Rob Fahrni

grug tempted to reach for club and yell “big brain no maintain code! big brain move on next architecture committee leave code for grug deal with!”

I love The Grug Brained Developer. Grug make laugh. 🤣

I was able to make it to the coffee shop and work on Stream today. I’ve been revisiting how to construct a good AppKit cell view — NSCellView — that does exactly what I want. And I continue to fail.

I’ve tried using constructing a cell using a NIB. It didn’t work as I’d wanted it to and I could never get it right. I abandoned that attempt.

Next I tried doing it in code. I managed to get the same exact results. It didn’t resize properly. I abandoned it.

I decided I should do it in SwiftUI. It only took me an hour or so of tweaks to make it work exactly like I wanted! Yay! 🥳

Next I had to get the little blue read/unread indicator working. I tried a lot of stuff but I couldn’t make it work driving it from an AppKit view (more on this later.)

So, I decided to give AppKit another try. This time using NSGridView in code. I wasn’t able to get the results I was after. So, you guessed it, I abandoned the attempt.

I thought I’d be clever and let Claude do it for me because I’m so darned hung up on it working as an AppKit cell.

I gave Claude a description of what I wanted, pointed it at the working SwiftUI version, told it to use my coding style, and turned it loose. At first glance I was surprised. What it built worked exactly like my AppKit versions. The date wasn’t pinned to the right of the cell view and things didn’t flow properly as I resized the cell. These are the exact same issues my hand built versions had. 😳

I went back to Claude and explained what I wanted to change and why. It went to work and made some tweaks. I thought, this is it!

Nope. Not it. Still has the same issue. The code was tweaked but I got the exact same results. 😳

I was puzzled to say the least.

At that point I was ready to declare I was a completely incompetent developer, throw my computer in a lake, and go hide away in the woods somewhere until I died.

I decided that was a little extreme and decided I’d go back to the working SwiftUI version.

Now, how do I actually get the darned blue read/unread dot to update properly?

I poked around at how Combine and SwiftUI work and how to properly expose and use a property when it updated. This time I went right to my model and made the very simple changes. Those worked as expected. 🥳

Now, to be clear, I’d tried some combination of things prior to this attempt and they all failed. Why didn’t I do it this way to start with? Well, I’m dumb, and stubborn, and wanted it to work a certain way, so I kept trying to do it my way. Sure, I used Combine and @Publish and ObservableObject, and the other macro I’m forgetting at the moment, or some other combination of those.

This time I told myself “Just bite the bullet and do it exactly like the documentation says, don’t try to fit it into your model.”

It works. I’m happy about it.

I stubbed out Command+click options on the cell and added some print statements just to make sure it did stuff. It did.

I packaged up my laptop and headed home. Now I sit here tying this up. I’ve been banging my head against a wall off and on since December of last year. I am an idiot and maybe I should quit?

Problem is, I really want to make this app. 😁

Time to hit publish and go mow the lawn, where I’ll think about my next steps for Stream for Mac. For the time being I’m freed of that burden I carried for so long.

Now I can do the features I need to ship the first release.

That is a good feeling. 👍🏼

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Sorry for missing last week. We had our granddaughter over and I wasn’t able to get my writing completed before she woke up.

Today we have our grandson. He’s still asleep so I’ll try to get this out before he wakes up. 😀

Work continues on Stream for Mac. I’ve struggled to get my table view cells to look and act the way I want. From AppKit to SwiftUI and back it’s been quite a frustrating experience. What I need is to pair with a real AppKit expert for a few hours to get it working. I feel like after I get over this hump and move more quickly.

Onward! 🚀

Welp, my grandson is awake and running circles around the house. Time to publish what I have. Hope you enjoy the links!

Manton Reece

SwiftUI is great for new programmers who don’t want to embrace AI-assisted coding, but old school developers should not feel any guilt sticking with AppKit. It’s still the gold standard.

Old school AppKit Devs move fast. Manton is no exception. He managed to release a new native Mac RSS reader in no time.

I wish I could move this quickly. If I were on Windows using the Windows API — the original one — I’d move extremely fast. I have 20+ years experience working in that environment and built a small class library that works perfectly for me.

John Brayton • Golden Hills Software

This is a quick update on my current priorities for the next versions of Unread. I anticipate changes to these priorities over time, but this is my current thinking.

I’m a huge fan of John’s work. Unread is one of the premier iOS and Mac Feed Readers on the market and John continues to make it better. Thanks for the list, John!

Of course you should download Stream as well. 😁

Ken Sandler, Ph.D • Blue Virginia

This Tuesday, March 17th, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors will hold a public hearing to consider the sale of 41.7 acres of county property to a data center developer. The following is testimony on this matter that I’m providing to the Board, as a county resident. I encourage others to make their voices heard on this issue as well.

We have a crazy number of data centers in Virginia, especially in Northern Virginia, or NOVA as the locals call it.

There’s a lot of pushback against new data centers and I can’t blame folks given how AI bros treat locals.

Nikita Prokopov

These days, though, native is as bad as the web, if not worse. Consistency is basically out the window. Anything can look like anything, buttons have no borders, contrast doesn’t exist, and neither do conventions. Apple, for example, seems to place traffic lights and corner radius by vibes rather than by any measurable guidelines.

Coen Jacobs

There’s a particular kind of silence that exists in the WordPress ecosystem. It’s not the silence of having nothing to say. It’s the silence of having something to say and deciding that saying it isn’t worth the risk. I know this silence well, because I’ve been living in it off and on myself.

Peter Custance

🎉 Visual Studio turns 29 today! From VB in ’97 to AI‑powered coding in 2026, it’s been nearly three decades of shipping apps

Ryan Scott • Fangora

Oddity is a movie that does a lot with relatively little. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel as some piece of “elevated” horror and it really only plays with a few locations. But McCarthy is the sort of filmmaker who makes the most out of the tools in his bag.

Shubham Bose

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

Open UI

The purpose of the Open UI, a W3C Community Group, is to allow web developers to style and extend built-in web UI components and controls, such as select dropdowns, checkboxes, radio buttons, and date color pickers.

