Rob Fahrni

First time seeing one of these in the wild. 😃

Today’s progress on Stream for Mac felt great. I was able to replace the Collection View item in the Blog List — leftmost column — with a native NSCollectionViewItem, which was extremely straightforward.

I also added right mouse click menu support so you can do a few actions in your blog list; Mark All Read, Copy Feed Link, View Website, and Unsubscribe. All of the actions work as expected.

Cmd+A now selects the top most item in the list — All — and displays all items from all blogs in the middle column. You can, of course, select that item with the mouse and get the same results.

The middle column adds right mouse menu support for; Copy Link, Open, and Share… All actions work as expected.

I’m showing my hand a little bit with the item called “Read Later.” 😃 Yes, I’m adding an Share Sheet Action that will allow you to not only “Subscribe in Stream” to add a subscription from the blog you’re browsing but a new item will be called “Read Later in Stream” that will stash a reference to any site you’re browsing so you can check it out later. Hey, I really need that for myself! It’s how I collect notes for Saturday Morning Coffee. For now I’m using John Brayton’s excellent Unread to do that for me. Stream needs that support so it’s gonna get it. Both the Mac and iOS versions will have it.

I still have a lot of cleanup and tweaking to do. Mostly in the area of design. I have visual nicities to add and tightening some visual elements up to make my eye happy. It’s getting there.

Some things that need fixing. Selection of a blog item currently has black text and a blue highlight. The text needs to become white so you can read it easier. I’d also like to round the selection rectangle a bit and give it some inset so it doesn’t look so sharp. They currently look like you could cut yourself on them! Same for the middle column. Selection needs some help and that includes the same rounding and inset work. Using the app shouldn’t result in cuts.

I have some nagivation stuff to add — like using the spacebar to advance an article and jump to the next one when you reach the bottom. I’ve already added vim J and K keys to havigate up and down the middle column. I’d like to be able to navigate the entire thing without taking your hands off of the keyboard. Need to add something for navigating the blog list with the keyboard, maybe D & F? Are there standards for that yet? I’ll see what other Feed Readers use.

I feel very close now. My current plan is to ship the first release without Settings, so no way to tip me. 😄 I will add that support next. For now I’m just really excited to kick it out the door. I can build on what I have from there. Once it gets out there are things I’d like to do for the iOS version and Mac version that will be shared. I need better article parsing, I rely on what the RSS feed provides and if it doesn’t provide the full text of the article, I can’t display it. In the future the app will go to the article and parse the full text if allowed.

So little time, so many features I’d love to do!

LET’S GO!

Things are starting to get really happy around here.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

The grandkids are coming down the stairs! I’ve been rushing to finish this post since 6AM, it’s now 7AM and I’m mostly done!

Hope you enjoy the links! Hitting that publish button in 3… 2… 1…

ABC 7 News

Philz Coffee is reversing course and adding Pride flags back to all of its locations, a little over a week after it decided it would pull them from stores to create “an inclusive experience.”

I was puzzled the CEO thought pulling Pride flags down would create “an inclusive experience.” Pulling them down does the exact opposite. It tolks folks they weren’t as important and weren’t welcome back to Philz. Poor form. 🤬

Brian VanHooker • Polygon

This week, The Walt Disney Company initiated company-wide layoffs that affected departments across the entire organization, targeting everything from the home video team to ESPN. One division was hit hard according to reports: Marvel Studios, which lost nearly its entire visual development team. Over the last two decades, these artists shaped the look of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, from costume design to the films’ biggest moments, and won many awards along the way.

One particularly poignant post came from artist Wesley Burt, who lamented “the irony of having a one-on-one HR layoff meeting in the conference room with my Loki mural on it.”

That line “the irony of having a one-on-one HR layoff meeting in the conference room with my Loki mural on it.” kills me. I’ve been laid off and felt embarassed. I hope others don’t feel that way but being sat across from something you worked so hard to create is like rubbing salt in an already open wound.

Benjamin Mayo • 9 to 5 Mac

The availability of higher-end models of Mac Studio and Mac mini continues to deplete, amid worsening supply constraints and the possibility of an M5 refresh just around the corner.

