Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
In April, Gil Durán was permanently banned from Elon Musk’s X for posting just two words. Durán was responding to a post from the tech company Palantir outlining its 22‑point “technological manifesto”, which praised American “hard power”, western culture and AI weapons, denounced inclusivity and called for compulsory national service. Durán responded: “TLDR: Fascism” (TLDR is short for “too long, didn’t read”).
The tech oligarchs — broligarchs — are a danger to us all. They have waaaay too much money and in cases are pusing an extreme right-wing agenda. Space Karen and his friend Peter Thiel are particularly extreme in their beliefs.
We simply don’t need them in charge of anything to do with how we live our lives.
Curtis Yarvin is ready to employ volunrary euthanasia — Nazi’s called it Lebensunwertes Leben — to deal with what he calls unproductive citizens. Yeah, it’s a Nazi thing.
Get lost, all of you.🖕🏼
According to Taiwanese outlet DigiTimes, citing “industry insiders” as the source, the big three memory suppliers have reportedly allocated all of 2027’s DRAM and HBM capacity. Essentially, this means that all memory on track to be manufactured in 2027 by Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron is now sold out, with no additional supply planned.
If this reporting is accurate I wonder if we’re in for an additional increase in RAM prices or will “older” devices with more modern RAM become extremely valuable? I heard someone in a podcast a few days back describe a newer, fully loaded, Mac Mini for sale on eBay as “costing as much as a new car.”
I’m glad I managed to get my MacBook Air when I did. I’m writing on it this morning and it’s a great little machine. I was able to build Stream in no time at all. It’s kind of perfect and I hope it lasts me, at a minimum, five years. I’d love to stretch it out to 10 years. 🤞🏼
I dedicated years bringing web technologies and desktop apps closer together. The most recent and most successful project in that vein is Electron, which I’ve spent the last ten years working on.
There is zero doubt Electron is extremely attractive to developers for a number of reasons, least of which is the idea of running one codebase on multiple platforms.
When you’ve poured a great deal of time into a technical solution like Electron I can see why you’d defend it. It’s extremely useful and the work Felix has done over the last 10 years is incredible. As a developer who loves building SDKs for others to use I know where he’s coming from. Tooling for the masses is very rewarding.
Most apps today are based in the browser. From a 30,000 foot perspective Electron wraps that site in a dedicated application. I know it’s more than that, but from a very high level you could look at it that way.
I know a lot of folks railed on 1Password’s conversion to Electron. It was surprising given their history of building great Mac client apps but it works fine and runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows.
When your business isn’t building platform specific applications that cross platform framework is very attractive. 💻
You don’t need me to tell you that Ray Bradbury was a great writer. One of this most famous stories, amongst many famous stories, is “There Will Come Soft Rains.” It tells the story of a smarthome at the end of the world. It is quite moving, and takes place on August 4th, 2026.
It looks like Mr. Bradbury could see into the future! 🔮
Inspired by Automatticians James Kemp and Dave Smith, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of our discord in the design of WordPress stems from the differences of our two big tribes: Bloggers and Builders.
I think Matt nails it. WordPress started life as a blogging tool and soon became so much more. I don’t think it’s bloated or anything but as a blogger all I need is a simple text editor so I can write in Markdown and a way to publish. I use Tot to compose my posts, since it autosaves, and publish via MarsEdit.
A simplified user interface for WordPress, targeted to writers, would be nice. See the work Dave Winer’s been doing with WordLand. The editor is super simple and does what you’d expect from a blogging tool.
I am very sorry that the software that I created and put online for free, without any warranty, explicit or implied, has not met your expectations. You are entitled to a full refund. I have taken the liberty to initiate it. You should already have it.
A look inside one open source developer’s struggles. These folks are software engineering heros. They do this work because they love it, not to become wealthy, and folks can often be real jerks to them.
Every few years, the internet convinces writers that a new digital paradise has arrived. First, it was social media like Facebook. Then blogging networks like Tumblr. Then it was Medium. More recently, it’s been Substack.
Elizabeth makes a great case for owning your own domain and choosing an open platform so you can take your data with you, easily, if you choose to move.
But, you should absolutely not use Substack given their support of terrible organizations.
I’ve no idea yet where my blog will head to in the future. Not sure if I’ll end up posting regularly or occasionally. Not sure if it will still (all) be tech related, or (also) about other stuff. If I make myself decide about a direction first, that means that I block myself from posting about other stuff, and I don’t need any more barriers.
My blog is just random stuff. I post pictures, short blurbs, and longer posts (like this one.) Those posts are published to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Tumblr.