Manton Reese

Last week we shipped Inkwell, our new feed reader for Micro.blog. Today I’m releasing a native Mac app for Inkwell.

Edward Munn

YouTube channel DirectorFeng has posted a video demonstrating a 1TB storage upgrade to the newly release MacBook Neo.

Gobbler Press

Gobbler brings all your RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds into one beautiful interface. No algorithm. No noise. Just the articles you want to read.

Out of curiosity I just configured a new MacBook Air. I’m pretty sure it’s the one I’d buy if I were in the market for a new laptop.

Here’s the configuration:

• 15in.
• Sky Blue
• 32GB Memory
• 1TB SSD
• Included power adapter
• Yearly AppleCare+

Total price: $1,899

My work laptop is a 16in M2 MacBook Pro with 32GB memory and 1TB storage and it’s a great computer. Fast and reliable.

The Air would definitely be enough horsepower for my app development.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I typically collect the articles I like to during the week. I’ll go through the list, clip quotes, and add links. Then I come back up here and write an introduction.

This week’s links and my commentary are kind of a drag. The commentary on LLMs in particular definitely comes across negatively but it’s only because I am afraid of losing my job. I really am.

I’m working very dilligently to become an LLM usage expert so I have a place in software development going forward but I’m also aware there is an outside chance I could lose my job.

As it stands now I am using an LLM on a project at work and it’s going really well. Preparing your project for use with an LLM is pretty important. You can hook it up to your ticketing system, design system, and other things so the LLM can drive itself using those specifications and designs, as well as the general settings you’ve configured it with.

We still look at the code to make sure it’s following the coding standard and practices we’ve outlined and we still do PRs and take feedback from other developers. It’s not completely LLM driven but it could be if we felt completely comfortable with its output.

Bottom line: These things work.🤖

I hope you enjoy the links!

Brent Simmons

Of those I was leaning toward C because speed is an issue. I wanted to make rendering this blog, over 25 years old and with thousands of posts, to happen in under one second. The system I was replacing took a few seconds. But I wanted more speed (personality flaw).

And then I thought, I swear just for a split second, about how great it would be if C had something a little nicer than C structs for modeling my app’s data — and oh well too bad there’s nothing like that.

And then I remembered Objective-C, which is C plus some things a little nicer than C structs. 🎩🦖

I love reading Bren’t work. He’s one of those Mac and iOS heros I look up to. His work has been an inspiration for my own iOS and Mac(still working on it!) work.

Anywho. I love that he chose to use Objective-C for his blog publishing tool. He’s obviously very comfortable with the language and he’s mastered it. Why not use it?

Oh, and Brent, there is another choice if you want “something a little nicer than C structs for modeling my app’s data.” C++ is a great choice for that and you don’t really have to take full advantage of the richness of it. You can write C code and do a little C++ here and there and have a perfectly valid, robust, application.😄

I have a little project I started where I was going to write a collection of blogging tools for myself. Reading this makes me want to return to C++ to do it. I could use my little collection of Cocoa inspired C++ classes to do it; HSString, HSDictionary, HSArray, etc.😃

That would allow me to run everything on a Linux server but so would Swift!

Stephen Hackett

With a price point of $599 (or $499 for students!) Apple had to make some cuts when designing the MacBook Neo.

Here’s a list of what separates the MacBook Neo from the MacBook Air:

I was thinking the MacBook Neo would be an awesome choice for my wife. She’s been talking about getting a MacBook for quite a while now and I think this would fit her needs perfectly. I think we’d get her the “high end” version with 512GB of storage.

Mr. Hackett’s piece is quite helpful if you’re trying to decide between the Neo and Air.🙏🏼

Om Malik

For the first time in five generations of Apple Silicon, these chips are not a single piece of silicon. The newly announced M5 Pro and M5 Max use what Apple calls Fusion Architecture. This is a big structural change, with long-term implications. And you can see this at work in the newly announced flagship Apple laptops. On the surface these are two third-generation 3-nanometer dies, bonded together into one system on a chip. But dig deeper, and with this modular, scalable silicon approach, Apple is setting itself up to cash in on the computing needs of the AI future.

Remember, Apple talked about creating their own servers for their private AI network at WWDC 2024. I wonder if they tested this technology there first, found it worked, and decided it was the way forward for consumer chips.

John Siracusa talked on ATP about the need for Apple to create their equivalent of a Ferrari, not because they really needed it, but because it allows them push the computing envelope. Racing has always influenced consumer automobiles, why not have high end computers used in a data center infulence consumer computing?

Of course that all conjecture on my part.😄

Swift Language on Mastodon

BridgeJS changes that: annotate your Swift, get typed glue code in both directions. Compile-time safe. Zero manual boilerplate.

Seems interesting given a lot of native apps use the JavaScriptCore engine to allow for a more scripted approach to extending their applications. Take Tapestry, from The Iconfactory, for example. It uses JavaScript, it calls Connectors, to allow you to process feeds. Be it RSS or a custom feed output by your own proprietary system it give you the power to rerpresent that data via a well defined interface, using JavaScript.

Mahesh Gupta

Something strange happened in early 2026. Apple stores started running low on Mac Minis. Tech forums exploded with setup guides. Developers were ordering three, five, sometimes twelve units at a time. The reason had nothing to do with Apple and everything to do with what people were tired of giving away.

From a technical standpoint it’s interesting to see how folks are setting their own private AI agents up internally. Apparently ClawBot can be a security nightmare if you’re not careful about how its configured.

Be careful out there.🤖

Cody Hamman ⦁ JoBlo

The legendary Bruce Campbell is hoping to go on tour with his movie Ernie & Emma this fall and I’m hoping he’ll be considered for the lead role in the film adaptation of Grady Hendrix’s novella BadAsstronauts – but before we get to either of those things, Campbell has revealed that he has been diagnosed with cancer and will be undergoing treatment.

It sounds like this is something he can survive with for a long time. I certainly hope so. He seems to be a decent man and I’ve always loved his on screen presence.

