Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
We managed to sell our camping trailer, which was really nice, because we bought a slightly bigger one and needed to get rid of it. 🤣
Work has been fine. Nothing hair raising happening. I went into the office on Thursday to meet with my new Manager and enjoyed being there. The only downside to being there is not having co-workers on my project being in the office. We’re geographically dispersed so I sat alone. Which, in the end, was completely fine with me. I found a quiet area and went to work. Open workplaces are mostly not fun to work in. Too noisy and distracting. Microsoft and Visio had it right. Offices for everyone. That’s where it’s at. 😃
Of course I dropped by Grit on my way in. ☕️
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Wanton Destruction Of CBS Property - Letterman & Colbert Toss Stuff Off The Roof Of The Ed Sullivan
I’m not a late night TV guy so I haven’t seen Colbert in years but the man is very entertaining and I love that he got under the skin of our thin orange skinned President.
Having Letterman on to send the show off like this was a great idea. I have a strange feeling Colbert will be more popular than ever and I’m looking forward to whatever he does.
The joy of RSS was that you could subscribe to tens or thousands of feeds, and get a chronological view, like an inbox, of the latest “news.” News could include blog entries, stories from major newspapers, price updates for a retail item, podcasts, service alerts, “diffs” when something is updated (such as changes to the text of a New York Times article or a Wikipedia entry), search results that changed over time, and much more.
Feed reader popularity is going up. Tools around feeds are seeing a reniassance and I’m here for it. I like feed readers so much — self promotion to follow — that I made my own feed reader. I’m glad I did because it serves a small category of folks. Some people want to view their feeds as a timeline. Just a River of News.
My feed reader, Stream, presents feeds as a River of News.
Katherine Legge will become the first woman to attempt the Indianapolis 500 and Coca-Cola 600 “Double” on May 24, one of the most demanding feats in all of motorsports. She will be fueled by e.l.f. Cosmetics, a brand from e.l.f. Beauty (NYSE: ELF), a bold disruptor with a kind heart, as primary sponsor across both events, with Chevrolet power.
I’m really happy to see this! The first time I ever saw Ms. Legge drive was at the Indy 500, then she made her way over to NASCAR and drove in the O’Reily Series and later in the Cup Series. She’s a great race car driver I just wish she could run full time in NASCAR Cup. I really believe she could show all these good old boys something. 😃
Today marks the 30 year anniversary of my becoming a full-time employee of Apple Computer, Inc.
Daniel is another one of those Mac developers I have a lot of respect for. He’s been around a long time — obviously — building excellent quality Mac software. If you’re a blogger you should check out MarsEdit. It’s a really great native Mac blogging client.
I’ve been posting more from my Mac recently and I use MarsEdit to publish.
A compromised dependency in the JavaScript ecosystem led to credential theft, which enabled a supply chain attack on a Rust compression library, which was vendored into a Python build tool, which shipped malware to approximately 4 million developers before being inadvertently patched by an unrelated cryptocurrency mining worm.
If you’re into software security take a few minutes to read this incident report. It’s fascinating the lengths naferious people will go to compromise something. All in all this set of hacks was fairly easy to integrate into their targeted software components because stewards of many open source projects move on or don’t have time to tend to their software. It’s a real problem.
Then there’s software like npm, which is powerful, and permissive, and once we start using it we stop paying close attention to what we’re installing or upgrading. I’m guilty of that!
Vigilance, I suppose, is the only way to combat this sort of stuff?
Substack, the once buzzy newsletter platform, is losing a new swath of writers to rival platforms most people haven’t heard of. Just last month, The Ankler, one of Substack’s most popular publications, left for a platform that gives it more control over its site. Others who have departed Substack within the past year voiced similar complaints and cite the platform’s increased focus on social features as well as a pricing model that puts a chokehold on their business.
Substack faced talent drain in 2024 linked to its platforming of Nazi newsletters, but now it’s not just the platform’s stance on hate speech that’s driving away creators.
It’s really nice to see folks migrating off of Substack and onto various other open, less expensive, platforms.
While Ghost and Beehiv are mentioned in the article it was another mention that caught my eye: Passport, a partnership between Automattic and Stratechery found Ben Thompson. That is what WordPress needs! Ben built his own subscription system so I’m curious to see how Passport works out. It could be a real boon for all these indipendent writers currently shilling for Substack.
Side note: It really grinds my gears when folks say “Read it on my Substack” instead of “Go to [insert domain/publication here] to read all about it” or something like that. It’s YOUR content but you’re selling it as Substack’s. Don’t do that.
