Love these kiddos and the ocean.
Kolby Jack
(Yes, that’s his name)
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Welp, I’m on PTO! 🥳 The sad thing is I don’t feel like I’m on vacation, yet. Today I need to vacuum Kim’s car and my truck so they’re nice and clean because Monday morning we’re off to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for a week of camping at the beach with our daughter, grandkids, and the dogs. We enjoy it down there. The folks are nice, the campgrounds are well maintained, and the beach is, well… it’s the beach. Everything is better at the beach!⛱️
My only fear is Ms. Gracie will misbehave. She barks at everything and I’m afraid she’ll have a lot of trouble at night because campgrounds can be a little noisy at times.
I will, of course, need a vacation when we get back from our vacation, so I took Monday and Tuesday of the following week off to recover a bit before going back to work. 😁
CBS News has fired veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley a day after he confronted the show’s new executive producer at a heated staff meeting.
Bravo Scott Pelley! Let ‘em have it! Watching CBS slide into fascism hasn’t been fun to watch but seeing someone on the inside push back, in such a public manner, has been refreshing.
Sure, CBS is now a fascist hellscape of a broadcast and news company but the fine news people they have don’t have to be a part of it.
The web is the place for great news to happen. I hope Mr. Pelley creates his own news blog — NOT ON SUBSTACK — and publishes his own brand of investigative reports.
Yesterday on Pivot Scott Galloway suggested Netflix should pick up the 60-minutes crew and let it operate on its own as “Hour News” or some such. I like the idea. 😃
Apple is expected to launch its first foldable iPhone later this year. Rumors suggest the “iPhone Ultra” will come in two color options, and a leaker shared an image today that allegedly shows one of them.
If the picture in that article is the new phone I can confidently say I don’t like the form factor. I haven’t held it in my hand of course but it looks huge.
Hopefully we’ll see this new phone in September or October of this year. Even though I doubt it’s something I’d like to use I will, of course, do what I can to support it in Stream. 😄
A digital detox was on my list to accomplish. I’ve read blog posts about this regarding deleting apps on your phone and deleting accounts from services. I reviewed how I was using my time through the day and reading rss feeds of blogs and tech articles. Many tech posts I didn’t even read past the headlines since I’m not interested any longer in tech. These were the first to go from my rss reader.
I have a feeling this happens more than we realize and I’d also imagine it’s accelerating with the advent of LLMs.
I know he’s abandoned RSS but I’d like to point out that part of why I made Stream was so I wouldn’t feel that need to be a completionists with my feeds. Of course I eventually caved and added read/unread markers on every feed item, it was heavily requested.
For the Mac version I’ve made displaying those read/unread dots optional, by request of course.
Sorry, I don’t know Jon’s last name or I’d have use it! 😂
I haven’t seen anything as stupid as the WeWork IPO document in a very long time — that is, until Elon Musk filed to take SpaceX public. WeWork was a joke. SpaceX is a threat. And if Musk and his bankers have their way, you are going to be their bagholder.
I’m not so sure Elon Musk is at all interested in saving humanity, as he was once fond of saying. He’s interested in power and stuffing his already fat pockets with even more money at the expense of everything and everyone around him.
SpaceX may be a good company, doing interesting things, but Musk is a real garbage human and he leaves a stench on whatever he touches, SpaceX included.
He’s bound and determined to destroy Tesla and his social media platform has become a right wing troll farm.
We can’t get a ultra wealth tax in place fast enough. Everything over 10-billion should be taxed somewhere between 80-100% with zero loopholes afforded for borrowing against it. These wealthy suckers use every trick in the book to get around paying taxes and even benefit on their taxes by taking out loans against their wealth. Yes, yet another way to absolutely screw the average and the poor.
Screw you, Space Karen.
Get on a rocket and get your ass to Mars already. 🚀
It’s time for me to learn what standard.site is and how it compares to the things I know and work with. This is the result of the conversation I had this morning with ChatGPT.
This is a neat summary comparing standard.site and RSS provided by ChatGPT. It’s definitely worth a read.
And, I still don’t understand AT Protocol. 😂
I’ve updated Micro.blog with initial support for Standard.site, a set of lexicons for long-form blogging on the atmosphere. I’m a little late to the party. Thanks to Leaflet, Pckt, and others for leading the way here.
I love how Manton keeps Micro.blog at the forefront of blogging and the social web. This site will benefit from his work adding standard.site support and I won’t have to lift a finger.
Thank you, Manton! ❤️
PHP is foundational to the modern web, and ensuring its security is essential for a significant portion of the web’s functionality and integrity.
I know a lot of language purists love to pick on PHP but to me it’s the C of the web. It’s been around for so long and is beloved by so many for it’s ease of use. Heck, until fairly recently you could write PHP code on your Mac without installing a single package. Just write some PHP and browse to it. Simple. We need more of that because modern software development is a mess of packages upon packages upon packages. Half the time you spend on your project is keeping packages and your fragile environment working. Unless you’re me, then you decide to use C++ to write a backend service so you can stay away from as much external stuff as possible. Don’t worry, I’m gonna let an LLM help me with it. 🤣
The anthology movie is a distinct art form, one whose strengths and drawbacks are well known and almost entirely foundational to the general understanding of how the genre works.
Creep Show and Trick-r-Treat are easily my favorite horror anthologies.
tl;dr AI took the last of the wind out of my Open Source sails. I wish you all the best!
I like the way Chad exited tech. He typed his reasons, on real paper, then hand edited mistakes and left notes in the margin with a pen.
Good luck, Chad! I hope you’re able to stay away from the draw of tech! 😄
Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with the target account.
This is a heckuva thing. Please, for all that pure in this world, don’t connect these things to dangerous systems of any kind. Please, keep us fallable — thinking, empathetic — humans in charge of those. Pachinko machines have no place near dangerous systems.
In April, Apple rejected an update to my Mac dictation app, WhisperPad, under Guideline 2.4.5. Their position was that I was using the accessibility API in a way that wasn’t an accessibility use. The app exists because I have a hand injury. Apple had approved earlier versions doing the same thing. This time they did not.
This was really quite sad to read. Rene creates something to help with their pain issue and decides to share it with the world, because hey, someone else may need it, but Apple rejects it.
I’ve actually experienced something similar. In 2013-2014 my left hand pinky and ring finger became very painful when I’d type for too long. Turns out my ulnar nerve was pinched and required surgery to repair. This app would’ve been very handy at the time.
Winners and finalists in this category provide memorable, engaging, and satisfying experiences enhanced by Apple technologies.
WWDC 2026 is next week so I thought I’d share the finalists and give them a big “Congratulations!” on their nominations!
I see, yet again, Stream isn’t in the list. 🤣
Much like Google, Microsoft is launching its own version of OpenClaw. Microsoft Scout is an always-on assistant that integrates into Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams, allowing businesses to assign a virtual assistant to employees to help with organizing calendars, expense reporting, email drafts, and much more.
This app looks pretty nice to me. I haven’t seen it front and center but it looks pretty nice at first glance.
The first thing I thought was “Did they do this in Electron or React Native like they’ve been doing in other areas?”
It would be nice to discover it’s native C++ or C#, but I’m not holding my breath. For some reason they love writing stuff in TypeScript now.
As I’ve said before, the web is now the desktop. I can’t really wrap my brain around the attraction to React Native and TypeScript and I’ve been working with it for over a year now. It’s super popular with developers of all ages and, of course, I’m going with the flow, but I still prefer using the native tools, frameworks, and languages of the platform.
Maybe it’s just time for all platforms to give in and embrace TypeScript and React Native as their preferred platform. At least then they could create really great tooling around it. The arcane, backwards, tooling is part of what I really dislike about using TypeScript and React Native.
Enough complaining.🤣 The app looks pretty nice. I hope it’s extremely useful.
Andrew Cunningham ⦁ Ars Technica
On the hardware front, we didn’t get any updates for existing Surface devices (not counting yesterday’s Surface Laptop Ultra announcement), but we did get something new: the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is “a compact developer PC” built around Nvidia’s new RTX Spark chip with up to 128GB of built-in memory.
The RTX Spark is getting a lot of ink these days and I’d love to see one in action. Makes me wonder if Apple has any of these running in a lab somewhere in Cupertino?
I’ll bet these things are going to be crazy expensive.🤑
Microsoft CEO says new AI data centers use as little water annually as a restaurant — closed-loop cooling system aims to slash consumption from millions of gallons as AI infrastructure faces mounting environmental scrutiny
I hope this is a real thing because it would certainly go a long way toward fixing one of the real problems created by Data Centers. Now, provide your own clean, silent running, power and you’ve really got something.
Regard for the natural world and the comfort of people around these places should be the highest priority of any Data Center build. All these folks see is money at any cost.
