Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
It’s been a pretty quite week. Work is moving along fine and we’re getting ready for our camping trip to the beach with the grandkids, our youngest daughter, and our dogs. Today I need to remove the wheels from the trailer and get new tires. I’ve never had to do that and I hope it goes smoothly. I’ll have to remove two at a time, run them down for new tires, put them back on the trailer and repeat the process for the remaining two. It’ll make for a bit of busy work and alone time driving to Charlottesville and back, which I really enjoy.
My brain is already in vacation mode so I’ll have to push myself to remain focused on work the coming week. Then I get a week off to enjoy time with my family. ❤️
The actor you see in the commercial is Patrick Renna, and his face looks so familiar because in our collective memory, he will forever be tied to an absolute cult character: Hamilton “Ham” Porter, the talkative, charismatic, and loyal kid from The Sandlot, the 1993 cinematic masterpiece that redefined the spirit of childhood and 90s summers.
How can you not love Ham Porter? He’s the portly, quick witted, catcher from The Sandlot. I love that movie! Have since the first time I saw it. While he’s just one of many great characters in the movie he definitely stands out. Seeing him explain how to make a s’more to his kid is heartwarming. ❤️
During one amazing period in August, Pyromania was selling 100,000 copies a day in the US. The album climbed to No.2 on the Billboard chart – second only to Thriller. “We actually outsold Thriller for one week,” Elliott says, “but that just happened to be the week that the Flashdance soundtrack went to No.1, with us at two and Jacko at three.”
Back in High School Pyromania was a huge hit. It’s one of the albums I purchased as soon as I could, hey, it helped me fulfill my obligation to my Columbia House subscription and is one of my favorite albums from that era.
At that time MTV was also huge and I feel like they helped each other reach great success. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent in front of the TV watching MTV over the summer. It was a lot. MTV was to my generation what TikTok is to today’s generation. At least it was for me.
If I wasn’t playing baseball, D&D, or going to a movie, I was watching MTV and Def Leppard was all over it.
If you know anyone at Silver Lake, Quinn Emanuel, or WP Engine in that order, please beg, plead with them to stop the violence. End this internecine warfare that is threatening to destroy one of the last stalwarts of the Open Web.
WordPress is part of the fabric of the web at this point in time. The little CMS that could, and did, take over so many websites that needed to be organized and scaled for millions and millions of hits per month, so it’s troubling to see the man who created it begging for help. It seems the legal battle with WP Engine has taken its toll on WordPress and Matt. That’s a crying shame and I wish WP Engine would back off the lawsuits and dive head first into making WordPress even better.
WordPress isn’t a tiny company any longer but they don’t bring the power and money a company backed by private equity firm [Silver Lake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SilverLake(investment_firm).
I want to see WordPress survive and thrive. Long live the open web.
Microsoft is telling employees that the decision is about converging on Copilot CLI as its main agentic command line interface tool across Experiences + Devices, but sources tell me the decision is also a financial one. The June 30th cutoff is the last day of Microsoft’s current financial year, and canceling Claude Code licenses is an easy way to cut some operating expenses for when the new financial year starts in July.
Microsoft isn’t the only company asking developers to use other tools or cut back their use of AI. There are reports that Amazon and Uber are also cutting back. These tools are extremely powerful and really helpful to software developers but are also very expensive to use all the time.
Like everything else the LLM companies will figure out how to make things faster and cheaper. My biggest hope it they figure out how to LLMs work without turning the planet into a wasteland.
At the end of last year, three excellent AT Protocol-based publishing apps—Leaflet, pckt.blog, and Offprint—got together and decided to collaborate on creating their own Lexicon for publishing longer records like blog posts, articles, and newsletters on the protocol. They called it Standard.site and it has since emerged as one of the most successful community generated Lexicons on the Atmosphere.
I admit I still don’t understand AT Protocol. There, I said it. I think I’d need to fully dive into it for a while to really grok it.