I wrote a little blurb about this in 2011, but at that time people were using Facebook. Where did that get them? Exactly. Nowhere.
Red Hot Chili Peppers have sold their recorded music catalog to Warner Music Group for more than $300 million, reports Billboard. The deal includes all of the band’s recorded output, including their 13 studio albums, which reportedly generate around $26 million annually. Although the band owned their recorded catalog independently for the past year, during which they were allegedly seeking $350 million for the package, Warner is a logical buyer to foot the bill, as the label originally released Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Californication.
When I see big sales like this one part of me understands it and another part doesn’t.
The side that gets it says “Well, why not? They can retire and do whatever they want.” Of course I’d imagine they already had the ability to do whatever they want. I could be wrong but I’d imagine they’re all fabiously wealthy at this point. But, selling it seems like a fine idea. If someone offered me the right amount of money for Hayseed and my little apps I’d sell it, even though it would hurt a bit. 😃
The other side of me is like “Why give up the rights to all of your amazing work?” They’ve worked really hard to get where they are, why sell the rights to that work?
That side of me doesn’t get it, but as I’ve aged I’m more on the side that gets it.
Local residents complained of low water pressure. When the county utility investigated, it realized a data center had been draining the water system for months without paying.
Our current craze to build datacenters to power LLMs is crazy! We’re using precious resources like mad and it changes lives.
Local governments are salivating for tax money and jobs, but at a great cost. The environment can only provide so much. Water is so precious, not to mention the noise and light polution residents experience. It’s not good y’all.
We need to slow our roll a bit. Consider environmental impacts. These datacenters consume huge amounts of electricity and water for cooling. They need to provide their own power, be it solar, wind, or even nuclear. Having diesel generators running 24-7-365 isn’t exactly a good idea.
They also need to solve the cooling issue. Water is way too precious to waste on LLMs. If, like me, you’re a California native you may understand what I’m saying. If not, calling water presious may not mean a thing to you. Suffice it to say humans need water to survive.
A question for the BigCo’s building datacenters. Why not put them under ground? I’m asking because I don’t know the impact but I do know that the ground provides some cooling naturally. Perhaps things just get too hot to do that? It’s probably because it would make things more expensive and take more time to deliver.
Today, Ben McCarthy and I are launching Indigo. It’s a full-featured client for both Mastodon and Bluesky, available on iPhone, iPad and macOS. Go get it on the App Store!
At the time we began work on this app in the fall of 2024, there was a consensus opinion that you couldn’t combine these two networks. Two text-based social networks, each with their own distinct characters (both in terms of the people and features!), could not help but fall apart under scrutiny.
Congratulations Aaron and Ben!🥳 It’s so difficult to ship high quality software and it looks like Aaron and Ben have done just that. Sure it’s gonna have issues that need resolving and sure it’s gonna be missing features we’d like but they got a solid 1.0 out the door. That is such a huge deal.
If you’d like something that allows you to see a timeline of Mastodon and Bluesky mixed in one interface you may want to give Indigo a try.
Aluminium OS, Google’s upcoming version of Android for PC, may have just leaked a few hours before Google’s Android Show presentation. As Android Authority reports, leaker Mystic Leaks shared a 16-minute video on their Telegram channel that appears to show a lengthy hands-on demo of the new operating system.
While I may not agree with Google’s style very often I do appreciate them bringing Android to a laptop form. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having a choice of operating systems to consider. The more the merrier. I hope this will push Apple, Microsoft, and Linux to be better.
This subterranean monster had been growing unnoticed in the Victorian-era sewer running underneath the busy street, until workers carrying out a routine inspection bumped into its rock-hard flank. Now, a team wielding pickaxes, high-pressure water jets and clad head-to-toe in protective clothing, were preparing to tackle the putrid beast.
Their foe? A stomach-churning agglomeration of fat, oil, grease, wet wipes, sanitary products and condoms, known as a “fatberg”.
Someone needs to make a horror film based on the “fatberg.” 🤣 It sounds totally disgusting. 🤮
Brandon Vigliarolo ⦁ The Register
cURL developer Daniel Stenberg has seen Anthropic’s Mythos, a model the AI biz has suggested is too capable at finding security holes to release publicly, scan his popular open source project. But after the system turned up just a single vulnerability, he concluded the hype around Mythos was “primarily marketing” rather than a major AI security breakthrough.
