Short dated entries, links, and microblog-style notes.
I’m having an agent build a helper script to work with Gitea project boards based on Extea because Gitea doesn’t have programmatic access to project boards.
And this is just single player mode, me keeping my own stuff straight! So yeah, private data through @happyview.dev is looking attractive
I wrote a reply in the atmosphere community forum about how pushing people to pick a PDS isn’t what we should be doing.
It’s long enough I want to keep a copy in my journal posts.
I need to write more on this topic, of a minimum viable community product, but more concisely than this.
The PDS is a commodity. Which is excellent. It’s cheap to run and we can think of it is a database. Databases have powered a lot of things for a long time, but they are boring tech. The starting point is absolutely not “which server should hold my account”. Pick any of them, they work everywhere, and it’s not the thing that gets you excited by itself: we’ll hand you a PDS wherever you start.
Products. Well built, designed, and articulated. With a point of view that fits a set of people. And a plan to tell people about it, and a plan to fund its operations.
I think a PDS and a member list and a couple of integrated apps and maybe a custom feed or three could be a product that is in and around groups and communities and so on.
EuroSky has gotten there and has more room to experiment. The PDS is there, and their portal shows apps, and Mu gives them a unique surface that they can showcase more things.
AtStore is one piece we can use to direct people. Even there, like EuroSky has done a great job not of saying “here are 1000 apps” but rather here are 8 or 12, that are useful, that are made in Europe, that you should be proud of.
And other than that: we do marketing. We write things. We share experiences. We cross promote. We try things. We try one thing in one culture and another in another and sometimes we’ll swap them.
We have a meetup not of our own (well, we can do a couple of those, too), but people inside every interest, who show up with the atmosphere in their pocket and a URL to get started with.
Yes, there will be a PDS buried somewhere at the bottom. But mostly, there will be people. Not platforms.
Umans has Cloud Agents, which are pre-paid hosted VMs similar to what exe.dev provides by default.
Right now they support pre-loading with OpenCode or OpenDesign, with Fusion and pi-web on the backlog.
I paid $10 for a month of a Small VM (2 vCPU · 4 GB RAM · 40 GB). There are $20 and $40 options as well.
After that, I immediately wanted to be running OpenCode2 which is in beta and what I’m running my laptop.
I used the agent itself to install, configure and troubleshoot this setup, and have been using it all day through a mobile web browser. I added it to my iPhone Home Screen as a web app so I could easily switch to web pages as well.
I’ve prepaid (not actually sure if it recurs automatically) so this gives me 30 days to set this up on my own on BringYourOwn.Computer OVH bare metal Proxmox.
I need to figure out a proper Ansible setup so that my agents can deploy their own sandboxed apps on Proxmox.
Exe.dev is great by the way. I got started down this path because they have an iOS app that I tried out last weekend with their Shelley agent. They also have a whole set of secure integrations like Discord, Slack, Tailscale etc.
So much stuff happening. I don’t NEED hosted compute anywhere as an individual, but of course that’s always been the case for personal / homelab style work.
And of course, next up, multiplayer.
Did a first version of integrating @lichen.wiki into my site. There’s both a Markdown note in my private git repo, and it’s published as an atproto wiki.lichen.note. Revisions are pulled from history and displayed on page.
And made a lichen wiki note editor. A good start!
I’m testing mentions, so @bmann.ca gets a tag.
I am going to demo my journal editor to som (link below). The links get appended. We’re talking about how Obsidian and Automerge and atproto could be best friends.
Extensible Software points to Software for One, which in turn kicks off by pointing to Robin Sloan’s an app can be a home cooked meal.
I think personal software is the right name for all of this. As opposed to factory software SaaS that dominates today.
Jeremy @jeremymorrell.dev writes about Extensible Software in the age of LLMs.
It’s about building software so that it can be extensible, malleable software, including some of the pieces Cloudflare has to make this a reality - hat tip to capabilities & Kenton Varda.
Just downloading the exe.dev iOS app to test it out. Need to figure out my own remote code sessions.
I’ve been using Liquid’s Apollo app with models running on our Z-Space Local AI. It syncs with desktop over iCloud and is only chat sessions.
Manton has added independent PDS hosting for Micro.blog users:
“When new users opt to use Micro .blog’s PDS, their domain name becomes their Bluesky handle. They can then immediately sign into Bluesky with their own domain name without creating an account on Bluesky.”
When Does a Specification Become a Program? is @chadfowler.com’s latest.
“I suspect the useful abstraction looks closer to a knowledge graph than a requirements document”
That sounds technical, but it’s best for humans too: a bundle of info in different formats.
Aargh. Finding Takeout Tools after I’ve gotten this Saved Places.json from Gmaps. Now going to get the CSV version so I can get separate lists.
“Google’s Takeout export for saved places is incomplete by design, but the gaps aren’t obvious until you’ve already gone through the process ”
I was excited to try OpenWork, an open source version of Claude Cowork powered by OpenCode… and then I found their Enterprise Edition folder, licensed as Functional Source License. Just reminds me of Cal.com, and is another product that is enterprise-gating SSO.
The Cloudron team have packaged Tymeslot as an alternative to Cal.com, which has gone closed source as of April. I’ve used and enjoyed our @commonscomputer.com Cal.com instance for a couple of years now. I’ll try Tymeslot and report back.
Cloudflare launching wallets for agents with x402 support.
They’re doing the handles landgrab at cloudflare.pay - but looks like it uses subdomains, so could compose with atproto.
Bending Spoons is buying Airtable - which is very bad because BS is known for buying companies & squeezing them for profit. Gordon screams & wants a local first version.
Grist is an OSS alternative supported by European governments.
I subscribed to the Umans founders plan at the end of June. Below is the email they sent canceling it as of August 1st.
I’m happy with the usage I had, which wasn’t 24/7 agents, and two weeks of travel. I guess I’ll try pay-per-token for a while, and of course our local AI compute ZAI project continues.
We built the founding plans around a simple picture: one developer, working intensively, free from token anxiety. That picture is gone. Agentic usage exploded. Many of you now run fleets of agents 24/7 across multiple machines, and you expect more models, availability in every time zone, lower latency, higher throughput. We serve thousands of developers and several trillion tokens a month, as a small self-funded team.
A flat unlimited plan cannot carry that world. Not because the usage is wrong, but because the only way to keep such a plan alive is to slowly fill it with throttles, hidden limits and fair-use enforcement. We would spend our energy policing usage instead of doing what we are actually good at: running large open-weight models fast, reliably and at low cost.
So we are choosing the clean reset over the slow degradation.
What this means for you, as a Founding Max subscriber
Plates, restaurant menus on atproto, by jbhutch.bsky.social