This was unexpected. Walking back to my hotel tonight, I noticed that some of the traffic lights were out. Turns out the power is out at the hotel too, and they gave everyone little glow sticks to help navigate the stairs and rooms.

Finished reading: The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future by Keach Hagey. Listened to the last part as I was wandering around Lake Merritt in Oakland today. Some great details in this book, and perfect leading up to WWDC. 📚

Days before WWDC, where Apple is rumored to open up their models to developers, I must be the only one hitting my head against the wall trying to get image analysis to work with an embedded Gemma 3 model inside my Mac app. I started down this path a month ago, keep chipping away at it, keep failing.

I ended up having to completely skip FediForum. With travel and coding, just too much going on. I’ve also retreated from the fediverse for a bit, so I can focus on my blog and the Micro.blog community. Hope there will be some blog post write-ups of the conference sessions I can read later.

Rest in peace, Bill Atkinson. From John Gruber:

One of the great heroes in not just Apple history, but computer history. If you want to cheer yourself up, go to Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore.org site and (re-)read all the entries about Atkinson. Here’s just one, with Steve Jobs inspiring Atkinson to invent the roundrect.

I was actually thinking of old QuickDraw a week ago while I was mowing the yard. No joke, my mind wandered into realizing that the most efficient mowing path is a roundrect.

Really enjoying everyone’s photos for this month’s Micro.blog photoblogging challenge. Thanks for sharing! I’ll post the next week of prompts later today. Any word suggestions?

Day 6 of the photo challenge, contrast. Jack London Square / C. L. Dellums Station in Oakland.

For a minute I got really excited about this headline of a LoveFrom-designed electric bike from Rivian. But… a screen and it’s “bike-like”? I’ve been eyeing a new electric bike and always prefer something that looks like an actual, old-fashioned bike. No need to reinvent everything for this.

More jacaranda trees in bloom.

Joanne Jang who works at OpenAI has a blog post on human-AI relationships:

…many people say “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT not because they’re confused about how it works, but because being kind matters to them.

I read this last night and ever since I’ve been trying to figure out why I usually type to an AI chatbot with proper spelling and punctuation, even correcting my chat text when I make a typo. It doesn’t matter, the robots don’t care. But it’s almost like if I skip that step, if I’m careless, I’ve somehow compromised all of my writing.

Reviewing my short post last night about the NYT vs. OpenAI data retention, maybe “wild” overreach was an unnecessary adjective. I also hadn’t seen OpenAI’s response:

As part of their baseless lawsuit, they’ve recently asked the court to force us to retain all user content indefinitely going forward, based on speculation that they might find something that supports their case.

There are very real fair-use questions for training, but I’m not sure they can be resolved by this lawsuit, and probably not without updating copyright law.

A couple photos heading up the coast, from each side of the train. 🚂

Congrats to Brent Simmons on his retirement! This is an impressive list of apps to have been a part of. I’ve actively used all of them over the years, and a few I still do:

Along the way I worked on, among other apps, Userland Frontier, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, Glassboard, Vesper, OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, and Audible.

I did a little digging, looks like I first linked to Brent in 2002, not long after starting my blog. I met him later at WWDC, back when it felt like you could meet everyone, although which year escapes me.

While walking to Groundwork Coffee this morning in Los Angeles. A jacaranda tree, I think.

Maybe I’ve become a little bitter because a decade ago I was screaming about big centralized platforms and a return to indie microblogging, and now that everyone else is excited, my voice is still hoarse, and I have less to say. Onward.

Dave Winer blogs about what he’d say in a keynote about new web standards. Keep it simple and don’t reinvent the wheel:

Mastodon and Bluesky should support inbound and outbound RSS, and do it really well. Right now they do outbound only, and the implementations are incomplete at covering the functionality they have now, and there needs to be more

Inbound RSS means letting people’s accounts be configured so that their posts are automatically pulled from a location external to the platform. Micro.blog is one of the only platforms that can do this.

I submitted the latest Micro.blog for Android to Google this morning. Hopefully goes through review and will be available later today or this weekend. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can also install directly by downloading the latest .apk file.

Ghost is weeks away from shipping 6.0 with fediverse support. Excellent!

We have a real opportunity, now, to create the web we want – but the most tempting mistake is to wait for everyone else to join, before getting involved.

No one is waiting. People have been using the fediverse for years. Micro.blog has supported it since 2018. Welcome to the party, Ghost. 🤪

Rolled into Los Angeles super early. Found a coffee shop that I could walk to that was open at 6am. Still forming some thoughts about this Amtrak trip… It was disappointing, and I think I’m done with Amtrak for a few years, which is unfortunate because I love trains. Just too many weird problems.

Seth Godin on burning bridges:

While it’s tempting to imagine that we’re always racing forward, it’s far more likely we’ll benefit from traveling over this bridge again one day soon.

Put another way, some people can be so caught in what’s happening now that they aren’t thinking about the future.

Wow, Pacers. I tuned in just at the right time toward the end. Glad to have some cell coverage tonight! 🏀

Flaky internet today, so just catching up on the new levels of chaos with Trump and Elon Musk. Trump will eventually turn against anyone who supported him, lashing out selfishly, no matter the cost to people or country. This devolved shockingly quickly. 🇺🇸

Vise Coffee in Alpine. I had just finished a cold brew I brought with me, so got a sticker and postcard instead of actual coffee.

I continue to doubt that Apple can roll back external payment links now that the genie is out of the bottle. The appeals court was not persuaded that they should block the order. So we’ll have months of users using external links and the world not ending.

Congrats to A New Social on announcing Bounce, a way to move followers between Bluesky and the fediverse. I like how they’re previewing what followers (and follows) will move. Migrating accounts currently feels very blind, as you cross your fingers and hope everything works across fediverse servers.