@ryanbooker Yeah, my comment started as a joke, then turned more serious. Although I’m sort of annoyed with articles that kick a company’s leadership while they’re down, as if management mistakes explain everything.
The new iPhone announcement is just a couple days away, and on today’s Core Int we give our thoughts about the upcoming event, including a discussion about AI.
Looking up, at Beyond Van Gogh. In the old Austin American-Statesman building.
@KimberlyHirsh For sure. There are so many photo sharing apps, not an easy market to break into either.
@the Haha, that goes for my garage too. We moved last year and there is a lot of stuff in boxes, very unorganized.
This post about Marissa Mayer’s company Sunshine on Platformer is several months old, but I saw it linked again this week and wanted to highlight something:
Employees say they learn what they are working on each week during Monday morning standup meetings, and that their mandate shifts frequently as Mayer changes priorities.
This sounds exactly like how I run Micro.blog, actually. Founder mode, I guess? It sounds chaotic and “bad” but it’s also a strength of a very small team to change our minds quickly.
@numericcitizen @KimberlyHirsh @pratik We always imagined that we'd have a small team of curators that could come and go as time allowed. Unfortunately I don't really have the bandwidth to make that happen either right now... I'd love to prioritize it for later this year, after we get a few more bug fixes and app updates wrapped up.
Good news, everyone. Accidentally left the garage door open and someone stole a couple random things — looks like mostly power tools that are easy to replace — but they left the Power Mac 7500 and Power Mac G5. Suckers! They have no sense of quality and value. 🤪
@o22ie Thanks, glad you like it! You could use categories for this, and each category will get its own page (linked from the Archive page). That won't use the photos grid template, though. It should be possible to create a custom Hugo template to do that... Maybe that's something we can write a plug-in for. (That's a good question for the Help Center too in case others have done something similar.)
@robertbreen This sounds like a bug. You should be able to edit the finished date to fix it. I'll look into what happened… I think I've seen something like this before where the dates get mixed up.
@markstoneman I think auto-generated alt text is best as a starting point that can be tweaked. But I will say there’s no way the AI we use in Micro.blog would be as bad as their examples with the apples photo.
Talking to Daniel today for the next podcast episode, about AI, and afterwards I was thinking about why I find ChatGPT so effective instead of Google search. It’s not just the “here’s the answer” but also the very fast, clean results. Imagine a web search with 5-10 results that was as simple.
@Havn Yeah, it becomes a problem when a monopolist (or gatekeeper) leverages those kind of integrations to have an unfair advantage. I don't think Apple should be required to open up every little API, but for the big stuff like the App Store, they need to.
@neoyokel I don’t think it mentions it. But in fairness it wasn’t attempting to cover everything, just a couple specific parts of the DMA. Browser engines are worth a follow-up.
@drewmccormack Good point. I haven’t noticed whether Google has rolled out their Android compliance for this yet.
John Gruber has a long take-down on the DMA. There is plenty to think about in this, but a quick comment on his point about Chrome:
My guess is that, perhaps counterintuitively, the single biggest beneficiary of this mandatory browser choice screen will be Google Chrome, which I consider the single most dominant software monopoly in the world today.
This rings true. Google puts Chrome in your face everywhere. Perhaps one side effect of this is that Apple is going to need to do actual marketing for Safari.
@dejus That's sort of how it works now. But it's a little clunky and confusing for the user.
I feel that I’ve been overpaying for sending email for years. Making another attempt at migrating to Amazon SES with a dedicated IP. Should cut my bill in half and hopefully fix some reliability problems. (If anything bounced at SendGrid, it would stop sending emails until reset… Not great.)
@gustavo I'm not really thinking about whether jobs disappear, but how we can contribute to existing jobs that use our strengths as humans. Everyone wants to do meaningful work. Basically: for any job, think about what robots could do, then do more of the other thing they can't do. Every job has many layers.
@vladcampos They've said they will allow migration. I'm sure it will be the very last thing they do, though.
People worry that AI will take over what humans should be doing. It’s more profound than that. Using AI has helped me understand what actually makes us uniquely human. Love, creativity, leadership, fear, individualism, beauty. Let’s lean in to what only we can do and let that drive everything else.
