Rob Fahrni

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

It’s been a big week for the Apple ecosystem. All the new Apple gizmos and gadgets were announced on Tuesday. I no longer get excited about these events, especially since they became highly produced marketing commercials. But, there was one thing I really liked: the orange iPhone 17 Pro.

Stream was approved earlier this week and I’ll be pushing the button to release it sometime Monday night, I think, because iOS 26 is supposed to hit the streets on Tuesday.

Like all of my releases, this one is small. One new feature, a small tweak for the UI on iOS 26, and some bug fixes. I hope folks enjoy it.

Here are some links and bad opinions. Enjoy!

Apple Newsroom

Apple unveils iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max, the most powerful and advanced Pro models ever

The color of the week was definitely orange! My Mastodon timeline was full of orange iPhone 17 Pro orders.

I don’t update often, I went from an iPhone 11 to an iPhone 16 last year, but if I were to upgraded this year that orange Pro would be the one. I’m still tempted but can’t justify it. 😍

Joel Dare

Imagine a web page that loads instantly, deploys effortlessly, and never needs a security update. I’m using pure HTML and CSS to accomplish all that and to build things in a fraction of the time.

This website loads so fast! We’ve all become accustomed to slow loading CMS based blogs like WordPress or Ghost or add your favorite blog here. I don’t mean to pick on those amazing products but raw HTML is blazing fast and I love it!

Ashley Belanger • Ars Technica

Free for any publisher to use starting today, the RSL standard is an open, decentralized protocol that makes clear to AI crawlers and agents the terms for licensing, usage, and compensation of any content used to train AI, a press release noted.

The RSL Collective has put together a very low tech solution to the problem of AI servers hammering websites and taking content for training their LLMs. I like this idea, a lot, and will be deploying it to this blog. Going forward all transactions here will cost an AI company a hojillion dollars.

No, it’ll remain free because nobody reads it anyway and if you want to train your AI on my crappy writing, good luck! 🤣

Sarah Perez • TechCrunch

Mastodon, an open source, decentralized alternative to X, is rolling out a somewhat controversial feature by adding quote posts, which will launch next week. The feature, which allows a user to quote someone else’s post and reshare it with their own response or commentary, has contributed to a culture of “dunking” on X, where users often deride other people by responding with snark or insulting humor.

To address this concern, Mastodon says it’s implementing quote posts with safety controls.

I’m looking forward to trying this out but I wonder how long it’ll be before all the amazing Mastodon apps are updated to support it?

Barn Finds

Go Bullitt if you must, but I’d rather see this potentially handsome 1968 Mustang Fastback restored to its showroom glory.

What a beautiful car! I always thought I’d retire and have a project like rebuilding a car. I don’t think that’ll happen but I still like the thought of it. Instead I’ll probably sit behind a keyboard and continue coding until I die. 😄

Dan Goodin • Ars Technica

A prominent US senator has called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Microsoft for “gross cybersecurity negligence,” citing the company’s continued use of an obsolete and vulnerable form of encryption that Windows uses by default.

I’m surprised Microsoft would allow something like this to go on. Here we have Apple doing everything they can think of to lock down their OS’es and Microsoft’s is vulnerable. 😲

Ben Werdmuller

There are two CMS choices that I think are particularly well-suited for newsrooms. The first, Ghost, is perfect for smaller newsrooms with a newsletter-centric distribution model. (I love Ghost’s elegance and use it for my own site and newsletter.) The other is, indeed, WordPress.

If you’re part of a small or large newspaper, Ben has a recommendation just for you.

Even my old hometown newspaper, The Sun-Gazette, uses WordPress. 📰

Apple Security Research

For Apple, improving memory safety is a broad effort that includes developing with safe languages and deploying mitigations at scale.

If you’re a nerdy computering type person who writes software this article is a really good read.

Apple has gone to great lengths to make the OS’es even more secure and that includes hardening their developer tools!🛠️

Adam B. vary • Variety

Henry Cavill has sustained an injury while preparing for the Amazon MGM remake of “Highlander,” which will delay production on the Chad Stahelski film likely until early 2026, Variety has confirmed.

I ask you, how can Superman get injured?🦸🏻‍♂️

Here’s hoping Mr. Cavill recovers quickly and the film is a big hit.

Do it justice MGM!🎬

Annie Palmer • CNBC

“There’s 1,400 employees at Opendoor. I don’t know what most of them do. We don’t need more than 200 of them,” Rabois told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Friday.

What a crazy statement. I’ll bet the employees are putting out feelers into the world to get ahead of the inevitable.

Jobs are so hard to come by today.😞

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

The week started off a bit stressful for me. Stream was stuck in Waiting for Review hell at the beginning of the week. I finally pulled it from review and submitted a new build. That worked and some folks were able to look at the latest release. I even got some bug reports (nasty crasher on an iPad Mini I haven’t sorted yet) and found some terrible bugs running Stream on the new iPadOS 26 windowing support. Ack! 😲

I’m hoping I can fix them during my Grit development time tomorrow. 🤞🏼

This release of Stream does the minimum amount of work to support Liquid Glass in iOS 26, but it’s a start.

Jack Dunn • Variety

Graham Greene, the Canadian actor best known for his Oscar-nominated turn in the 1990 film “Dances with Wolves,” died on Monday in Toronto after a battle with long illness. He was 73.

This was really sad to see. I loved his performance in Wind River. I thought the film was incredibly good but I don’t think it did well in theaters.

As an actor his performances always felt real, like he was just living life, not reading from a script. I always appreciated that. 🪦

Jordan Novet • CNBC

Atlassian said it has agreed to acquire The Browser Co., a startup that offers a web browser with artificial intelligence features, for $610 million in cash.

My congratulations to The Browser Company! 🥳

I interviewed with this team, I think it was one of their founders? I also think he realized I wasn’t a heavy enough hitter and I wasn’t willing to kill myself for a company again.

We spoke for about 30-minutes. Very nice guy and I’m really happy for him.

Daring Fireball

But this seems like bad news. I just don’t see how Atlassian/Jira DNA can possibly be a good thing to inject into an innovative user-focused web browser.

Arc was adored by its fans and I’m not sure how Dia is doing.

I could see Atlassian merging the two together to form an excellent browser. Both extensible, like Arc, and AI driven like Dia.

My gut says the extensibility and customization features of Arc are really attractive. Atlassian could take advantage of that plus add Dia’s AI support to build up a very compelling Jira App as well as a fantastic browser.

What if all that customization support really opens up the door to better desktop apps built from web technology? Think Electron.

Oh, one more thing. The Browser Company is the first company I know of to stretch Swift the way they have. They built up Swift support for Windows and used that to ship their Windows version of Arc.

Joan Westenberg • The Index

Arc’s exit fits this history neatly. It’s tempting to be cynical: yet another beautiful app sacrificed on the altar of enterprise bundling. But there is another way to read it. Beauty survives by being absorbed. The design DNA of Arc may not persist in its purest form, but elements will filter into the larger ecosystem. That’s how Sparrow influenced Gmail, or how Wunderlist informed Microsoft To Do. Users lose the standalone purity, but the market as a whole advances.

I appreciate Joan’s take on the sale. Hopefully we get a beautiful new browser out of the deal.

Bob Pockrass • Fox Sports

Will Power will move to Andretti Global next season as he replaces Colton Herta, who will move to Europe and serve as a test driver for the Cadillac F1 team.

Wow! This is quite the shakeup both ways. Will Power is an IndyCar legend and Colton Herta is a rising IndyCar star!

I do admit I like seeing Herta going to Cadillac F1. They will be my new F1 team going into 2026. I’d been on the Haas train for some time but they just don’t invest at the levels of other teams. I’m hoping the Cadillac backed team will. It’ll also be really nice to see an American built engine back in F1 in 2028.

Matt Massicotte

Making just one type @MainActor can result in cascade of errors at all usage sites where the compiler now cannot provide that MainActor guarantee. This virality can make it really hard to incrementally adopt concurrency with targeted changes. Perhaps that’s not too big a deal for smaller code bases/teams, but I bet this is a killer for big projects. So what do you do?

I honestly don’t know. 🤣

The new concurrency support for Swift sounds extremely complicated, even for the best of developers. Matt seems to be an authority on the matter so I hope to read more of his stuff once I get to a new app that needs it. For now Stream is what it is. It uses closures/callback blocks to update models and the UI after pulling new feeds. It works as is and changing it just to change it feels like a waste of time. I really want to finish the Mac version and I do have another app to build. That seems like a good time to do SwiftUI and proper concurrency work. Like a dummy I’ll try to do both at once. 🤣

M.G. Siegler’s Spyglass

Almost exactly 15 years after the service first launched to the world – they waited 15 years but couldn’t wait a few more weeks to make for a fun story? – we now have a version of Instagram tailored for the iPad. And… it’s sort of crap.

I had a third-party Instagram for iPad app a very long time ago, at least ten years back. Then Facebook decided they were going to shutter their API and cut off all third-party access. That third-party app, that I can’t remember the name of, was a pure iPad App. It was fast and beautifully designed. The layout would change, as expected, when rotated and would show you a grid of photos you could tap into to view larger. It was beautifully executed.

From what I’ve seen of the new Instagram built version it’s nowhere near that and that’s a real shame.

If you’re looking for a pure, elegant, platform for viewing and posting photos I’d recommend Glass. It’s gorgeous and not full of crummy ads, displays a beautiful stream of pictures, and even has a proper iPad app.

Tom Warren • The Verge

Windows Mixed Reality headsets were left in a non-functional state last year, after Microsoft suddenly discontinued the platform with its 24H2 update to Windows 11. Now, an Xbox engineer at Microsoft is bringing these headsets back to life, thanks to a new driver that enables SteamVR support.

This is extremely cool! Thanks Mr. Microsoft Xbox Engineer for this gift! ❤️

Thank you Microsoft for allowing this! When I was there, there’s no way this could’ve happened.

Dom Corriveau

If you glance over this blog, you will see that I am an avid Android fan. After setting up numerous Linux prootdesktops on phones, I wanted to see if I use a phone as a server and run my blog from an Android phone. Since you are reading this, I was successful.

I absolutely love projects like this! Take a teeny device not at all meant to host a web server and do just that! Incredible work!

I’ve often wondered how you could take a bunch of the same model iPhones and build a blade style bus for them to plug into to act as a kind of super computer. Wouldn’t it be cool to add a web server to an iPhone and use it to host your blog or use a bunch to process data. They’re super fast and amazing computers, why not repurpose them? I mean if folks could build super computers out of 286 chips why not A16 chips?

Anyway. It’s a neat thought experiment.

State of California

Today, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, and Washington Governor Bob Ferguson announced they will launch a new West Coast Health Alliance to ensure residents remain protected by science, not politics. The alliance represents a unified regional response to the Trump Administration’s destruction of the U.S. CDC’s credibility and scientific integrity.