Several models are now showing as “currently unavailable” at the Apple Store, which means buyers aren’t even able to place an order for them. That includes the M4 Mac mini with 32 GB RAM, and two configurations of Mac Studio

Interesting times at Apple. They’re in the uncomfortable position of being extremely popular. 🤣

Steve Troughton-Smith via Mastodon

The story around the decline in software quality around macOS is the same as it’s been for years: Apple doesn’t have the bandwidth to maintain two copies of every app, one for macOS and one for iOS, and keep feature parity. That’s why they embarked down the road of Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI. The two paths out of this rut are either invest heavily in hiring and training up dwindling desktop/AppKit engineers, or align with the iOS versions and just have one codebase built with UIKit and/or SwiftUI

In a lot of ways this is extremely sad to me. I know a lot of companies are ok going the “least common denominator” route when it comes to shipping cross platform software, but we’re not used to seeing Apple do that. Apple has always been know for its design and engineering prowess. For making software highly functional, fully embracing everything their operating system has to offer, and make it all delightful.

The iOS’ification of macOS is hard on the old timers to accept. Their beautiful user interface has become less and less beautiful over time and less stable.

As for me, I’m rolling with the punches as they say. I’ve seen some things with Liquid Glass that make me say to myself “interesting choice” but mostly things are fine and on occasion I’ll run into something new that gives me joy.

Here’s hoping the Apple Engineering teams tighten things up and the design team does the same.

Pika Blog

Along with launching the Micropub API, we are also happy to share that Pika now supports iA Writer and Drafts. Visit those links to find instructions for using these excellent writing tools to create draft posts on Pika. We anticipate adding a few more third-party apps to the mix soon!

This is pretty exciting news! Supporting Micropub is absolutely the way to go for third party clients. Of course I say this because Rooster — my top secret project — is going to support Micropub. So, yeah, I see it as a very good thing.

My first targeted blogging platform is Micro.blog but if all goes well that work should work directly with Pika as well.

Now, can we get WordPress to support Micropub? It would open the door to more writers and bloggers who are more interested in publishing words than managing a CMS.

Congratulations Pika folks! 🥳

Lauren Feiner • The Verge

Before allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home, the 20-year-old accused attacker wrote about his fear that the AI race would cause humans to go extinct, The San Francisco Chronicle found. Two days later, Altman’s home appeared to be targeted a second time, according to The San Francisco Standard. Only a week earlier, an Indianapolis councilman reported 13 shots fired at his door, with a note that read, “No Data Centers,” after he’d supported a rezoning petition for a data center developer.

This is extremely scary but it doesn’t surprise me. The way CEOs of our LLM companies talk these things will become sentient at some point and they’re already being used to replace people in the workplace, just look at all the layoffs with CEOs saying just that.

I’d imagine we’ll see a lot more of this. Hell, I am surprised someone hasn’t attacked an AI datacenter and burned it to the ground. It’ll happen.

Austin Ginder • Anchor

Two supply chain attacks in two weeks. Both followed the same pattern. Buy a trusted plugin with an established install base, inherit the WordPress.org commit access, and inject malicious code. The Flippa listing for Essential Plugin was public. The buyer’s background in SEO and gambling marketing was public. And yet the acquisition sailed through without any review from WordPress.org.

WordPress.org has no mechanism to flag or review plugin ownership transfers. There is no “change of control” notification to users. No additional code review triggered by a new committer. The Plugins Team responded quickly once the attack was discovered. But 8 months passed between the backdoor being planted and being caught.

This is all too common. Back int 2010 I installed a theme to my WordPress site that injected some code into it and it took me a day to sort out what happened and fix it.

I still believe in WordPress and hope they’re able to put some rules in place to mitigate issues like this. Code review, diffs, and administrative rules may help curb some of these catastropic problems. Fingers crossed. 🤞🏼

Dave Rogers

The tech-bros are building slaves. They may not have consciousness yet, but it’s by no means certain that they won’t one day. And they’ll have access to all of human history, and they’ll understand what we’ve done and why.

I love reading Dave’s stuff, always have, and this is a sobering take on the state of LLMs and where the tech bros are taking us.

Jess Weatherbed • The Verge

Snap is laying off roughly 16 percent of its global workforce in a cost-cutting effort to chase improved profitability with the help of AI. The cuts will impact around 1,000 full-time employees, according to a memo sent to staffers from Snap CEO Evan Spiegel. An additional 300 open roles are also being closed.

Here’s yet another example of a company dismissing folks in favor of replacing them with LLMs. It’s so frightening and depressing to see it.

On the flip side my company — TELUS Digital — sees it as a force multiplier for our developers. So far, so good.

Jason Snell • Six Colors

Now the bad news: Since the MacBook Neo is powered by the A18 Pro chip from 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro, a product that’s been discontinued, there is likely a finite number of chips available for MacBook Neo production. Which is why, as reported by Tim Culpan, Apple faces a dilemma, namely: What happens when it runs out of chips to use in the MacBook Neo?