There won’t be money to make if we’re all dead.😵
This isn’t a Rust-is-faster story. It’s a story about how std::unordered_map, std::map, and std::list — the containers every C++ textbook teaches, the ones the committee has shipped since 1998 — are so catastrophically bad for modern hardware that a Rust beginner using default containers demolishes a C++ solution without trying. And how we proved it by systematically replacing each C++ container until parity was reached.
To me this is a Rust is faster than C++ story. This is shameful in my eyes as someone who has written a ton of C++ code. At the time I was writing C and C++ code it was as popular as JavaScript and TypeScript are today. It was ubiquitous. The compilers were top notch and constantly improving. Today we have so many great choices, like Rust and Swift. I’d love to see Swift in a head-to-head with Rust using these same tests.
If you want to use an alternative to the standard library (std::) checkout Google’s Abseil. It’s way faster and battle tested.💨
Under the terms of the deal, Google will pay SpaceX $920 million per month from October 2026 through June 2029 for access to “approximately 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs, CPUs, memory, and other related components.”
What’s the deal with these companies going to SpaceX — xAI really — to get compute? I guess all that money spent on getting data centers setup before the pushback was a good idea, but at huge cost to nature and people.
People see Musk as a genius. He’s not. He’s a sociopath who does whatever he wants. You can take that to the bank.
<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/5176/2026/cc538cc8f9.png” width=“600” height=“892” alt=“MAGA Cult”>
It would appear that Donald J. Trump is a closeted gay man? Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay but this dude should just come out and admit he’s gay, or bi, or whatever.
Don’t hide it Donnie Boy. There are definitely gay men who’d love to have you, I think? 🤔
Just look at those, clearly, gay cheerleaders in the picture.
Rejected by Starbucks
Oh a whim I applied for an iOS dev job with Starbucks. I’ve always liked the app because it’s super easy to use and gives me exactly what I want from an app: a way to order and a way to pay. Simple. To the point. It could be a much smaller app, but it’s one of a group of useful ordering apps I call Marketing Apps.
Anywho, I did not expect to get a call and I didn’t. Just a nice rejection email, which I was grateful for because it’s nice to have your rejection acknowledge.
Corey Heim gets full time Cup ride
Neha Dwivedi • Daily Downforce
Corey Heim will join Denny Hamlin and Michael Jordan-owned 23XI Racing team as a full-time NASCAR Cup Series driver beginning in the 2027 season. While the development marks the fulfillment of a big opportunity for Heim, it also signals the end of Riley Herbst’s tenure in the seat, with Heim ready to replace him when the transition happens.
It’s about damned time! Corey Heim is an amazing talent but he didn’t have a big name sponsor like Riley Herbst does. NASCAR is a really weird sport and they’re not great to drivers. Heim was screwed at one point because he couldn’t bring money to the seat, but Herbst has Monster Energy behind him and is a good driver in his own right. Now Herbst gets the short end of the stick.
Riley Herbst is a fine NASCAR driver and I hope he finds an open seat. With the death of Kyle Bush there is a seat open at Richard Childress Racing. It would be cool if RCR could negotiate with 23XI to pick up Herbst for the remainder of the season and see how he does in the 33. That would at least give him an option moving forward. If they could do that the seat opens for Heim right away so he can get started now.
Food for thought.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
It’s been a pretty quite week. Work is moving along fine and we’re getting ready for our camping trip to the beach with the grandkids, our youngest daughter, and our dogs. Today I need to remove the wheels from the trailer and get new tires. I’ve never had to do that and I hope it goes smoothly. I’ll have to remove two at a time, run them down for new tires, put them back on the trailer and repeat the process for the remaining two. It’ll make for a bit of busy work and alone time driving to Charlottesville and back, which I really enjoy.
My brain is already in vacation mode so I’ll have to push myself to remain focused on work the coming week. Then I get a week off to enjoy time with my family. ❤️
The actor you see in the commercial is Patrick Renna, and his face looks so familiar because in our collective memory, he will forever be tied to an absolute cult character: Hamilton “Ham” Porter, the talkative, charismatic, and loyal kid from The Sandlot, the 1993 cinematic masterpiece that redefined the spirit of childhood and 90s summers.
How can you not love Ham Porter? He’s the portly, quick witted, catcher from The Sandlot. I love that movie! Have since the first time I saw it. While he’s just one of many great characters in the movie he definitely stands out. Seeing him explain how to make a s’more to his kid is heartwarming. ❤️
During one amazing period in August, Pyromania was selling 100,000 copies a day in the US. The album climbed to No.2 on the Billboard chart – second only to Thriller. “We actually outsold Thriller for one week,” Elliott says, “but that just happened to be the week that the Flashdance soundtrack went to No.1, with us at two and Jacko at three.”
Back in High School Pyromania was a huge hit. It’s one of the albums I purchased as soon as I could, hey, it helped me fulfill my obligation to my Columbia House subscription and is one of my favorite albums from that era.
At that time MTV was also huge and I feel like they helped each other reach great success. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent in front of the TV watching MTV over the summer. It was a lot. MTV was to my generation what TikTok is to today’s generation. At least it was for me.
If I wasn’t playing baseball, D&D, or going to a movie, I was watching MTV and Def Leppard was all over it.
If you know anyone at Silver Lake, Quinn Emanuel, or WP Engine in that order, please beg, plead with them to stop the violence. End this internecine warfare that is threatening to destroy one of the last stalwarts of the Open Web.
WordPress is part of the fabric of the web at this point in time. The little CMS that could, and did, take over so many websites that needed to be organized and scaled for millions and millions of hits per month, so it’s troubling to see the man who created it begging for help. It seems the legal battle with WP Engine has taken its toll on WordPress and Matt. That’s a crying shame and I wish WP Engine would back off the lawsuits and dive head first into making WordPress even better.
WordPress isn’t a tiny company any longer but they don’t bring the power and money a company backed by private equity firm [Silver Lake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SilverLake(investment_firm).
I want to see WordPress survive and thrive. Long live the open web.
Microsoft is telling employees that the decision is about converging on Copilot CLI as its main agentic command line interface tool across Experiences + Devices, but sources tell me the decision is also a financial one. The June 30th cutoff is the last day of Microsoft’s current financial year, and canceling Claude Code licenses is an easy way to cut some operating expenses for when the new financial year starts in July.
Microsoft isn’t the only company asking developers to use other tools or cut back their use of AI. There are reports that Amazon and Uber are also cutting back. These tools are extremely powerful and really helpful to software developers but are also very expensive to use all the time.
Like everything else the LLM companies will figure out how to make things faster and cheaper. My biggest hope it they figure out how to LLMs work without turning the planet into a wasteland.
At the end of last year, three excellent AT Protocol-based publishing apps—Leaflet, pckt.blog, and Offprint—got together and decided to collaborate on creating their own Lexicon for publishing longer records like blog posts, articles, and newsletters on the protocol. They called it Standard.site and it has since emerged as one of the most successful community generated Lexicons on the Atmosphere.
I admit I still don’t understand AT Protocol. There, I said it. I think I’d need to fully dive into it for a while to really grok it.
When reading this piece I was left saying to myself “How is this so much different than an RSS feed?” If you know, please reach out and tell me how it’s different or why it’s better. I believe someone could do the same UI work based on an RSS feed for a blog? Am I wrong? Let me know.
Before Frontier could become useful, it had to be buildable on modern operating systems, readable, writable, browsable… survivable. This is where the rubber hit the road.
I am very interested in Jake’s Frontier adventure and I love the idea of a headless Frontier. Being able to put other faces on the object database and scripting language sound like a really great idea to me. I’ve never been into using an outline as an editor and having the ability to bring my own IDE to the party sounds amazing.
If you’re not familiar with Frontier it’s a scripting language with a built in object database that is very powerful. The way Jake is rebuilding it I think it could make for a great embedded language for applications. Think the old VBA — still the best scripting environment ever made — in Microsoft Office apps.
The 2026 Razrs don’t change much in the design department versus last year’s versions, but that’s fine. They still look great. There are wood panels, soft touch plastics, vegan leather, and synthetic fabrics—all things you won’t find on the latest devices from Samsung, Google, or Apple. These are, hands down, the prettiest phones you can buy right now.
These phones are pretty darned stunning. I’m not the target audience for them, to be honest I don’t know who is, but I really like them. I hope Apple’s new entrant looks as nice as these Razrs do.
Many workers are experiencing “AI brain fry,” or mental fatigue from using and overseeing AI tools. And it’s no wonder why: Organizational change can take a toll on workers, and right now, there’s no greater organizational change than that caused by AI.
As a longtime developer the thought of an LLM replacing me scared the crap out of me. I’ve been doing this work for 30+ years and it’s all I know. However, once I dipped my toe into the LLM waters I realized it was just another tool. Someone needs to be around to define what needs doing and be there to review the outputs because it can, at least today, get things wrong or maybe you need to make an additional change you missed along the way.
An observation I’m sure many others have made. Since LLMs were trained on the worlds collective data their “reasoning” comes across very human like. The LLM studies code, formulates an understanding, and comes up with a plan to make changes. Then sets about making those changes. It just does it way faster than I can.
