Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
It’s been an eon since I posted! Moving as an older couple — no, I’m not that old — is a bit more difficult than when we were 20, 30, or even 40. I’m in such bad physical condition it doesn’t help. Shame on me for allowing myself to become this way.
BREAKING NEWS: As I composing this, Gracie, one of our puppers, needed to go outside. Off to the left I notice a light I’d never noticed before. That’s because it wasn’t a light, it was a transformer on fire! It blew. Now we’re without power. Luckily my Air can run on battery for quite a while. Since I can’t make coffee I may have to run to the closest Starbucks! 😂
Anyway, I hope you have a nice piping hot cup of coffee or tea in your hand as you’re reading this. Enjoy the links. 😃
NOTE: After going out and getting my coffee I came home and fell back to sleep, I’m tired, and don’t feel well. I woke up just after noon. So, this is going to be an afternoon edition of Saturday Morning Coffee. 😃
Mike Ditka, who won NFL titles as a player and coach with the Chicago Bears, has died. He was 86.
R.I.P. Iron Mike. 🐻
Delivery estimates for the iPhone Duo slipped into next year in less than an hour after Apple opened preorders for it at 8AM ET on Friday.
The first question I asked myself was “Did they run out because they didn’t expect sales to be this high or was there a shortage of components?” I suppose either is likely.
I was never going to buy one because they’re just too rich for my pocketbook, but I sure do want one. 😃
For all my Mac apps of any notable complexity, I like to include a comprehensive (hand-written!) user manual. See the Octavo user manual and McKinley user manual for examples.
Amy knows how to ship software. I purchased McKinley because she’s an Indie and needs to be rewarded for her hard work and dedication to craft. McKinley is a beautifully built piece of software. It’s just the kind of software Mac users expect. To top it off Amy took the time to fully document it. That’s amazing! I don’t even think about manuals or help books. Shame on me! Good on Amy!
After reading the article go checkout her software.
[Liliana Fannin • Fresno Bee]
Fresno offers much cheaper housing prices than areas along the coast, with an average home price of $400,000, and was recently ranked as one of the 10 cities in the United States that have seen job opportunities increase.
You see these kinds of articles surface every few years, especially as home prices skyrocket in the Silicon Valley. Yes, it is a LOT easier to purchase a home in Fresno and the San Joaquin Valley of California but you have to be willing to pay in other ways. It’s extremely hot from May to October. It has air quality problems and if you’re an asthma sufferer you’ll struggle.
I grew up in Exeter, south of Fresno, and I love the valley but it’s not for everyone. If you’re ok with a nice dry heat you’ll do fine. You’ll just spend time in the Sierra or head to the beach on the Central Coast like most valley residents do. If you’re lucky you’ll have your own pool, but who knows how long that’ll be allowed given the constant drought situation?
Unlike Kim and I, my brother has been planted in his Fresno home for well over 20 years and he lives in a very nice neighborhood. One I’d love to live in if we were to move back.
Bruno Ferreira • Tom’s Hardware
Linus Torvalds posts his first AI-assisted patch to the Linux kernel, synthetic test clocks 23x performance leap — the bossman makes use of AI tooling himself after issuing clear pro-AI directives
LLMs are a very useful tool, that’s it, they’re tools, just like an editor or a debugger. There are many upsides as well as many downsides to their use. On the positive side they allow developers to do the same work much more quickly. I am still on an AI First team and using an LLM allowed us to move faster. It didn’t replace us, it just augmented our ability to produce code at a faster pace. I review all the code produced and I’ve hand made changes where I thought it was necessary, especially early on, but with the latest models and the addition of our own skills targeting the project it’s become very good at producing features that fit right into the existing codebase as if it were written by any one of the developers on the project. Granted, it was an existing project, with a team of developers who set the tone and rules of the road for the project. Claude adopted those rules fairly quickly and the skill reinforced them.
I’m not surprised to see Linus Torvalds trying LLMs on Linux. They’ve been trained on Linux and any other operating system they can get their hands on plus all the software in the world they have access to. They’re just a library of coding excellence as well as coding garbage but they have humans to keep them on the straight and narrow.
I’m also not surprised it was able to make a change that resulted in a 23x performance improvement. It’s still to be seen if that holds up under real world usage but it’s an interesting test case, isn’t it?
On the downside I hate a number of things about LLMs and their corporate masters. This is a very powerful technology run by greedy humans. Humans who want to be ultra wealthy and that’s extremely bad for the rest of us. I don’t want oligarchs in America running the country. Not to mention some believe LLMs will eventually kill us.
If reporting is to be believed AI companies are building data centers at such a fast pace they’re not considering the environmental impacts. Some states like Texas and Tennessee don’t seem to care so much about the average citizen and have allowed Space Karen and his ilk to operate disel powered generators to drive their data centers. That’s downright shameful. And then you have the water usage. I’ve heard they’ve solved for this by using closed systems. But those closed loop systems also pollute the water because they include a type of coolant. Also, shameful. It should be people before machines and these data center companies should be required to bring their own green / clean power and have a solution for water usage and pollution of that water. Not to mention the noise and light pollution issues associate with them.