I hadn’t heard or Ernie & Emma before reading this article, now I want to see it. Here’s hoping Mr. Campbell carries on for a very long time and gets a chance to make many more adult stories.❤️

Caroline Crampton

My favourite thing of all, though, is when people have fun with the differing perspective that RSS gives you on the web. Dave Rupert runs an “RSS Club”, where members pledge to publish stuff to their feeds that never appears anywhere else — a secret, just for those in the know. Many use it for more personal writing, or works in progress, or art that they don’t want to expose to the whole internet yet. Somehow, still using RSS, which is a beautifully simple bit of tech from the early days of the web, makes you part of a community of like-minded strangers. When I’ve spent hours scrolling through my never-ending stream of text that nobody else ever sees, I feel a warm glow when I come across something that was written just for me.

I’m tellin’ ya, RSS is awesome! So are feed readers, no matter which one you choose. There’s one for everyone. Find one and enjoy bringing the web to you.

And… not to toot my own horn, ok, ok, I’m tooting my own horn, you can always download Stream for your iOS device.😄

Todd Farmer ⦁ Fangoria

The story of my car-sleeping year was published in 2015 and somehow went Hollywood viral. That’s a snooty way of saying it was met with praise — and no shortage of hate. But I also received over 1,000 private messages and emails from people who not only related, but had been there. Some far more successful than me. Some who had lost far more than me.

As I read this I imagined me and my wife living out of our car. An old software developer unable to find a job because of LLMs. Yes, it’s a fear I live with, and it sucks.

In the meantime I’m embracing LLMs for use at work. We’re encouraged to use them and I honestly believe the best shot I have at working in this industry until later in life is making sure I can use LLMs.

Jon Hicks

A long dive into the features that make my ideal music app, and why nothing currently fulfils the brief.

Music apps leave me wanting.

This post is a year old and I’m certain I mentioned it back then but it showed up recently on Mastodon and I had to revisit it. I’m not sure about other developers out there but when I see stuff like this I think “I could do that.” Of course I could do that with some time and money on my side. I hope Jon is able to find his perfect solution. I’m still working on mine.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus ⦁ The New Yorker

A large language model is nothing more than a monumental pile of small numbers. It converts words into numbers, runs those numbers through a numerical pinball game, and turns the resulting numbers back into words

I really love this explanation. I’ve been using the pachinko machine as an example when I talk to folks but I think both work well.

What kills me is when you hear folks say “They don’t even know how it works.” The “they” are the creators of this technology. Kind of scary.

L. Jeffrey Zeldman

The point is that the former Twitter has become a hateful cesspool, not simply mirroring but amplifying its owner’s profound insecurities, god-awful beliefs, and self-serving lies, and forcing that insanity into the public consciousness, whether we avoid X or not.

X is indeed a hateful cesspool and it took me a while to decide to jettison my beloved Twitter “fahrni@twitter.com” account. Someone else snatched it up in December 2023 and their last name isn’t even Fahrni! 🤣 Oh well. You can find me on Mastodon or here on my trusty old blog.

Murphy Randle

If you feel offended at this statement, and move to defend it as “just the way things go in business”, I understand. I have that reaction, too. But after that I take time for some abstract consideration; if our companies aren’t here to keep us employed and innovating, what are they here for? Is their purpose to maximize profit for the owners? Is that what our societies are showing a need for right now, maximized profit? More concentrated power?

A look at the human cost of LLMs in the workplace. Greed, like everything else, drives our LLM overlords to keep pushing forward. That classic Dr. Ian Malcom line from Jurassic Park comes to mind: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

If our world valued human life and human diginity we’d find a way to allow everyone to do the jobs that give them joy and not have to worry about housing, food, health care, and education. It would all be there for us to use as a member of society. If we don’t have that, what’s the alternative? A reduced population as Scrooge would say?

I know, that’s a gloomy take on it, but it certainly does come to mind. I’m the perfect candidate to fire. I’m in a senior level position, I’m not the brightest bulb in the box, and I’m old.👴🏼

⚠️ Politics

Dave Rogers

Add this to your existential dread bucket, Trump is totally winging it with war on Iran. The guy doesn’t have a plan. I think Netanuyahu has been flattering him, blowing warm smoke up his ass, and Trump is desperate to get Epstein out of the news cycle, so why not start a little war.

Folks already know I’m not a fan of our President and his administration. I do not want the United States engaged in yet another war in the Middle East.

What I believe is Marmalade Messiah is following the Nethanuyahu playbook and is going to raze much of Iran’s big cities and infrastructure so he can become Supreme Leader of Iran as well as President of the United States. Once he’s done that he’ll move to rebuild Iran and its cities as Trump cities. He’ll also have American companies move in to run all the oil and resource extraction outfits in the region. Of course he’ll extract big rents from all of these companies that’ll go directly into his own pockets.

The man and his administration need to be shown the door.🚪

When I finally kick Stream for Mac out the door it’s going to have two modes of viewing feeda. The first will be the Classic Timeline View. It’s the reason I created Stream in the first place. I wanted something that felt like a social media timeline. A continuous stream of news in a unified timeline, flowing from newest to oldest. It’s a very simple concept and one I think some folks appreciate.

Here’s what the Timeline view will look like on the Mac.

The second view style will be Blog View — at least I think that’s what I’ll call it? This view will be the view most folks associate with Feed Readers. It will have the three column, Mail like — view with Blogs in the leftmost column, a list of Posts in the middle (the Timeline), and the Post Reader on the right side.

I need to put Thunder Chicken down for a bit and focus on Stream for Mac because I have a lot of work to build out before I’ll feel good about shipping it. 😊

OMG! My favorite IPA ever is back! 😍

Firestone Walker Double Jack IPA!

Apple Newsroom

MacBook Neo features a beautifully crafted aluminum design that’s built to last. With its soft, rounded corners, MacBook Neo looks elegant while feeling solid and comfortable to hold. At just 2.7 pounds, it’s also easy to carry in a backpack or handbag. Bringing a fun touch of personality and style to everyday computing, MacBook Neo comes in a spectrum of four gorgeous colors: blush, indigo, silver, and citrus. These colors extend to the Magic Keyboard in lighter shades and new wallpapers, creating a cohesive design aesthetic and making MacBook Neo the most colorful MacBook yet.