Another observation. At the beginning of the project I’m on now my team was given an area of the app to work on and we were running as fast as possible to deliver features. LLMs were definitely a productivity booster. Now, however, we’re dealing with typical end of project stuff. We have dependencies on parters and other teams and LLMs can’t take care of those for us, which is 100% fine. Now we’re down to the end of the project and a lot of cooperation between various teams is where we spend most of our time.
Bottom line: we still need humans to do this work.
Starting today Google AI Studio can build entire Android apps for you in minutes from just a prompt. You don’t need to install any software or configure any libraries, which significantly lowers the barrier to development. Whether you’re a seasoned developer looking to prototype at lightning speed or a creator building your first-ever mobile experience, you can now go from a single prompt to a high-quality, Kotlin-based Android app in AI Studio.
This is kind of cool and makes me wonder if Apple would ever offer a service like this. Not that I’d be the target audience but having something that could create an entire application for you, get it setup on the App Store, and publish it without the need for Xcode would be something to behold.
Having the ability to download the project a build it locally and maintain that connectivity to all the project stuff around it would be nice to have, if Apple ever does something like this.
Ever since I added substackcdn.com to my blocklist, I have learned how many bloggers have solved their “substack nazi” problem by just hiding it behind their own domain. Spoiler: it’s a lot.
I cringe ever time I hear or read “Go to my Substack” because they’re just blogs. Blogs hosted on a platform you have zero control over and I really hate that. Especially since people don’t seem to care they support some of the worst people ever to live on the planet. So many great writes out there I refuse to support or read because of the white supremacists and Nazis.
I know I can’t make a difference or convince folks to leave the platform but I’m going to keep trying. Before one of their co-founders went on Decoder with Nilay Patel and refused to say Substack would kick racists off the platform I’ve had zero respect for the company.
Today’s “new media” doesn’t seem to care they’re supporting horrible people. They’re lazy and only care about the money. Money they could have more of if they’d switch platforms. They’d also stop giving their hard earned cash to horrible people.
Until someone finds a way to make an open version of Substack that resonates with people stand alone blogs will probably be less attractive than Substack because folks like the social nature of it.
We could absolutely have the same experience as Substack with open source solutions but someone would have to build all that infrastructure and pay for it somehow.
A lot of the parts are there: HTTPS, RSS, ActivityPub, Micropub. Look at Micro.blog as an example of bringing some of those technologies together to make a social blogging experience. It publishes RSS, publishes to many different social networks, and gives you complete access to all of your data.
The boss of Standard Chartered has apologised after describing employees whose jobs are vulnerable to being replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) as “lower value human capital”.
Nice work, dude. This will be used in all kinds of think pieces and business schools as how not to motivate your employees.
Yeah, we all know we’re worthless cogs in the capitalist machine, but you don’t have to point it out. 🤬
Our consciousness, our experience of being, is shaped by things beyond our control. It is that experience of being that shapes our desires, and that is imposed or imprinted on us in our growing-up years.
Dave is going deep in this post and it rings true.
I’ve always loved Dave’s writing and I’ve followed him for at least 20 years, back to when he was writing Groundhog Day. He’s a good man and philosopher, I bet he’d disagree with me on that last point, but he’s a great writer and deep thinker none-the-less and worth a follow.
The software industry as we know it is dying and CEOs realized it months ago.
As long as I’ve been in this industry LLMs are the biggest shift I’ve ever seen. The web was seismic. At some point I knew I’d have to become a web developer if I wanted to continue to do computering stuff. Mobile came along and prolonged that shift for me. But, LLMs are a whole different thin for the world of software development. Sure, we still need the human element to tie it all together but you need good people skills and vision to make what we did by hand before. The coding practice is forever changed. We’re using LLMs to code in TypeScript, building React Native apps, but we could just as easily do everything in C, C++, Rust or native to platform languages like Swift and Kotlin. It doesn’t matter to the LLM, just to the client.
I have a web service in mind and I think I’ll do a CGI based thing using C++ because I’m comfortable with it and can edit everything by hand when I want. My idea is to generate the shell of it then do all the other work by hand using my own framework of C++ I’ve built over the years. It may never happen because I have to finish Stream for Mac and get Thunder Chicken rolling. Sorry for the tangent. My brain often does that. As the commercial says “The mind is a terrible thing.” 🤣
To help the industry get back on the right track, I’ve created a checklist for car designers. Make sure your new car—EV or otherwise—checks all these boxes to avoid making the same stupid mistakes that have plagued modern cars for years.
I think John Siracusa is a software engineering/tech nerd national treasure. His hypercritical nature and observations lead to great product and, let’s face it, extremely entertaining. John has a great way of expressing himself. He’s always funny and I absolutely love hearing one of his mini-rants on ATP.
It’s nice to see him write once in a while and I love seeing his work pop up in Stream on that rare occasion.
One of these days I’d love to shake his hand and thank him for all the years of joy and knowledge he’s brought to my life.
As an aside, ATP is an example of a small podcast done right. They have their own custom built subscription system and don’t rely on Apple or another big entity to make money. They’re not locked in. I’m an ATP subscriber and there are other podcasts I might’ve subscribed to but they’re dependent on Apple Podcasts to pay for those subscriptions. I don’t use Apple Podcasts. That is yet another proprietary lock-in I don’t want to depend on. Yes, Apple does many wonderful things for podcasts and I’m thankful for that, but their subscription model is not something I can appreciate. I get it, they’re a business, just as ATP is a business, but ATP has a very open model, no lock-in. Bring your favorite podcast player to the party and it works with ATP as is.
Republican lawmakers want a $250 bill featuring President Trump for the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration, but the proposal faces legal and legislative hurdles.
Why would anyone want a giant orange asshole on our money.
Doesn’t he realize his mug and all his gaudy gold shit is going to be ripped off of everything once he’s gone?
Biology will ultimately take care of him. I just hope he hasn’t well and truly fucked the country up beyond repair.
Re-imagining Platinum
This morning I ran across the image above and I think it’s the MacOS Platinum design? I like it. I really, really like it. Since macOS 26 saw the light of day and folks have been bagging on Liquid Glass I’ve been looking at older Mac UIs for something pleasing to my eye. Not that I hate Liquid Glass, I don’t. It’s fine.
When I see screenshots of Platinum I keep thinking “I wish Apple would take Platinum as a starting point and re-imagine it for today.”
Then I ran across this screenshot from MacOS X Lion. It kind of looks like Platinum re-imagined. 😳
Maybe you knuckleheads shouldn’t have started a war with them? 🤬
The stupidity of this administration is shocking.
Struggling Today
Today is one of those days. I don’t feel like writing code today, but I’m at the coffee shop, head in hands, trying to motivate myself.
I will work on Stream for Mac today because there’s so much to do. Maybe I’ll tackle OPML and Refresh updating in the UI? I’ve had some really great feedback from the few Beta Testers I have. I appreciate each and every one of you. Thank you for helping me make this app presentable. ❤️
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
I'm moving really fast this morning to get this "out the door" because I have to go pickup our trailer this morning. We bought a larger one, but it needed a bit of work and a good once over. The work is done, time to get ready for our maiden voyage in June.
I’ve only had one cup of coffee so I decided to play the Doom Soundtrack to increase my typing speed 1000%. 🤣
I hope you enjoy the links and the bad opinions. ❤️
Kyle Busch, a two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion, has died at the age of 41, just hours after his family said he was suffering from a severe illness.
Kim sent me a text Thursday night that simply read “Kyle Busch died.” When I read it, it didn’t quite register at first. My first thought was “Can’t be that Kyle Busch?” I was so wrong.
Kyle Busch was one of my favorite NASCAR drivers. He was brash but had mellowed over the years and I liked his competitive nature. Even though he’s struggled to record a win over the last three seasons he is, as Denny Hamlin says, on the Mount Rushmore of NASCAR.
I especially feel for his family. I can’t imagine the pain. ❤️
Godspeed, Mr. Busch.
I think maybe it’s time to consider a reboot of WordPress. I can’t seem to seed them with any ideas about building on it from the point of view of the web. It’s a product unto itself, it has plugins, but I’m not a plug-in sort of guy. I write operating systems. That’s what drives me. I see a great place to put an OS with WordPress as the storage and publishing component, and everything else grows up around it.
I’ve been watching Dave create his WordLand project on top of WordPress for a while now and it got me thinking about using WordPress as the backend for a new project. I don’t think it needs a reboot, just some different ways to use it. Dave’s own work shows that would work.
My idea is to build out a Micropub implementation that uses WordPress as its backend. That would allow for anyone to hook up their Micropub enabled client app or website to the backend.
The other part of my idea was to hook into the publishing flow to output static HTML pages since it’s what I prefer for my blog.