I like the way Daniel and the cURL team use LLMs and other tools in their work. They’re very aware of what a security flaw means to the users of cURL. It’s such a ubiquitous piece of software one little security flaw could affect millions of computers. We still need humans in the mix.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says Elon Musk did “huge damage” to the culture of the AI startup. During testimony as part of Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, Altman said Musk required OpenAI president Greg Brockman and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever to rank researchers by their accomplishments and “take a chainsaw through a bunch.”
Space Karen being a dick to people is nothing new. I kind of wish we’d kick him out of the country. Send him back to South Africa or, better yet, Mars. Let him run his companies from there. He’s a huge stain on the United States of America.
Nextpad++ feels like a fever dream. Like what Mac apps would be if the Nazis had won WWII. Look, there are all sorts of foreign apps on the Mac. Electron apps. Apps ported with Wine. Web apps running in browser tabs or saved to the Dock. The curious new generation of lean-and-mean apps that are, in a technical sense, “native”, but are decidedly not Mac-assed apps, like Zed and Tolaria. All those types of apps feel alien on MacOS. Like different species. They are apps for the Mac but aren’t Mac apps. The Mac, however, is welcoming to them all, like the Mos Eisley cantina. We do serve their kind here. Nextpad++ isn’t like that. It doesn’t feel like an alien. It feels like Vincent D’Onofrio’s alien-bug-in-human-skin character from Men in Black.
The real value of Nextpad++ is familiarity to Windows developers coming to the Mac. It’s like using vi or emacs. Longtime developers who use those editors appreciate having them available on all platforms.
The Mac already has great text editors like BBEdit and Nova if you’re willing to spend a few bucks. They’re worth it.
I know VSCode is extremely popular. In my opinion it’s popular for a few reasons. It’s free, it’s on the major platforms, and it’s extensible. It also feels like crap if you’re a Mac or iOS developer. I know because I’ve used it on two projects. Since my current team didn’t mandate it I switched to Nova and it’s been a much better developer experience because the UI works the way I expect it to and the UI configuration works the awy I expect it to.
Cross platfom is good, I spent years at Pelco doing cross platform work, but if your cross platform code is UI code it can often feel so foreign to native users it turns them off. That’s how VSCode feels to me on the Mac and it’s how John feels about Nextpad++.
A $1 billion data center that Microsoft and Abu Dhabi-based AI firm G42 planned to build in Kenya has stalled after the Kenyan government failed to meet Microsoft’s demand for guaranteed annual capacity payments, Bloomberg reported Sunday. Kenyan President William Ruto put the scale of the project’s power requirements into clear terms at a recent state event in Nairobi, saying the country would need to “switch off half the country” to keep the facility running.
See my earlier opinion above. Here’s a prime example of datacenter companies needing to bring their own power to the party. How are they gonna cool the darned thing? I thought water was super precious in Kenya too? Doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Then again this is a huge American company with tons of money who doesn’t care about human rights and suffering. They see dollar signs and a country willing to let its people suffer and starve.
Shameful.
Developers who are told to use AI whether they like it or not, however, tell a different story. On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to.
Emphasis above is mine. I can see where developers are coming from. If you don’t sharpen your blade occasionally it doesn’t make for a very good cutting tool. And as the drug commercials used to say “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
Using an LLM has allowed me to work in a programming language and framework I’m not all that familiar with. I understand programming concepts just fine, but the language and framework are still, by and large, foriegn to me. Sure, I’ve written TypeScript/React Native code all by myself and paid attention to how others use the tools but the LLM has been a productivity booster for me. Our company is using LLMs to augment our developers, not replace them. If you don’t vibe code your apps you can build solid, maintainable, shared, code. If I could show you what we’ve produced you’d say it was fine TypeScript/React Native code. Have I hand edited code? Yes, I sure have, but that was well before we had the LLM dialed in to our project. Now it knows the codebase and has an entire list of rules and skills to follow. It’s only getting better at writing code. Do I plan on using it for personal projects? No, I don’t, because I want to become a better Mac and iOS developer. I won’t say I’ll never use it but for now I don’t plan on it.
Over 70 percent of Americans oppose AI data center construction in their area, according to a new Gallup survey. Just seven percent said they were “strongly” in favor of new data centers. According to Gallup, data centers are so strongly disliked that Americans would prefer to live near a nuclear power plant than a data center — even at its peak, opposition to nuclear power plant construction topped out at 63 percent.
Ah, back to datacenters. I seem to have a real theme going today. Safe to say I see them as a real problem.
I hope we can find excellent solutions to all the problems they present. We’re a smart people, we can do it if we want to do it. Thing is, we need to do it for the future of our planet.
