Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Val Kilmer, who played Bruce Wayne in “Batman Forever,” channeled Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone‘s “The Doors” and starred as a tubercular Doc Holliday in “Tombstone,” died Tuesday in Los Angeles.
We lost a good one. I’ve always enjoyed Val Kilmer in his roles. My favorite is his portrayal of Doc Holiday in Tombstone but I also liked him in Real Genius, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and The Saint.
If you were a fan or are curious about Mr Kilmer give the documentary Val a viewing. It’s really well done.
Oh, I also liked his Madmartigan in Willow.
RIP 🪦
Last Tuesday at 1 AM, I was debugging a critical production issue in my AI dev tool. As I dug through layers of functions, I suddenly realized — unlike the new generation of developers, I was grateful that I could actually understand my codebase. That’s when I started thinking more about Karpathy’s recent statements on vibe coding.
I’ve noted here frequently how slow I am to pick up new languages and frameworks. Largely it’s because I have to dig in, get to the bottom of things, and really develop an understanding of how things actually work. The more abstract — or magic — the language or framework the harder I have to work and the longer it takes for me to grok it. That takes time. For me it usually takes two times longer than most people. I’m a dumb redneck who likes computers, I ain’t that smart, so I learn via a lot of head banging and frustration, oh, and persistence and hard work.
All that to say, I love the craft of software development and I have a really hard time with the notion of using an LLM to develop and entire application for me. I can see using an LLM to get past things I’m not great at. Like my current huge struggle with auto layout in AppKit, but not for everything. 🧠
You say ‘city,’ and I’m going to piss myself, and there’s no way I’m going to hide that wet spot just to make you libs more comfortable. I’m going to tell it like it is—for instance, I’m a man, and I’m scared of my own desires, and I don’t care who knows it!
When I think of Conservatives I think of folks who believe they’re patriots, self reliant, tough, and religious.
Often I think they’re none of those things. Being a patriot doesn’t mean wearing a flag shirt or having the Constitution tattooed on your arm or the American flag waving in your front yard.
A patriot is someone who loves their country and would do anything to protect it. That also means being critical of it and standing up for what you believe.
Many Conservatives I’ve met tend to be hateful of others and angry about what others have.
The Onion has a nice way of capturing that. 😃
I’ve been using the recently revamped Reeder on iOS, and after just a few weeks it feels pretty darned close to my ideal way of reading feeds.
Ashur has written a nice piece on his experience with Reeder. It is a very fine piece of software for iOS and Mac and Silvio Rizzi is an extremely talented designer/developer.
He’s taken a new direction with his beloved feed reader. It’s now more broad and can subscribe to more than RSS feeds, which is something I’ve wanted to do with Stream, and The Icon Factory have done with Tapestry.
It’s a new dawn for feed readers. They’re more general purpose viewers now. Expect to see more of this from other readers in future releases.
Also, thank you for the mention Ashur. I’m very grateful for your support over the years! ❤️
Tom Warren and Jay Peters • The Verge
A Microsoft employee disrupted the company’s 50th anniversary event to protest its use of AI.
The world is in such a strange place at this point in history and I hope we learn from it, otherwise we are doomed to complete failure. War, division, and climate change are all huge threats to humanity.
I don’t blame Israel for defending itself against Hamas. Who would? They were attacked by a terrorist organization who wants to exterminate them. We did the same thing after 9/11.
However, I do take issue with Israel attempting to obliterate Gaza and all her people.
Israel of all countries should know better. Jews were hunted by Hitler’s Nazi Germany who wanted to exterminate them. How can they turn around and do the same? 🙏🏼
Elon Musk’s polygonal pickup is a polarizing sales flop that’s missed the billionaire’s volume goal by a staggering 84%. And there’s no sign that things are improving.
Yeah, the Cyber Truck. 🤣
Vojtech Novak, Shubham Gupta, Fabrizio Cucci, Riccardo Cipolleschi • React Native Developer Blog
This release ships React 19 in React Native and some other relevant features like native support for Android Vector drawables and better brownfield integration for iOS.
I hope we get an opportunity at adopt this on the project I’m on at WillowTree. It sounds like a nice step forward for hybrid apps like the one I’m working on.
Last week I bought a 13" MacBook Air in Midnight (24GB memory, 512GB SSD).