Taking a short break from Threads and Bluesky. Nothing against those services, but I started over-thinking the post length differences. I need to focus on work and blogging first. Because my blog natively uses ActivityPub, Mastodon folks will still see my posts.
manton.org@gazshaw That's a really interesting idea. Sometimes I wonder if there should be a permanent $1 plan with the most basic of features.
@Annie That makes sense to me too. We started with 10-day trials and expanded to 30 later. Really a couple days should be enough to know whether it works.
@gregmorris We require a payment method now, although there are ways around it. Not sure how but I’ve seen people provide fake (stolen?) credit cards that can be saved but fail after the trial.
@ladyhope Nope, no requirement to include www for custom domains. Markdown and HTML are both supported too. Let me know if you have any questions!
While Micro.blog avoids viral features, making misinformation less likely to spread quickly, we still have a 30-day free trial that content spammers sometimes try to use. Thinking about going paid-only without a trial until after the election, to remove another potential source of problems.
@mitchw That would be nice too! Wonder if that can be done in a fairly private, secure way.
@cdevroe Yeah, the problem is we only show the Conversation link when there are replies already. Not sure what the best solution is, happy to hear suggestions!
Congrats to @rizzi@gloria.social on the release of the new Reeder! It’s a huge redesign, refocusing the app around timelines, viewing conversations, and more. Great integration with Micro.blog too.
@bapsi I was fascinated with the Spectacles but really want something that looks more like "normal" glasses. 🙂
“I’d run the risk of losing everything.
Sell all my things, become nomadic.”
— Clairo
My number one use case for AR glasses is when on a road trip and can’t stop to take pictures. Old buildings in forgotten towns, long abandoned, that were once beautiful.
@AlexKucera I wonder if something is cached somewhere... It is sometimes resolving for me, but not 100% of the time. Give it a few hours and let me know if it starts working or not. I think it was configured correctly.
@jeromechoo Wise. 🙂 Summer camping in Texas is always a bit rough. The nice thing is that I mostly had the place to myself, though.
Cloudy morning at Brazos Bend State Park, from the observation tower. Unlike any other state park I’ve been to. Didn’t see any alligators.
Seeing the “luxurious” headline on this review at The Verge for the new reMarkable Paper Pro, I was expecting it to be more expensive than $579. Looks really nice. And it makes sense to go for the high-end. The super low-end is well served by Kindles and paper notebooks.
I’ve always been a mosquito magnet. They go for me before anyone else, and leave several bites before I notice. This morning waiting for my coffee order outside, just got bit, and thanks to sensationalist “the sky is always falling” 24-hour news, now I can only think of EEE and other viruses. 🦟
The Verge writing about VW’s in-car AI:
Volkswagen says that OpenAI’s chatbot along with a “multitude” of other models are provided by automotive chatbot company Cerence, which will take over for IDA when requests are more complex than tweaking your air conditioning settings. For instance, the company says when drivers ask for things like restaurant recommendations or for the chatbot to tell you a story, that will go to the cloud.
I’ve long wanted something like this for road trips. I want to be able to ask it about nearby historical markers, towns, mountains, etc.
Congrats to Tapbots on the Ivory 2.2 release. However, to comment on their announcement post:
Ivory 2.2 for iOS/iPadOS is now available on the App Store! Release notes in the ALT text of the image or on the App Store.
This is not what alt text is for. With social platforms often showing alt text everywhere, effectively collapsing HTML alt and title attributes to be the same thing, this is increasingly misused. If the accessibility text does not match what’s in the image, it’s worse for folks who are visually impaired.
Speaking of Micro.blog apps, the new version of Mimi Uploader can batch generate alt text for multiple photos at once. Very cool.
Happy to announce that our companion app for notes, Strata, is now available for Android. Notes syncing and sharing is a feature for all Micro.blog paid subscribers. Get started on the web first, then you can copy your secret key over to Android.
Nice web utility from @mary.my.id that archives your Bluesky posts as HTML. Always a good idea to have multiple formats of everything.
Sometimes you just need a little color. Stairwell at Central Market.
There is a place for the WordPress block editor, or Medium, or Squarespace, or any number of very nice editors. But if you want to write natively for the web, those will never be quite right.