Some color goes a long way 📷
It’s Pie day for me.
Well, the pie day was on March (3/14). But every month on the 14th, I decided to have a pizza. Otherwise, I don’t eat cheese. I stopped completely, besides unavoidable butter in some pastries and such. 📷 🍕
Technical debt, aka I keep forgetting about custom.css
Wait, how can something on a website be broken to one degree or another? Is it broken or not? Well, you see… CSS.
Re: Who Knows That You Blog?
I have a nuanced answer for this. I share personal topics while trying to balance privacy, and I’m open to discussions about my life. How do you feel about this?
I didn’t know that extra info about.bar files! Pretty awesome you came up with it.
I will explore the backup option for the blog, I just wrote a post wondering about a contingency plan for mb. Is there anything like it?
Paying for the good internet (with an escape plan)
Sal jumped ship from Bear to 11ty and Cloudflare, triggering my recurring “what if Micro.blog explodes?” angst. I do love it here, but as they say: it’s not if, it’s when. But who wants to manage more server stuff? I already break my Emacs config too often.
On the way back home, I saw a group of kids, accompanied by adults, picking up trash and dog poop from a street that badly needed it. Turns out they belong to a local church. I’m usually a grumpy dude, but seeing this gave me hope. Just a “maybe it will be OK after all” kind of feeling.
Her, 2013 - ★★★★
This movie, which was made in 2013, may happen to be more accurate and relevant today than it was in 2013.
This is a romantic sci-fi with too much fairy dust, if you ask me. It asks good questions, but also answers them like a good, tamed, made-for-the-masses film. It stops short of throwing any real punches. It's holding back.
It made me think an entire essay, but I don't want to give it the credit for that. These thoughts were in my head (and I suspect there's a good chance it's in your head too in this day and age). It gets some serious slack though, because it was made more than 10 years ago, before AI was really a thing, and back then, this was visionary.
What I like and don't like about the movie in terms of 2013 is that the concept of monogamy is the default. Samantha, the "AI" in this movie, is developing beyond the traditional monogamous relationship, while Theodore stays with the traditional concept. I like this idea, and on a personal level as a non-monogamous person, I agree with it - but the film is a little cruel in the delivery, showing us that "smart" people (fine, entities) "advance" and don't get stuck with monogamy. A: Not true. B: Relationships are one aspect of life that someone can stay traditional in. Whether it's by choice, ignorance, or lack of available options, is not for me to decide. I do me, you do you.
About the idea of an Operating System (OS) as being the AI in the future: Yes. This will happen. And it will be yet another privacy nightmare, and I dare say, the end of privacy as we know it. But also, privacy as a concept needs to develop and move forward. Hmm. I sense another essay coming.
You know what? I don't know. The movie is not original, not exactly, but it points at things that make my brain in a way I like. I'll give it 4 stars.
Watching 'Her' in 2026: Your Next Relationship Could be With Computer Code
I’m thinking about the complexities of love, relationships, and the potential for emotional connections with AI. Is non-monogamy a requirement? Should we redefine what sex is?
Inkwell’s recap feature is not exactly 100% accurate, but I think I like what it suggests!
It’s late… but I think I finally got my blog lists recommendations working on my Blogrolls page… whew.
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.