That was underscored this week when the streaming giant Netflix began shedding 6% of its workforce, or about 1,000 jobs — believed to be the largest layoff in the company’s history and exceeding the last round of job cuts in 2022, when it reported subscriber declines.
It seems all big companies eventually run into some kind of disruption that requires scaling back but the number of layoffs in tech in the last few years has been staggering.
I’m so grateful to still be employed.
We’ve released NetNewsWire 7.2 for Mac with a new column view layout: choose View > Use Column Layout to switch. (Choose it again to switch back.)
Congratulations to the NetNewsWire team and Brent Simmons! This is a beautiful new(old) feature. The columns are really nice and are really bring a sense of organization to the app. I like the look but I still find a vertically oriented UI more to my liking.
I’m sure this new view will have a huge following. Great work y’all! ❤️
In iOS 27.2 beta 4, Apple changed the Apple Music app icon from white musical notes on a vibrant red background to similar black notes on a white background.
The reaction was immediate and overwhelmingly negative after the beta came out Tuesday. Apple Music fans slammed the change, with some calling it one of the company’s worst design choices ever.
My gut reaction to this change was “Oh, I don’t like that at all!” After reading a few articles about the hate it’s been receiving and thinking about it for a bit, I came to the conclusion it’s not so bad. When you read sheet music what do you see? Black notes on a white background and this new design breks Music out of the blue and white icon hell that’s become Apple applications.
My favorite version is still the Apple rainbow on a white background. 🌈
“We had six different doctors and they advised us not to do the show. They said it would kill him. Ozzy said, I know I’m dying. If I miss a few months of my life, I want to go this way.” Sharon Osbourne on Ozzy’s farewell live performance
I’m always a little puzzled by statements like “They said it would kill him.” It makes me wonder what kind of evidence they have to tell someone if you sit in this chair on a stage and sing, it will kill you. How bad off was the man? It must’ve been really bad.
Anyway, the man got to go the way he wanted. That’s more than most of us will get. 🦇
Introducing @socialspec.org: APIs for social engagement on the World Wide Web (of websites). Built on open standards.
I am absolutely fascinated with this little group of specifications. They’re all using open web standards to create a social like experience for websites. You’ll have to go read them to understand what I’m saying but I can tell you this, I want to implement this in Stream and I’d encourage other feed reader developers to do the same. It’s genius! Really excellent work, Caleb! 🙏🏼
Luca Versari, Moritz Firsching, and Philip Jägenstedt • Chrome Developer Blog
We’re excited to announce that Chrome is shipping decoding support for the JPEG XL (.jxl) image format starting from Chrome 155. JPEG XL is a next-generation image format designed to meet the needs of modern web developers and photographers. It offers 30-50% better compression than JPEG, lossless compression, built-in HDR support, lossless JPEG transcoding, and more.
I don’t have anything to say about this but web developers are probably going to love it, right? 🤔
Visual Basic’s initial release in 1991 was followed by five major versions (not including an ill-fated version for DOS). By the time Visual Basic 6.0 was released in 1998, its dominance was absolute: two-thirds of all business application programming on Windows PCs was done in Visual Basic. At its peak, Visual Basic had nearly 3.5 million developers worldwide, more than ten times the number of C++ programmers.
I LOVE VISUAL BASIC. I especially love the original, old school, version. The pre .NET Visual Basic, Classic Visual Basic as some call it. The story of how it came to be is even more interesting than I’d heard. Go read the linked story if you’d like to learn a bit about it.
I was a BASIC developer working on Accounting software when Visual Basic 1.0 was in Beta and we were lucky enough to get our hands on it, yes, through official channels if you must know! 😂 As a DOS mode developer it blew my mind that I could click on a button control in the palette, it would appear on the form, and I could double click it to write code for various different types of events supported by that control. It was absolutely genius. I have no idea how the current incarnation of Visual Basic.Net does it but I have a feeling it’s not as cool as Classic Visual Basic was.
Microsoft took Basic and this notion of programming for normal folks to the next level by embedding it into Excel and using it as the language behind Access. Then taking that experience and building Visual Basic for Applications. That opened the door to all kinds of amazing development for all the Office Apps and Visio. We were able to do really cool things with VBA and it allowed our users to do really cool things.
It’s surprising to me Microsoft let that whole idea get away from them. They stopped shipping and updating VBA 20 years ago and only touch the code if they need to. It’s still shipping in Microsoft’s Office apps, Visio, and other Windows Applications, like little known IntelliCAD, which was also a Visio product.
If you’d like to build a native Mac version of IntelliCAD, using native tooling, reach out, I’d love to chat about it. 😃
Alex Brown, Ashley Murray, Jennifer Shutt, Amanda Watford • Virginia Mercury
In the course of a single election cycle, the backlash against data centers has grown from an issue at local planning commission and city council meetings to become a flashpoint in state and federal races across the country.
Well, I alreaydy went off on my data center rant earlier. Suffice it to say I’m torn over our new technology. I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon but I sure wish it had been pursued as OpenAI was originally pursuing it. Having commercial software teams, university teams, and government oversight and support, I think, would’ve been a good idea. Do we need more hojillionaires running the world? No. Could we use a regulated LLM to help us build things and be responsible about it? Yes.