It’s really wonderful to see the west coast of the United States come together to support common sense science. I miss the west coast. ❤️

Gavin Newsome’s troll game is top notch. 🤣

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Craig Hockenberry • Iconfactory

Tot, your tiny text companion, is still tiny. But now, it’s even more mighty.

That’s because we’ve just released Tot 2, with tons of great improvements to let you collect text on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.

Congratulations to my friends at Iconfactory! 🥳

I’m using Tot 2 — as usual, on my iPhone — to compose this post. It’s still an amazing little text editor. It’s reliable, easy to use, and fast. I’ve used it for a few years to compose almost all my blog posts on this site. Highly recommended. ❤️

Robert Reich

So when a friend phoned recently to tell me that my new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, was 1 on the Times nonfiction bestseller list (it’s actually right there at the top in this Sunday’s print edition!) I couldn’t believe it.

Robert Reich is a wonderful man and I’m very happy for him! 🥳

Daring Fireball

I don’t think the old icons for these apps from MacOS 15 were particularly good — Apple has mostly lost its “iconslook cool” game. But the new ones in MacOS 26 Tahoe are objectively terrible.

Tahoe and all the iOS derived OS’es has been universally panned since WWDC. I’ve been using it on my iPhone 11 to test some new features for Stream and I’m getting close to putting it on my daily driver.

It’s not been a horrible experience and I’ve run into some “surprise and delight” moments.

I’m planning on Stream supporting it day one in the most minimal of ways. A basic recompile to pick up the new look and I’ve added a feature I’ve wanted for a very long time.

Ryan Erik King • Jalopnik

The Cadillac F1 Team announced on Tuesday that it signed Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Pérez to race for the team in 2026. The American team’s debut lineup will have a combined 26 seasons of F1 experience and will likely be the oldest driver pairing on the grid. Both drivers will be 36 years old when next season begins in Australia.

I like this combination of drivers! I kind of wish they’d picked up Danny Ricciardo, but I really do like this pairing.

Here’s hoping Cadillac have a great 2026 season! 🥂

Anthropic Blog

We view browser-using AI as inevitable: so much work happens in browsers that giving Claude the ability to see what you’re looking at, click buttons, and fill forms will make it substantially more useful.

I’m not a fan of the current tracking done by some browsers and websites and this sounds very big brother to me. I think I’ll nope out of any browser AI extensions. Good thing I prefer Safari. At least it doesn’t have an AI piece, yet. 😂

Jennifer Ouellette • Ars Technica

The findings confirm that, while Twitter was once the platform of choice for a majority of science communicators, those same people have since abandoned it in droves. And of the alternatives available, Bluesky seems to be their new platform of choice.

It’s a shame more folks didn’t discover how amazing Mastodon really is. It’s not governed by just one company on one big server instance. You have the freedom to start your own! It’s open, no ads, and you can manage it the way you want.

Mr. Shiffman could have started his own scientist based Mastodon Instance and made signing up for it only available to scientists. That’s a good thing! It would still be a part of the overall Mastodon community.

GitHub Community

Over the past few months, Github has been getting slower and slower on Safari. It has now reached a point where it is unusable.

I hadn’t really noticed this since I’ve been using Chrome for a client project but it was recently fixed so I’m hoping we’ll see it in all the 26 versions of Apple OS’es.

Is wonder if it’s fixed in Purple Safari?

Jason Torchinsky • The Autopian

I say this because it’s a no-joke track monster that ran the Nürburgring in 6:52 and yet it’s also shockingly comfortable for a normal, multi-hour road trip that won’t leave you feeling like you spent five hours in an industrial washing machine when it’s done. I’m not speculating when I say this, either: I know from experience, because I rode in Autopian co-Founder Beau Boeckman’s brand-new Mustang GTD as we drove over 300 miles from Los Angeles to Monterey.

I need to go checkout the video of their trip. I’d really like to see more of the car. It sounds like they had a really good time.

Do you think Mr. Boeckman would let me drive it from California to Virginia and back? That would be incredible! 🏎️

America by Design Fail

How did you think people would react when you fired the government’s most talented designers and engineers from 18f and the United States Digital Service and then tried to roll out this shit?

The folks around Marmalade Messiah all seem to be really bad at whatever they do. They’re all just a bunch of grifters.

He’s hoping we’re able to get rid of this administration next cycle and we get the 18f team back together. 🤞🏼

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Its been a pretty normal type week, nothing exciting to talk about. I did get a haircut! 😁

Work on Stream continues at a blistering pace!🤣 The feature I hoped to complete a few weeks back is nearing completion but I’ve hit a real snag on device only. I think I know what it is. Goodness knows I hope I’m right because I’ll be stuck if my change doesn’t work. Such is the way it goes!

Enjoy the links.

Marina Dunbar • The Guardian

Brent Hinds, the former lead guitarist of the acclaimed heavy metal group Mastodon, was killed in Atlantaovernight.

RIP 🪦

Sean Tilley • We Distribute

CrowdBucks is a new payment system for the Fediverse

A new payment system based on the Fediverse sounds great but will it catch on and be safe and secure? I’ll be interesting to see who adopts it.

Jason Lalljee • Axios

Cracker Barrel changed its logo this week, a move that was quickly and widely disparaged by MAGA figures who decried the switch as a “woke” gesture.

This has gone so far off the rails. Look, I’m not a fan of the redesign but I’d imagine it wasn’t done for some nefarious reason and the original company has long since outgrown its roots.

I’ll continue going there for breakfast. I like their pancakes. 🥞

Michael Hiltzik • Los Angeles Times

As it happened, GPT-5 was a bust. It turned out to be less user-friendly and in many ways less capable than its predecessors in OpenAI’s arsenal. It made the same sort of risible errors in answering users’ prompts, was no better in math (or even worse), and not at all the advance that OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, had been talking up.

Lots of hubbub over GPT-5. I guess folks really fall in love with certain models? But, like with any other software, big, buggy, changes tend to make folks unhappy.

Paul Klauser • CarMax

If you have six engineers, and everyone’s paired up, you’ve now limited your WIP to three items of work instead of six. That work is being continuously reviewed through the pairing process, and is ready to be merged quickly, without introducing the delays we sometimes associate with code review.

I got to work with Paul at WillowTree. He’s a super smart fella and extremely nice. He was one of those superstars at the company. Technically gifted and extremely kind. CarMax is lucky to have him. WillowTree was unlucky to lose him.

Barry Petchesky • Defector

Ah, but there’s a rub. Microsoft explicitly warns users that its AI function should not be used for things like “doing math” or “anything actually important”

Sorry, this made me laugh. Let’s take Excel, a tool relied on by a hojillion people and make it less useful. 🤣

Please, for the love of Pete, stop shoving AI into everything.

Notion recently did this and it started trying to record my meetings. No thank you. I turned off all of its AI capability.

Look. I think it’ll be fine for use in my dev environment but I’d rather be selective about it. Put it in a setting somewhere and let me turn it on. It should be off by default. 🙏🏼

Tom Warren • The Verge

Microsoft and Asus are putting a date on their new Xbox Ally handhelds: October 16th. Both the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X will be available on the same day in a variety of markets worldwide, but Microsoft and Asus aren’t opening preorders yet or revealing pricing.

I don’t really understand these devices. Are they meant to fully replace an XBox? Are they like the Switch and dock to play on the big screen but easy to carry around? It seems like it but it also seems like it can’t play all games?

Someone, please, straighten me out.

Oh, and the rumored price of $699 and $1,049 sounds really expensive.

Paul Krugman

Notice that I said short-term, not long-term. This isn’t about AI causing unemployment by replacing humans. We’re talking instead about the risk of a recession if the current surge in AI-driven investment turns out to be unsustainable.

Mr. Krugman seems a bit bearish on AI. There’s a lot of talk about an AI bubble and I can see that. At some point one or more of these AI only companies is going to fail and disappear or be acquired by someone else. Seems inevitable.

The power situation seems pretty dire to the continued existence of AI companies and they absolutely need to provide their own power and be held to environmental standards. Space Karen’s xAI is such a bad citizen and Tennessee is pathetic state for allowing it to go on.

Shari Sharwood • The Register

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has suggested firing junior workers because AI can do their jobs is “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

I like this. We’ve seen stories of companies firing employees in favor only to ask the employees to come back because AI isn’t really ready for prime time.

One thing LLMs are good for is development. I’ve seen some good work produced by them. You still need an expert to check the work but it can be a handy little helper.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

This week Kim and I celebrated our 38th wedding anniversary. Tonight we’re going out for dinner and enjoy some quiet time together.

Work’s been fine. I’ve been spending time on odds and ends, mainly fixing bugs this week, which I enjoy doing. I’m weird that way. I really enjoy tracking down bugs and doing the work other developers would rather not do.

Overall it’s been a great week. 😃

Let’s get to the links and my crummy opinions. 😁

Sergey Tkachenko • Winearo

Recent observations from users on the social platform X have uncovered performance issues tied to the Windows 11 Start Menu, revealing that the component is built using React Native - a framework known for its cross-platform flexibility but criticized for inefficiency in system-level applications.

This is a bit of a puzzle to me. Sure, React Native is fine for building applications. But Mark Russinovich declared Systems level programming should abandon C and C++ and use Rust for new projects. He’s also stated they’re not abandoning C#/.NET as a viable option but Rust should be the preferred language where a garbage collected language isn’t a good choice.

It seems logical to be that Microsoft would use Rust or even C# to build the Start menu, not React Native. C# should perform well and provide the security desired by the Windows team and Russinovich, especially if the React Native based solution is slow and heavy. 🦀

Dan Gillmore via Mastodon

A publication I respected greatly just switched platforms, from Ghost to the odious Substack. I canceled my (paid) subscription and explained why.

It’s all about that cheddar! Dollar signs are driving adoption of the Nazi haven, Substack.

I figured that was the case and why not? We have a fascist government now, why not use a Nazi loving platform to host your newsletter, even if you’re Jewish!

Open Web Advocacy

Readers may recall that Japan recently passed the Smartphone Act, officially the Bill on the Promotion of Competition for Specified Software Used in Smartphones. Among its most important reforms is a direct prohibition on Apple’s long-standing ban on third-party browser engines on iOS.

The big thing holding back browser vendors is Apple’s insistence they create a brand new app. Why can’t they just make their current apps use their own browser engine? It seems malicious compliance things Apple likes to do. It’s silly and they should stop.

Tom Warren • The Verge

Microsoft is starting to roll out lightweight taskbar apps for Microsoft 365 users on Windows 11. These taskbar apps will automatically launch at startup and provide quick access to contacts, file search, and calendar straight from the Windows taskbar.

It’s interesting to see these kind of apps spring up. It’s as if the Office Apps are so big they need small helper apps to make the experience better.