All the parts are there. They just need connecting. I’m sure it won’t be without its challenges but I bet an LLM like Claude could help pull it all together. I’m thinking of doing it in C++ because it’s something I know and is highly portable. Swift would also be a decent choice since it’s also very portable.
Who am I kidding. It needs to run on Linux. 😄
Virginia might be for lovers, but more recently, it’s for data centers. The state has more data centers than anywhere in the world, and companies are pushing to build more of them, including around some of the most hallowed ground in the country: the Manassas National Battlefield Park.
We’re definitely data center heavy here in Virginia and folks all over the state don’t want them in their area. Who can blame them given stories out of states like Texas and Tennessee where data center operators are polluting the air and water and making residents sick. Noise and light pollution are real things.
I mentioned it last weekend. If data center operators want to build they need to bring two things with them; power and an alternative to water for cooling. Oh, and they need to be HIGHLY regulated. I mean regulated like nuclear power plants. Green energy and restrictive noise pollution standards. Water is a big one. We need it to survive and many of these places are polluting water and putting it right back in the ground.
They’ve become a nuisance to communities. Who’d want them in their neck of the woods? I sure don’t.
The Nice Guys bombed at the box office in 2016, grossing an estimated $62 million at the end of its theatrical run with a $50 million budget. This commercial turnout is largely credited to releasing the same weekend as the Angry Birds movie, and in the 10 years since critics and fans alike have bemoaned the loss of potential sequels this action-comedy could have spawned had it received more spotlight. To this day, cast and crew still get asked about the possibility of it in interviews.
I think I saw The Nice Guys on Netflix a few years back, it could’ve been another streaming service, but I think it was Netflix. Anywho, it’s a good film and I’d recomment putting it on your “to see” list.
I’m referring, of course, to the daily miracle that is coffee. Our grandparents were told to cut back on this dirty-tasting beverage but today, it has become one of the most studied and virtuous and quietly luxurious parts of the human diet. All in all, coffee — yes, coffee — is one of the best reasons to be alive in the year 2026.
I mean, duh! Coffee is life blood! If you’re reading this now you understand I drink a decent amount of coffee throughout the day. Three cups in the morning — occasionally adding a medium mocha on top of that — and a hot cup or maybe a large cold brew in the afternoon.
LONG LIVE COFFEE! ☕️
Microsoft first teased its movable taskbar in March as part of efforts to rebuild trust among users. You can adjust the alignment of the icons inside the taskbar, as well as open the Start menu drawer from wherever you placed it. Windows 11 Insiders can access a shorter taskbar, too, which could come in handy for devices with smaller displays. There’s also an option to choose from a “Small” or “Large” Start menu.
It’s really nice to see Microsoft take a step back and work on fixing up the Windows UI. One thing I wish they’d do is make the UI consistent and get all to look and behave the same. Their settings app used to be tiny and clear of clutter. Now it’s a real mess.
Separating WinUI 3 from the operating system is a plus and a minus. It’s a plus because they support older releases. It’s a minus because the Windows team hasn’t fully integrated that new look into the OS. By fully integrating I mean anything built with the “old” Windows API — on top of the USER component. Why hasn’t Microsoft updated USER to draw using WinUI 3? If they were able to do that all applications using the old User functions for window and dialog management should adopt the new UI without change, or very little change. I think KERNEL and GDI could stay the same, maybe? Of the two GDI is definitely a candidate for updating so they could hide new graphics technology under it.
When Microsoft was developing NT they did an amazing job maintaining backward compatibility that allowed 16-bit Windows apps to easily move to their new 32-bit operating system. Did we have to make changes? Yes, we did, but they were really minor.
I’d imagine it’s not important to the big picture. Folks don’t really build new native Windows apps any longer. Most stuff is built to run in the browser. 😔
I have all kinds of bad ideas around marrying the old and the new to allow existing applications to get the benefit of the new without a total rewrite. Microsoft is usually pretty good at backward compatibility. In the case of WinUI 3 they opted to leave USER behind, to bit rot. Which is kind of sad to me.
As soon as people found a Bun branch mentioning an experiment to use an LLM to port the existing Zig code to Rust, they went mad.
This experiment is fascinating! From what I’ve read they have a direct port that works and passes existing unit tests. That’s wild and kind of exciting.
Using an LLM to create a blueprint of an existing piece of code and rewriting it a memory safe language is not such a bad idea. Sure, it’s going to take human intervention. Developers will need to review the code and understand it. Testers will need to understand how to test it and build tooling for it. But as LLMs improve it seems like this could be a really good way to rewrite a huge project bit by bit and get a safer version of it.
It’s not a perfect idea but seeing experiments like this is both terrifying and encouraging.
I’m going to keep an eye on this and see where it goes.
Hokum recently hit theaters, and it’s already outperforming box office expectations. If this Kubrick-referencing haunted hotel flick starring Adam Scott was your introduction to director Damian McCarthy, do yourself a favor and go watch his previous film, Oddity.
Kim discovered Oddity not long after it released and being a horror fan we watched it. It’s quite good.
Highly recommended if you’re a fan of the genre. 🍿
The metal-inspired soundtrack for 1993 shoot-’em-up Doom entered the Library Of Congress’ National Recording Registry last week, joining music by the likes of Metallica, Beyoncé, the Beatles and Bob Dylan. In 2024, Hammer interviewed designer John Romero, Bury Tomorrow bassist Davyd Winter-Bates and Periphery guitarist Misha Mansoor to find out how the game was created – and why it made such a lasting impact on heavy music.
The soundtrack will shred your brain, jack you up, and build tension. I just want to bang my head and jump. It’s perfect for the pace of the game.
I’ve wanted try to modernize Frontier for at least ten years. I had a long-tail of things I’d wanted to do inside UserLand before leaving for Microsoft, and since the Frontier kernel was open source it was always possible — at least in theory. But I never had the right combination of available time and C-coding chops, and I lacked familiarity with the deeper parts of the C-based Frontier/UserTalk runtime for it to be a realistic thing to attempt.
I’ve looked at the original Frontier code many times since it was released to the public. It does seem like a daunting task to refresh it for modern OS’es but in the end it could make for a relly nice scripting language on Linux. No, seriously! It had a large following at one time and was used by UserLand to create Manilla and Radio. Both very good blogging platforms when blogging was young.
As someone who loves building APIs and SDKs for developers I’d like to see the UI and main Frontier engine separated so it could be embedded inside other applications. Maybe the UI could be there? 🤔 Microsoft’s VBA was a full IDE you could embed in your applications. Seeing something like that for Mac, Linux, and Windows would be incredible.
Jake, can you make that happen? 😄 Have you considered using a modern, memory safe, language and doing a straight across port? Not optimized, not really taking advantage of the language, just a line for line port from C to say Rust or Swift? Then you could slowly do any language optimaization or take better advantage of what the language has to offer after getting that initial port complete.
Food for thought. 🍕
Work Note: Stream for Mac
What did I get done today? 🤔
I did a bunch of little things to make the app have fewer rough edges.
- Removed the border around the blog list (Thanks, Lucien)
- Updated the selected Blog in the blog list to use white text
- Rounded the corners of the selected blog item in the blog list
- Adjusted the position of Blog list items to have some space around them
- Set the divider between panes to be thin
- If one blog is select and you refresh it, we only refresh that one item (Thanks, John)
- Updated the All and Read Later icons to have some color
I tried to fix an issue that causes the preview text in the feed item list to sometimes display only a single line but the text view is three lines high. Weird, I know. Sometimes it will display a single line but the text could be three lines high. I know this has something to do with cell recycling. I tried some recommended things to get the cells to resize their Text but no luck yet. I’ll get there.
Another thing I need to do to fix this is decode any HTML included in the feed and strip everything at the top that’s not a paragraph marker. What happens now is you won’t get any preview text because the top bit is an image or other HTML I’m not accounting for.
I didn’t get around to fixing OPML Import so it displays some sort of progress indicator while it’s working. I’m thinking about displaying a simple spinner with text to the right that reads something like “Importing: [blog name goes here]” in the toolbar. I think I’ll hide the refresh button and the Stream title text and replace it with the spinner and import text. That sounds good in my brain at the moment. 🧠
You are not entitled
No, you orange asshole, you are not entitled to it.
Twenty-Second Amendment
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
Nothing in the 22nd Amendment says you can be President for more than two terms.
NOTHING.
Even if you try some sneaky ass trick like being Vice President or Speaker of the House, that still doesn’t entitle you to another term. It’s fixed, at two. You’re done at the end of your current term. In 2028 we will have a new President, not you, or there will be a real mess for you to deal with.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
We managed to sell our camping trailer, which was really nice, because we bought a slightly bigger one and needed to get rid of it. 🤣
Work has been fine. Nothing hair raising happening. I went into the office on Thursday to meet with my new Manager and enjoyed being there. The only downside to being there is not having co-workers on my project being in the office. We’re geographically dispersed so I sat alone. Which, in the end, was completely fine with me. I found a quiet area and went to work. Open workplaces are mostly not fun to work in. Too noisy and distracting. Microsoft and Visio had it right. Offices for everyone. That’s where it’s at. 😃
Of course I dropped by Grit on my way in. ☕️
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Wanton Destruction Of CBS Property - Letterman & Colbert Toss Stuff Off The Roof Of The Ed Sullivan
I’m not a late night TV guy so I haven’t seen Colbert in years but the man is very entertaining and I love that he got under the skin of our thin orange skinned President.