I love the color choices! I’d go for the Citrus one myself. 😄

TL;DR - 8GB RAM is the only memory choice, max of 512GB of storage. In that configuration it’s $699.00.

All-in-all a great low end Mac. 👍🏼

Someone must’ve mentioned Stream yesterday? 😀

I had 130 downloads, which is a good day for it!

Thank you to whoever mentioned it! 🙏🏼

Apple Newsroom

Available in three elegant colors with a premium matte finish — black, white, and a beautiful new soft pink — iPhone 17e will be available for pre-order beginning Wednesday, March 4, with availability starting Wednesday, March 11. iPhone 17e will start at 256GB of storage for $599 — 2x the entry storage from the previous generation at the same starting price, and 4x more than iPhone 12 — giving users more space for high-resolution photos, 4K videos, apps, games, and more.

If you configure one with the maximum amount of storage at 512GB, no trade-in, select Buy, select Connect to any carrier, and get the Annual coverage the price is $799.

Not bad for $800. This looks to be a great entry level phone and is actually something I could fit into. I have a 512GB iPhone 16 and it’s a wonderful device that, I believe, cost over double that $800 price tag.

Sure the camera isn’t as good but I think I could live with that.

It comes in three colors; Soft Pink, White, and Black. That works. I hope this thing sells like hot cakes. 🥞

UPDATE: The price of my iPhone 16 was $1,407.84 when I was all said and done. That included shipping. So, definitely not over double the price. 😁

Hat tip: K Longoso on Mastodon. 🎩

Sitting at Grit — my favorite coffee shop — sipping my mocha trying to decide what to work on.

Stream for Mac, Stream for iOS, or Thunder Chicken?

It should be Stream for Mac. I haven’t worked on it in a while because I’ve been working on Thunder Chicken.

I’ve thought about doing a German localization for Stream.

Adding a right mouse action menu to the Mac version of Stream, and whatever else I can complete.

What about having Claude create an NSCellView for me that sizes properly when the column it’s in resizes. I could never get this working properly but did it in SwiftUI rather quickly.

How about completing the first full implementation of a network client for Thunder Chicken? Get posts, create posts, update post, delete posts, etc. I have an abstraction so I can support multiple blogging platforms.

Oh, I forgot about Arrgly. It’s my link shortener that uses YOURLS for its backend. I have a new SwiftUI version of it I need to finish off, just because.

Decisions, decisions.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Nothing much to say.

Please, enjoy the links.

Jay Peters • The Verge

Jack Dorsey’s Block, the financial tech company that runs Square and the Cash app, is cutting its workforce by “nearly half” and axing more than 4,000 jobs. The company will shrink from more than 10,000 people to less than 6,000, Dorsey says in a post on X. And the reason why? AI.

Emphasis is mine. I’d imagine we’ll see this become a trend as companies learn how to use LLM’s.

I had an Engineering Lead say to me “I had a designer build a full application that worked. They didn’t know how to code.”

My heart sunk. I’m on an AI first team, but it’s four software developers.

As a side note, I cut Claude loose on a one page specification for an application. That spec shared the URL for fetching data and the data structure the app should operate on.

The Swift / SwiftUI code it output was really good. It left me a bit speechless to be honest.

It had a couple errors that needed correcting but they were tiny in the overall scheme and I understood every hunk of code it output. It took somewhere between five and 10 minutes to complete the code.

By contrast it took me an hour to write the code that defined the data types, fetch the data, and display it. And my version was just the basics. It was not a complete solution.

The more advanced requirements would’ve taken me most of the day to complete, if at all.

The folks who survive going forward will embrace these tools as a part of their daily practice.

A friend of mine from California, who works in the Bay Area, said 70% of their engineering teams were let go. 😔

Oh, one more thing. If you read his posting on X 🤮 you’d notice he wrote the entire thing without a single capitalized word. What’s up with that? Y’all too wealthy to even care about capital letters? 😳

Philippe Dubois • SchwadLabs

In 2008, why the lucky stiff released Shoes—a toolkit for writing tiny graphical programs in Ruby. The pitch was simple: GUI programming didn’t have to be painful.

I remember reading _why’s work years back, very superficially. I had no idea he’d created a framework for creating UI. That’s incredible!

I liked _why’s approach. He was using native code on each platform. The new attempt is relying on the browser. I don’t like that. Native frameworks are so much better than relying on a browser to create your UI.

Scharon Harding • Ars Technica

Netflix backed out of its deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD’s) streaming and movie studios businesses on Thursday night. After increasing its bid for all of WBD by $1 per share on Tuesday, Paramount Skydance is poised to become the new owner of WBD, including Game of Thrones, DC Comics, and other IP, as well as the HBO Max streaming service and cable channels CNN and TBS.

Netflix is ultimately the big winner here. They get to save billions of dollars for content creation and lure Paramount into a huge amount of debt.

The big bummer of the deal is having a right wing nutter buying it. What will the do to CNN? Will it become another Fox News or CBS? Probably.

What happens to HBO? Do they gut it and stop making the best content in the streaming business?

Who could fill the gap left by HBO and CNN if they’re run into the ground? It could become a huge opening for Netflix, Apple TV+, and others to fill.

Jason Snell • Six Colors

It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment—the “vibe in the room”—regarding the past year. (And by looking at previous survey results, we can even see how that sentiment has drifted over the course of an entire decade.)

It seems like the punditry is mostly unhappy with Apple about two things; Liquid Glass and Apple’s lack of backbone to stand up against the Trump mob syndication.

I don’t have a real problem with Liquid Glass. Sure, it has some problems, but I think Apple will eventually straighten it out or change it outright.

As for how spineless Tim Cook has been with Trump, well, I agree with that. Sure, sure, shareholder value… blah, blah, blah.