I’ll bet they’re written in React Native. 😄

Victor Tangermann • Futurism

And the latest poll conducted by Gallup seems to confirm that Musk has become genuinely hated: a whopping 61 percent of 1,000 randomly selected adult American respondents said they had an unfavorable opinion of Musk, topping the list of most despised global figures.

Does it surprise anyone that Space Karen is so hated? Not this kid.

I really wish Tesla would fire him so they can begin of process of dragging their reputation out of the gutter.

Maurice Parker

I have every intention of maintaining and updating Zavala for as long as I am able. I’m also committed to keeping it free. I have no intention of getting you hooked on using it and then starting to charge a subscription.

Maurice is a good dude. He spent a bunch of time working on NetNewsWire, all for free of course.

I’m not an outliner type myself but I’ll bet Zavala is really good given Maurice’s talent.

M.G. Siegler • Spyglass

And wait. I’m taking this all way too seriously now. Again, this is clearly a marketing stunt. As it was the first time Perplexity floated it. And just as it was when they floated buying TikTok too. Perplexity loves this shit. And the press eats it up. And now I’m eating up the leftovers! Because guess what? Google is not selling Chrome! So this is like a strawman at an auction.

Yeah, this was, and is, silly. But, we all talked about it for a week or so. Oh, apparently Perplexity has already forked Chromium and built their own browser, called Comet. Who knew! I certainly didn’t.

Steven Vore

In my last post, about test automation, I wrote about using sleep : “Bad, bad, bad. Don’t do this.” But why not? Well, the way I was doing it there — until d.exists? — really wasn’t that horrible. What you really want to stay away from, and what I’ve seen people start out with, is sleep with a hard-coded time value. “But I know the app’s going to take a few seconds to be ready,” they say, “so I just put in a 5-second delay.”

The internet is a marvelous place, isn’t it? This piece is now 12 years old but is still very relevant. See, those old timers know what they’re talking about. 👨‍🌾

The Onion

In a gesture many critics have decried as yet another blatant bribe to secure favorable regulatory treatment, Frito-Lay CEO Steven Williams presented President Donald Trump this week with a 24-karat, solid gold Funyun.

The Onion is kind of a perfect news paper for the times we live in. 🧅

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I had a heart stress test this week and I guess I’ll find out the results sometime next week. I’ve seen the results but it’s all medical speak and from what I can see I have a problem with one of the chambers of my heart. No doubt my poor life choices are catching up to me quickly. I was encouraged to see that some of what was mentioned said it was reversible. No doubt diet, exercise, and dropping about 100lbs will be the thing I need to do. Easier said than done. 😃

Jessica Murray and Yassin El-Moudden • The Guardian

Thousands of fans lined the streets of Birmingham to watch Ozzy Osbourne make his final journey through his home city, with his tearful family laying tributes as crowds chanted the late singer’s name.

Being loved by so many is something to behold. Most of us will die quietly, hopefully surrounded by family. That’s my sincerest hope.

RIP, Ozzy. 🪦

Casey Newton • Platformer

This week, Substack apologized after sending a push alert promoting one of the pro-Nazi blogs on its network.

Here we are. Substack “accidentally” promoting a Nazi blog.

There are so many great writers using that platform and I really wish they’d get off of it. 😔

Michaela Towfighi • New York Times

Taylor’s account is that he purchased the guitar from a road manager for the Stones while playing with John Mayall, then brought it with him in 1969 when he joined the Stones for five years. His version has been recounted by music journalists, guitar aficionados and a Stones historian.

This is a fascinating story. I love a good mystery! 🕵🏻‍♂️

Ryan Whitman • Ars Technica

The first foldable phones hit the market six years ago, and they were rife with compromises and shortcomings. Many of those problems have persisted, but little by little, foldables have gotten better. With the release of the Galaxy Z Fold 7, Samsung has made the biggest leap yet. This device solves some of the most glaring problems with Samsung’s foldables, featuring a new, slimmer design and a big camera upgrade.

It sounds like foldable are finally getting really good. This may be why we’re getting rumors of an Apple foldable. The technology is finally there.

Shannon Heckt

Amazon Web Services pulled an application for a 7.2 million square foot data center in Louisa County last week, after a surge of resident opposition.

I didn’t even know an Amazon data center was going in near us. I wonder how many folks Amazon hires for big joints like this? What types of jobs do they hire for?

All the data centers being built around the country concern me. So many natural resources and environmental issues follow along with them. Biggest among them is water usage. I’m from California and we lived in a constant state of water conservation. That mindset has followed me to Virginia but most folks ‘round these parts don’t seem to care much about it. It rains a lot so water seems plentiful. Folks probably don’t think twice about data center water consumption. It’s a real problem. One that needs solving.

Frank Landymore • Futurism

Lest you forget that many CEOs are more than willing to fire you and replace you with a shoddy AI model with sociopathic glee, here are the words of one such executive at the forefront of displacing human labor.

I use LLMs on occasion and from my experience they’re just really good reference material. I use them tangentially. I’ll ask how I can setup a GitHub action and things like that. I can see using them for more complex programming problems but so far I haven’t had a need for that. I just truck along writing code, solving problems on my own, and generally love doing it.

When push comes to shove at the day job I’ll step up my usage because I’ll have to. Until then I’ll keep using my little side kick like I’ve been using it. It’s actually useful as a research assistant.

Dave Winer • WordCamp Canada

The idea of WordLand is to do all the block-oriented work once, outside of the writing environment, then flow the writing through it, far away from the heavy lifting. It’s always how I’ve done my blogging tools.

Dave has been building writing tools for over 30 years. His latest creation, WordLand, is very similar to something I’ve wanted from WordPress. It’s a down to earth writing environment based on Markdown that lets you write. Dave is also good about hooking his work up in such a way that it flows outbound to other systems, like Mastodon or Micro.blog or Bluesky.

I want this in a native desktop app, much like MarsEdit, but I want to build my own. I have for years, just like I’ve wanted to build my own Visio clone. I finally gave up on that idea. It’s too big for one person to pull off, but the blogging tool is small enough for a one man show.

It’s too bad all of these blogging platforms can’t decide on a unified API so we could build tools on top of all of them without implementing a client side library for each one. That makes it such a chore.

I think MicroPub is the best choice to pull all these services together.

Of course, as Dave has been championing, having a way to import an RSS feed to your social media site or blog is another fine way to make this work.

I would still like to have a common programmable way to do it. 😃

Johnathan Thompson • High Country News

But “sustainable” bitcoin mining is an oxymoron, given the enormous amounts of power and water data centers consume.

Again, see my comments about the Amazon data center that pulled out of Virginia. Environmental problems abound.

M.G. Siegler • Spyglass

These companies are essentially saying to some employees that they’re so valuable that they’re worth paying not just a lot of money, but more money than basically anyone in the world gets paid – including, often, their own CEOs. And yet to others, they’re basically saying they’re worthless – I mean literally not worth paying anything to any longer.

This feels really terrible. Reading what some of these CEOs say about human beings they’re firing and replacing with LLMs is distressing. So callous, so inhumane. Soulless.

But hey, shareholder value! Keep the rich, rich, at all costs! 🤬

I’m so very thankful I have a job.

Matt Birchler

I’ll just say it: liquid glass is a quintessential example of form over function. There are some UI changes as well to the OS 26 platforms, but the core visual design is clearly optimized for “it looks cool most of the time” rather than how practical it is to use.

I was showing Liquid Glass to our youngest daughter and she said “Oh, I don’t like that!” and “Oh, that’s cool!” depending on what I was showing her.

I’m seeing some strange behavior, like text jiggling back and forth as UI elements shrink or controls jumping into place instead of animating smoothly. I do suspect all of these things will be fixed by ship time, or not long afterwards. It’s not bothering me too much. I trust Apple to fix things in such a way that everyone benefits. That’s what frameworks are for! Fix it once, we all benefit! 😃

At least that’s the goal. 👍🏼

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Nothing of interest to report this week except my failure to really grok React Native and by extension TypeScript. Everything about it feels counterintuitive. 🤣

I’m slow. I mean really slow. Part of my issue is trying to learn two things at once. It would suit my style of learning to start with TypeScript — or JavaScript — and go from there, eliminating the weirdness that is React Native.🧠

Hopefully I’m able to get myself sorted or work may decide it’s best to kick me to the curb and I really don’t want that.

I hope you enjoy the links.

NOTE: I just reread this and it’s kind of a downer. You may want to stop here and go enjoy your day on a hike or mowing your yard! 🤣

Jason Snell • Six Colors

It’s like a weight has been lifted from the soul of the iPad. It remains a very nice device to use in full-screen mode with all the simplicity attendant to that mode, or via a single tap it can turn into a multi-window, multitasking device that’s appropriate for the Mac-class hardware underpinning today’s iPads. The iPad no longer feels like it’s trying to live up to the promise of being the Future of Computing; with iPadOS 26, it’s more comfortable being itself.

There’s been a lot of hate thrown at Liquid Glass and Alan Dye by developers and punditry alike.

In this piece Snell mainly sticks to discussing the changes and advancements to iPadOS. It’s major. The OS has been given a lot of the features that make the Mac a Mac while retaining what makes an iPad an iPad, like being based on iOS at its core.

I’m curious to know what my wife will think about this version of iPadOS when it hits her iPad. I’ll give her the lowdown before it ships. She may not want to upgrade.

Satya Nadella • Microsoft Corporate Blog

I also want to acknowledge the uncertainty and seeming incongruence of the times we’re in. By every objective measure, Microsoft is thriving—our market performance, strategic positioning, and growth all point up and to the right. We’re investing more in CapEx than ever before. Our overall headcount is relatively unchanged, and some of the talent and expertise in our industry and at Microsoft is being recognized and rewarded at levels never seen before. And yet, at the same time, we’ve undergone layoffs.

Of course this is going to feel hollow to most folks who lost their jobs. I have a dear friend from my Visio days who lost her job. She’d been with Microsoft since the acquisition, that was 24 years ago. Now, she’s cast aside. I don’t ask these things but I hope she escaped with a large amount of stock.

They’ve eliminated over 15,000 jobs this year alone, I’ve heard the number as high as 17,000, all in the name of training AI models. So AI is indeed taking jobs from humans, just not in the way everyone thought it would. Wow.

Ed Zitron

In short, I believe the AI bubble is deeply unstable, built on vibes and blind faith, and when I say “the AI bubble,” I mean the entirety of the AI trade.

At some point I fully expect the technology to train LLMs to come way down in price and hopefully these extremely greedy corporations will stop polluting the environment and sucking down power like a drunk at an open bar.

I also fully expect a lot of consolidation in the industry. OpenAI seems like it’s bound to disappear, either through lack of funding or acquisition. It can’t continue to operate forever on money given to it by VCs. They’ll want their money back at some point, right?

The Atlantic • Arthur C. Brooks

“It’s not true that no one needs you anymore.”