More success affecting Apple. 😂

Apparently the MacBook Neo is a raging success! Now, how do they deal with chip shortages cause by that success? I have no idea but it’ll be fun to watch. 🍿

Jake Roach • Tom’s Hardware

Small Missouri town ousts half its city council after $6 billion AI data center approval — petition calls for mayor’s removal as frustration (and violence) over AI data centers mounts

This is a less violent way to deal with AI data centers than burning them to the ground. Bravo for choosing intelligence over violence.

NCR

“I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” Vance said. “If you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth and that’s one of the things that I try to do and it’s certainly something I would expect from the clergy.”

Man, JD Vance is an idiot. Are you saying Pope Leo doesn’t know anything about theology? 😵‍💫

Oh, and there’s this nugget from the article about Pop Leo.

Before becoming a bishop, Leo was head of the global Augustinian religious order inspired by the life and teachings of the saint; he wrote his doctoral dissertation on St. Augustine’s understanding of authority.

So, what we have here is JD Vance questioning a man who is, by all accounts, an authority on St. Augustine. Wow.

Is it just me or is Vance a malignant narcissist like Trump?

JD, go find a couch to hump, get out of politics, and forget about being a Catholic.

Time to work on Stream.

Code by me, coffee by Grit

Beautiful day out. ☀️

Perfect for doing yard work.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Boone Ashworth • Wired

In an email to customers, Amazon announced that it would be ending service for Kindle devices older than the 2012 edition. Those devices will lose access to the Kindle Store.

Something that’s always kind of bugged me about technology is how it often marches forward at the expense of older technologies. I’m talking about the backward compatibility problem. We have old storage mechanisms, like floppy drives, that folks can no longer use. And by use I mean get their old data off of them if they want it. I have a collection of random detritus I’ve been carrying around with me for years and years and I’ve had to move it from storage mechanism to storage mechanism manually because I knew that old tech would fall out of favor at some point.

A dev team is probably being held back by supporting older models or their plans for an upcoming release dropped the requirement to support older models. Regardless, it’s a real bummer. I know, I know, folks can read on the Kindle app and use the website if they’d prefer but that’s not the point. Is it too much to ask for your reader device to work forever? Maybe. But it would be nice if they could keep the older devices from becoming e-waste, which you know is gonna happen.

Nathaniel Myersohn • CNN

Instead of wiping out jobs, AI is shifting the tasks of developers. They are doing less routine coding work and devoting more of their schedule to overseeing swarms of AI-powered code-writing agents — autonomous bots that can complete tasks. Engineers, in turn, are spending more time designing the structure of software and generating ideas.

I see this daily at WillowTree. We’ve been using LLMs to drive development to greater and greater effect. Sure, we look the code over, and make changes, but that happens with human developers as well — ever get PR feedback?

The point is I’m still employed and doing exactly what the article says. I’m orchestrating the LLM to do work for me. I not using it to swarm on tasks yet but I do point it at tickets in JIRA and have it go to work. It works really well if the tickets are well defined and have enough detail so the LLM doesn’t need additional input.

I’m still not using AI directly in my personal projects because I love the challenge of writing code. Sure, I get frustrated and struggle, just look at my last post about finally getting something to work in Stream for Mac as an example, but I just love the work.

I’ll continue to use LLMs at work as long as they’ll have me and continue to learn new stuff on my own time in my own apps.

Kenyatta Thomas • EFF

After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X. This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue. The math hasn’t worked out for a while now.

More folks need to follow the EFF’s lead and get the heck out of X hell. It’s a sess pool of right wing loonies and tech bros.

Come join us in the Fediverse. Mastodon is an incredible replacement for X and it’s not nearly as difficult to join and understand as many folks have lead you to believe.

If you’d like to get an easy start just pull down the Mastodon iOS or Android apps and use those to create your account. Once you better understand the Mastodon communities you can choose to switch to a different server — or instance in Mastodon parlance — or stay on the main Mastodon instance. No harm, no foul.

If you get there feel free to reach out to me! I’d love to chat with you and answer any questions you may have — as long as you’re ok with me not knowing the answer. 😃

Arthur-Ficial

The free AI already on your Mac.

macOS Tahoe ships with a 3B parameter LLM. apfel gives you CLI access with one brew install. No model downloads, no API keys, no configuration needed, just works.