What about American greatness and bravery? What about democracy? What about decency?

You’re afraid of a dictator but not the loss of our democratic way of life. Shameful.

Chris Person • Aftermath

RAM, flash memory, and HDDs are unaffordable because of a bunch of greedy idiots that do not love the computer.

Thank you AI companies for making computers even more expensive. I can’t imagine what Apple is going to do to their prices. 😳

I can see it now: “The new 14in. MacBook Pro is available today with a starting price of $5,999.00 for 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.”

A 32GB system with 1TB of storage would be like $15,000.00. 🤣

I certainly hope not.

G German • Ruby Stack News

Ruby 4 doesn’t arrive with a flashy headline feature. Instead, it delivers a dense package of under-the-hood engineering improvements: reduced allocations, refinements in the VM, better JIT behavior, and internal API polish. The result is not dramatic in isolation, but cumulative in effect — applications feel smoother, more predictable, and more efficient under load. It’s the kind of progress that shows up in production dashboards rather than conference demos.

It’s really nice to see a team work so hard on the little things under the hood. Looking for performance and memory wins is always appreciated by developers using your tools.

It’s also really interesting to see Rust integrated into Ruby Core.

Matt Birchler

How’s this for a hot take to start the weekend: I think Apple is going to discontinue iPadOS. I know, I know, it’s a big swing, but put the pitchforks away and hear me out. iPadOS, as it exists now, is being stretched too thin. The idea of having one operating system, with the same features, that spans from a small, 8" tablet up through a 13" laptop-style slab that also connects to a 32" monitor is fundamentally problematic.

🔥 Hot take indeed! 😃

Witney Seibold • Slashfilm

Alan Parker’s 1987 film “Angel Heart” is simultaneously gorgeous and salacious. Michael Seresin’s steady, professorial photography is some of the best you’ll ever see in a horror movie, and the film is further classed up by the presence of Robert De Niro as a mysterious benefactor named Lou Cyphre.

DeNiro’s Lucifer is definitely one of the best ever. Especially at the end when his eyes glow red. It really creeped me out. 😈

It’s one of those films I’d like to own.

David Bryant Copeland

My visceral reaction to these tools has been a combination of disgust and boredom. Here are the things I have told myself about why this technology can or should be ignored:

Like I said earlier. If you want to survive the LLM revolution you’d better embrace it with open arms.

Got my Pixel Portrait today!

I owe a big thank you to my friends at The Iconfactory! You’re the best! ❤️

This would be a welcome UI change in macOS. I keep thinking about older operating system UIs and I miss that more chiseled look. I’ve also always loved the color versions of Mac icons and the angle they’re drawn.

I think I’m just feeling nostalgic but I’d love to see a modern take on this older MacOS look.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Nothing much to say this week! Hope you enjoy the links.

Whakkee

I’m fed up with every other website telling me “we value your privacy”, and then showing me an opt-out list of hundreds of vendors they’d like to share my information with. If it’s free, you’re the product. Even when it’s not free, that seems to be the case.

I think a lot of us are in the same boat as Whakkee, but they’re doing something about it.

Cabel Sasser

This post is about a found mural, a lost artist, and a conference talk. It’s the full story of Wes Cook and The McDonald’s Mural. Grab a beverage, sit back, relax, and thank you for joining me.

Read the post and make sure you go watch Cabel’s XOXO presentation. It is a beautiful story and Cabel is an excellent story teller. He’s also so full of joy and laughter. It’s such a good watch!

Witney Seibold • Slashfilm

“Mimic” hit theaters late in the summer of 1997. It was Guillermo del Toro’s second feature-length directorial effort after his debut on the acclaimed 1992 vampire flick “Cronos,” as well as his first movie fully in English. Based on “Mimic,” the world wouldn’t have been able to predict that its director would go on to become a beloved cult icon and legit Hollywood darling in subsequent decades.

I like this movie and so does my wife. We saw it in theaters together and I think I need to go purchase it for our collection. 😁

NetNewsWire Blog

NetNewsWire 1.0 for Mac shipped 23 years ago today! 🎸🎩🕶️

Happy Birthday NetNewsWire! You’re buying the beer! 🍻

Congratulations Brent Simmons and the NNW team. It really is a beautiful piece of work and the granddaddy of Mac feed readers.

Fred Lambert • Electrek

Ferrari has officially named its first all-electric vehicle: the Ferrari Luce. The Italian automaker unveiled parts of the interior design today in San Francisco, showcasing a cabin co-designed with Jony Ive’s creative collective LoveFrom that prioritizes physical controls over touchscreens.

The work by LoveFrom is incredible. It’s a very nice mix of digital and analog cockpit. 😘

Jeff Gluck and Jordan Bianchi • The Athletic

Anthony Alfredo said he’d only cried tears of joy like this twice in his life: when his daughter, Everleigh, was born in November and when he made the Daytona 500 on Thursday night. Except less than an hour after one of his most triumphant moments, Alfredo received crushing news. His finish in Thursday’s qualifying race was disallowed because of a technical violation on his No. 62 car, and Alfredo was sent home for Sunday’s Great American Race instead.

The Daytona 500 is the biggest race of the NASCAR season and it just happens to be the first race of the season. Weird right?

Anywho, after qualifying there are two mini races on Thursday called Duels that allow racers to improve their position and let what are called Open Cars race their way into the show on Sunday. There were six open cars trying to get in and two spots to fill. Anthony Alfredo filled one of those spots. It’s a shame a small technicality eliminated them. 😔

Nolan Lawson

You could abstain out of moral principle. And that’s fine, especially if you’re at the tail end of your career. And if you’re at the beginning of your career, you don’t need me to explain any of this to you, because you already use Warp and Cursor and Claude, with ChatGPT as your therapist and pair programmer and maybe even your lover. This post is for the 40-somethings in my audience who don’t realize this fact yet.

Lean into LLMs in your day job if you’re employed by a company like mine. It’s a place where we do client work for big name brands and our company encourages its use.