Having Letterman on to send the show off like this was a great idea. I have a strange feeling Colbert will be more popular than ever and I’m looking forward to whatever he does.
The joy of RSS was that you could subscribe to tens or thousands of feeds, and get a chronological view, like an inbox, of the latest “news.” News could include blog entries, stories from major newspapers, price updates for a retail item, podcasts, service alerts, “diffs” when something is updated (such as changes to the text of a New York Times article or a Wikipedia entry), search results that changed over time, and much more.
Feed reader popularity is going up. Tools around feeds are seeing a reniassance and I’m here for it. I like feed readers so much — self promotion to follow — that I made my own feed reader. I’m glad I did because it serves a small category of folks. Some people want to view their feeds as a timeline. Just a River of News.
My feed reader, Stream, presents feeds as a River of News.
Katherine Legge will become the first woman to attempt the Indianapolis 500 and Coca-Cola 600 “Double” on May 24, one of the most demanding feats in all of motorsports. She will be fueled by e.l.f. Cosmetics, a brand from e.l.f. Beauty (NYSE: ELF), a bold disruptor with a kind heart, as primary sponsor across both events, with Chevrolet power.
I’m really happy to see this! The first time I ever saw Ms. Legge drive was at the Indy 500, then she made her way over to NASCAR and drove in the O’Reily Series and later in the Cup Series. She’s a great race car driver I just wish she could run full time in NASCAR Cup. I really believe she could show all these good old boys something. 😃
Today marks the 30 year anniversary of my becoming a full-time employee of Apple Computer, Inc.
Daniel is another one of those Mac developers I have a lot of respect for. He’s been around a long time — obviously — building excellent quality Mac software. If you’re a blogger you should check out MarsEdit. It’s a really great native Mac blogging client.
I’ve been posting more from my Mac recently and I use MarsEdit to publish.
A compromised dependency in the JavaScript ecosystem led to credential theft, which enabled a supply chain attack on a Rust compression library, which was vendored into a Python build tool, which shipped malware to approximately 4 million developers before being inadvertently patched by an unrelated cryptocurrency mining worm.
If you’re into software security take a few minutes to read this incident report. It’s fascinating the lengths naferious people will go to compromise something. All in all this set of hacks was fairly easy to integrate into their targeted software components because stewards of many open source projects move on or don’t have time to tend to their software. It’s a real problem.
Then there’s software like npm, which is powerful, and permissive, and once we start using it we stop paying close attention to what we’re installing or upgrading. I’m guilty of that!
Vigilance, I suppose, is the only way to combat this sort of stuff?
Substack, the once buzzy newsletter platform, is losing a new swath of writers to rival platforms most people haven’t heard of. Just last month, The Ankler, one of Substack’s most popular publications, left for a platform that gives it more control over its site. Others who have departed Substack within the past year voiced similar complaints and cite the platform’s increased focus on social features as well as a pricing model that puts a chokehold on their business.
Substack faced talent drain in 2024 linked to its platforming of Nazi newsletters, but now it’s not just the platform’s stance on hate speech that’s driving away creators.
It’s really nice to see folks migrating off of Substack and onto various other open, less expensive, platforms.
While Ghost and Beehiv are mentioned in the article it was another mention that caught my eye: Passport, a partnership between Automattic and Stratechery found Ben Thompson. That is what WordPress needs! Ben built his own subscription system so I’m curious to see how Passport works out. It could be a real boon for all these indipendent writers currently shilling for Substack.
Side note: It really grinds my gears when folks say “Read it on my Substack” instead of “Go to [insert domain/publication here] to read all about it” or something like that. It’s YOUR content but you’re selling it as Substack’s. Don’t do that.
I wrote a little blurb about this in 2011, but at that time people were using Facebook. Where did that get them? Exactly. Nowhere.
Red Hot Chili Peppers have sold their recorded music catalog to Warner Music Group for more than $300 million, reports Billboard. The deal includes all of the band’s recorded output, including their 13 studio albums, which reportedly generate around $26 million annually. Although the band owned their recorded catalog independently for the past year, during which they were allegedly seeking $350 million for the package, Warner is a logical buyer to foot the bill, as the label originally released Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Californication.
When I see big sales like this one part of me understands it and another part doesn’t.
The side that gets it says “Well, why not? They can retire and do whatever they want.” Of course I’d imagine they already had the ability to do whatever they want. I could be wrong but I’d imagine they’re all fabiously wealthy at this point. But, selling it seems like a fine idea. If someone offered me the right amount of money for Hayseed and my little apps I’d sell it, even though it would hurt a bit. 😃
The other side of me is like “Why give up the rights to all of your amazing work?” They’ve worked really hard to get where they are, why sell the rights to that work?
That side of me doesn’t get it, but as I’ve aged I’m more on the side that gets it.
Local residents complained of low water pressure. When the county utility investigated, it realized a data center had been draining the water system for months without paying.
Our current craze to build datacenters to power LLMs is crazy! We’re using precious resources like mad and it changes lives.
Local governments are salivating for tax money and jobs, but at a great cost. The environment can only provide so much. Water is so precious, not to mention the noise and light polution residents experience. It’s not good y’all.
We need to slow our roll a bit. Consider environmental impacts. These datacenters consume huge amounts of electricity and water for cooling. They need to provide their own power, be it solar, wind, or even nuclear. Having diesel generators running 24-7-365 isn’t exactly a good idea.
They also need to solve the cooling issue. Water is way too precious to waste on LLMs. If, like me, you’re a California native you may understand what I’m saying. If not, calling water presious may not mean a thing to you. Suffice it to say humans need water to survive.
A question for the BigCo’s building datacenters. Why not put them under ground? I’m asking because I don’t know the impact but I do know that the ground provides some cooling naturally. Perhaps things just get too hot to do that? It’s probably because it would make things more expensive and take more time to deliver.
Today, Ben McCarthy and I are launching Indigo. It’s a full-featured client for both Mastodon and Bluesky, available on iPhone, iPad and macOS. Go get it on the App Store!
At the time we began work on this app in the fall of 2024, there was a consensus opinion that you couldn’t combine these two networks. Two text-based social networks, each with their own distinct characters (both in terms of the people and features!), could not help but fall apart under scrutiny.
Congratulations Aaron and Ben!🥳 It’s so difficult to ship high quality software and it looks like Aaron and Ben have done just that. Sure it’s gonna have issues that need resolving and sure it’s gonna be missing features we’d like but they got a solid 1.0 out the door. That is such a huge deal.
If you’d like something that allows you to see a timeline of Mastodon and Bluesky mixed in one interface you may want to give Indigo a try.
Aluminium OS, Google’s upcoming version of Android for PC, may have just leaked a few hours before Google’s Android Show presentation. As Android Authority reports, leaker Mystic Leaks shared a 16-minute video on their Telegram channel that appears to show a lengthy hands-on demo of the new operating system.
While I may not agree with Google’s style very often I do appreciate them bringing Android to a laptop form. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having a choice of operating systems to consider. The more the merrier. I hope this will push Apple, Microsoft, and Linux to be better.
This subterranean monster had been growing unnoticed in the Victorian-era sewer running underneath the busy street, until workers carrying out a routine inspection bumped into its rock-hard flank. Now, a team wielding pickaxes, high-pressure water jets and clad head-to-toe in protective clothing, were preparing to tackle the putrid beast.
Their foe? A stomach-churning agglomeration of fat, oil, grease, wet wipes, sanitary products and condoms, known as a “fatberg”.
Someone needs to make a horror film based on the “fatberg.” 🤣 It sounds totally disgusting. 🤮
Brandon Vigliarolo ⦁ The Register
cURL developer Daniel Stenberg has seen Anthropic’s Mythos, a model the AI biz has suggested is too capable at finding security holes to release publicly, scan his popular open source project. But after the system turned up just a single vulnerability, he concluded the hype around Mythos was “primarily marketing” rather than a major AI security breakthrough.
I like the way Daniel and the cURL team use LLMs and other tools in their work. They’re very aware of what a security flaw means to the users of cURL. It’s such a ubiquitous piece of software one little security flaw could affect millions of computers. We still need humans in the mix.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says Elon Musk did “huge damage” to the culture of the AI startup. During testimony as part of Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, Altman said Musk required OpenAI president Greg Brockman and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever to rank researchers by their accomplishments and “take a chainsaw through a bunch.”
