The New Yorker has a long profile of Tim Berners-Lee: "Somehow, the man responsible for all of this is a mild-mannered British Unitarian who loves model trains and folk music, and recently celebrated his seventieth birthday with a picnic on a Welsh mountain." Wait, how did I not know that he loves model trains? 🚂 Looking forward to his memoir: This Is For Everyone. 📚

The New Yorker

Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It

In 1989, Sir Tim revolutionized the online world. Today, in the era of misinformation, addictive algorithms, and extractive monopolies, he thinks h...

This Is for Everyone

New book: Adventures in Animation. We were at Alamo recently and before the movie there were the usual shorts and old commercials. One struck me immediately and I thought: that looks like Richard Williams. It was.

Doing some more work with FFmpeg. It’s amazing how far video and audio tools have come. Ages ago when I was working on my app Wii Transfer, I had to jump through all sorts of hoops. Although that was in the Flash days before HTML 5 video.

Enjoying the WNBA playoffs. Today is Aces / Fever game 4. And the NBA preseason starts on Thursday! 🏀

ChatGPT Pulse

Manton Reece - ChatGPT Pulse

Asked Codex for a simple fix to something, and it went way off in the weeds and wrote its own Ruby and Python shell scripts to test its theory about the bug. Too thorough! Sometimes I really do just want the quick, possibly wrong answer that I can then tweak myself. 🤪

A contrast in two announcements today. This is why OpenAI is a different kind of company than Meta and should not be distracted with an ad-based business. ChatGPT Pulse from OpenAI. Fidji Simo: "Pulse has already helped me discover new emerging treatments for my health condition, recommended new painting techniques for my art practice, surfaced great weekend events for my family, and more." Vibes from Meta. Mark Zuckerberg: "Introducing Vibes – a feed of expressive AI-generated videos from artists and creators in the Meta AI app."

A new paradigm of proactive, steerable AI

We believe AI is going to give everyone more power than ever, so we need to make it easy for everyone to use AI to its fullest potential.

Threads

Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck) on Threads

⁠Introducing Vibes -- a feed of expressive AI-generated videos from artists and creators in the Meta AI app. Create and remix videos with le...

Started listening to the latest WP Tavern podcast earlier, with Dave Winer. Great so far. Dave’s fired up! I like it. As he blogged today about not waiting for the silos: "I’m not intimidated any more, I’m fed up and going ahead without them." We can build a better web. Open, connected, portable.

#186 – Dave Winer on Decentralisation, WordPress and Open Publishing – WP Tavern

Scripting News

Scripting News: Thursday, September 25, 2025

Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It

Email to SWICG about handles

Manton Reece - Email to SWICG about handles

More with book covers

Manton Reece - More with book covers

Matt Birchler has been in App Store review limbo, waiting for a week while his customers can’t upgrade to pay for his own app. So frustrating. Quick Subtitles looks like a cool app.

Birchtree

I'm running to the press

It's amazing how easy it is to be driven mad by the App Store and app review. I recently released a new app that I'm really proud of called Quick S...

App Store

Quick Subtitles App - App Store

Download Quick Subtitles by Matt Birchler on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips, and more games like Quick Subtitles.

Alex Heath writing on his new blog / newsletter site Sources that Fidji Simo is planning for ads in ChatGPT. I’m disappointed in this. It is going to be very difficult to do ads without compromising something. "Sources say that Simo has recently been meeting with potential candidates, including some of her former Facebook colleagues, to lead a new team that will be tasked with bringing ads to ChatGPT."

OpenAI is looking for a head of ads

Fidji Simo is on the hunt for someone to oversee all monetization efforts, including bringing advertising to ChatGPT. Plus: Sam Altman's internal n...

Final trailer for Wicked: For Good. After the first movie, I have complete faith in them to finish strong. Can’t wait to see what they do with No Good Deed and For Good. 🍿

I own about a dozen domain names in the form micro.tld. Most for things not announced yet, some that won’t ever happen. For better or worse, it’s the brand. Too many fun domains out there. 🤪

Thinking about video hosting

Manton Reece - Thinking about video hosting

Facebook has had 3 billion users for a while, but I wasn’t expecting Instagram to already have 3 billion monthly active users. Insane scale.

The Verge

Instagram hits 3 billion monthly users

Meta is now looking to drive growth further by testing changes for DMs and Reels.

An invaluable resource. The Internet Archive is getting close to 1 trillion pages archived: "Since 1996, the Wayback Machine has been capturing the web—saving the voices, creativity, and communities that make up our shared digital history. Nearly one trillion pages later, we’re still archiving, so that future generations can look back and understand the world as we lived it online."

Celebrating 1 Trillion Webpages Archived: Share Your Wayback Story | Internet Archive Blogs

Posted a quick 1-minute video on YouTube (boo!) to demo a new feature to install Open Graph preview cards for Micro.blog themes, even if you don’t use the full design from the theme.

Unfortunately picked today with an expected high of 100° as the day I should start taking long walks again.

I’ve had a couple side conversations recently about centralized video. John Gruber makes a strong case today that this needs to be solved soon: "With YouTube, Google has a centralized chokehold on video. We need a way that’s as easy and scalable to host video content, independently, as it is for written content. I don’t know what the answer to that is, technically, but we ought to start working on it with urgency."

Daring Fireball

‘Jimmy Kimmel’s Suspension Is a Wake-Up Call’

Link to: https://politicalwire.com/2025/09/18/jimmy-kimmels-suspension-is-a-wake-up-call/