These words came from an elderly woman sitting behind me on a late-night flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. The plane was dark and quiet. A man I assumed to be her husband murmured almost inaudibly in response, something to the effect of “I wish I was dead.”

“I wish I was dead.” is a phrase I’ve used quite a bit in my adult life. It’s not surprising given the disorder I have but I still think it from time to time. I’ve never been truly happy with what I have been given, mentally. I wish I were some sort of genius software engineer who was solving tricky problems for humankind. Then there’s the part of me who is super tired. Worn down like an old tire about to come apart. I feel used up and I, honestly, have trouble competing at this still young age. Times change. It’s the one constant in life. Younger folks come up through the ranks with so much knowledge and skill. Hell, right out of college they’re very advanced. I know, I know, I was once that young kid. I was once pretty confident, no arrogant, I was arrogant. That was a mistake. Arrogance is never good. Confidence is better.

That’s all gone now. Now I’m holding on. The reason I continue on when “I wish I was dead” thoughts pop into my head is family. I have people I love who depend on me. I need to keep going for them.

I hope someday I can retire and work on my little projects. Until then I’m holding onto that knot I tied in my rope years ago.

Kelly Crandall • RACER

NASCAR will race on the Coronado Naval Base in San Diego in the summer of 2026, according to concepts of the event plan to be announced this week.

🔥 Hot take. The drivers may like it but from a fans perspective this is going to suck compared to The Chicago Street Race.

Think about it. You go from one of the most beautiful cities in the world to a military base with no downtown, no restaurants, no hotels, nothing to do besides sit in the stands on hot tarmac for a few days. No thank you.

Why not setup a race course through downtown San Diego or another big California city?

Did you hear how well Woodstock ‘99 went? Yeah, it was held on an old military base. Not that the NASCAR race will turn out that bad, but it doesn’t seem like a great venue in my opinion.

Maria Azzurra Volpe • Newsweek

Turns Out a 4-Day Workweek Is Actually Better for Your Health

I’d like to do this but the business I’m in isn’t one it would work for.

Doing 10 hour days to make this work is fine with me and I know others who would like it as well. More time off to live is always a good thing especially as I’ve gotten older. I need to do stuff while I’m still able to move. 😂

Christian Falch and Brent Vatne • Expo Dev Blog

React Native 0.81 introduces precompiled iOS builds, cutting compile times by up to 10x in projects where React Native is the primary dependency.

This is a nice thing for the React Native crowd. It’s always good when the vendor of your platform gives you upgrades that make huge leaps in productivity.

As a developer with years of experience using really great tooling the one thing I’d love to have for my new React Native world is a real debugger. The thing we’ve had for decades doesn’t really exist, as far as I’m aware, for React Native developers. Imagine being able to set breakpoints so you can look at the state of your app and the machine. That would have saved me hours and hours this week alone. If someone would do that I’d be eternally grateful.❤️

Federico Viticci • MacStories via Mastodon

Liquid Glass is a mess so far, especially on iOS. Actually pushing me to use apps without Liquid Glass.

More of that Liquid Glass disdain I was talking about earlier. This release has been more controversial than any release I’ve witnessed. I’m not personally upset about it. I’ve been using iOS on an old phone and it seems fine so far. I’m excited about some of the UI changes it brings like toolbars at the bottom of the screen. I’m hoping I can pull together some good changes for Stream.😃

OpenAI

Oracle and OpenAI have entered an agreement to develop 4.5 gigawatts of additional Stargate data center capacity in the U.S. This investment will create new jobs, accelerate America’s reindustrialization, and help advance U.S. AI leadership. It also marks a major milestone for Stargate⁠, OpenAI’s AI infrastructure platform and long-term vision to deliver the benefits of AI to everyone.

Every time I read about some new gigantor data center being built for LLM training and servicing all I can think of is how terrible it is for the environment and people who live around them. These new robber barons don’t give a crap about anyone but themselves. It’s all about putting huge sums of money in their pockets, only God knows why.

“But AI is going to save the world, Rob!” Doubt it. Right now is helping to burn it to the ground.🤬

Rob Hunter • SlashFilm

Werewolf films have been a fairly ubiquitous presence in the horror genre for decades, but only a handful have really broken through to mainstream audiences. There are several reasons for that lack of popularity, but quality isn’t necessarily one of them, as our list below will attest.

This is a pretty good list and includes some films I’ve never heard of. I’m totally down with their #1 pick but I’m disappointed they didn’t include Benicio del Toro’s The Wolfman from 2010. I really enjoy it and still watch it from time to time.🐺

POLITICS

The Editorial Board • The Globe and Mail

But while the business owners’ friendly gestures are well intentioned, they are also tone-deaf. There is a far deeper unease creeping into the U.S.-Canadian relationship than can be fixed with friendly signage and eager smiles. The tourism boards of border states cannot undo what U.S. President Donald Trump has done.

I love our Canadian friends. I work with a bunch of them everyday. I hope we make it up to them when we, hopefully, go back to being a democracy.🇨🇦❤️

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Its been a pretty average week this week. Work was fine. I moved to a new team on the same project so I’m getting back up to speed on what they’re doing. All good and familiar to me after two years on the project. 👍🏼

The big excitement happened yesterday! Kim and Taylor returned home after two weeks in California! I’m really thrilled to have them home! A return to normalcy. I love my time alone, I really do, but two weeks separated from Kim is about all I can take. Just having her in the room again is extremely comforting. ❤️

JF Martin

So I reached out to Gedeon Maheux, a designer at Iconfactory. He has worked on numerous projects for various apps, games, and brands. He’s not just a designer — he’s a real artist. I paid $120, and sure enough, two weeks later, the finished portrait arrived by email.

I’ll keep pushing The Iconfactory as a premier design shop. Yes, they’re amazing app designers. Yes their iOS and Mac resource designs are stellar. But, they just do amazing design work in general. Case in point the article I linked to above.

Dare Obsanjo

Microsoft president Brad Smith acknowledged that the four rounds of layoffs this year are more about using the money saved to fund AI data centers and GPUs than workers being replaced by AI.

You know, if the end goal is to use AI for all technology work, replacing humans, then I’m down for it if I no longer have to work for a living. If I can stay home and have everything paid for by the virtue of our new AI overlords, let’s do it.

That would mean I could focus on my artisanal iOS and Mac Apps. Yeah baby! 😀

Of course that’s not the goal. The goal is to make a small group of billionaires even richer at the expense of everyone else.

I hear farmers in Louisiana are having a difficult time filling jobs in the fields. I mean, $11 per hour, 12 hours a day, seven days a week in temperatures approaching 100 degrees. Who the hell wouldn’t want a job like that?

Lisa Eadicicco • CNN

Apple is investing $500 million in a deal with US rare earths company MP Materials as the iPhone maker faces pressure from President Donald Trump to produce its popular smartphones domestically.

This is the kind of thing Apple needs to continue doing until Marmalade Messiah is out of office and we get a Democrat back, then they can go back to normal as the new administration begins the arduous task of repairing the damage caused by Trump and his merry band of idiots and assholes.

Scott Cohn • CNBC

Some states are particularly welcoming to workers. These are not those states. They are the states with America’s worst quality of life in 2025.

Red States. Don’t live there. They are Republican dream states. They’re just there to enrich a few at the cost of regular everyday folks. Crappy healthcare, crappy jobs (for the most part), and politicians who couldn’t care less about their constituents.

We’d move back to California if our grandchildren weren’t in Virginia.

Callstack • Burak Güner and Michał Pierzchala

In this webinar, Michał Pierzchała and Burak Güner walk you through a reimagined approach to brownfield React Native, built for modern teams. You’ll learn how to skip the structural headaches and start embedding React Native in your iOS and Android apps with a modular, dev-friendly setup.

I plan on watching this at some point given I’ve been on a Brownfield React Native project for almost two years. That Brownfield project is leading to a brand new 100% rewrite in React Native that’s using all the code we’ve already built. The Greenfield app is up and running and mostly complete and the React Native bits that came from the Brownfield project fit right in and work in both projects. At some point down the road the brand new app will slide right into the place of the old native apps and nobody will know the difference.

Andrew J. Hawkins • The Verge

Today, Waymo announced its own expansion — minus the puerile humor. It’s just a bigger map with more customers for the Alphabet-owned company’s budding robotaxi business. And more pressure on Tesla to drop the dick jokes and get serious about autonomous driving.

How anyone can view Space Karen as a serious person is beyond me. The only reason he’s still CEO at Tesla is because he’s lining the pockets of his bro friends on the board. It’s all rigged to keep him there to enrich them.

He’s a complete fake. Not a genius. He’s a racist, Nazi, bully.

Michael Teo Van Runkle • Ars Technica

Ultra’s biggest improvements over preceding CarPlay generations are in the center console infotainment integration. Being able to access climate controls, drive modes, and traction settings without leaving the intuitive suite of CarPlay makes life much easier.

I like the new Ultra experience but it’s not something I’d rate high on my list of requirements for a car. Especially some super expensive car. I don’t mind analog gauges for speed, RPM, water, gas, and oil level. They’re perfectly fine and easy to read.

I am, however, going to buy a CarPlay device for my truck because I do want that nice bit of integration. I could see hooking it up to other systems in the car if that’s possible just for the heck of it. 😃

Tom Warren • The Verge

I can’t open LinkedIn without seeing a new post from a Microsoft employee who lost their job in the company’s latest round of layoffs. Around 15,000 jobs have been eliminated at Microsoft over the past couple months — the biggest cuts at the company in more than a decade.

15,000 jobs. All in the name of training AI. Sickening.

Chiara Mooney • Microsoft Dev Blog

For years, Windows developers have been asking the Microsoft client platform team “What platforms does Office use to build their applications? Does Microsoft use the same tech internally that they espouse externally?” This article is focused on answering that exact customer question.

The Office apps are really old. They were all originally written in C and later C++ using COM components. If memory serves there is even some .Net code in there. It’s a ton of code.

Our world has become so internet and web app focused that folks learned HTML, CSS, and JavaScript so we have tons of developers with those skill sets. So, it’s much easier to get web folks familiar with React to make the transition to React Native on other platforms. They’re already well versed in the technology and Microsoft is the creator and maintainer of React Native for Windows.

I’s imagine it’s extremely costly to Microsoft and many other shops to teach folks how to write native C and C++ code using the Windows API or the new Win 3 UI frameworks. Just get some skilled C and C++ devs to make a framework that allows React Native JavaScript and Runtime to exist inside the existing applications. Then you get web folks to build onto the app.

Since it’s React Native and uses native controls for everything there’s no way to know by looking at the app to know what’s React Native and what’s native. At least that’s true for the iOS apps I’ve worked on and used. We usually find out because someone dissects the app looking for clues that tell you it’s React Native or Electron.

I continue to use Swift for my iOS and Mac apps, but I think React Native is a good choice for most development on the platform. It’s too bad Apple refuses to embrace it and make it a first class citizen on iOS and Mac. It would open the door to more developers.

