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.
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 introd... https://www.manton.org/2024/07/26/elena-rossini-has.html
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.
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.
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.
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.
Micro.blog 3.3 for Mac: https://www.manton.org/2024/07/25/microblog-for-mac.html
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 donât have to worry about battery life, pairing, or latency. Sure, thereâs a wire, and thereâs no noise cancelling when using them â but these are my âdowntime earbudsâ anyway, so... https://www.manton.org/2024/07/24/federico-viticci-on...
bsky.app
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.
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.
Llama 3.1: https://www.manton.org/2024/07/23/llama.html
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”.
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.
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. 🇺🇸
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.
Rewatched Twister (singular) this week. It holds up! Went to see Twisters (plural) tonight and it’s also good. Sort of a remake and sort of a sequel, but it works. 🍿
@manton Oops, looks like I have a link formatting problem in replies. Will fix.
@manton @scripting.com Every once in a while someone does start a conversation, usually because of a place they've visited too. I go for iced coffee in the winter here too, although "winter" in Texas isn't that cold very often. It has to be really freezing for me to switch to hot coffee.
@manton Yes, that's my bug. No editing so I'll just let it stand, but here's the fixed link: eeyo.bike
@manton Ouch. I don't think I've fallen for a talking point but it is something I've been thinking about. Either way I do think "woke" is too broad a stroke, too simple to encompass everything that is happening.
@bryan Fixed now, sorry about that!
@boris That’s just how the feature works. It brings in all replies so you don’t need to check two places. I get that it was unexpected in this case but I wonder if it would be just as confusing if it didn’t work that way by default. I think a setting would make this more clear, though.
@boris If we add a setting, would you prefer that it not show any mentions from Bluesky in Micro.blog, or only not show replies if they weren't to blog posts?
@boris If you disable Bluesky cross-posting it will also stop pulling the replies, but I think we need a separate setting to control this.
@vladcampos.com Thanks! I'm not sure but I can't wait to get access to the API and experiment.
@manton I dunno, I might be wrong. But 25 years is a really long time to spend in jail. I'm not sure what is achieved by it. To be clear, in both cases I think some number of years is definitely justified.
@manton If I get a new computer, what will happen to all my stickers? Seriously though, I just dislike the hassle of replacing computers.
@manton That is essentially how I've been trying to view things. If something helps make the web better, I'm for it. I think there are some good ideas in ActivityPub that should be inspiring future versions of ActivityPub too.
@manton This is wired up now and kind of works like magic. For example, I saw your ORLY reply inside Micro.blog.
@manton Another quick test for Bridgy.