I’ve been on a very lean team, four developers, a Product Manager, and a part time Lead, and the team is cranking out high quality code faster than I’ve seen it done in a career of almost 40 years.

It’s not perfect out of the gate and can take coaxing to make changes you’d like but the first pass is usually extremely good. Yes, I’ve tweaked stuff by hand but it’s mostly what I want right away.

I may even use it on my personal projects a bit. Maybe.🙂

Todd Vaziri via Mastodon

Framestore’s very good visual effects breakdown of their work on “F1” (2025).

Framestore did incredible work for F1 the movie. The video Todd links to is short and well worth a few minutes of your life.🏎️

Darko Mesaroš

Here’s a crazy idea, can I expose and host a website on a 2001 Sun MicroSystems Netra X1 SPARC Server? Yes, yes I can. Let’s get into how I set this up.

I love the idea of using old hardware like this. I’ve often wished operating systems could freeze in a way and only be modified to fix bugs, enhance security, and improve performance. I really only want this for servers. Don’t keep piling on features that bloat it.

Could you imagine something like an Intel 286, 386, or 486 running a static site like a blog or simple small business site? I can and it sounds amazing to me.

Robert Reich

This is what a rigged economy looks like.

America. Land of the free, home of the Oligarchs.

Geraldine McKelvie • The Guardian

The global publishing platform Substackis generating revenue from newsletters that promote virulent Nazi ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism, a Guardian investigation has found.

It is the proverbial Nazi bar. I’m glad more publications are talking about this. There are a number of us nobodies out here talking about it and it’s not making a dent in the business or convincing extremely great writers to leave the platform. Even Jewish writers like Robert Reich and Jennifer Rubin remain on the platform. I just don’t get it. It makes me wonder if they’re still using Space Karen’s X platform as well. I wouldn’t know, I’m not there.

Before all the Nazi kerfuffle I read there all the time. They support RSS so it was easy to point Stream at a writer and get their feed. I even subscribed to Michael Beschloss and considered others.

So why is it publications and writers love this platform so much they’ll go against everything they believe? Most of the folks I followed are for decency and democracy and rail against the Trump administration almost every day, but they turn a blind eye to the Nazis sitting at the bar next to them. In the end I’d bet it’s all about the money.

Encourage them to leave if you happen to stumble across this post.

Here are some of the amazing writers I’d love to see abandon the platform.

• The Contrarian - many writers
• The Bulwark - many writers
• Robert Reich
• Steve Beschloss
• Paul Krugman
• Heather Cox Richardson
• Michael McFaul
• Timothy Snyder
• Andrew Weissman
• Michael Moore
• Malcom Nance
• W. Kamau Bell

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I hope you enjoy the links. 🙂

Freddie Harrison • Sketch Blog

Here are five ways we’ve been using the MCP server internally at Sketch. We’ve included prompts we’ve tried for you to copy and adapt for your own use cases.

We’re Claude Code fans here — so that’s what our examples use and what we’ve tested with — but you can use any MCP-compatible client.

I have a couple friends who used to work on Sketch and I hope they’re proud of everything they dumped into this incredible design product.

This piece talks about the design side of using the MPC but I’d love to see it in use to generate UI.

I’ve been doing that with Figma and Claude code recently and it does a decent job. Not perfect, but decent.

I believe setting up your design project properly will go a long way toward making code generation much better.

Benj Edwards • Ars Technica

On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch complained on X after rival AI lab Anthropic released four commercials, two of which will run during the Super Bowl on Sunday, mocking the idea of including ads in AI chatbot conversations. Anthropic’s campaign seemingly touched a nerve at OpenAI just weeks after the ChatGPT maker began testing ads in a lower-cost tier of its chatbot.

The commercial is really well done and made me laugh and shake my head because I could see a company doing something just like this. 🤣

Maybe OpenAI isn’t going to do it like this, but it’s still gross.

Tasha Robinson • Polygon

Mark Fischbach’s unlikely box-office hit Iron Lung caught the conventional film world by surprise. An adaptation and expansion of David Szymanski’s short, vibes-driven indie game of the same name, the sci-fi horror movie was self-financed, self-distributed, and marketed largely through Fischbach’s YouTube channel

Sign me up. I want to see this.

Charlotte Rene Woods • Virginia Mercury

A bill by outgoing Sen. Adam Ebbin, D-Alexandria, that would remove Confederate monuments from Virginia’s Capitol Square advanced in the state legislature Wednesday. 

Every Confederate monument reminds us of another dark time in our democracy. A time when the nation went to war over keeping people as pets.

The Union won. The Confederacy lost. Quit celebrating that. Celebrate the end of slavery.

Remove every last monument and melt them down.

Cody Hammon • Jo Blo

Nina Kiri played the character Alma on 28 episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale, and now she has the lead role in a horror film called Undertone, which is stirring up a lot of buzz.

I’m looking forward to this film. It looks great!

Omar Elsayed

Ever wondered why some SwiftUI views feel buttery smooth while others… don’t? I’ve been asking myself this question a lot lately.

I love simple, concise, examples like this that provide instant performance boosts. 💪🏼

Joseph Cox • 404 Media

Lockdown Mode is a sometimes overlooked feature of Apple devices that broadly make them harder to hack. A court record indicates the feature might be effective at stopping third parties unlocking someone’s device. At least for now.

When you go to a protest make sure you get this setup beforehand. And, if you can, setup an old phone with its own phone number and Apple ID and take that instead. It’s what I did for the DC No Kings rally in case things went sideways and I was arrested.

Wil Wheaton

Having a gun and being able to carry it wherever you want is a core and fundamental right of every U.S. citizen, or anyway that is what I have been told all my life by the same people who now use the mere existence of Pretti’s alleged gun as proof his murder was justified

I had this very argument with someone yesterday. It’s sickening that some the Second Amendment crowd are victim blaming.

Why would Alex Pretti not have his legally concealed weapon with him? I bet her carried it everyday. Why would that day be any different?

Second Amendment freaks, you can’t have it both ways.

