Daniel talks to Manton about his new Micro.one initiative, which aims to bring in new users to Micro.blog. They talk about the risks and rewards of offering a free trial, the sustainability of under-priced web services, and whether Manton can measure the success of his new pricing options.
Many thanks to our sponsor this week:
Links:
- Micro.one – Manton’s new introductory, lower-cost blogging service.
- A/B Testing – Wikipedia article about the practice of running business experiments on users.
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January 10, 2025 at 10:40 pm.
Manton tells Daniel about the accidental mini-disaster he caused at Micro.blog while daring to deploy changes while on a cruise. They talk about the risk of losing trust with users when you make mistakes, especially repeatedly, and how unit testing might be a good protection against such problems. Then they talk more about Bluesky’s recent surge in popularity, and prospects for the future of the open web.
Many thanks to our sponsor this week:
Links:
- Micro.blog – Manton’s blog-hosting service.
- Hugo – Web templating framework used by Micro.blog.
- AT Protocol – The social networking protocol used by Bluesky.
- Finally in a Good Place – Manton’s post appreciating the advantages of both the ActivityPub and AT protocol.
- Dithering – Subscription podcast from John Gruber and Ben Thompson.
- ActivityPub – The social networking protocol used by Mastodon and many other services.
- Social Web Community Group – W3C community group supporting social networking technologies.
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November 27, 2024 at 9:53 pm.
Daniel and Manton talk about Apple’s new Image Playground, an AI-based graphic generator. Even if it’s not super-impressive, maybe it’s exciting for the average user? Manton relates his recent attempts to write a new app in SwiftUI, which leads to an assessment of whether SwiftUI is ready for prime-time on iOS and/or Mac. Finally, they talk about whether we’re all propelling towards a web-only future, and whether that might be just fine.
Many thanks to our sponsor this week:
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November 15, 2024 at 11:37 pm.
Daniel talks about his recent updates to Black Ink, for both Mac and iOS. He and Manton compare notes about updating icons for iOS 18 to support Dark and Tinted home screen modes. They talk about application versioning, again!, and the virtue of choosing to do things one way sometimes just because it’s right. They react to recent speculation about the identity of the inventor of Bitcoin, and whether it’s responsible for anybody to make such allegations. Finally, they talk a bit more about AI, what it means for the future of programming, and it’s impact on the world’s approach to manufacturing energy.
Many thanks to our sponsor this week:
Links:
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October 11, 2024 at 8:53 pm.
Manton talks to Daniel about his Daniel’s latest experience trying to use his Apple Vision Pro. They react to Meta’s Orion glasses demo, and wonder how much of a threat, if any they’ll be to Apple. They consider the possibility that accessories like glasses should be tethered to a phone, as a high-performance, expensive piece of hardware the customer has already bought. Finally, whatever happened to Google’s interest in AR Glasses?
Links:
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October 8, 2024 at 11:25 pm.
Daniel talks to Manton about the new iPhones, whether they’re buying one or not, and the pros and cons of pickup vs. delivery. They discuss the merit of AppleCare+ particular for iPhones. They consider the new Camera Control button and whether it’s likely to be a “dud” or not.
Daniel and Manton going for the new phones, whether to buy AppleCare+ or not. Finally, they consider the possibility that the new AirPods hardware is feature-locked by software, and whether it’s ethical to charge customers more for features built-in to a hardware device.
Many thanks to our sponsor this week:
Links:
- Apple Event – Apple’s latest product announcement video featuring iPhone 16 and Apple Watch Series 10.
- µBrowser – Web browsing app for Apple Watch.
- Minimized Embiggening – Accidental Tech Podcast episode discussing the possibility of Apple selling software-limited hardware.
- iFixit – Repair-it-yourself site famous for its hardware teardown.
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September 16, 2024 at 1:31 pm.
Manton and Daniel talk about the upcoming Apple special event where new iPhones are expected to be announced. They talk about their respective likelihoods of buying one, and remark on the diminishing importance of smallness in a phone’s physical design. They discuss the nascent Apple Intelligence features in macOS and iOS betas, the general competitive state of AI services, and the virtue of being able to easily switch from one hosted AI services provider to another.
Links:
- Apple Event – Watch live at 10 a.m. Pacific Time.
- What to Expect – The Verge’s rundown of anticipated announcements.
- Apple Intelligence – Apple’s product marketing page for Apple Intelligence.
- Priority Phishing Email – Cabel Sasser shares his experience with Apple’s AI misclassifying a scam email.
- Claude – ChatGPT competitor from Anthropic.
- Prompt Engineering – OpenAI documentation on improving the effectiveness of AI prompts.
- Apple’s Pre-Prompts – MacRumors reports on the uncovering of OS-bundled prompts in Apple’s apps.
- Claude’s Pre-Prompts – Documentation from Anthropic about the specific prompts they preload their AI products with.
- Llama 3 – Open-source LLM software from Meta.
- xAI Rush in Memphis – Manton’s post about Elon Musk’s huge AI server center in Tennessee.
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September 7, 2024 at 8:21 pm.
Daniel and Manton talk about the U.S. Government’s anti-trust verdict against Google, and consider the impact it may have on browser vendors such as Apple and Mozilla. They discuss the slow rollout of Apple’s beta Apple Intelligence features, and bemoan the lack of extensibility and integration points for developers. Finally, they talk about how increasingly locked down computing platforms are diminishing the ability for the diverse population of developers to push the limits of said platforms.
Links:
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August 9, 2024 at 7:49 pm.
Daniel and Manton talk about the CrowdStrike fiasco, Daniel’s narrow escape from traveling chaos, and the resilience of people during an emergency. They wonder how a company whose overt value is to protect you from outages can survive a catastrophic failure? They also chat about OpenAI’s recently announced SearchGPT, and the potential it may have to disrupt Google. Will all future search engines use AI? Finally, they consider the potential for a future where search engines are freemium and ad free.
Many thanks to our sponsor this week:
Links:
- CrowdStrike – Article on the Verge about the worldwide software failure.
- 1Password – Popular cross-platform password management software.
- LastPass – Verge article about LastPass’s security breaches.
- SearchGPT – OpenAI’s prototype phase AI-assisted search engine.
- Perplexity – Popular AI-assisted search engine.
- Kagi – Ad-free search engine.
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July 27, 2024 at 5:20 pm.
Daniel and Manton talk a bit more about AI, peoples’ skepticism about its value, and their opinion that it obviously has some utility. They discuss the Perplexity AI controversy around HTTP user agents, and whether it’s an ethical requirement that all services should always reveal their identity. Daniel talks about his recent adventures with Swift Concurrency, and they weigh the challenge of tackling a major architectural change, versus the payoff from Swift’s compile-time data safety.
Links:
- Perplexity – An AI service that combines its own model with models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and others.
- Rabbit R1 – Tiny consumer electronics device that provides AI services based on Perplexity.
- Perplexity AI is Lying – Robb Knight writes about Perplexity’s alleged sneakiness with respect to HTTP user agents.
- Blocking AI Bots: – Help page on Micro.blog about how to prevent AI bots from scraping your content.
- The Machine Stops – Post by Jeremy Keith about attempts to sabotage AI scraping bots.
- Adopting Swift Strict Concurrency – Updated documentation from Apple about using the latest concurrency techniques.
- Migrating to Swift 6 – An evolving document from the Swift open source team about migrating to Swift’s strict concurrency.
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June 21, 2024 at 10:27 pm.