So, this is kinda nifty! Unlock the LLM already on your computer! Why the heck not? It’s there. Might as well use it, right? 👍🏼

Zack Sharf • Variety

Michael J. Fox is alive and well, the “Back to the Future” icon assured fans on Threads after CNN sparked a death scare by releasing a video on its content platforms titled “Remembering the life of actor Michael J. Fox.”

I’m sorry he had to see this. All the major news organizations probably have something like this already set aside for famous peoples death. It’s cold and impersonal but it’s the way these things work.

I’m happy to hear Marty McFly hasn’t left us yet. He seems to be a really great person and he’s definitely made my life richer.

Back to the Future Part III is still the best of the three. 😄 (Go ahead and @ me.)

Simon Young • Louder

Tool and Puscifer frontman Maynard James Keenan has shared a message of support for his former military academy prep school friend, General Randy George, who was recently driven out of his position as Army Chief of Staff during the early stages of the USA’s conflict with Iran.

I knew Mr. Keenan has some military experience but I didn’t know the extent of it. It’s nice to see him publically support his friend like this.

I hope they get together and have a few beers together, or perhaps some wine?

James Snell • Six Colors

I’ve been so proud of my reading workflow, using Feedbin as a repository for all the newsletters I get, that I missed the other important part of that workflow: I open ReadKit once a day, read the items in my story list that interest me, and then close the iPad and go about my day. I am not looking for updates throughout the day, or using the app as a read-later service—in fact, my default view only shows me items from the past 48 hours—but as the true successor of that old morning newspaper.

I read part of this and sent a Mastodon post to Mr. Snell pointing him to Stream, but that was before reading the entire piece, which was a mistake. He’s looking for something differen, not a River of News style reader, which is what Stream was built for.

I’m also a subscriber to the site so I get a private feed of podcasts and on the latest Six Colors Podcast he and Dan talk about his reading setup and what he thinks might be his perfect setup. It sounds to me like he’d love to have Google Reader back. It had some features other feed readers typically don’t have, like searching for keywords and building a feed from that. The benefits of a backend service, if you can afford to run one.

Scripting News

The perfect app for an AI to do for you is a demo app. Yesterday I wrote about making WordPress boom with new apps for writers that run in the web ecosystem, not as plug-ins, in JS running in the browser, or on the desktop, any desktop, that would work too. Probably would be fine to put an MCP shell around it so it can be in AI-internal scripts.

Yes, LLMs are great for this! I can see exactly what Dave is trying to do but some folks may see it as him trying to pull a fast one on them. I don’t see it that way at all. I believe he’s genuinely trying to make the web better for writers. Why else would he go to the trouble to build so many open source projects over the years? His WordLand project is worth your time. It’s a nice, very small, writing surface built just for writers.

Joe Rossignal • MacRumors

Apple’s online store in the U.S. is currently showing delivery estimates of up to 4-5 months for many Mac mini and Mac Studio configurations with upgraded amounts of RAM. The delays are occurring amid a severe global memory chip shortage driven by surging demand from companies building AI servers that requires large amounts of RAM.

Darned AI companies! This is, at some point, going to make computers outrageously expensive. That may not be the case in today’s Apple ecosystem but it’s coming. I need to pull the trigger on a new box before they’re out of reach.

I’ll just leave this here.

Our Dogwood’s are extremely happy.

No, this guy isn’t off his rocker. 😳

Can Republicans find some intestinal fortitude and 25th Amendment this nut burger before the country is completely destroyed?

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Pretty slow week at work but we had the grandkids for three days — they’re on spring break — so house was a mad house. 🤣 In all the best ways of course. 😃

The Next Web

Oracle is cutting up to 30,000 employees to pay for AI data centres

And it started with a 6 AM email.

The slaughter continues and this is another one related to LLMs.

Oracle is taking on tons of debt to build out. Add that to his support of his kids fantasy of being a movie mogul and others have to foot the bill.

Liran Tal • snyk

On March 31, 2026, two malicious versions of axios, the enormously popular JavaScript HTTP client with over 300 million weekly downloads, were briefly published to npm via a compromised maintainer account. The packages contained a hidden dependency that deployed a cross-platform remote access trojan (RAT) to any machine that ran npm install during a two-hour window.

Hackers gonna hack. I’ve mentioned this before but it seems to me like whoever runs npm as an organization needs to make it a bit more difficult to submit package updates for extremely popular packages. I know, I know, it goes totally against the spirt of open source and freedom but this poisoned package just caused how many millions of dollars in lost productivity.