Space Karen being a dick to people is nothing new. I kind of wish we’d kick him out of the country. Send him back to South Africa or, better yet, Mars. Let him run his companies from there. He’s a huge stain on the United States of America.
Nextpad++ feels like a fever dream. Like what Mac apps would be if the Nazis had won WWII. Look, there are all sorts of foreign apps on the Mac. Electron apps. Apps ported with Wine. Web apps running in browser tabs or saved to the Dock. The curious new generation of lean-and-mean apps that are, in a technical sense, “native”, but are decidedly not Mac-assed apps, like Zed and Tolaria. All those types of apps feel alien on MacOS. Like different species. They are apps for the Mac but aren’t Mac apps. The Mac, however, is welcoming to them all, like the Mos Eisley cantina. We do serve their kind here. Nextpad++ isn’t like that. It doesn’t feel like an alien. It feels like Vincent D’Onofrio’s alien-bug-in-human-skin character from Men in Black.
The real value of Nextpad++ is familiarity to Windows developers coming to the Mac. It’s like using vi or emacs. Longtime developers who use those editors appreciate having them available on all platforms.
The Mac already has great text editors like BBEdit and Nova if you’re willing to spend a few bucks. They’re worth it.
I know VSCode is extremely popular. In my opinion it’s popular for a few reasons. It’s free, it’s on the major platforms, and it’s extensible. It also feels like crap if you’re a Mac or iOS developer. I know because I’ve used it on two projects. Since my current team didn’t mandate it I switched to Nova and it’s been a much better developer experience because the UI works the way I expect it to and the UI configuration works the awy I expect it to.
Cross platfom is good, I spent years at Pelco doing cross platform work, but if your cross platform code is UI code it can often feel so foreign to native users it turns them off. That’s how VSCode feels to me on the Mac and it’s how John feels about Nextpad++.
A $1 billion data center that Microsoft and Abu Dhabi-based AI firm G42 planned to build in Kenya has stalled after the Kenyan government failed to meet Microsoft’s demand for guaranteed annual capacity payments, Bloomberg reported Sunday. Kenyan President William Ruto put the scale of the project’s power requirements into clear terms at a recent state event in Nairobi, saying the country would need to “switch off half the country” to keep the facility running.
See my earlier opinion above. Here’s a prime example of datacenter companies needing to bring their own power to the party. How are they gonna cool the darned thing? I thought water was super precious in Kenya too? Doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Then again this is a huge American company with tons of money who doesn’t care about human rights and suffering. They see dollar signs and a country willing to let its people suffer and starve.
Shameful.
Developers who are told to use AI whether they like it or not, however, tell a different story. On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to.
Emphasis above is mine. I can see where developers are coming from. If you don’t sharpen your blade occasionally it doesn’t make for a very good cutting tool. And as the drug commercials used to say “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
Using an LLM has allowed me to work in a programming language and framework I’m not all that familiar with. I understand programming concepts just fine, but the language and framework are still, by and large, foriegn to me. Sure, I’ve written TypeScript/React Native code all by myself and paid attention to how others use the tools but the LLM has been a productivity booster for me. Our company is using LLMs to augment our developers, not replace them. If you don’t vibe code your apps you can build solid, maintainable, shared, code. If I could show you what we’ve produced you’d say it was fine TypeScript/React Native code. Have I hand edited code? Yes, I sure have, but that was well before we had the LLM dialed in to our project. Now it knows the codebase and has an entire list of rules and skills to follow. It’s only getting better at writing code. Do I plan on using it for personal projects? No, I don’t, because I want to become a better Mac and iOS developer. I won’t say I’ll never use it but for now I don’t plan on it.
Over 70 percent of Americans oppose AI data center construction in their area, according to a new Gallup survey. Just seven percent said they were “strongly” in favor of new data centers. According to Gallup, data centers are so strongly disliked that Americans would prefer to live near a nuclear power plant than a data center — even at its peak, opposition to nuclear power plant construction topped out at 63 percent.
Ah, back to datacenters. I seem to have a real theme going today. Safe to say I see them as a real problem.
I hope we can find excellent solutions to all the problems they present. We’re a smart people, we can do it if we want to do it. Thing is, we need to do it for the future of our planet.
Musk vs. Altman Court Battle
“Unlike a lot of other meetings with Mr. Musk, this was a good vibes meeting.”It was when Altman met with Musk and Zilis to discuss plans for for-profit meetings. Zilis texted after the meeting to say she was glad they had the meeting to let Musk think about “the investment thing so it won’t irk him later.”
A good vibes meeting means a long conversation of Musk ”showing us memes on his phone.”
Elon Musk is not a serious person. He’s a fraud and a swindler. His big gift is bullshit, the grift. That and a lot of money go a long way toward getting what he wants.
Get your ass to Mars, Mr. Musk, and let us fix this planet.
Random East Coast Observation
In California we lived at the base of the Sierra Nevada. Right behind Exeter sits a hill called Rocky Hill.
In Virginia they would refer to that as a mountain.
We refer to it as a foothill. Those foothills get ever taller as you drive deeper into them until you’re into the Sierra Nevada.
Folks have never been west if hills are mountains to them.
The Sierra Nevada is extremely impressive.
Don’t take that as a slight. It’s what people know growing up here.
The Appalachian’s are also very impressive and I wish I had the stamina and time to hike the entire 2,000+ miles of the Appalachian Trail.
Making RSS and Blogs Better
Why did Twitter win? Because the RSS developers wouldn’t work with each other. Thus subscribing to a feed was complicated. In Twitter, it a single click to subscribe, and another to unsub. You could also see who your friends subscribed to, again – one click to subscribe to one of the feeds. And eventually that grew into a Suggested Users List. RSS had none of that because the RSS devs refused to work with each other.
Dave is, of course, the biggest cheerleader of RSS in our industry. Rightfully so, the man created it.🙏🏼
Like Dave I see RSS as a great way to pull data, like a feed reader does, and push data. That latter bit is only used in one place I’m aware of: Micro.blog. I’d love to see Mastodon, Bluesky, WordPress, and many others support the import of RSS as a way to create posts. That would be a nice to have.
As Dave points out we’re missing one click subscriptions and recommendations. Which are big in the social network scene.
What else are we missing?
Discovery
Something Apple did many years ago was create a podcast directory and they shared it with the world. You can still use it, for free, to this day. I’d say that was a huge step for podcasting because it’s extremely difficult to discover new podcasts.
Apple doesn’t host the podcast files, just a profile of the podcast so folks can more easily find things. I’m sure it’s a large expense to them to host it but I it’s been beneficial to them. They’re being really nice, and people like really nice.
Now, like me, you may think “But a centralized directory is against everything RSS is about” and you’d be right. RSS is all about decentralization and allowing us normals to publish our works to the open web in a simple, standard, format. Not too different from HTML.
But… that centralized repository is what social networks offer and what Apple donated to the podcasting world. Remember, RSS is the format behind podcast distribution and having those podcasts in one easy to find place was a big deal.
Centralized? Are you nuts?!
Yep, totally, because what I’d like to see is bloggers, podcasters, and anyone else who uses RSS come together to build a centralized repository of basic attributes for bloggers and podcasters. It would be Apple’s directory but not limited to podcasts.
If the repository was “free” to feed readers and podcast players we could all pull from it to create recommended feeds and/or create separate timelines in our readers and players of latest posts. It opens the door to many possibilities. Bloggers and podcasters wouldn’t have to change a thing. Their RSS feed would remain the same. They’d have to do one tiny thing. Register that feed with the repository so it could make a nice card for you and list your podcasts.
Readers and players would direct any searches for blogs or podcasts to that directory and provide a list of items so the user could one click subscribe to it.
You could tell folks to “Subscribe wherever you get your feed” because RSS is completely open it doesn’t require you to be part of the centralized directory! The directory just helps with discovery.
Threaded Conversations
This is another thing missing from RSS and weblogs in general. How does RSS become a two-way conversation? Does it need to be?
For me the jury is still out. Mastodon has done an amazing job of making it easy to have your own instance interact with every other instance. That’s been really nice to have.
How would blogging solve that? I’d read a piece from Dave a number of months back that addressed this but I can’t find it now. I’d imagine others have worked on ways to make it happen.
Have you seen ActivityPub support in WordPress? It’s pretty nice and getting better all the time. When someone replies to your blog post on Mastodon it shows up in your blog as threaded comments! That’s incredible and going a long way toward making blogs more two way like conversations. It would be nice if it were a bit tighter with RSS but it’s a start.
Also of note is Automattic’s recent Radical Speed Month effort. It hooks blogging, Mastodon, and Bluesky into a single reading interface. Really nice stuff.
There are, of course, other examples of this, like The Iconfactory’s Tapestry or Reeder. Unread is starting to do some of this.
Ideas are getting better and better. Folks are trying out new things and experimenting more and more with formats.