Matt Gemmell

I recently wrote about the decline in my opinion of Apple. This presents me with an ethical problem, because we’re heavily invested in the company. We don’t own any of its stock, but we’re very much entangled in its products and services ecosystem.

I’m seeing a number of folks starting the process of switching to Linux. Perhaps now Linux will get more folks working on the UI and really make it something special.

Ryan Cooper • The American Prospect

One year ago this month, I predicted that Tesla was cooked. Now the verdict is in, and there is a distinctly charred odor coming from the Austin area. Sales are down, yearly revenue is down for the first time ever, and quarterly profits fell by a whopping 61 percent, to just $840 million. That gives it a price-to-earnings ratio of 297—a ludicrous figure, historically speaking. According to a report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the company has paid precisely zero federal taxes on its earnings in both 2025 and 2024, so the company is certainly being helped along by federal forbearance. But things are getting dire.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. 🤣

Seeing this right after a friend died is a real gut punch. So many folks just don’t know they’re gone. 😔

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Well the day of sleet we got on Sunday really left us in a mess. We had somewhere between 8-10in of sleet on the ground, which turned into a crust of ice overnight. Temperatures have been frigid so that ice continues to thicken. Breaking it out is a pain so I hired someone with a skid steer and he did a great job clearing off our driveway. The gentleman who did the work is just a random dude helping out his neighbors. Absolutely worth the $50. Our youngest daughter is terrified I’m gonna drop dead while shoveling snow, like a man down the street did last week. 😔

Work is fine. I’m on the second week of a new project on a very focused, small, team. We are using LLMs to great effect. No, we are not vibe coding. We’re all processional software developers who know how to build product. We all check our work and will instruct the LLM when it needs to be corrected. It’s working better than I expected and our code matches the work, in terms of style and architecture, as the work done previously. It’s also accelerated our delivery. 😀

Hope you enjoy the links.

Andrew Dalton and Jocelyn Noveck • AP

Catherine O’Hara, a gifted Canadian-born comic actor and “SCTV” alum who starred as Macaulay Culkin’s harried mother in two “Home Alone” movies and won an Emmy as the dramatically ditzy wealthy matriarch Moira Rose in “Schitt’s Creek,” died Friday. She was 71.

This one hit me because I’ve always had a bit of a crush on her. She’s so funny and seems to be a genuinely kind person. I also find her to be very beautiful.

The last thing I saw her in was The Last of Us in season two. It was a great role for her. A little different role but she was so perfect for it.

RIP. 💔

Nilay Patel • The Verge

On today’s episode of Decoder, I’m talking about the bidding war over Warner Bros. Discovery, which is the biggest story in the entertainment industry right now, and for good reason. It has pretty much everything you could want in a buzzy Hollywood saga — big names, big money, and big drama.

I really hope Netflix is able to win this battle because Paramount would be such a crummy deal for WB. Just look at how they’ve ruined CBS, once a trusted news source is now a running joke.

Can you imagine what they’d do to the likes of CNN and HBO? They’d become dumpster fires, full of extreme right wing talking points and entertainment. No thanks.

Kevin Chan • AP

Amazon is slashing about 16,000 corporate jobs in the second round of mass layoffs for the ecommerce company in three months.

The tech massacre continues. As an older gentleman I’ve mentioned how much this terrifies me. Not only does it terrify me, it terrifies young folks as well.

I’m very grateful for my gig.

Sebastian de With • via Threads

Some big personal news: I’ve joined the Design Team at Apple.So excited to work with the very best team in the world on my favorite products. ✌️

I’m more than a little surprised Sebastian returned to Apple. He cofounded Lux Optics with Benjamin Sandofsky and they managed to create a most beloved camera app named Halide.

My hope is the Apple Design Team reached out to Sebastian because of his piece describing what he hoped the new iOS 26 design would look like. The post predates WWDC 2025 when Apple announced the extremely controversial Liquid Glass and I think Sebastian’s design is so much better than Liquid Glass.

If he’s not there to work in his design to the various OS’es, then why hire him? 🤞🏼

Om Malik

Power. Comfort. A seat at the table. Or, in this case, the crushing weight of a trillion-dollar valuation that demands constant appeasement. MG Siegler puts it plainly: Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, is captured. And so is the rest of the technology community. This is what happens when valuations trump values.

I would hate to be a CEO in the era of Marmalade Messiah. I don’t know Tim Cook, or any “important” people for that matter, but I had hoped he would push back against this horrible administration.

He’s taken a stand when it was easy but taking a stand when it’s difficult is what leaders do.

If he didn’t feel he could uphold the standards expected of an Apple employee then he should’ve retired. Heck, he should retire.

Maybe he believes in Trump and the horrible things they’re doing? It’s hard to believe he’s boot licking just to serve shareholders?

It makes me wish macOS and iOS weren’t Apple products.

Max Tani • Semafor

In recent weeks, rumors have flown around the newsroom about the size of the cuts and when they would be implemented, but the conversation reached a fever pitch late last week, aided by unverified reports about section-wide eliminations. The Post has largely remained silent, leaving staff to read the tea leaves in conversations between individual editors and reporters: Some editors have quietly been suggesting to staff across various verticals, including sports, that it may not be a bad idea to begin looking for other jobs, Semafor has learned, and one Post source said editors would not answer questions about whether there would be a sports section after the cuts at all.

Here’s another boot licking oligarch ruining an American gem.

At one point I know Kara Swisher was interested in putting together a group to buy the Washington Post. What happened to that?

The Post needs an owner who can guide it through this dark time in American history and tell the difficult stories that need telling.

Doug Gregor • Swift.org

There are many interesting, useful, and fun C libraries in the software ecosystem. While one could go and rewrite these libraries in Swift, usually there is no need, because Swift provides direct interoperability with C. With a little setup, you can directly use existing C libraries from your Swift code.

I need to sit down and read and understand how this works but to be perfectly honest creating a tiny Objective-C class that calls the C code is super easy and the resulting code is easy to use from Swift.

Your mileage may vary. 😃

Another cold morning. This is the lowest I’ve seen the temperature since we move to Virginia in 2019.

