I wish there were a beta 5 for Apple OS27 this week, but alas, no; we’ll have to wait until early next week, I guess. According to this iOS Version History chart, iOS 27 beta 4 stands at 19 days, the second-longest beta 4 period for a .0 release since iOS 6.0 beta 4, which lasted 37 days. I don’t know if this is a good sign. Maybe I shouldn’t try to read too much into this.
I’ve been working as a technical project manager on a major migration project at my job. It’s a new role for me, which has increased the demand for my soft skills. While I’m technically inclined, it’s not necessarily my strongest area, but I manage well enough. Yesterday, a team member privately mentioned that my project management style sometimes borders on micromanagement. Though it’s hard to hear, I responded positively and thanked him for the feedback. Our discussion lasted some time, helping me understand his perspective. The issue is that my technical expertise often leads me to ask detailed questions, which might seem like I don’t trust my team members’ abilities. However, that’s not the case. This feedback prompted deep reflection and self-assessment.
As an experiment and out of curiosity, I provided the context to Claude AI and sought advice. Overall, the experience was very insightful. My issue isn’t unique and is likely common and well-documented in management literature. After this session with Claude AI, I felt uplifted and more prepared to confront today’s challenges. It’s not easy, and the project may be full of pitfalls and surprises, but I believe it will help me grow.
MyMind now offers an MCP endpoint for use with Claude. I can imagine that for those who store a lot in MyMind, it could be really useful. I tested MyMind and liked a few things about it. It’s like Pinterest but without the AI and ads crap. I connect to my MyMind account from time to time just to see how the service is evolving, and it does, but I eventually found it was redundant with what I already use: Craft, which also supports MCP and API endpoints.
What can I learn from the demise of EchoFeed? Earlier this year, when I heard about this service, I looked into it to see if it could be useful. It wasn’t, thanks to Micro.blog’s ability to cross-post to Bluesky, Mastodon and more. Plus, at first it looked like an experiment more than anything else. I didn’t know EchoFeed’s long-term goals. I was on the breaks.
I’m wary of one-person services like EchoFeed. Another example is FeedPress. I like this service a lot, but I think there is only one person behind it, and it’s owned by a parent company which I know nothing about. It’s not entirely clear from this post what their mission is. What happens if this guy decides, or the parent company says, it’s no longer viable? Moving off EchoFeed might be a pain for people who need cross-posting capabilities. I highly doubt these people are willing to move to Buffer.
The same could be said about moving off FeedPress. It would be a pain in the ass to reconfigure all my feeds. The same torment applies to Micro.blog itself (or Scribbles.page, for that matter!). What is the future of Micro.blog if something bad happens to its founder? What is the continuity plan? Micro.blog has done everything it can to enable data portability and ownership, but moving things around, even if you own most parts, is not as easy as it sounds. In today’s world, nothing is permanent, and planning for this is mandatory.
One quick question for the Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta IT guys: is it that hard to configure a sandbox to block outbound traffic to the Internet? I know really good guys who could help you with this. Or, if you don’t want to hire a human to do it, just ask your fuckin models how to do it. Until then, how can we trust you?
Manton Reece writing about the demise of a Mastodon instance
I had missed that mastodon.cloud is shutting down. While its active user base has been shrinking, it still has a lot of total users and millions of posts. There’s still no way to migrate posts between Mastodon servers. (Mastodon posts → Micro.blog and some other fediverse servers works.)
POSSE principle is often talked about when referring to one of Micro.blog’s strengths, but being able to own your content and import content from other places are also important distinctive features of Micro.blog.
I’m returning from a short visit to YouTube Studio to find out that Google is now offering AI-based ideas to inspire the creation of new videos. I selected that one because it relates to Micro.blog. Very low quality. Here’s an excerpt:
“Most Micro.blog sites are digital ghosts, invisible to the search engines and professional networks that matter. We are going to fix that by engineering a high-authority ecosystem that ranks on the first page while keeping you in total control. Stop shouting into a void and start building a discoverable hub.”
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Since my bookmarking app now features links to Bluesky, I’ve observed that my Bluesky timeline is heavily political, which I dislike. I’m unsure how to unfollow people or lists. I wish there was a way to simply reset the timeline and start fresh for a better experience.
I saw people mention FreshRSS on my timeline today and I was curious about it. Why? Because self-hosting an RSS reader service might mean that I could drop Inoreader… so, I started reading the documentation. If there was a single-click install droplet on DigitalOcean, that would be enticing, provided that FreshRSS offers a great set of APIs. The UI is meh, though, but using the engine with a nice client like NNW might be a possibility. I didn’t go further in my exploration so far… but now I want to look at other self-hosting solutions, too. Suggestions?
Apple’s iCloud File Sharing Left Ex-Employees With Access to Secret Documents:
The former employees said many Apple files they had been shared on over their careers at the company—including planning documents for product launch events—continued to sync to their personal devices through the iCloud storage service after they left Apple. In some cases, they even received notifications about fresh updates to the documents. Some former employees said they were petrified to delete the files for fear that doing so would attract Apple’s attention.
Wow! I work in the banking system and such document life cycle management would be considered lousy at best. I think it’s time for Apple to make iCloud a little bit more business-friendly. The story on the iPhone is better as corporate-controlled apps are using their own partition which can be wiped independantly from the personal partition. But on iCloud? It doesn’t seem to be the case.