After reading this I’m tempted to go with a new Air as a personal Mac. I’ve been one of those die hard must own a MacBook Pro people but seeing a developer I have a lot of respect for say it works beautifully for an app like Acorn gives me confidence it would be a great choice for my less substantial projects, like Stream. 👍🏼
Warner Bros. dropped a new sneak-peek teaser for James Gunn’s Superman on Thursday out of CinemaCon, and it’s mostly just the same trailer we saw back in December, with the same quick-cut looks at Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi), Guy “worst haircut in the ’verse” Gardner (Nathan Fillion), Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan), a giant kaiju that might be Jimmy Olsen, and more. The difference is, there’s an extra two minutes of footage that might just be the full theatrical cut of the sequence that follows after Superman crashlands in the snow near the Fortress of Solitude — and it’s a long, agonizing two minutes.
Based on the trailers I’ve seen I don’t think I’m gonna like this Superman.
Henry Cavil is still the best Superman. 🦸🏻♂️
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, and a range of other online services, is reducing its workforce. The layoffs will impact 16% of staff across divisions, an Automattic blog post published Wednesday reveals.
I feel really bad for Automatticians. They’ve been through a real rough patch over the last year. First all the hubbub with WPEngine, the mass resignations, and now a layoff.
I hope they all land on their feet and Automattic survives and continues to lead the progression of WordPress far into the future.
I’d also like to see Matt Mullenweg loosen his grip on the open source organization so it can lead future efforts. ❤️
Back in 2019 I moved my blog off of WordPress and over to Ghost. In short, I wasn’t happy with WordPress and wanted a blogging engine that felt more like it was made for blogging than a full CMS where I didn’t use 99% of the features on offer. Ghost seemed to align with my values as a writer and a general user of technology, and over the past 6 years, that’s only become more clear that was the right choice for me.
Paying an organization to take care of the servers and infrastructure for your blog is very freeing.
I switched to Micro.blog a few years back and don’t regret it. The team makes sure we’re always up and running and the service and user experience are dirt simple for blogging. Just as they should be. ❤️
I’ve used most Google’s products since the day they were introduced, so it was a great opportunity to see what these products are like for first time users, since the first time I used them long ago, they usually looked much different.
An interesting read on Google’s widely used products and services. Understanding how the Enterprise versions work is challenging. I’ve had a number of odd experiences with sharing documents over the years. Go read it. You may find yourself nodding your head in agreement.
France’s competition watchdog (Autorité de la concurrence) ordered Apple to pay €150 million (~$162.4 million) after finding that its App Tracking Transparency system allows the company to abuse its dominance in the mobile app market. In its decision, the authority says the initiative — which Apple pitches as a way to give users more control of their privacy — harms small publishers and “is neither necessary for nor proportionate with” Apple’s goal of protecting personal data.
Heh, App Tracking Transparency is something I really appreciate as a user but I can see how some App Developers would not like the idea.
At WillowTree we create a lot of what I refer to as “Marketing Apps.” Most large corporations who have something to sell you really need to have these beautifully designed and implemented applications that not only advertise their products but often need an ordering workflow. We do that and we do that really well.
Every one of the apps I’ve worked on is chock full of analytics measuring all sorts of things. The great companies take the user experience data they collect very seriously and make improvements accordingly.
The app I’m working on now has improved dramatically over the last year because the company we’ve done work for studies their analytics. It really can work.
Politics
Johnathan V. Last • The Bulwark
Fittingly, it was the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, who declared the official time of death.
The United States of America is now a world wide embarrassment that cannot be trusted and has become a laughing stock.
Postpone any trip to the US you’ve had booked. It’s a real mess here.
If you had told me a decade ago that a former president would waltz back into the White House, torch the global economy, slap double-digit tariffs on damn near everything, spook the markets into evaporating over three trillion dollars in a single day, and call it a “booming economy” with a straight face—I would’ve thought it a particularly cruel and poorly conceived joke.
Again. See my first comment above.
Trump and his administration are burning everything down. Morons all.
Of note, Joan Westenberg has become one of my favorite writers. She delivers facts and opinions with a dry wit I really appreciate.
Now as the owner of The Atlantic, she is the quiet superhero behind the current Signalgate scandal. Editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who in full disclosure I know well enough to have his email, has rightfully been taking a hero’s tour on media everywhere since he broke the story of having been “accidentally” included in a Signal chat group of the top national security officials talking about an imminent attack on the Houthis, in violation of every imaginable security protocol not to mention common sense.
It took one brave woman to put all the billionaire bros to shame.
Now if we could convince Bezos to sell the Washington Post to Kara Swisher that would be incredible.