When reading this piece I was left saying to myself “How is this so much different than an RSS feed?” If you know, please reach out and tell me how it’s different or why it’s better. I believe someone could do the same UI work based on an RSS feed for a blog? Am I wrong? Let me know.
Before Frontier could become useful, it had to be buildable on modern operating systems, readable, writable, browsable… survivable. This is where the rubber hit the road.
I am very interested in Jake’s Frontier adventure and I love the idea of a headless Frontier. Being able to put other faces on the object database and scripting language sound like a really great idea to me. I’ve never been into using an outline as an editor and having the ability to bring my own IDE to the party sounds amazing.
If you’re not familiar with Frontier it’s a scripting language with a built in object database that is very powerful. The way Jake is rebuilding it I think it could make for a great embedded language for applications. Think the old VBA — still the best scripting environment ever made — in Microsoft Office apps.
The 2026 Razrs don’t change much in the design department versus last year’s versions, but that’s fine. They still look great. There are wood panels, soft touch plastics, vegan leather, and synthetic fabrics—all things you won’t find on the latest devices from Samsung, Google, or Apple. These are, hands down, the prettiest phones you can buy right now.
These phones are pretty darned stunning. I’m not the target audience for them, to be honest I don’t know who is, but I really like them. I hope Apple’s new entrant looks as nice as these Razrs do.
Many workers are experiencing “AI brain fry,” or mental fatigue from using and overseeing AI tools. And it’s no wonder why: Organizational change can take a toll on workers, and right now, there’s no greater organizational change than that caused by AI.
As a longtime developer the thought of an LLM replacing me scared the crap out of me. I’ve been doing this work for 30+ years and it’s all I know. However, once I dipped my toe into the LLM waters I realized it was just another tool. Someone needs to be around to define what needs doing and be there to review the outputs because it can, at least today, get things wrong or maybe you need to make an additional change you missed along the way.
An observation I’m sure many others have made. Since LLMs were trained on the worlds collective data their “reasoning” comes across very human like. The LLM studies code, formulates an understanding, and comes up with a plan to make changes. Then sets about making those changes. It just does it way faster than I can.
Another observation. At the beginning of the project I’m on now my team was given an area of the app to work on and we were running as fast as possible to deliver features. LLMs were definitely a productivity booster. Now, however, we’re dealing with typical end of project stuff. We have dependencies on parters and other teams and LLMs can’t take care of those for us, which is 100% fine. Now we’re down to the end of the project and a lot of cooperation between various teams is where we spend most of our time.
Bottom line: we still need humans to do this work.
Starting today Google AI Studio can build entire Android apps for you in minutes from just a prompt. You don’t need to install any software or configure any libraries, which significantly lowers the barrier to development. Whether you’re a seasoned developer looking to prototype at lightning speed or a creator building your first-ever mobile experience, you can now go from a single prompt to a high-quality, Kotlin-based Android app in AI Studio.
This is kind of cool and makes me wonder if Apple would ever offer a service like this. Not that I’d be the target audience but having something that could create an entire application for you, get it setup on the App Store, and publish it without the need for Xcode would be something to behold.
Having the ability to download the project a build it locally and maintain that connectivity to all the project stuff around it would be nice to have, if Apple ever does something like this.
Ever since I added substackcdn.com to my blocklist, I have learned how many bloggers have solved their “substack nazi” problem by just hiding it behind their own domain. Spoiler: it’s a lot.
I cringe ever time I hear or read “Go to my Substack” because they’re just blogs. Blogs hosted on a platform you have zero control over and I really hate that. Especially since people don’t seem to care they support some of the worst people ever to live on the planet. So many great writes out there I refuse to support or read because of the white supremacists and Nazis.
I know I can’t make a difference or convince folks to leave the platform but I’m going to keep trying. Before one of their co-founders went on Decoder with Nilay Patel and refused to say Substack would kick racists off the platform I’ve had zero respect for the company.
