Got a lot of good feedback yesterday about what should be prioritized for Micro.blog for macOS. I can’t get to everything, but this next release is shaping up to be very nice. One thing: much better keyboard navigation. I’ve been reserving command-R for years now and finally get to use it.
After five years with the Touch Bar, kind of strange to get used to a real function key row again. A good strange, of course.
Coming back from lunch, saw a totally orange Cybertruck and in a weird way it actually looked better than the default color. If you’re going to be different, might as well lean into it.
David Pierce at The Verge writing about Google Podcasts going away and Google’s pattern of abandoning their own apps:
"It always goes the same way: the company launches a new service with grandiose language about how this fits its mission of organizing and making accessible the world’s information, quickly updates it with a couple of neat features, immediately seems to forget it exists…"
https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24118873/google-podcasts-shutdown-graveyard
Time for an upgrade. Intel to M3.
Finally saw The Holdovers. Really enjoyed it. 🍿
If I’ve learned nothing else managing servers, it’s that you don’t deploy changes in the evening, no matter how tempting it is to get something live right away, no matter how minor or well-tested a change it is. Morning is best. All day to test more, to get feedback, and to notice unforeseen quirks.
Working this morning at Lazarus on Airport. ☕️
Wicked is an all-time favorite. Haven’t seen it in years and forgot a few details that you miss on the soundtrack. Amazing.
Bluesky mentions in Micro.blog https://www.manton.org/2024/03/31/bluesky-mentions-in.html
The last few Spurs games have been so good. First time they’ve won three in a row all season. Figuring out how to finish games, and Wemby looking great. 🏀
Core Int 593: California’s Pretty Nice. WWDC 2024 dates are announced, thinking about our trip plans, and whether this is the peak of Apple’s growth and success.
https://coreint.org/2024/03/episode-593-californias-pretty-nice/
OpenAI’s unreleased voice engine is too good:
"…uses text input and a single 15-second audio sample to generate natural-sounding speech that closely resembles the original speaker."
I’m generally optimistic about AI’s potential in tools to help humans, but we are clearly going to need more laws around this.
https://openai.com/blog/navigating-the-challenges-and-opportunities-of-synthetic-voices
Primary database server hitting 75% disk space usage, time to revisit the long-term plan for scaling that part of the platform. Would prefer to shard some of the data and I had built the tables to allow that.
Share Openly is a cool new post sharing option from Ben Werdmuller that works with Mastodon, Micro.blog, Bluesky, and other services. Good to have platform-agnostic sharing.
April is just around the corner and we’re doing another Micro.blog photo challenge! There will be daily prompts to help inspire posting a photo each day, and a collection so you can see everything together. Check out the details here.
https://challenges.micro.blog/2024/03/27/april-photoblogging-challenge.html
Hot take on so-called white-collar crime, like the Sam Bankman-Fried sentence: 25 years is too long. I also thought Elizabeth Holmes was unfairly sentenced. Everyone wants a villain but real life isn’t that simple.
Colin Devroe has a new interview with me about all things Micro.blog. Interesting to compare what has changed and stayed the same since the last time I talked to Colin a few years ago.
Drove by this old gas station on Lamar a few weeks ago. Closed, junk everywhere, fence around the lot, clearly not long for this world. It had such a cool run-down look I wanted to snap a photo, but I was in my car and couldn’t. Drove by today and it has already been demolished.
Taking a little time this morning to improve the plumbing for Bluesky. Getting closer to a system that can seamlessly mix posts and replies from multiple networks. I think this will be a unique strength of Micro.blog compared to other platforms.