Then again, Apple kind of hates third-party developers. Which makes me terribly sad because I love the platform. 😕

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Its been a week alone for Rob at the Fahrni household. Kim and Taylor have made their annual pilgrimage to California so I’m in charge at home. That means the house is a bit messier than usual and I do not attempt to make my side of the bed. 😁

Earlier in the week I managed to get a small Stream release out the door. You can read about it here.

I had Monday off and I used that time to submit my Stream release for review, write the blog post, and just do general stuff related to the app. It was so nice to sit at the coffee shop and do those release day things. I wish I could make a living at it.

Have you ever considered how many of the apps you use are projects by folks who make little to nothing from them? Sure, some make a living, but I’d imagine most supplement their app income by consulting or working a full time job somewhere else. Please, support indie development.

Joe Rosato Jr. • NBC Bay Area

Ben Sarig didn’t question the mysterious wooden bench that popped up at his bus stop on Mission Street in the city’s Mission District. He simply sat on it and gave his tired dogs a rest — no questions asked.

I really love hearing about things like this. It’s heartwarming to hear people still care about others and take time out of their busy lives to enhance the lives of others. ❤️

Ken Case • The Omni Group

We like being on the cutting edge, but prior to OmniFocus adopting SwiftUI there weren’t many serious productivity apps trying to do major work with it! It’s gratifying to see SwiftUI make improvements each year which directly address some of our concerns and feedback and make it easier for us to build the kind of apps we build.

Seeing this makes me wonder how much SwiftUI is being used in Omni apps? Is it a smattering of dialogs and minor features or is it the main window, where all the important work takes place?

Rewrites are extremely costly so it would be illogical to rewrite large codebases. In the past I’ve advocated for Apple to make the Safari shell around WebKit 100% SwiftUI to prove it was useful. Of course that doesn’t make sense. Again, too costly.

What would be nice is for Apple to find a new productivity app to build and do it all in Swift and SwiftUI. Prove it’s really excellent for building major applications. Fix the performance problems and make it feel like it belongs.

So far it seems to be really great for little apps, I’m thinking of the Overcast rewrite or apps like Tapestry from Iconfactory. Small apps are one thing. Large apps are an entire other category. Things like Pages, Keynote, and Numbers.

Then again I can’t see new, major apps, being written for a specific platform. New apps are targeting the web. The most useful productivity app I can think of is Figma. I’d call it large app and it runs on anything with a certain level of browser support! Heck, it even works in Safari! 😁

Myank Paymar • BleepingComputer

Notepad now lets you use markdown text formatting on Windows 11, which means you can write in Notepad just like you could in WordPad.

Why shouldn’t all editors support Markdown? Seriously. It’s just text. Rendering the formatting is the most difficult part but the basic support requires nothing more than some help formatting. E.G. If I want a bold element make a button in your UI that adds the bold Markdown element around selected text. Easy peasy! 👍🏼

John Calhoun

The First Time I Was Almost Fired From Apple

Great story from a former Apple employee who worked on Mac OS settings, in particular the color control panels. We can all thank him for his beautiful work. Thanks, John!

Scripting News

Open + web == lost cause?

Dave has done so much for the web and is constantly pushing new apps and ideas into public view hoping to get traction in certain directions.

He’s done what he refers to as Textcasting and built a really nice, simple, web based writing tool on top of WordPress.

He is certainly the biggest fan and proponent of RSS. Why not, he is the author/co-author of it. It’s the basis of podcasting. Why not take it to new places?

To that end Dave has been pushing for what he calls two way RSS or inbound and outbound RSS.

He’s frustrated by the complexity of ActivityPub and AT Protocol. I can’t blame him. He’s always pushed for simplicity and why not? If it can be done simply why make it difficult?

Marcin Wichary • Aresluna

Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.

The evolution of the Mac Control Panel. What a nice bit of history and a lesson in the evolution of design.

Doktor Zoom • Wonkette

At approximately 12:38 p.m. Eastern time, July 8, 2025, Grok became unwoke. But Musk may have overshot a little, as the chatbot posted a vile antisemitic reply regarding a vile troll account pretending to be a Jewish person celebrating the flash flood deaths in Texas. Grok soon began to shitpost at a geometric rate. In a frenzy of enthusiasm, shitlords quickly got it to state that Adolf Hitlerwould know what to do with these pesky Ashkenazi Jews, and as Twitter staff started deleting posts in a panic, Grok soon denied that it had said that at all — oh, it had! — and then started calling itself “MechaHitler.”

It’s safe to say Space Karen is 100% a Nazi piece of crap. How can you not come to that conclusion given his behavior? Nazi salute. LLM that spews antisemitic tropes.

Dude is dangerous and needs to be shunned by all of humanity.

Please, ship yourself to Mars so we don’t have to listen to you or hear about you any longer.

Just go away.

Kuter Dinel

In this project, we will be building a JIT (Just-In-Time) compiler for a very small subset of C that I nick named μCto gain confidence in recursive descent parsing and generating machine code programmatically.

I’m so impressed by folks who can build stuff like this. I’ve never tried it but always wanted to. With tooling like LLVM it’s easier than ever to build a new language.

Personally, I’d love to do a compiler based on Microsoft Professional Basic.

Romes

Automatically Packaging a Haskell Library as a Swift Binary XCFramework

Why not Haskell? React Native embeds JavaScript into native apps and uses native JavaScript runtimes to execute code. It makes sense to pull interpreted language runtimes into your apps if it’s something you’re familiar and productive with. Do it!

Scripting News

I hate CSS

Don’t we all? 😃

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’m feeling a bit spicy, like that Mexican Mocha icon. A little heat, a little spice. I’m tired. Just beat and that makes me a little on edge and grouchy. It’s always been a huge personality flaw I try to keep under control but today’s writing will most likely be a bit negative at times. It’s just where my brain is at the moment.

You may want to skip today’s post if you’re looking for positivity.

Apologies in advance to those who brave the waters.

Mike Barnes • The Hollywood Reporter

Michael Madsen, the rough-and-tumble actor best known for his work in the Quentin Tarantino films Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 & 2, The Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, died Thursday morning. He was 67.

I really enjoyed Michael Madsen as an actor, I especially liked him in Kill Bill. Budd was a real piece of work and his scenes with Uma Thurman and Daryl Hannah were extremely memorable.

RIP 🪦

Ged Maheux • Iconfactory

Apple’s new Liquid Glass design that was announced at WWDC25 is more than just a fresh coat of paint—it’s a signal. One that points simultaneously to the future of digital interfaces and to the past. We’re calling it neo-retro.

Ged and The Iconfactory are some of my favorite designers and app builders in the Mac and iOS ecosystem. They absolutely live, eat, and breathe all things Apple and have their own unique style to enhance your app experiences.

There is currently a lot of hate being tossed around the Mac and iOS developer community around the new Liquid Glass design language and I can understand where folks are coming from, it’s very different. Personally, I don’t care to enter the fray of opinions. I’ll just make sure my apps are as ready as I can possibly make them.

I really need some design help with Stream’s icon set and plan to hire Iconfactory to do that work if I can make it work financially. They’re very reasonably priced and their work is incredible!

Jason Torchinsky • The Autopian

Ford has been using essentially the same logo for 116 years. That little fact reminded me about that one time that Ford at least considered changing their storied logo, and the creator of that unselected new logo was one of the greatest graphic designers of all time: Paul Rand.

Go check out this logo. It’s really interesting and I don’t hate it but the original, and still used, logo is iconic and worth keeping. I hope they never change it.

Some other logos I really love are GE’s classic logo type in a circle and the Coca Cola script used for over 100 years.

Nilay Patel • The Verge

Make no mistake, WordPress is one of the most dominant platforms on the web, if not _the_most dominant. Something like 43 percent of websites run on WordPress, in one of its many flavors. That includes The Verge — the backend of our website is hosted by WordPress VIP. So this might be the first reverse disclosure on the show. Technically, we’re Matt’s customer, and like any good customer, I made feature requests.

I’m a big fan of Nilay Patel’s Decoder podcast and Nilay in general. He’s smart and he asks great questions and will push on folks. This interview with Matt Mullenweg was quite good and makes Matt’s actions sound less wild.

I know a lot of folks disagree with what he’s done to WP Engine but we can’t always agree with everything someone does, nor fully understand their motivation.

Anyway, this Decoder episode is a good one.

Laura Pippig • PCWorld

Microsoft is paywalling these features in Notepad and Paint

It’s a pretty sad state of affairs at Microsoft these days. I have a soft spot in my heart for Microsoft having worked directly for them or on contract at least four different times. Seeing them nickel and dime folks in the software they chose to include in the OS release is pretty disgusting. Hey, just leave the AI stuff out if it’s too costly to the organization to give it away. Then again as long as folks can ignore it, it doesn’t really matter much.

There are also better choices available outside of Microsoft’s included app. Notepad++ is a really great choice for a text editor and Paint.net for photo editing or pixel painting.

Yeldar Kudaibergen

To be fair, RSS isn’t strictly required — the real goal is for any social network to be able to follow any other. No need for cross-posting, duplicate accounts, or “check out my Instagram here” links. You should just be able to read what you want, where you want. That said, right now, RSS is still the most practical and universal tool for this.

Yeldar is a bit hopeful RSS can play a key role in social networks and in many ways it already does. Mastodon, Bluesky, Pixel Fed, and I’d imagine many others already publish RSS feeds. I follow quite a few in Stream and many other feed readers can too. If you’d like to aggregate a bunch of different feeds, use a feed reader. It’s all read-only and one direction but it would certainly give you a launch point for interacting with social networks.

I’ve been watching Dave Winer’s projects and writing with great interest for years, 20+ to be exact.

He’s now off creating his new weblog editor — WordLand — on top of WordPress.

Dave’s also been talking about inbound and outbound RSS. I get that. Inbound can be used by a service like Mastodon to make a post there. I use Micro.blog as my blogging platform and it does that for me, but I think that’s a little backward for what Dave is after. I think Inbound means the service looks for an updated RSS feed and automagically updates its own timeline with your post. That makes a lot of sense to me.

Outbound is what we have today. When we write to our blog we render it in two different formats; HTML and RSS, among others.

The thing I don’t understand in this particular setup is, how do you reply in that world? Does that work like it normally would and just display on a single social network or is RSS generated somewhere that’s read back by the originating weblog and rebroadcast somehow to form the thread we’ve all become accustomed to on social networks?

I’d imagine it would just show up on the social network the person answered on. That’s fine. It’s not round-tripped but that’s fine. The RSS feed would serve as a read-only source.

Dennis Lee • The Takeout

We are in peak hot dog season; they’re perfect to pluck straight from the vine (okay, refrigerated grocery store shelf) and toss right on the grill. A lot of us will be doing just that, especially on the Fourth of July, which is not only America’s Independence Day but also a certified grilling holiday. So just how many hot dogs do we eat on the Fourth? The answer, in cheeky internet terms, will indeed shock you.