Today’s “new media” doesn’t seem to care they’re supporting horrible people. They’re lazy and only care about the money. Money they could have more of if they’d switch platforms. They’d also stop giving their hard earned cash to horrible people.
Until someone finds a way to make an open version of Substack that resonates with people stand alone blogs will probably be less attractive than Substack because folks like the social nature of it.
We could absolutely have the same experience as Substack with open source solutions but someone would have to build all that infrastructure and pay for it somehow.
A lot of the parts are there: HTTPS, RSS, ActivityPub, Micropub. Look at Micro.blog as an example of bringing some of those technologies together to make a social blogging experience. It publishes RSS, publishes to many different social networks, and gives you complete access to all of your data.
The boss of Standard Chartered has apologised after describing employees whose jobs are vulnerable to being replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) as “lower value human capital”.
Nice work, dude. This will be used in all kinds of think pieces and business schools as how not to motivate your employees.
Yeah, we all know we’re worthless cogs in the capitalist machine, but you don’t have to point it out. 🤬
Our consciousness, our experience of being, is shaped by things beyond our control. It is that experience of being that shapes our desires, and that is imposed or imprinted on us in our growing-up years.
Dave is going deep in this post and it rings true.
I’ve always loved Dave’s writing and I’ve followed him for at least 20 years, back to when he was writing Groundhog Day. He’s a good man and philosopher, I bet he’d disagree with me on that last point, but he’s a great writer and deep thinker none-the-less and worth a follow.
The software industry as we know it is dying and CEOs realized it months ago.
As long as I’ve been in this industry LLMs are the biggest shift I’ve ever seen. The web was seismic. At some point I knew I’d have to become a web developer if I wanted to continue to do computering stuff. Mobile came along and prolonged that shift for me. But, LLMs are a whole different thin for the world of software development. Sure, we still need the human element to tie it all together but you need good people skills and vision to make what we did by hand before. The coding practice is forever changed. We’re using LLMs to code in TypeScript, building React Native apps, but we could just as easily do everything in C, C++, Rust or native to platform languages like Swift and Kotlin. It doesn’t matter to the LLM, just to the client.
I have a web service in mind and I think I’ll do a CGI based thing using C++ because I’m comfortable with it and can edit everything by hand when I want. My idea is to generate the shell of it then do all the other work by hand using my own framework of C++ I’ve built over the years. It may never happen because I have to finish Stream for Mac and get Thunder Chicken rolling. Sorry for the tangent. My brain often does that. As the commercial says “The mind is a terrible thing.” 🤣
To help the industry get back on the right track, I’ve created a checklist for car designers. Make sure your new car—EV or otherwise—checks all these boxes to avoid making the same stupid mistakes that have plagued modern cars for years.
I think John Siracusa is a software engineering/tech nerd national treasure. His hypercritical nature and observations lead to great product and, let’s face it, extremely entertaining. John has a great way of expressing himself. He’s always funny and I absolutely love hearing one of his mini-rants on ATP.
It’s nice to see him write once in a while and I love seeing his work pop up in Stream on that rare occasion.
One of these days I’d love to shake his hand and thank him for all the years of joy and knowledge he’s brought to my life.
As an aside, ATP is an example of a small podcast done right. They have their own custom built subscription system and don’t rely on Apple or another big entity to make money. They’re not locked in. I’m an ATP subscriber and there are other podcasts I might’ve subscribed to but they’re dependent on Apple Podcasts to pay for those subscriptions. I don’t use Apple Podcasts. That is yet another proprietary lock-in I don’t want to depend on. Yes, Apple does many wonderful things for podcasts and I’m thankful for that, but their subscription model is not something I can appreciate. I get it, they’re a business, just as ATP is a business, but ATP has a very open model, no lock-in. Bring your favorite podcast player to the party and it works with ATP as is.
