Looking forward to Rings of Power season 2. Looks like what I blogged during season 1 is still true. They’ve put a lot into this show.
Camping at Lake Somerville State Park. Lots of dense trees and bushes around each site, makes for nice privacy if anyone was actually here except me. Not pictured: the lake.
@vrsimility True, I call out Kagi in our upcoming podcast episode too. Really like what they're doing.
Cheat sheet for emoji in my blog posts:
- 📚: about books I’m reading
- 🇺🇸: politics
- 🙂: friendly reply, please don’t take offense
- 🤪: usually gripes that are slightly exaggerated from how I really feel
Elena Rossini has a blog post walking through the compatibility between Mastodon and Pixelfed specifically, and also more generally with Mastodon API clients like Phanpy and Ivory:
The ultimate goal of The Future is Federated is to introduce the Fediverse to “regular people,” encouraging them to try out one or more of its networks, allowing them to experience social media away from the walled gardens of Big Tech
@js Oh really, I missed that they're supporting C2S. I'm happy to support it... Are there any C2S clients yet? That's mostly what I was waiting for.
@numericcitizen @pratik Thanks y'all! I just need to vent a little. 🙂
ActivityPub folks: I’ve posted FEP-eb22 to document supported features in NodeInfo, so that clients and servers can better communicate about what to show in a client UI. Would love your thoughts on it. There’s some overlap with other FEPs but those seem stalled and not quite what I need.
@warner I'm correcting the thread. Also I think I found the problem so it can be fixed going forward.
To be honest, the Ghost ActivityPub emails are both exciting and a little bit painful for me to read. Ghost is a popular platform and it is definitely a good thing to support an open standard. But also, I did most of this same work 6 years ago, without the jokes and pug artwork. Let’s go already! 🤪
My initial take on SearchGPT (without using it yet) is that it should be a step forward for linking to and crediting sources in a way that chat assistants aren’t. It also looks much cleaner than Google, which is a mess of ads and uneven results now. Daniel and I talk about this on the next Core Int.
@warner It's not specifically with the Mac app, but it is an issue that I'm looking into where the threads get mixed up.
Not sure what to make of Sam Altman’s op-ed in The Washington Post. When he writes about model weights and export restrictions, I keep thinking of the Llama 3.1 release this week. Feels like more between the lines that I’m missing.
Big news for AltStore to be getting Fortnite. Also from Epic, they are pulling Fortnite from Samsung’s store to protest how sideloading is now disabled by default. And in a way, they’ve sort of been protesting the same thing on iOS for the last few years.
@rileytestut Very cool, congrats!
Thinking more about Biden’s address last night and his legacy, it’s remarkable how much he accomplished. Investments in infrastructure and climate, progress on guns. All he had to do was get us through the pandemic and clean up a little of Trump’s mess. Feeling optimistic that we can build on this.
@moonmehta Thanks! I think it has a lot of potential, for search too in the future. I'll revisit automatically flagging broken links too.
@moonmehta It archives links inside Micro.blog. It also sends your own posts to the Wayback Machine, but not other posts you link to. It doesn't (yet) notify you of dead links, but it does make it easy to update them... I showed how it works in this video, probably better than any of the written docs right now.
Evan Prodromou in a post on Mastodon:
If you make a Fediverse explainer, try to show some real communities as the nodes in the network, rather than using software packages and their logos. Companies, local governments, universities, families, friend groups, individuals.
I think this is a good approach. Talking about platforms is also effective, though. If Threads could talk to TikTok, people would get that, even if it’s not as distributed as showing communities. Ideally large platforms would be broken down, e.g. not just TikTok but BookTok.
Set the presidential address to record while out tonight so we could watch it fully, without all the noise of news and social media. He hit it just right. Moving. “…one day sit behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office as president of the United States. But here I am.” Thank you, Joe Biden. 🇺🇸
Federico Viticci on how wired EarPods are still great:
I don’t have to worry about battery life, pairing, or latency. Sure, there’s a wire, and there’s no noise cancelling when using them – but these are my “downtime earbuds” anyway, so I don’t care.
I find myself using my AirPods Pro less and less, actually. For some reason I misplace them when I don’t misplace anything else. They’re amazing, but there’s always that brief moment when I question whether the wireless is actually working, and they still don’t feel as comfortable to me as EarPods.