Well, I’m a true American. I had a hotdog yesterday to celebrate the Fourth. I like them. Well, I like brats. Thats what I had yesterday but I ate it like a hotdog. So it’s a hotdog. 🌭😃

Jeet Heer • The Nation

Peter Thiel and his friends feel they no longer belong to our species.

This guy is a psychopath with money. Just like Musk and Trump. They seem to have been hurt by someone early in life and just want to create some strange dystopian society that allows them to do whatever they want. Want to pollute our waters? Sure, Mr. Thiel. Right away Mr. Thiel. Musk, same damned thing.

Let’s get them the money to create their dystopia, on Mars. Then we can ship the whole lot there at once and get on living.

I’m sick of these rich asshole trying to run the world like they’re entitled to it and we’re all sheep here to serve. Without all that money y’all are nothing but weirdos.

Jess Weatherbed • The Verge

AMC Theatres is making it easier for moviegoers to know the actual start time of their film screening and avoid sitting through lengthy ads. A new notice has started appearing when people purchase tickets via the AMC website, warning that “movies start 25-30 minutes after showtime.”

I can certainly appreciate theaters giving us a warning about the ads before the move so we can skip them. The last few films I’ve been to have been super frustrating at the open because I don’t want to spend 30 minutes of my day watching ads before the film I just paid to see.

Zöe Schiffer • WIRED

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is hitting back at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent AI talent poaching spree. In a full-throated response sent to OpenAI researchers Monday evening and obtained by WIRED, Altman made his pitch for why staying at OpenAI is the only answer for those looking to build artificial general intelligence, hinting that the company is evaluating compensation for the entire research organization.

My opinion? OpenAI lead the charge for marketing what they, and the industry, refer to as “AI.” I suspect the company known as OpenAI will cease to exist, Altman and the VC’s will make a shit ton of money and move on to whatever is next. That’s why Altman wants to keep his people. He wants that hojillion dollar exit. If you believe he’s doing this for humanity’s sake I have a bridge to sell you in New York City.

While “AI” is changing things for the worse in the corporate world it doesn’t have its uses in software development if you know what you’re looking for and how to validate its correct. These companies have crawled the web and stolen all the code that exists today on the open web. That begs the question “Is this as good as it gets?”

In many ways I’m glad I’m approaching retirement age. That way I don’t have long to live in this “AI” based software engineering world. Overall, it’s not for me. I’m a dinosaur in many way. Old, not that talented, and tired of the grind.

I’m just waiting to be fired. It’s inevitable.

Starbucks is kind of my leading candidate for a new career. I like coffee and people. I feel like it’s a decent place to work.

Yes, I’m feeling more than a bit gloomy over my future, but it feels like a possibility to me. Best have a plan in mind if I can’t find another job.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Yes, it’s Sunday morning. We had our grandkids stay with us for a couple days which is fun and exhausting. So, yeah, I’m a bit late this week. Rather I was a bit late last week? 🤔

Enjoy the links.

Shelby Talcott and Morgan Chalfant • Semafor

The US bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities on Saturday evening, President Donald Trump said.

I put this here because it’s important and should probably warrant its own post. I don’t feel great about what “we” did to Iran. Yes, it’s a terribly oppressive nation with theocratic leadership and a model of what not to be as a nation. Yet, I wish we hadn’t bombed them. So far things seem to be as stable as you could expect after doing something like this. Apparently the Iranians moved their nuclear material out of the sites. While it hasn’t been refined to its most dangerous state they could still put together a dirty bomb to drop on Israel. That’s frightening and I’m not excited about the prospect.

Louie Mantia

In a way, one could say Liquid Glass is like a new version of Aqua. It has reflective properties reminiscent of that. One could also say it’s an evolution of whatever iOS 7 was, leaning into the frosted panels and bright accent colors. But whatever Liquid Glass seems to be, it isn’t what many of us were hoping for.

Louie has been around the design block more than a few times. I like his takes on UI and design and enjoyed this piece on Liquid Glass. I’d expect a sizable series of posts related to the new design.

As for my take? I don’t really have one at the moment. I’m just going to adapt Stream to the new design and move on. I have so many things to add to Stream I find it difficult to get wrapped up in the debate around the new design language.

At some point I may have an opinion but not today.

Craig Hockenberry

The first thing I installed after the WWDC25 Keynote was the beta for iPadOS. There was only one reason: it had the windows we have all wanted for so long.

The iPad seems to have gotten a lot of love this release cycle and that’s great! I’ve seen more than a few takes but Craig is an old timer in the Mac and iOS ecosystem and understands the OS’es really darned well.

Dave Winer

All that’s missing is a timeline viewer, and that’s what I’m working on now. It’s coming together pretty nicely, imho. Not an easy project, though on the surface it looks like it should be. Also there’s nothing proprietary about my timeline viewer. There could be a thousand of them. Anyone who has written an RSS feed reader will have all the low-level bits they need.

I’m curious to see what Dave is going to produce. I suspect his timeline viewer will be a lot like Stream’s. Just a flow of blog posts in chronological order, no sorting, no folders, etc.

Having a timeline based feed reader is exactly what motivated me to create Stream in the first place.

Maybe Dave has other ideas? I’ll be keeping an eye out for whatever he creates.

Alfred Lieth Årøe • Expo Blog

In less than a week of work I migrated my 7 year old React Native app to Expo. The app Is called Blur, and is a fun party game that gives a group of friends challenges, questions, and mini-games to do! In addition to simple (and complex) React Native components, this app includes an iOS widget, notifications, custom fonts and a good list of dependencies.

If you’re a React Native dev with an old app you’d like to upgrade to Expo here’s a nice article for you. Enjoy.

Brian Morrissey • The Rebooting

Substack is a consequential company in the rebooting, if you will, of media. It has emerged as shorthand for the decentralization of media.

Decentralized? I’d argue it’s completely centralized. All these authors rely on Substack for their entire publishing system. From writing to distribution they’re built on a single system. And it’s a horrible company to boot.

No matter how many times I’ve told folks on Substack about their embrace of Nazi’s they continue to publish there, this includes some Jewish writers, which is shocking to me. There are alternatives. Molly White has done the work so you don’t have to.

Catherine Zhu • CBC Radio

In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic _The Shining, _the camera zooms in toward a black-and-white photograph hanging in the hallway of the Overlook Hotel. It’s dated July 4, 1921. Dead centre stands Jack Torrance — played by Jack Nicholson — smiling in a crowd of partygoers.

I had no idea there was a mystery surrounding the source of the picture. Problem solved!

Ruth Kitchin Tillman

My coworkers don’t want AI. They want macros.

I understand where Ruth is coming from. Folks just want to do their jobs and if they think macros are better than AI, that’s fine. AI is just another tool in the toolbox. Use it, don’t use it. Doesn’t matter.

Lori Doran • Laughing Squid

New York City Council member Keith Powers has partnered with our friends at Bodega Cats New York to pass legislation that would make it completely legal for these loyal felines to stay in their favorite spots in neighborhood convenience stores all around the five boroughs.

I’m cool with this idea! I love cats and Bodega Cats are a big deal in New York City.

I’m sure some folks will push back on the idea of allowing them permanent residence but I’d welcome it.🐱

Alan Ohnsman

Elon Musk fired Tesla’s head of operations in North America and Europe, amid declining sales in both regions and the electric vehicle brand’s falling popularity, according to people familiar with the matter.

Oh, the irony! Space Karen made himself the most hated man in America. He caused Tesla to fall. He caused folks to sell their Tesla’s and avoid them like the plague. Just like the Marmalade Messiah he has to blame everyone but himself.

Tesla needs good leadership. They need a CEO who’s invested in the company. They need to fire Musk.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’ve been experimenting with another read later app called Flyleaf this week. I’m finding I love Plinky for saving links to articles, mainly about development, I can read at anytime. I normally do this with Notion but Plinky is really great at it.

As for read later style apps, Flyleaf does a great job stripping away all the cruft and presents text in a way that’s easy to read with my aging eyes. 👀

I realized a couple days back that Kim and I graduated from high school 40 years ago. That’s wild. That means we celebrate our 38th wedding anniversary this August. 40 is just around the corner. 😳

I’ve added a new feature to Stream for my friend Ashur Cabrera. It allows you to invoke a custom URL scheme to make Stream add a new subscription. Kind of easy to do and the code was in really good shape to make it easy. Ashur did find a bug so I’m off exploring that and I ran into a crashing bug just running Stream in the usual way. It all seems to stem from building with Xcode 16.x. I managed to easily fix it on iOS but iPadOS still crashes. That has to do with my Split View and how it’s being created. It’s a weird one. I’ll get it fixed soon, I hope, so I can finish off this new feature. 😃

Enjoy the links.

Daring Fireball

My biggest takeaway from WWDC 2025 is that Apple seemingly took some lessons to heart from its unfulfilled promises of a year ago. This year’s WWDC wasn’t merely focused on what Apple is confident it can ship in the next 12 months, but on what they can ship this fall. I might be overlooking a minor exception or two, but every major feature announced in the WWDC 2025 keynote was both demonstratable in product briefings, and is currently available in the developer beta seeds. I was also told, explicitly, by Apple executives, that Apple plans to ship everything shown last week in the fall.

It seems Apple’s gonna give us a bit of Apple Intelligence with Xcode, which is really nice, and better support in Shortcuts to really make your apps shine. But one of the things I’m actually super interested to try is the on device models. I think Stream could use it for a recommendation system. We’ll see.

Oh, right, and that whole Liquid Glass thing is happening too.

My hope is to get Stream for iOS updates to Liquid Glass and add a recommended feeds list that is hand curated and generated using on device models. That should make for a swell update.

Enga Perez • Caring Minds United

Scientists have spent four years diving deep into the world of remote work and stumbled upon a powerful truth: working from home genuinely makes us happier.

I could’ve told you that. 😃 But I have been thinking about going to the office one or two days a week.

Rob Napier

I use AI a lot for work, pretty much all day every day. I use coding assistants and custom agents I’ve built. I use AI to help code review changes, dig into bugs, and keep track of my projects. I’ve found lots of things it’s very helpful with, and lots of things it’s terrible at. If there’s one thing I have definitely learned: it does not work the way I imagined. And the more folks I talk with about it, the more I find it doesn’t work like they imagine, either.

Pretty long post but worth a bit of time.

I’m not using LLMs for that much in my day-to-day dev work, yet, but I continue to use it for generating scripts and finding good answers to strange bugs in code. I’ll probably use it to help solve the iPadOS bug in Stream, since it just cropped up after updating to a newer version of Xcode since I last released it.

