Finished watching: Better Call Saul S6E10, Nippy 📺
Good to go back to this show. I’m almost done. Seems like they are summing up… once Saul Goodman, always Saul Goodman.
Yesterday at some point at work I just reached my limit. I got up, left the office, took a nap at home, and reconsidered how to start scheduling myself out of meetings and stop replying to most emails. I’m worried about pushback but I need to face this worry.
Because I keep finding web pages listing other web pages (different blog lists that list independent blogs), I decided to add a category on my blogroll just for those. It also features my first pixel-art “masterpiece” and two quotes: one from a song I like and another from a movie I like.
I’m still working out the kinks (it required fixes for my CSS specifically for that image, and a new blogroll means a new shortcode in Hugo), but it should be fully operational shortly.
All the good indie web stuff I’ve posted and I didn’t talk about the shows I want to watch, the good movies I did watch, and I also want to keep trying for the video game stuff… I need a productive staycation.
Bubbles, Scrolls, and made by a human seal of approval
Exploring Bubbles, a blog-focused site similar to Hacker News; Scrolls, a newsletter tool for Fediverse Indieweb geeks; and a JSON-based tool to ensure a blog is made by a human rather than AI.
I haven’t heard about Bubbles before, but one of the folks I’ve added recently to my feeds introduced me, indirectly. Seems very promising for us bloggers! I signed up (basically, all you need is a Mastodon account).
My post about writing emails gets people to... write me emails. Good stuff.
There’s been a notable increase in emails from readers and fellow bloggers, especially because of my post about… writing each other emails. Who would have thought?
Claude fixed my page, and now it's teaching me how
Fixed my On This Day page using Claude. This was a lot. Forked the original script, customized Python for my Hugo setup, deployed on Render, then debugged JavaScript with Safari’s Inspector… two days’ work. Now I’m going back through everything to understand why it worked. This AI-assisted workflow keeps impressing me.
Manton about AI usage in Micro.blog:
Earlier this year I blogged a strategy for how I want to use AI thoughtfully in Micro.blog. It has been a good guide for me, like user-centered guardrails. There is still so much we can build that fits within that strategy, hopefully avoiding the worst “put AI in everything” fixation from bigger companies that users are rejecting.
Micro.blog has a master switch for AI. If the user turns it off, there’s no AI usage. Period. None of the AI features would work:
While it’s true that users of Micro.blog would lose some of the benefits of the service if they turn it off (and they’re paying for the service just the same), it is right to let the users choose if they want to use AI, without forcing it everywhere possible, like Microsoft has done with Copilot.
I find that Micro.blog has followed this mentality, especially looking into what is being done around Inkwell (Inkwell has a feature where AI can summarize several RSS feeds in a helpful “here’s what happened on JTR’s blog in the last week” sort of way).
This post from Manton didn’t come out of nowhere; he was listening to Nilay Patel’s opinion piece about “Software Brain,” which is worth listening to. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy following Manton’s feed - it’s not just Micro.blog, but there are also interesting opinions about AI and using it.
On This Day page dates are broken
When you fix one thing, you break another. ISO dates are nice, but now my “On This Day” page doesn’t understand what these mean. American dates have and will always be an “old man yells at cloud” issue for me.