Write whatever you want and publish. That’s my opinion. 😁
Seven years after its blockbuster 2019 announcement, SwiftUI was supposed to be the mature, production-grade future of cross-platform UI development on all Apple platforms. Instead, SwiftUI feels like a perpetual beta, even in 2026. In this deep dive, I break down why the initial excitement has given way to deep professional frustration for senior engineers. I analyze the systemic issues with performance and layout predictability, the chaotic state of SwiftUI’s ever-changing data flow, and the frustrating lack of backward compatibility that forces developers into a nightmare of shims and workarounds.
Scathing review of SwiftUI. Watch the YouTube video. It’s good.
My use of SwiftUI in Stream is only going to grow. It’s used in a single spot in Stream for Mac and I’d imagine folks won’t notice when they use the app. I plan on doing any new iOS and Mac work in SwiftUI. I don’t see replacing the existing UIKit and AppKit code because it works. My plan is to do supporting UI like dialogs in 100% SwiftUI and leave the main UI bits alone until Apple tells me everything is going to break. This has happened in the past, see the Carbon API’s for more information. Thankfully my apps are tiny. 😁
If you have a WordPress blog, you can turn it into a Fediverse server, which means people will be able to follow the blog and comment on it from Mastodon etc.
Yep! This totally works! My test blog — Bahookey — is configured to work as a Mastodon server and you can carry on conversations on the Fediverse just like you would with any other Mastodon instance. The UI is very different but it works fine.
I’d love to have a feature added to WordPress that allows you to log in using a Mastodon client like Ivory or Mona and use it for replying. Baby steps.
Rudy Huyn, a Partner Architect at Microsoft, recently made an appeal on X (via Windows Latest) for software devs to form a new team that will build Windows apps. When queried over the specific nature of those apps, Huyn was very clear. “100% native”, he said.
I wonder how this is working out? I think it’s encouraging to see Microsoft eat its own dog food and I hope they’re fully embracing WinUI 3 and building beautiful native applications.
We’re living through a massive shift in the software security industry. Large Language Models (LLMs) are unlocking unprecedented capabilities for automated vulnerability discovery, scaling far beyond the limits of human security expertise, and requiring new approaches for staying ahead of attackers.
This means deploying AI models at scale to find and fix hundreds of security bugs, faster than ever, with the goal of achieving greater resilience and comprehensive remediation.
Here’s how we’re doing it.
They’re using AI, a lot, for Chrome development. Take some time to read through how they’re using it. This stuff can be configured in so many ways it’s incredible.
Security fixes alone will make AI worth the effort.
Say, has anyone at Apple used AI to do a port of WebKit to Swift? 🤔 That would be very interesting, but I’d imagine noone has the time for experiments like that.
Blogs always used to have comments, but they went out of fashion for a while. Well, now they’re hot again and fully supported in Pagecord Premium! 🔥
Pagecord continues to imporove as a blogging platform. Olly is killing it! 👍🏼
With a box office haul of just over $76 million, “Violent Night” was a modest R-rated success, and that was enough to convince Universal to bring Santa back for another round. The first “Violent Night 2” trailer has just arrived, expanding the lore of St. Nick by introducing his wife, played by “Frozen” star Kristen Bell. When it comes to Santa Claus being on the naughty list, losing his powers, and being forced to reckon with a mall full of armed criminals led by Jared Harris (“Chernobyl”), Mrs. Claus isn’t simply going to … let it go. (See what we did there?)
We loved this film, I’m a fan of David Harbour. He was great in the first movie and I suspect he’ll be great in this one as well. Having Kristin Bell as Ms. Clause is nice.
We’ll be there. 🎅🏼
In its first acquisition since going public last month, Bending Spoons on Tuesday said that it has agreed to buy spreadsheet and database startup Airtable for $1.28 billion in cash.
Bending Spoons is the place great applications and services go to die. I loved Evernote and used it for a long time. I abandoned it when they rewrote the apps. Their web clipper was the best in the business and it allowed me to save all kinds of stuff to read later. Stuff for blog posts and developer articles.
Now I split those between Unread and Plinky. Unread for saving articles to read later — for blog posts — and Plinky for longer term keeping. I also have quite a few items saved in Notion. So, yeah, Evernote served me well and I can’t see using it again. But who knows. 🤷🏻♂️ (Maybe I should try it again?)
Side note: I applied for a job at Evernote, interviewed, liked it, but I didn’t want to move to the Silicon Valley, so we ended the interview process there.
⚠️ Content Warning: Politics
Caitlin Hornik • The Independent
“We might be asking too much of Trump to reopen the Strait of Hormuz when he can’t even reopen the pool in his backyard,” Fallon added.
Trump is the ultimate knucklehead grifter. What a job.
