Bastrop Abstract Company. Established 1883. Closed.

Micro Social continues to improve. The new version adds a share sheet and iPad support.

We just passed an old wagon and mules on highway 290. It was Cowboy’s Last Ride, a restored wagon from 1899, going 350 miles across central Texas to raise money for St. Jude:

At 82 years old, Larry Jollisant, has chosen to honor his life as a cowboy in the most authentic, western way possible. […] Every night, he sets up camp, cooks over an open flame, and sleeps under the stars or in the wagon, embracing the same hardships and beauty that defined the cowboy way of life.

I love this. 🤠

Interesting segment on The Late Show last night with guest Reid Hoffman about AI. I’ve listened to his Masters of Scale podcast from time to time. On AI, I’ve realized recently that we are not all ever going to agree about the benefits and dangers. It’s a big shift and there will be a big schism.

Ready to plant, along Mopac. 🌱

Linkrot is always a problem for the web, but please let’s not purposefully destroy our own content when it’s easy to keep it going. John Gruber on 538 shutting everything down:

Why not keep the FiveThirtyEight site up and running — at least for a while, if not in perpetuity? It costs practically nothing to run a website serving a static/archived website. I don’t get it. It betrays a profound level of disrespect for the work that the site hosted.

Seth Godin blogs about making the most of a second chance with customers:

If a customer service call goes wrong, or if a new employee is stumbling, this is the moment to escalate and get the second impression just right. It shows that we can recover, that we’re listening, and that the relationship is worth something to us.

Listening to the Decoder episode with Panos Panay, I’m almost convinced that what Amazon is trying with Alexa+ will work. Everyone’s expectations are so low with voice assistants. If they actually pull it off, it will be impressive.

Parker Ortolani blogging about the new MacBook Air. I hadn’t even thought about the color until now:

For the first time in 24 years, since the introduction of the first white iBook, Apple has a blue laptop again. While the new MacBook Airs are most certainly a “spec bump,” they make for a pretty good one.

Interesting new post from OpenAI about safety. About humans being in control:

Our approach to alignment centers humans. We aim to develop mechanisms that empower human stakeholders to express their intent clearly and supervise⁠ AI systems effectively - even in complex situations, and as AI capabilities scale beyond human capabilities.

This is probably my biggest concern, AI agents running without human supervision and executing tasks that are beyond what we even know how to do. There are many positive benefits to AI, but there are also some things we shouldn’t attempt.

Tapbots is working on a Bluesky client, called Phoenix. On making it a separate app, they say:

While there may be some conveniences of an app that supports multiple social media protocols, we believe the experience will be much better overall if we keep them separate. We do plan to provide a way to cross-post between them so you don’t have to write duplicate posts.

This is fine, but I think eventually more people will just post to their own blogs and not have to manage separate apps or accounts.

Very quick video of the latest Micro.blog for Mac with new blog post summary field. You can type your own summary that will be used in the timeline and cross-posting, or have it generate one for you.

Reminder for folks in Austin, Fediverse House is this weekend, Sunday and Monday. I’ll be there. In a happy coincidence, Sunday is also the anniversary of the first post to my blog. 23 years.

Worked a bunch on the Mac app today, one of my favorite things to work on. Almost done with the next update, so I’ll wrap it up tomorrow morning and release it. Also finally solved that ridiculous “41 new posts” bug.

I like this post from @devilgate about not being discouraged to write, even when we know that doing more than writing could have a better impact:

But not everyone can do more, or give more. And even those who can, or could or should: for some of us, writing is not just what we do, it’s what we are. We need to write.

With politics there’s also an opposite problem, avoiding blogging about something just because it’s a controversial topic. The web is a big place with room to explore a lot of ideas, we probably shouldn’t second-guess ourselves as much as we sometimes do.

Funny that SF Symbols now has a “robotic vacuum” icon but not just a robot. Wonder if it’s an oversight or because of Android. 🤖

Sometimes the debugging is all in the wrong place. Spent a couple hours trying to find a bug in JavaScript — lots of printf-style debugging, element inspection, random code changes — only to eventually track it down to a single line of CSS.

Thinking about the Wii yesterday thanks to Sven’s post, I re-read my old blog post from 2007 about when I gave away a Wii in a contest. Wonder what happened to that console and whether the new owners had fun with it. If any kids played it, they would be adults now.

Some of my really old blog posts are still in Textile format instead of Markdown. Whenever I find one, I just manually edit it to fix the links. No memory now of why I didn’t batch convert them years ago.

Apple updates a couple iPads. From Dan Moren at Six Colors:

The base iPad’s update is perhaps somewhat more disappointing, as that model was introduced in 2022 and its A16 processor will make it one of the few current main-line Apple devices—perhaps only—not to support Apple Intelligence.

Apple’s AI strategy is a sort of paradox. All in on marketing, but on-device models are limited and Apple resists using private cloud compute where it could help older devices.

Staple! is coming up next month, April 12-13, at St. Edward’s in Austin. Special guests Kazu Kibuishi and more! Amazing that the show started 20 years ago.

Great list of folks to follow on Micro.blog. Thanks for the reminder @Miraz!

We used to have Micro Monday around here, to help community members be discovered. Here are a dozen of the many Micro.Bloggers I enjoy…

M.G. Siegler: Apple Should Swap Out Siri with ChatGPT.

Apple won’t do this, and some users might not want it either, but it’s a legitimate idea. Generative AI provides a very rare moment of disruption. If a good Siri is two years away at best, that’s a long time to risk on something so important.

I like the naming on this collaborative Git system based on AT Proto: Tangled. The servers are “knots”. Just the right amount of clever.

Even when it seems the news is all bad, there is something incredible. James Harrison’s blood donations saved two million babies’ lives:

Harrison donated blood and plasma a whopping 1,173 times, according to Lifeblood, every two weeks between 1954 and 2018. […] Harrison’s plasma contained a rare and precious antibody called anti-D, which was discovered in the mid-1960s. It is used in medications to prevent haemolytic disease of the fetus and newborn