn't appear to work with XCancel. More digging required.
In lieu of flowers, Dolly Parton’s family is asking for donations to her Imagination Library, which has distributed over 330 million books to kids.
Dolly Parton was one of a kind. We still watch 9 to 5 and Steel Magnolias sometimes. The “kindness” billboards featuring Dolly are a perfect tribute. Rest in peace.
RIP Dolly Parton, a gem and a hero. She died today at the age of 80.
“Ultimately there are people who want to live, not in a world of reconciliation, but in a world without repercussions.”
We've been catching up on Apple TV shows. Watched: Lucky. I wish they'd make a season "0" that is all heist, but I liked how it wrapped up. 📺
“At least 1-in-4 of all the people who have played in the NFL might expect to end up with chronic traumatic encephalopathy [CTE], according to a study of hundreds of cases over a recent six-year period.”
Holy moly. A maxed out Mac Studio is $18k. If you wanted a nice Mac with lots of RAM, you missed the window. 💰