I feel like we need more glue to make discovery and search better. That’s a big missing piece.❤️
Technical Foundation: Built with modern technologies — Electron, React 18, and TypeScript
If I’d had a mouthful of coffee I’d have spit it all over my display. 🤣
I didn’t realize Electron, React, and TypeScript were “modern” technologies for building desktop apps?
But… these technologies seem to work and there’s an abundance of web developers who can step right in to create a nice desktop app.
I guess I have to face it. The web is now the desktop.
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Another week in the books. As I’ve aged days fly by which means weeks and months and years zip past me.
I’ve fallen into routine I should probably change. I get up, drink coffee, read Slack and email. Poke around code, do code reviews, maybe work on a feature or bug, then shower, and go to standup. Work for a spell then have lunch and head into the afternoon. Coffee around 2PM then finish out the day. It’s the same thing day-in and day-out. Wash, rinse, repeat.
I need a change. I’m thinking about going back to the office at least once a week. Maybe? Will lazy me win or will the old adventurous Rob win? We’ll find out.😃
I’m on my third cup of coffee. All the links and snippets I wanted to talk about are complete. It’s a little before 8AM, Flynn is in my lap, snoring. Time to be opinionated and finish this post off.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I do sharing it.😄
There’s an alarming number of otherwise smart people who are suddenly convinced that their computer software has become self-aware. Like renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who was the subject of some raised eyebrows last week after he boldly declared in an essay that he believes Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot is fully conscious:
This is fascinating. Some folks are beginning to believe these LLMs are becoming intelligent and conscious. They’re a bunch of bits arranged in a way their inventors don’t understand. Our tech overlords are in a race to see who can build the ultimate LLM. The one that may possibly result in the extinction of the human race, but let’s get one thing clear: they’re not conscious. They’re code. Built by humans. Flawed humans racing each other to some end. But to what end? I haven’t the slightest clue.
Matthias Pfefferle • ActivityPub Blog
The Radical Speed Month bet: ship three protocol adapters in four weeks, and prove the Reader can become a universal aggregator. RSS / Google Reader API (so any reader app can use WordPress.com as a sync backend), ActivityPub (so Mastodon, Pixelfed, and friends show up natively), and ATProto / Bluesky (because that’s where a real chunk of the social-web conversation has gone). One Reader, every protocol you care about.
This is an extremely cool project. As the developer of a feed reader I’ve seen a huge uptick in readers and sync services. I myself have a GINORMOUS backlog of features to add to Stream. Some of those features were unique and I’ve fairly recently seen a number of them implemented in other readers. So many have done it that I will look like the copycat. 😁 You snooze, you lose, right?
Anywho, this is ultimately good for the feed reading market and feed reader developers. We’ll all continue to push each other in all the best ways, I hope.
Stream doesn’t currently have a sync system and some folks consider that a complete failure and nonstarter for their feed reading needs. I get it. I want that too! Seeing services glom on to standard ways of syncing is encouraging. I just wish we had something better than the old Google Reader API for doing it.
Could we work together to build one all feed readers can agree on? I mean a subset of what your sync service supplies today. That would allow us to use the feed reader of our choice and use whatever backend we want. Sure, you can still charge for your service. Why not? It’s just a spec for everyone to support or not. Ultimately the sync service is your product, not the front end. Open it up so more folks will pay you to use it.
You knew. And you signed off anyway. Because the alternative was losing the job, and the job was the mortgage, and the school fees, and the visa, and the version of yourself who’d fix it later once things stabilized.
This is a fun read and hits home for me. The paragraph I chose to use above was very intentional. I’m older than, I’d bet, 90% of my colleagues. With each generation those young folks come out of school way smarter and more prepared than me. Add LLM use into the mix and I wonder every day if today is the day I’m dismissed from work. It’s seriously a terrible way to live. But, it’s my reality.
One encouraging thing! My company has invested heavily in LLM usage but the stated goal is for us to be more efficient and become experts in the field. Experts so we attract more clients. That gives me a bit of hope and I need it.❤️
Claire Barber • Inside Climate News
For the first time, California discharged just over 12,000 megawatts, equivalent to 12 large nuclear plants, of energy from its battery arrays. That’s enough to meet over 40 percent of the state’s energy demand.
Folks love to bag on California, especially some orange turd living in the Whitehouse, but I think it’s out of jealousy.
I’m biased of course. California is where I was born and where my soul yearns to be.
Seeing them in the forefront of renewable energy in the United States makes me very happy.
Amazon’s data centers in Bahrain and the UAE have been hit multiple times by drone and missile strikes from Iran since the U.S. started bombing the country in February 2026. This left the company’s ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1 disrupted, with the AWS Health Dashboard indicating that it will take months before they can go back online
When the war with Iran started I fully expected them to hit as many American companies as they could with a presence in the Middle East. Microsoft and Google have a presence there. I’m not sure about Facebook but it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that they do. Heck, are there any big AI data centers there now?
Anyway, it wouldn’t surprise me to see more western, especially American, companies hit with Iranian drones.
With our current knuckleheads in office I’m surprised they haven’t pulled off the assassination of a top government official. Maybe the FBI still has some adults doing the real work, even with a drunkard at the helm.
Alexander Hanff • That Privacy Guy
Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking.
Naughty, naughty. Google can, and should, fix this. Just ask. That’s all it takes. If the user nopes out, so be it. Respect your users.
The Turlock Irrigation District was California’s first such agency when it formed in 1887. On Wednesday, it showed off another pioneering feat.
TID got a $20 million state grant in 2022 to test solar panels atop two short canal stretches. The arrays reduce evaporation of the Tuolumne River water while helping supply the district’s power customers.
More California goodness! If you’ve ever travelled through the San Joaquin Valley of California, especially along I-5, you’ll notice high berms of dirt with concrete water canals running through them. They’re a very necessary part of California infrastructure that take up otherwise valuable land. Why not cover them and get a twofer! Deliver life saving water and generate power at the same time!
Love it!❤️
Andrew Cunningham • Ars Technica
Apparently, this news surprised Ho as well, who claims that the Mac version and its author, Andrey Letov, are “using the Notepad++ trademark (the name) without permission.”
High drama in the Notepad++ for Mac port story! Apparently the creator had no idea this was going on and didn’t sign off on the use of the name. Yikes!
It sounds like things are getting sorted. Good.
Cathy Bussewitz • Associated Press
Meegan is among the wage earners engaging in “microshifting,” a flexible scheduling approach that involves tackling job duties in short, productive bursts instead of a single nine-to-five stretch. The paid labor fits around and between non-work responsibilities and priorities. Performance is judged primarily by output, with less emphasis on the number of hours logged behind a screen.
I think a lot of us who work from home break up our days in ways different from folks in the office. It’s not a bad thing as long as your company is cool with it.
I can roll out of bed at between 6-6:30AM and start working. I take a break at 9AM to shower. It’s my thing. It works for me.
As I said above I’m ready for a change, but I understand the lure of a microshifted schedule because I live it, kind of.😁
I’m sort of a sucker for looking at pictures of [mock versions] bc(https://spyglass.org/iphone-fold-ipad-mini-ios/) of the iPhone Ultra/iPhone Fold, and certainly watching videos on the matter. I think it’s a good thing as it means I’m clearly excited about the device, perhaps in a way I haven’t been about an iPhone in quite some time.
There’s a link to a video of a mockup that apparently came from the factory. The form factor is kind of weird at first glance. I think I’d need to use one for a while to decide if it was right for me. The dude on the video says it’s more of an iPad Nano than a foldable phone and I can definitely see it.
Apple doesn’t always get it right and I cannot see them ever having another hardware product as profitable and industry altering as the iPhone. But, they have to keep trying, right?
Vox Media is in late discussions with James Murdoch’s investment firm, Lupa Systems, to sell its podcast network and part of its publishing business, a source confirmed to Axios.
Hoo boy. I feel like this would destroy the Vox Media Podcast Network. I listen to Pivot and I cannot see Kara working for these folks. Hopefully she has the rights to take Pivot anywhere she wants, like doing it on her own.
Side note: They talk a lot about how media is drying up and podcasting it where it’s at because you don’t need a big company with hundreds of folks involved with the production of your show. She and Scott are right, you don’t need a big production, but they have a media company behind the production of their podcast. What happens when/if it’s sold? Does Pivot continue on as if nothing happened and Kara sucks it up or does she take it or does it cease to exist?
The plot thickens!
Linea Sketch 4.4 from The Iconfactory
Linea’s interface has been updated to feel right at home on iOS 26 and Liquid Glass. Today’s update emphasizes your canvas while keeping tools just as accessible and intuitive as ever.
Redesigned transformation handles make it more obvious how to scale, rotate, and adjust your selections, reducing friction when refining your work.
Congratulations to my friends at The Iconfactory! 🥳
There are four apps I absolutely love from The Iconfactory; Wallaroo, Tot, Tapestry, and Linea Sketch. I admit I don’t have Linea Sketch because I don’t have a modern iPad, but if I did I could see using it for block diagrams of all kinds.
