I’ve been trying to trim down my business-related expenses. It’s mostly going well. I do sometimes miss ChatGPT Plus.

After 49 years in Austin, you’d think I’d know every little neighborhood. But places change with time. Searching for a house this last year, we’re discovering all these hidden gems. Old properties that have been dusted off. Neighborhoods whose time has come again.

Last month I coded up an OpenAI-powered note dictation experiment. I’m still not convinced Siri dictation is going to improve significantly in the next 2-3 years. (Example today: “in Austin” became “and awesome”, which made no sense in context.) Apple models are too limited until we have more RAM.

Didn’t realize this was missing but now that I’ve implemented it, I love it. Post to your blog, someone replies in Bluesky. The reply appears on your blog. If you reply back on Bluesky, that reply is included in the conversation on your blog too.

That wide-eyed look of discovery and wonder in a little kid’s face when they see something new for the first time… How much of our life as adults is just trying to recapture that feeling again?

Paul Kafasis blogs about cutting back on news consumption for our mental health:

…in Donald Trump’s first term as America’s commander in chief, I was unnecessarily tuned in to each and every horrid aspect of his presidency. I don’t intend to repeat that mistake when we take this wretched ride for a second time.

🇺🇸

While you can certainly have open APIs that require user authorization, it’s always a nice indication of just how open something is when there are public endpoints. Mastodon and Bluesky both get this.

Listened to the new Wicked’s Defying Gravity this morning in the car. Everything about it — Cynthia, Ariana, the orchestra… This rendition is extraordinary. 🧹

Book and film covers! I’ve updated Micro.blog to show little thumbnails of book covers when you blog about a book using Micro.blog or our companion app Epilogue. I wanted something visually helpful but less in your face than link preview banners. There’s also special support for Letterboxd links.

I’ve never thought custom emoji were a good idea. People say they love them, but how often are they used? Micro.blog spends a silly amount of time just downloading all the custom emoji from Mastodon instances so they can be displayed correctly. Currently 1 million custom emoji from 4000 servers. 🤪

Mum Foods. The best BBQ I’ve had in a long while.

Substack’s RSS feeds are a disaster. It’s like the programmers never once looked at the XML output. You could say it doesn’t matter, but feeds and HTML that are cleaner and more readable are also usually faster to process and do something useful with.

Good post by Allen Pike about Apple Intelligence. On-device AI is great for notification summaries, but falls short for much of the rest:

While an underpowered-but-automatic notification summary can be better than nothing, there isn’t a lot of purpose to an underpowered image generation app. You can tell from the name that Apple knows “Image Playground” is, at best, a toy.

Apple is a little bit trapped with their AI strategy. For some things they can’t be competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic. If I was Apple, I would focus only on what smaller models are great at — notifications and writing tools — and then open up Siri to be extensible with frontier models.

We went to see Wicked a second time. Happy to confirm that it wasn’t my imagination: they did, in fact, nail the film adaptation. Great crowd in the theater tonight too. 🧹

Alan Jacobs responds to posts from Ted Gioia, Sam Kahn, and others about Substack

It is of course the blog, which preceded Substack by more than two decades, that “releases founts of creativity” etc. Kahn’s argument is not an argument for Substack at all, but rather an argument for blogging.

Realized after posting this yesterday that I was trying to be too clever. I had thought it would work either taken literally or if recognized, but it mostly fell flat. Don’t read too much into it. For completeness here’s the Jack Dorsey tweet.

Mozart’s Coffee is already reserving spots for their Christmas lights, so next week’s IndieWeb Meetup will be at Radio Coffee & Beer instead. Wednesday, 7pm. 🎄

Working through several little server optimizations while the family sleeps. 😴

Austin’s IndieWeb Meetup returns next week: Wednesday, Dec 4th, 7pm at Mozart’s Coffee Radio Coffee & Beer. Everyone’s welcome to stop by for a coffee and chat about the open web. What are you working on, and what can we do to move the social web forward?

Tim Chambers blogs some more thoughts on where the social web platforms are right now:

Threads and Bluesky’s massive success of late and Mastodon’s modest success does not make Mastodon and other fediverse/activitypub offerings losers. In this case it isn’t zero-sum. Fully open, patent free, non-commercial offerings like Mastodon, etc, have different needs and lifecycles and futures not tied to VC’s or shareholders.

I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter, Mastodon, or Bluesky. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Jay Graber is the singular solution I trust.

This week Mark Zuckerberg met at Mar-a-Lago with a convicted criminal who is out on bail. I stopped posting to Instagram in 2017, but I keep giving Meta second chances. No more. It’s time to burn this shit to the ground and move forward with the open web. Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to.