Earlier in the week we were expecting negative temperatures. This is a bit better.

Of course Gracie loves it outside and it’s hard to get her back in the house. 🥶

President Biden, thank you for being the President America needs at this very dark time. 🙏🏼

I’ll probably be sharing these over the next few days because it’s cold. 🥶🤣

This is pure murder. Zero doubt.

These “agents” need to be brought up on murder charges, especially the first one to fire. What a coward. They cannot be trusted to serve the public much less carry a firearm.

Shut this mess down. Disband ICE and put someone in charge of Border Patrol who will conduct themselves with honor and integrity.

These “agents” are going to start being killed if they keep murdering peaceful protesters trying to help their fellow citizens.

Our democracy is lost. How do we take it back?

War.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

🚨 BREAKING NEWS: It’s Sunday 🚨

We had our grandkids yesterday so it gets very busy in the Fahrni household. That’s why I’m publishing this on Sunday.

I started a new project this week and can’t really say more than that. It’s another React Native project with a very short timeframe so it’s time to knuckle down and go to work. 👷‍♂️

We’re getting ready for a real cold spell leading into next week accompanied by possibly 18-24” of snow. 🥶

Folks at work have labeled it snowmageddon. 😂

Some call it Southern Winter. 🤣

My biggest worry is loss of power. It’s not just snow. We’re expected to get an ice storm as well. That leads to complete chaos. Here’s hoping the power stays on. 🙏🏼

I hope you enjoy the links.

Ashur Cabrera

I’ll cover some specifics like which tools I’m using, but won’t dive into implementation details or code snippets. Instead, my hope is that a high-level overview might plant a seed for someone else to try a new idea, or to finally fix that thing that’s been bugging them about their blog.

Ashur is someone I have a great deal of respect for and he’s a talented person, especially when it comes to the web. He creates beautiful, creative, websites you can’t label as boring.

I really love it when folks share how they produce their weblogs. No two workflows and tooling are the same. It’s a wonderful thing. 🧰

Varun Santhanam

Working with JSON in Swift can feel like fighting gravity. Swift is modern, powerful, expressive, and has perhaps the best type system of any programming language. But when it comes to working with JSON, especially unstructured or semi-structured payloads, you’re left with tools that are either clumsy, slow, or both. It barely feels like Swift. I wanted something better. When I couldn’t find it, I built it myself.

I’ve never found the JSON support offered by Codable to be slow but there are definitely software developers with the low level talent and who are speed demons who won’t put up with what they notice is slow.

This library might be for you. 🐦‍🔥

Henry Desroches

We were given this vast, holy realm of self-discovery and joy and philosophy and community; a thousand thousand acres of digital landscape, on which to grow our forests and grasslands of imagination, plant our gardens of learning, explore the caves of our making. We were given the chance to know anything about anything, to be our own Prometheus, to make wishes and to grant them.

But that’s not what we use the Internet for anymore. These days, instead of using it to make ourselves, most of us are using it to waste ourselves: we’re doom-scrolling brain-rot on the attention-farm, we’re getting slop from the feed.

More and more folks are discovering the power and freedom of the blog and RSS. Some of us never left but may have faltered a bit during the very dominant Twitter years. I’m guilty of that but I love my blog now more than ever. ❤️

Dave Rogers

I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose most of my 11 readers if I start writing about Nazis and fascists exclusively, but there’s only so many places I can direct this rage and incomprehension at the absence of rage all around me.

Write about the state of America and our failed democracy all you want, Dave. I’m still reading and agree with you more than ever. I’ve always loved your voice and how you share it through your writing. ❤️

Yosh • Unix Dog

C doesn’t have an official documentation channel, nor does it have syntax or standard library constructs that encourage one particular way of doing things. from this, there’s a bunch of inconsistencies in how people do things, and–especially in the early days of the language and standard library–the landscape and general practice is quite error prone.

It’s true. C is for folks who want to do it all. At least that was mostly my experience as I learned C and later C++. Platform vendors supplied us with frameworks and SDKs that gave us the building blocks we needed to do our jobs. No package managers.

⚠️ POLITICS BELOW HERE ⚠️

The Nobel Peace Prize

The medal and the diploma are the physical symbols confirming that an individual or organisation has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The prize itself – the honour and recognition – remains inseparably linked to the person or organisation designated as the laureate by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Yeah, what more can we say? Marmalade Messiah is a sociopathic narcissist. It’s all about him but he’s fake as hell and a hollow shell of a man.

Not to mention bully, rapist, pedophile, failed businessman, convicted felon, and now party to murder in Minnesota.

Just a garbage human who’d already be dead or in prison if he hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his lying mouth. 🤬

⚠️ Before reading any further I’m posting links from writers I really respect who have chosen to use a service that supports and publishes Nazi content. I won’t mention the name here but if you’ve followed me on this blog or on Mastodon you’ve heard me mention it.

I’ve encouraged both of them to leave and find better places to write but I’m a nobody so my begging goes unanswered (by unanswered they don’t interact with their audience much.)

I’ve made a rule not to link to these writers and others as long as they’re using this despicable service but with the murder of Alex Pretti I felt it necessary to ignore my own rule for the moment.

Paul Krugman

It has been clear for a long time, to anyone willing to see, that the people running the federal government — Trump, Miller, Noem, Bovino and more — are monsters.

Robert Reich

He’s coming after all of us who oppose his tyranny and brutality. All of us who defy his dictatorship. All of us who challenge his out-of-control, murderous goons.

Murder. Alex Pretti was murdered in cold blood for what? Filming ICE agents and trying to pick a woman up off the ground.

The man was shot 10 times. If that’s not an intentional act meant to kill him, I don’t know what is.

Our democracy is collapsing. When future generations of Americans and other countrymen write about the Second American Civil War they will name Minneapolis the event that catalyzed Americans to act. To use violence against violence.

Donald J. Trump, you are a thug, racist, pedophile, and rapist. You can now add murderer to that list.

It’s a dark time in the world and to have a once great nation fall this quickly is gut wrenching.

Link to eyewitness statement.