BrowserGate

Every time any of LinkedIn’s one billion users visits linkedin.com, hidden code searches their computer for installed software, collects the results, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers and to third-party companies including an American-Israeli cybersecurity firm.

Companies can be so scummy and I hate it. Look, I just want to use the site. If you need me to pay for it, fine, as for money so I don’t have to be harvested for data so you can sell it.

I had deleted my LinkedIn account after we moved to the east coast, then I discovered my company and folks in the east — in general — really use it, so I logged back in.

I’m dumb. 😁

Amanda Kondolojy • Pocket-lint

According to user iamonreddit, the most recent Netflix app update has made it slightly more difficult to use the fast-forward and rewind functions. Instead of clicking the back or forward button on the remote wheel to advance or return ten seconds, this button press now pauses the screen and brings up a frame selector. In order to actually go forward or go back, users then have to click the same button again. So essentially, what once required a single button press, now needs two.

User experience is a thing! If you screw up your design you’re gonna hear about it. Your customers will scream to the heavens and hit social media! 🤣

Matt “TK” Taylor & Matt Kane • Cloudflare

Our name for this new CMS is EmDash. We think of it as the spiritual successor to WordPress. It’s written entirely in TypeScript. It is serverless, but you can run it on your own hardware or any platform you choose. Plugins are securely sandboxed and can run in their own isolate, via Dynamic Workers, solving the fundamental security problem with the WordPress plugin architecture. And under the hood, EmDash is powered by Astro, the fastest web framework for content-driven websites.

EmDash looks very interesting. I don’t use WordPress for my main blog any longer because I wanted it published statically. I’m now at Micro.blog and I enjoy how scaled down the entire experience is. It’s built by a blogger for bloggers.

There’s nothing wrong with WordPress. I used it for well over ten years on my blog and it powers my Hayseed blog. It’s perfect for big organizations.

I don’t see it being replaced by EmDash but it’s neat to see another tool enter the market.

It really feels like we’re in a blogging renaissance and I love it!

Adi Robertson • The Verge

In an industry full of sprawling multipronged tech empires, the basic antitrust argument against Apple is comparatively simple: it’s become the ultimate gatekeeper to billions of people’s primary computing hardware, and it keeps competitors locked out while levying a heavy toll on the developers it lets through.

This will go on for years and years. Who knows what it’ll lead to but I’m strapped in for the show. 🍿

I do hope it results in better options and support for developers large and small.

Nikita Mazurov • The Intercept

Another option is to leave devices that contain sensitive information at home and instead bring throwaway travel devices you’re willing to have searched or confiscated. This doesn’t need to be an expensive proposition. You can reformat and repurpose an old phone or tablet, or purchase refurbished older models that are comparatively cheap.

This is what I did when I went to No Kings in Washington D.C. back in October of last year.

I reset my old iPhone 11 and set it up with a brand new Apple ID and a new phone carrier. It has very little data on it. I also enabled an extra layer of security on it. I can’t remember what it’s called at the moment but you should also do that for your “burner.”

It’s my testing phone for Stream and is still a really great phone, if the battery were better it would be perfect. 😃

Quinnipiac University

As artificial intelligence continues to leap from concept to reality in just about everything we do, an increasing number of Americans see more harm than good when it comes to AI’s impact on their daily lives and education and they are divided about its impact on health care. Trust in AI remains low.

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of skepticism. I was skeptical of an LLMs ability to help me in my everyday work.

But it turns out I was wrong. An LLM can be quite useful to a developer and once you dive a bit deeper you start to figure out how to tune the LLM to work like you’d prefer it to work and teach it to do many tasks at once.

Should you scrutinize the output? Yep. Because they can still make mistakes.

But, they can also be quite helpful.

Jeff Johnson

I’m not going to debate the major, controversial App Store policy issues here, such as Apple’s cut of developer revenue: 15% for members of the Small Business Program like myself, 30% for other developers. My argument is that even at the reduced rate of 15%, developers are not receiving their money’s worth in services from Apple.

Jeff shares his ideas on how to improve the App Store Developer experience.

It’s nice to see a developer share their experience and their list of wants/needs.

Joost de Valk

Matt’s response was generous in places. He acknowledged the engineering quality and called the Skills implementation “brilliant.” But his architectural arguments were almost entirely defensive. He suggested EmDash should adopt Gutenberg. He framed EmDash’s sandboxed plugin model as impractical. He questioned Cloudflare’s business motives.