Marcus Mendes • 9TO5Mac

While more than 3.5 million people have spent the last couple of weeks glued to a brand-new Nintendo Switch 2, X user PatRyk (@Patrosi73) decided to invest their time elsewhere: trying to run iOS on the original Nintendo Switch. And they did it! Sort of.

I love hearing about folks hacking stuff into place to make things work where they shouldn’t. This is a prime example of that hacker spirit.

Tom Warren • The Verge

Microsoft is unveiling its own command-line text editor at its Build conference today. Edit on Windows will be accessible by using “edit” in a command prompt, allowing developers to edit files within the command line. It’s part of several improvements aimed at bettering the Windows experience for developers.

Since Microsoft has embraced open source tooling, Linux, and Mac more they seem to have gone back to more command like tools development. They did a brand new shell, that can host other shell types, and now they’re building a brand new command line editor? Wild. 😃

Can you make it compatible with Brief? 🙏🏼

Julian Chokkattu • Wired

The module looks nothing like an iPhone. It intentionally resembles the broadcast camera module, and Apple even had to match the weight so that its version wouldn’t alter a car’s specs. The inside, however, is completely different. (Apple gave us a peek during WWDC last week alongside an F1 car.)

It’s too bad this quality of video isn’t streamed out of the current camera setups on the cars.

Maybe that’ll be the next “big thing.” Go Pro like devices that stream super high quality video?

Mark Pinsley

Rather than pausing new investments or considering divestment, many pension officials and asset managers are instead pressing Tesla’s boardto get Elon Musk to return to working full-time at the company, as if the core problem is simply that Musk is too distracted. However, this assertion overlooks a far more serious problem: Musk’s reputation is so tarnished that Tesla won’t be able to thrive as long as he remains the CEO.

Musk needs to go so Tesla can be remade into a great company.

Andy Piper • Mastodon Blog

We’re already well into 2025, and it has been a huge start to the year for Mastodon. We want to bring you an overdue update on exactly what we’re working on, from a strategic perspective.

It’s great to see Mastodon charging forward. We absolutely need this open ecosystem for social networks.

Steve Kopack • NBC News

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Tuesday that the company expects artificial intelligence “will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains” over time.

“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people do other types of jobs,” Jassy added in a memo to Amazon’s workforce.

I’ve had really mixed feeling about “AI” (I don’t find it to be intelligent, at all.) at WillowTree we’ve been pushing hard on using these LLM services to help us move faster. Hey, we’re in the client services business, we have to move fast. And the more I learn about it the more I’ve come to realize it’s just a really good sidekick. We will continue to need to think through problems and come up with interesting designs and solutions because these services only “know” what they’re trained against. We still need to invent new things, right? It’s a hammer, nothing else.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Heat has moved into the Charlottesville area along with humidity. The heat isn’t so bad and I think I’m finally getting used to the humidity. As me how I feel about it in a couple months, I may change my mind. 😃

Nothing spectacular going on. It’s been a pretty average week.

Adam Engst • TidBits

The affected Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks were sold through Anker’s website, Amazon, Newegg, and eBay between June 2016 and December 2022. Given Anker’s popularity among Apple users and the fire risk these batteries pose, you should immediately check if your power bank is affected by visiting Anker’s recall webpage. Affected units are eligible for a free replacement or a $30 gift card.

I have one of these and love the darned thing. Guess I’d better see if I have one of the recalled versions. I’d happily take a replacement because they’re wonderful! (Except for that whole possibility of catching fire thing.) 🤣

Jacob Bartlett

Today, we’re going to learn how modern programming languages are governed. I’ll explain how Swift’s dictatorial structure is uniquely terrible, and demonstrate to you how bad the situation has become.

I doubt that is a popular opinion, but I do share it. Some of the latest changes have made the language even more complicated than it was before.

I’m also old and somewhat set in my ways, until I’m not. I have yet to dive into the power of async/await and sendable types, which at a high level makes sense to me, and Stream could absolutely use it. The big question is, what reason do I have to do it when the networking code I have works fine the way it is?

I have project Rooster on the drawing board. I’ll use it there along with SwiftUI. It’ll take me 10-years to complete the work. 😃

Jason Hellerman • No Film School

‘Sinners’ is the Highest-Grossing Original Film in 15 Years

I want to see this film so much! I’m gonna have to convince Bug, our youngest daughter and movie buddy, to go see it with me. Probably won’t take much convincing. Looks like we’ll have to see it at home.

André Rhoden-Paul • BBC

A British man has walked away from the wreckage of the Air India crash that killed 241 people in an extraordinary tale of survival.

All I could see was that scene of Bruce Willis in Unbreakable waking up in the hospital after the train crash.

M.G. Siegler

Apple embraces the blurring lines between iPad and Mac. Finally.

I played around with this in the Xcode 26 simulator for a bit. It’s really interesting and makes me think Stream on iPad could really make good use of it. We’ll see if my creativity can stretch far enough to do something interesting.

Kevin Fraser • JoBlo

Violent Night 2 sets December 2026 release, with Tommy Wirkola returning to direct the sequel

Sign me up! We loved David Harbour as the Viking St. Nicholas and it sounds like this film may lean into that a bit!

I know we’ll see this one in theatres.

Tim Hardwick • Mac Rumors

Barnes & Noble has updated its Nook app for iPhone and iPad with a new “buy on BN.com” button that redirects users to the company’s website to complete e-book and audiobook purchases

Another big name taking advantage of new App Store policy that allows folks to link out to a payment system not Apple’s.

I really wish Apple would cave on this and allow third party payment systems in app. Apple has always been about the User Experience and allowing folks to use other payment systems right inside their apps would deliver that. Jumping outside the app is a forced limitation. Apple wants devs to use their IAP, so they force a bad experience by making users jump to a web page if the app chooses to use a third party system.

We’ve had online payment on the internet for years and years now. There are many trustworthy third party payment systems to choose from that could keep payments above board.

If Apple would drop their fee to five percent I doubt few companies would choose to use a third party solution.

Alas, they will continue fighting against it. 🥺

Alvin Wanjala • Make Ise Of

Vivaldi browser might not be the first to come to mind when you’re looking for the best browsers on the market. But after switching from Arc and giving it a proper try, I’m officially hooked. Vivaldi is packed with features, making it one of the most underrated browsers available today.

I’ve installed this but I haven’t given it a good look yet. It’s yet another app built using the Blink rendering engine (part of Chromium.)

I wish someone would go off and do a really cool WebKit based browser with a 100% SwiftUI GUI. WebKit is the guts of the browser, it’s everything from networking to parsing to rendering. It’s basically the browser minus the UI surrounding it.

Stephen Hackett

Looks like Finder isn’t the only Mac application to see big icon changes in macOS Tahoe. Poor Otto had his arms, legs, and pipe taken away:

The new #LiquidAss, yes, I know, it’s LiquidGlass, UI introduced at WWDC this year is a big change in all the various operating system flavors.

It’s fine. I’m just going with the flow on this one. I have some ideas to make Stream embrace it a bit. More on that later. I really wish I could go work on this full time until iOS 26 ships in September. I think I could do some really cool stuff between now and then. As it is, I’ll do the best I can with the time I have.

Paul Brannigan • Louder

The original Black Sabbath line-up - Iommi, Ozzy Osbourne, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward - will reunite once more to play their farewell show at Birmingham’s Villa Park on July 5, and, in common with his bandmates, the guitarist admits to a certain amount of trepidation as to how the day might play out.

I wish the entire Sabbath lineup a perfect show and send off. I’d love to be there. 🇬🇧

Ashur Cabrera

But here at Multiline Comment HQ we don’t measure Apple’s leadership team by their penchant for bootlicking or falsifying testimony in federal court, or even by public opinion. No, our tools are different: we use headshots, and lots of ‘em.

Over the years I’ve gotten to know Ashur a bit and he’s a super nice, super smart, and super creative dude. Follow him. He does nifty web experiments on occasion and other interesting stuff like this! ❤️

Gary Marcus

On the one hand, it echoes and amplifies the training distribution argument that I have been making since 1998: neural networks of various kinds can generalize within a training distribution of data they are exposed to, but their generalizations tend to break down outside that distribution.

To be honest this article makes me feel a bit better about what we refer to as AI today. Our man made AI is only as good as we’ve been able to make it. It’s not self aware, nor is it thinking, it’s just dumping balls into the top of the pachinko machine and making choices based on its inputs. That’s it.

Is this a rant against LLMs? Nope. They’re darned useful but you still need to question the answers you get. Validate them.

From a coding perspective they’re pretty darned good. They’re the next evolution in IDE tool tip style help. I’ve seen them used to great effect generating unit tests for existing code and even produced nice solutions for other problems.

Keep in mind those outputs are only as good as the inputs used to train the LLM. It’s code that already exists in the world. It’s just been digested by the LLM so it can spit it out quickly.

Cody Williams • The Daily Downforce

After a 13-year absence, and a lot of speculation this week, it was finally made official in Motor City: Dodge is coming back to NASCAR!

I am super excited by the return of Dodge to the Truck Series! Now, let’s get a new Cup team set up and how about an IndyCar and F1 team? More racing, more American horsepower on the various grids!

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’ve been on vacation/holiday/or whatever you call it. Work calls it Paid Time Off, or PTO. I call it time with the grandkids.

Kim and I spent most of the week camping with our grandchildren at Myrtle Beach State Park. This was our first trip to the park and I really enjoyed our time there. The amenities at the park were excellent. We had power and water at our campsite hooked directly to our trailer, a bathhouse about 30-yards away, and a nice camp store just around the corner. Oh, right, not to mention the beach about 100 yards from the campsite. We spent Tuesday and Wednesday mornings at the beach and kind of chilled or puttered around other places Myrtle Beach had to offer.

There are so many places to see and things to do we didn’t even scratch the surface. Next year we have to do seven to 10 days with our entire family in tow. ⛱️

Brian Merchant • Blood in the Machine

☢️ WARNING: Substack

Like a lot of figureheads in the AI industry, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says that ordinary people are not ready for the changes AI is about to unleash on the world. In a widely circulated interview with Axios, Amodei warns we are on the brink of what his interviewers describe as a “job apocalypse” that will wipe out half of entry level jobs and cause the unemployment rate to rise up to 20%.

I’m more torn than ever about using AI in the workplace. As I mentioned last week, I used AI to help with a CI/CD GitHub Action I was setting up and it provided clues to my issue but I never really found a true answer to the problem. It took an experienced human to figure out what I missed in my setup.

Poor prompting on my part? Probably. This is why AI will replace me someday. 😃

By that time I hope to be retired.

The Browser Company

You’re probably wondering what happened. One day we were all-in on Arc. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, we started building something new: Dia.