In fact, I believe, The Iconfactory crew should do Linea Diagram, a Visio-like diagramming app for Mac and iOS. (Yes, I’m biased because I worked on Visio for 10-years. Best job I’ve ever had!)
Then you’d have the Linea family of apps! ❤️
Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
We have the kiddos for the weekend so let’s see how much of this I can get through before they wake up. My first cup of coffee is nice and hot and my fingers are ready to type.
I hope you enjoy the links.
The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AI that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself and give the other half to the AI company.
We’re beginning to see what Cory is talking about. Layoffs continue at tech companies, see Meta for example.
I’m curious to see if we have course corrections somewhere down the road. Will these companies decide they need more people due to LLMs?
You must imagine Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berners-Lee’s throat.
It’s not a pleasant image. Sir Tim is, rightly, revered as the genial father of the World Wide Web. But, all the signs are pointing to the fact that we might be in endgame for “open” as we’ve known it on the Internet over the last few decades.
We’ve spent so much collective time making the open web an amazing place it’s difficult to think it may be eaten alive by the billionaires and tech bros.
Publicly released exploit code for an effectively unpatched vulnerability that gives root access to virtually all releases of Linux is setting off alarm bells as defenders scramble to ward off severe compromises inside data centers and on personal devices.
Very scary, easy to exploit, security vulnerability. In 1995 I watched a co-worker exploit a know security vulnerability in SunOS to gain access to our bosses computer because we needed to get something from it. Yes, the boss knew we needed it an approved us getting it. I don’t remember the exact reason but I do recall we really needed to get whatever the thing was. I just remember this grey beard saying “I hope he hasn’t patched his OS yet.” He hadn’t, we got in.
In March, Windows president Pavan Davuluri confirmed plans to address serious “paint points” across Windows 11that have eroded user trust and generated a wave of negative sentiment around the OS, spawned from Microsoft’s relentless push into AI and enshittification while neglecting core Windows fundamentals such as performance and reliability.
I really hope Microsoft can get their act together and make Windows more stable and get their UI sorted out. It’s embarrassing for an operating system I still believe is great to be in the position its in now.
Here’s to a better Windows. 🙏🏼
And so today we’re going to begin an experiment to see what that version of Platformer would look like. Free subscribers can still look forward to one column per week. Paid subscribers will get an additional column on Thursdays that we’re thinking of as a reporter’s notebook: what I’m hearing, what we’re working on, a Hard Fork preview, and a mailbag. Some of these may read like traditional columns; others may feel more formally daring.
I really want to see more indie media like Platformer survive and thrive. Casey and gang provide a real service to the community and change is difficult and scary. I hope this move is exactly what the doctor ordered and they trive for many years to come.
David “Underscore” Smith via Mastodon
I’ve been spending the morning going through loads of old Apple Watch screenshots for a post I’m writing about my various efforts over the years at putting maps on the wrist…just came across a folder full of concepts for custom watch faces I’ve built. 😔 Maybe one day…
It was neat to see his experiments. Third party watch faces is all I’ve wanted from the watch since it was introduced. I could see some extremely cringe movie inspired faces but I can also see some thoughtful, gorgeous, faces from great designers.
For 4 months now, I have been using multiagent AI workflows and in mid-March 2026 I decided to take on the task of porting Notepad++ to macOS as a native application. The macOS version retains most that made the original great, which is syntax highlighting for 80+ programming languages, powerful regex-based search and replace, split view editing, macro recording, and a plugin ecosystem. I think that gradually it will be feeling right at home on the Mac. It runs on macOS 11 and later, launches instantly on Intel and M-series chips.
When I was a Windows developer I used Notepad++ like I use BBEdit today, for tasks on the periphery of development. Things like writing scripts or browsing code from other projects for things I’d done in the past and would like to steal from.
I have yet to try this new version and I’m in no hurry because I do like BBEdit and my fingers are accustomed to how it works.
But I am curious.
One of my favourite aspects of Lua’s design that I like to preach about is how it’s really tight and small, while also being genuinely really sweet to write. Today, I’d like to focus on its Lisp-like aspect: domain specific languages (DSLs)—specifically, we will use it to build a templating language for HTML.
I’ve been a Lua fan for a long time and there was a time when I’d go poke around the code once in a while because it was fun to read. Riki’s use is novel and I love seeing folks build code in unexpected ways.
I showed it to Claude Code and asked “how easy would this codebase be for you to work with?” I told it not to hold back. Review it purely from an agentic coding perspective, ignore human aesthetics entirely.
The feedback wasn’t great.
Apparently shops are using LLMs to find bugs of all kinds, be it your garden variety crash to serious security flaws.
I’ve been thinking about running Stream through Claude, but I’m kind of afraid of what it’ll say. 😃
Two weeks ago, I quit my job.
It wasn’t a bad job, not by most metrics. It ticked the boxes a job is supposed to tick: good pay. Health insurance. Remote work. Time off. Nice coworkers.
The closer I get to retirement age the more I want to walk away from corporate life and focus on things I want to do. The reality is, I can’t because I didn’t plan properly.
Kim thinks I need to go back to school and get a history degree so I can get a job at the Smithsonian or place like that in D.C. I really do love history and especially our own American history. It’s a good idea, but time is a precious commodity and as I watch mine tick away all I want to do is spend it with Kim and our family more than ever. And, yes, I’d also like to work on my software projects. 😃
Looks like the cicadas are venturing out. I’ve seen a few now. Mostly a bunch of exuviae laying around outside.
But Kim found this dude outside.
Couple quick updates on Stream for Mac
I fixed the issue with my Context Menu’s not working. Totally stupid move by me — I knew it would be. After my last coding session I changed a property to be “weak” because I thought it was retained somewhere else. Then I committed that change because I needed to pack up and get home. Mistake! That property needed to be retained because it was passed in and the caller created it to be handed off, it was NOT retained. What a rookie move on my part. 🤦🏻
Removed the “weak” last night and now it magically works. Oh, yeah, I also made another change. Instead of using a NIB to create the menu I did it in code and I just like that better. It was extremely straight forward and felt very natrual. Works great! 🥳
Next, the app was approved for Testflight last night and I’ve already received some very good feedback! Thanks, John! (No we’re not competitors, John’s Unread is far and away one of the best Mac and iOS feed readers on the market. Go get it and subscribe because his sync service is fantastic!)
Look, I know Stream for Mac isn’t going to be good for everyone and even some of my testers may look at it and say “This is complete crap!” But, it makes me happy working on it and I’m especially thrilled to be making my first Mac app.
It’s ok to be critical of it! I’d love to get your feedback, so if you’re using it, please share your opinion. If you’d like to see a really rough beta, let me know (if you’re reading this you’ll know how to find me!) and I’ll add you to the list!
Work Note: Stream for Mac
This morning I decided to get TestFlight setup so I could start dropping alpha and beta versions of the app. It didn’t take long, which was really nice, and I’ve submitted a build for Apple to approve for testing. I’d imagine it will take some time to get through the gauntlet since it’s the first version of Stream for Mac. Fingers crossed it doesn’t take long to get through. 🤞🏼
Besides that I added a couple new menu items to the View menu and implemented them.
The first was View > Timeline which is meant to present Stream in its two pane layout with a stream of blog posts in the left column and the text of the post in the right pane. I’ve called it Timeline but I don’t like it. It feels backwards. When Timeline is selected the leftmost list of blogs is hidden so you get that two pane view instead of three. It feels backwards because when it’s checked the blog list is hidden. I need to find a better way of presenting it. The functionality works just fine.
The other menu item is called Read/Unread Dots. I need a better name for this as well. What it does is hide or show the read/unread state dots. When I originally shipped stream I didn’t keep track of read state. It was meant to make viewing a more chill experience. I had a lot of folks reach out and ask me to add that read/unread state, so I did. Now I want a way to turn them off. This feature will make its way back to the iOS App as well, probably in a new menu item or as part of Settings. I need to think on it a bit.
I’d intended to do a bit more but as I was running through the UI testing random stuff I noticed the context menu for the blog list wasn’t working. It worked just fine last weekend but not today. 🤬
I spent the remainder of my work time trying to understand what I’d done wrong. The actions were all hooked up, they just didn’t fire when a menu item was selected. I checked the NSMenuItem and it wasn’t nil and had all the menu items present. It just won’t invoke the associated action.
Depending on how those table view cells are configured I will remove the menu by setting the new menu to nil, but that’s only for the All and Read Later items since the menu items don’t make sense for two things.
The other thing I did was delete my toolbar from the main NIB. I put it back later in the day but it did make me wonder if that change had something to do with my other menus not working. Yeah, it’s a stretch since they’re in separate NIB files. But I sure can’t explain how I broke it. 🤔
Any tips from Mac AppKit experts would be appreciated. 🙏🏼
That’s all for today. It was a good start but that busted menu was a huge time sink and I don’t have an answer for it yet. Maybe I should see if Claude can fix it? 😁