A nice piece from Joost. Worth your time. ⏰

Ms. Gracie, living her best life.

Daring Fireball

Loads JavaScript from a random person’s GitHub Pages site (lonelycpp.github.io) for YouTube embeds. If that account is compromised, arbitrary code runs in the app’s WebView. […]

As quoted by John from the original work by someone called Thereallo. Sorry, the poor site has been Fireball’d.

This isn’t poking at John or the person who did the digging around, but I do have one thing to point out.

I noticed it’s an NPM package targeting React Native applications, so we know it’s a React Native application. An NPM package is installed using npm’s package manager, just as native iOS Devs would use Swift Package Manager(SPM) to get our packages.

I just don’t want the poor person who created it to be dragged for supporting the Trump Administration. They may, they may not, but the NPM pacakage gets somewhere around 100k downloads per week, so it’s built for the masses and the first release was published six years ago.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Well, it’s definitely allergy season and mine are the worst they’ve ever been. This is the first time post nasal drip has caused such a sore throat that it’s super swollen. Which in turn causes my sleep apnea to be bad. As a result, I’m not sleeping all that well. 🫩

No worries! That’s what caffeine is for, right? 😁

I’m well into my second cup of coffee. In fact, it’s now gone. Time for more. ☕️

I hope you enjoy the links.

Hartley Charlton • MacRumors

Sandofsky has now filed a lawsuit in the California Superior Court of Santa Cruz against de With, accusing him of improperly using more than $150,000 in Lux company funds to pay for personal expenses since 2022, as well as providing confidential material and source code from Lux to Apple.

I can’t find the link to the documents Mr. Sandofsky filed but I read through it earlier in the week. Wowzer. This is going to get extremely ugly and I hope it’s not the death of his company.

Side note. It’s so difficult for me to wrap my brain around an app company being so successful it can support two folks. What a dream.

Kennedy French • Variety

But no matter — that lifelong devotion has landed Colbert a credit that most fans could only ever dream of. Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema confirmed that Colbert will co-write “The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past” alongside screenwriter Philippa Boyens and Colbert’s son Peter McGee, with Jackson producing.

I had no idea Mr. Colbert was such a Lord of the Rings geek! I hope the man has the time of his life working on the new film given the years he’s had what with Marmalade Messiah and company getting his show cancelled.

Toby Sterling • Reuters

The skeleton of famed French musketeer Charles de Batz de Castelmore d’Artagnan may have been found in ‌front of a church altar in the Dutch city of Maastricht, church officials and an archaeologist said on Wednesday.

My wife and I both had similar thoughts on this. What are they gonna do with the poor person after they’ve gone through their identification process?

It would be nice for them to put the remains back where they found them and mark the location. I have no idea if Dutch law would allow that?

Tim Sweeney • Epic Games

Today we’re laying off over 1000 Epic employees. I’m sorry we’re here again. The downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025 means we’re spending significantly more than we’re making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded. This layoff, together with over $500 million of identified cost savings in contracting, marketing, and closing some open roles puts us in a more stable place.

More layoffs. Makes me sad for the poor folks on the receiving end of those pink slips. The market is so bad. 🥺

Joel Chrono

Regardless of what you do, on this website, it’s just me, here and now. Me and my dumb takes and opinions, my rambles about nothing and my thoughts on things everything has mentioned before, but it doesn’t really matter does it? Because I am the one writing. Helplessly human, helplessly unpolished, imperfect and wrong, but documenting it all because it’s just fun for me.

This is the whole idea behind having a blog. It’s all yours and you can do whatever the heck you want with it. Want to write about tech? Fine, do that. Want to write about sports, go right ahead. You could be like me and write about whatever floats your boat on a particular day. It’s raw and unfiltered. It’s your voice.

I started this blog in February 2001 in hopes it would make me a better writer. I may have failed in that endeavor but I still enjoy doing it. 😃

L. Jeffrey Zeldman

Abandon the em-dash in your human writing? The irony—and it’s a major irony—is that real writers use em-dash frequently, and for reasons. As a written signifier of verbal speech pauses, it means something different than what commas and semicolons mean. It connects while separating.

I think I already shared this little story, but my brother ran some of his own writing through an AI writing detector thingie and it reported his writing had a high probability of being written by an LLM. That’s crazy.

Think about that. What if you submit a paper to an academic periodical and they reject it because they claim it was written by an LLM? I’ll bet it’s already happened but I’m too lazy to search for an example.

It’s terrible to think we may have to dumb down our writing to please some stupid service.

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. 🎩