Nice work from Apple on the web version of Maps. Native apps are great, but some apps really should be on the web, especially apps that you want to link into.
A great new theme for Micro.blog: Sumo by Matt Langford. There’s a lot in here that is really well thought out.
Playing around with the new dataset from Overture Maps, a project started a couple years go between Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and others. I can download and query the data, but doesn’t seem like it can really be used if you don’t bring a lot of cash with you.
@numericcitizen Yes, I think on-device models are going to be very limited for years.
@iChris Ha! Yeah, it's a distraction to the business, though. Going all-in on services (and App Store revenue, and ads) has potential conflicts with what is best for users and developers, in my opinion.
I’ve tinkered with smaller Llama models, on my Mac and Linux servers, so I thought I’d try Llama 3.1. No surprise the 405-billion parameter model is huge, a 200+ GB download. But even the 70b model seems too much for my M3 with 48 GB RAM. Going to stick with cloud models for the foreseeable future.
There are some wild numbers in this report at Bloomberg about Apple’s spending on TV+ content. Reaffirms my belief that Apple has lost their focus. Too much attention on services, sometimes to the detriment of core platforms, developers, and users.
@incongruousm We moved things around a little to improve the editor. You can now click the "Open" button and then Edit CSS is there. I made a video that explains it in more detail.
@evan Beto's great. Probably too risky a pick for VP, but he'd be good at it, and it would make Texas something to watch, with Colin Allred vs. Ted Cruz also on the ballot.
@numericcitizen I can't really argue with that. Although as problematic as Facebook is as a silo, at least you can publish to the web without it. Not so with iOS apps.
@pratik Thanks for the heads-up that they've improved it. It's good enough that we can support it now. Too bad it's still missing caption text, though.
@pratik I like that. It's probably fair here, but also any movement toward more open platforms could benefit a lot of people. (I don't actually have strong opinions about AI open source, though.)
@rscottjones To be honest I dropped the ball on appealing the API rejection from Meta. It's on my list for this week.
@aleen The branding is a good point. I like to use first names when they are unique and more obvious than a last name alone. Examples: Hillary, LeBron. I think you're right to call out the press if they aren't consistent about this, and broadly there's probably some sexism there, but also I view it as a sign of respect. "You are the most famous person named Kamala!"
@gregmorris Thanks! Thinking about it for Threads. Need to get approved for basic API use first.
@jmanes Videos should work as long as they are under the 75 MB limit. I just did a quick test and it was fine, although there is a delay before the thumbnail appears, so maybe that was longer than expected? Mind trying again and waiting a little longer? If that's a problem, we should be able to improve it.
Following politics sort of obsessively, senate races, the 2020 primaries, I thought I knew a few things about Kamala Harris, but I’m still learning. Just read this essay by her from Elle in 2019, on being a stepmom — “Momala”.
@esamecar Thanks. Yep, I thought about editing but decided deleting / re-add is simple enough for now.
@maique That's okay, the new interface essentially creates the identical links and redirects as before, just much easier to understand.
Back down the rabbit hole of HTTP signatures + ActivityPub today. Fixed an issue, and reviewed the new community group draft. Don’t feel great that my code mostly resembles the make friends and verify requests blog post from 6 years ago rather than newer docs.
@moonmehta Following up, I am seeing an unusual issue today with a background task a little stuck. I'll keep an eye on things, hopefully that'll resolve it.
It’s such a good feeling to have the Biden reelection campaign drama behind us. It was going to be a slog, and I’m sure Joe knew it. No rush to pick a VP for Kamala Harris. Let’s take a deep breath. And Joe can focus on doing the job, and hopefully get a well-deserved break from the chaos too. 🇺🇸
@moonmehta No recent issues that I'm aware of. For external RSS feeds, it should usually be a few minutes. If it happens again, let me know, also might be some messages in Account → View logs, which should show when the feed is downloaded.
Micro.blog has a couple options for creating redirects, but adding pages to your blog navigation that go somewhere else hasn’t been intuitive before now. I’ve added a new option that makes this much more discoverable.
@ArnoldHoogerwerf @adamprocter Do you frequently use multiple iOS devices? Thinking it might be related to that, I'm looking into it again.