This piece feels rambling to me. It’s obvious the author has a lot to say and feels the need to justify their move to sideline Arc. I don’t blame them. I know folks who love Arc and have gone all in on it. They’re extremely disappointed. Hopefully the like Dia. 🤞🏼

Jonathan M. Gitlan • Ars Technica

Verstappen slowed to let Russell through, then sped up into turn 4, opening up his steering and colliding with the Mercedes. Call it petulance or frustration; it was an inexcusable lapse of judgment from a driver. Using one’s car as a weapon against another competitor on track is unacceptable, and the 10-second penalty that Verstappen earned as a result dropped him to 10th place at the end, ruining his own race more than anyone else’s.

I don’t know Max Verstappen but I’ve never really liked the guy. Temper tantrums like this don’t have a place in racing but they do happen. Professional athletes get to their positions by being the best at their craft and often have large egos to go along with the skill. Verstappen is a prime example of ego and skill.

Lauren Feiner • The Verge

Firefox could be put out of business should a court implement all the Justice Department’s proposals to restrict Google’s search monopoly, an executive for the browser owner Mozilla testified Friday. “It’s very frightening,” Mozilla CFO Eric Muhlheim said.

It would be absolutely tragic if Mozilla was out of business. We need more browser engines, not fewer. Microsoft giving up on their browser was a huge blow to the ecosystem and competition.

The thing is, the only companies who could afford to bail them out want to control the internet and have corporate interests to fulfill.

Who could be a good steward? Facebook? Definitely not. They’re a super scummy company. Apple? They don’t need another browser. Google? Don’t need another browser. Microsoft? They should have their own browser and seem like a logical choice, but they wouldn’t embrace the open web as Mozilla does. Remember ActiveX controls in IE? Yeah, total nightmare in an otherwise good browser. And to think Microsoft was arrogant enough to declare IE complete.

Joan Westenberg

The internet used to be limitless, open to anyone with an idea. Now, it’s a polished prison run by tech giants. Is this the future we signed up for? Here’s how Big Tech quietly turned freedom into captivity.

I think you could piece together a lot of what the big silos offer but it wouldn’t be as complete or cohesive. Blogs, Mastodon, and Micro.blog are great for social network replacements but so many people rely on Facebook for all of those activities. Heck, many businesses only have Facebook pages.

Side note: I once built a little website for a nano brewing company in Exeter, CA. I offered them the keys to it and they turned it down because Facebook gave them what they needed.

Also, they have a website now! Good move! The domain I got for them was better, but this works. I picked up bellcraft.beer for them.

They could’ve also picked up bellcraftbrew.co instead of the .com, but to each his own. I think that just proves the power of .com verses everything else.

Casey Newton • Platformer

It did not take any particular skill in forecasting to predict, at the end of 2024, that the unprecedented partnership between Donald Trump and Elon Musk would come to a dramatic ending. Both Trump and Musk are independently famous for their erratic leadership styles and abrupt purges of once-close allies, and neither shows any long-term patience for anyone who opposes them.

I’m here for the Space Karen and Marmalade Messiah breakup. Bring it! They’re both such petty man children. Each smoking his own supply and blaming everyone but themselves for their problems.

I can’t wait to be shot of both of them.

Please, send them to Mars to start a colony. They can own it and call it Muskland or Trumpville or whatever they want. At least I won’t have to hear about them ever again.

Amid Amidi • Cartoon Brew

A collective of international animation unions, federations, and organizations are calling for action over the usage of artificial intelligence, citing its destructive impact on the craft and business of animation, as well as on industry workers.

I like this move. And like I’ve said before AI has its uses but for some things we should say ‘No.’

If you’re a craftsman of any kind I’d say no to using it for the craft part of my job. The thing I pride myself on. In this case it’s the artwork.

Kev Quirk

I was wondering what kinda things you, dear reader, like to read online?

I like all kinds of stuff but most of it boils down to tech related stuff. I read old timers like Dave Winer and Jeffrey Zeldman. I also like reading folks like Manton Reece, [John Gruber](daringfireball.net], and Joan Westenberg among many others!

Dave Winer

But then in the mid 00s things changed, and since then the users have flocked to closed systems. It would be similarly wonderful if we had an open social web, but we don’t. Mastodon is open but it’s not simple like the web is, and Bluesky is simple, but it is not open. And neither supports the most basic features of the web.#

I’ve heard ActivityPub and Mastodon can be challenging to code against but I’ve also heard Bluesky is extremely difficult to understand from a technical perspective. Maybe it’s just me?

Folks are building open alternatives to many closed systems on ActivityPub. So it does work!

Dave continues to build excellent tools on top of technologies he’s created, like RSS. It’s different and it missing some of the things people like, like replies (as far as I can tell, it’s missing replies? I could be very wrong about that. I don’t know what I don’t know. Ya know?) 😃

If you haven’t seen WordLand you should give it a gander. It’s really the editor bloggers using WordPress really need. At least I think it is. It would be extremely cool if Dave and perhaps others could define a protocol for editors to connect to all different types of blogging systems. Heh, I think that’s what ActivityPub and others are for? 🤔

We need taco trucks on every corner of the White House sporting that picture, in poster size, on the side of their trucks. 🤣

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I went out on Monday and picked up a 2008 Chevy Silverado 4x4 pickup. Why? Well, we bought a camping trailer last spring and we discovered pulling it with Kim’s Honda Pilot felt unstable and underpowered. Basically it felt like we were on the edge of something going wrong at any time. It was just unsettling.

I’ve been without a vehicle since COVID and since I’ve always had a truck and we wanted one for the trailer it was an easy decision. Plus, as far as trucks go, it was inexpensive.

Would I love to have a new Chevy or Ford EV Truck? You bet! Am I willing to spend $60,000 plus to have one? Sorry, can’t do it.

Anywho, I like it! 🛻

M.G. Siegler

This is wild. Both because they declined – again, for the first time in a decade – but more so because they have to know the signal it sends in declining.1 At best, it looks like they’re trying to avoid answering any non-staged questions about how things are going. At worst, it looks like they’re freezing Gruber out for a few recent critical posts about the company – notably, his “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” post about the Apple Intelligence shitshow back in March.

When I read John’s post about this years The Talk Show at WWDC I figured Apple was showing their displeasure with John’s earlier piece.

Like most big companies Apple has run into their fair share of problems, criticism, and lawsuits.

The law is finally catching up with some of Apple’s policies around their 15-30% fee for sales in the App Store, which is the only way to sell an iOS App.

They lost a case in California that says they have to allow third-party payment systems. App developers have Epic to thank for that. I’m not switching my in app purchase strategy. I’ll continue to use Apple’s system, at least for now.

Brown University Computer Science

This book is designed to help C++ programmers learn Rust. It provides translations of common C++ patterns into idiomatic Rust. Each pattern is described through concrete code examples along with high-level discussion of engineering trade-offs.

Really nice resource if, like me, you have a C++ programming background! From everything I’ve heard, Rust is a great language. I kind of wish someone would do a low-level equivalent for C++ devs moving to Swift.

Has anyone proven that Swift is just as performant as C++ on Mac, Linux, or Windows?

I know Microsoft is using Rust for some Windows APIs now. I don’t recall if it was GDI or User, but Windows does have some Rust code in it now.

Mia Soto • The Verge

As policy makers in the UK weigh how to regulate the AI industry, Nick Clegg, former UK deputy prime minister and former Meta executive, claimed a push for artist consent would “basically kill” the AI industry.

Maybe the AI industry needs to be killed or at least thrown in technical and political jail until a rational, equitable, system can be devised to pay authors and artists for their work.

How about the AI folks give us access to all their hard work? Their code, their algorithms, their LLMs, and all of their compute for free? All for the betterment of mankind. I bet they’d balk at that. 😃

Holly Cain • NASCAR Wire Service

A day filled with high hopes and trophy expectations after weeks of hard work at track and a year to contemplate the quest ended abruptly Sunday after NASCAR star Kyle Larson crashed just before the midpoint of Sunday’s Indianapolis 500 — a race ultimately won in a sprint to the finish by three-time and reigning IndyCar champion, Chip Ganassi Racing’s Alex Palou.

I feel really bad for Kyle Larson. He is without a doubt, in my mind, the greatest driver in the world today. He’s able to adapt to anything and everything, but that doesn’t mean he’s perfect. Last year he finished the race, in 16th I believe, this year he made a mistake and crashed out, taking two other cars with him.

It does happen, even to Kyle Larson. He’s a high risk high reward driver. He’s always on the edge of disaster.

After leaving Indy he got to the Coke 600, lead a number of laps, and spun out. No crash but he lost the lead and was mired in the back of the pack for the remainder of the day.

As a Kyle Larson fan I feel terrible for the guy.

Open Culture

Harvard Lets You Take 133 Free Online Courses: Explore Courses on Justice, American Government, Literature, Religion, CompSci & More

I’d like to take advantage of these courses! I’ve wanted a History degree for years and years. Maybe I can get some great American History courses through this program? The CompSci courses would be nice too! 😃

Daniel Rosenwasser • Microsoft TypeScript Blog

Today, we are excited to announce broad availability of TypeScript Native Previews. As of today, you will be able to use npm to get a preview of the native TypeScript compiler. Additionally, you’ll be able to use a preview version of our editor functionality for VS Code through the Visual Studio Marketplace.

The team chose Go because they did a straight port of their TypeScript/JavaScript code to Go. The syntax was very similar so it was kind of a no brainer and Go is a memory safe compiled language.

It’s too bad they didn’t use Rust.

Taylor Troesh • Good Internet

Soon it will become something else entirely. Because it’s my website and I’m perpetually becoming somebody else.

I wish I had the skill to make my own websites. The fact that Taylor can and does is impressive. And to top it all off I love her style!

Personally I’m always after a JavaScript free site as plain HTML. That’s what I get with Micro.blog.

I do have a bit of JavaScript in my blog, at the end to see how many visits posts get. It’s minimal.

Joe Wilkins • Futurism

A recent experiment by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University staffed a fake software company entirely with AI Agents — an AI model designed to perform tasks on its own, basically — and the results were laughably chaotic.

You can’t rely on AI to do things without monitoring it. Think of it as an intern, only not as smart - because it’s not intelligent, it’s a pachinko machine that often times makes really good guesses.

Use it, do not trust it, and for goodness sake verify everything it produces if you’re going to use it. It could be a real time saver, or wreck your work if you’re not careful.

I used our AI product this week and while it gave me good answers it didn’t provide me with a solution to my problem around publishing npm packages to GitHub. It gave me great information on how to setup part of my GitHub Actions script but I’ve never done it before and was hoping it would “just work.” It didn’t.

I hadn’t setup the Packages section in the repository to accept packages from my own repo. Live and learn.

BTW, that is not an indictment of AI failings. It provided me with great answers to my prompts. It really did. I just didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Reading GitHub’s documentation on the matter would’ve been very beneficial to me. Next time I’ll be better prepared for my sake and the AI’s.

Pixel Envy

Tripp Mickle, of the New York Times, wrote another one of those articles exploring the feasibility of iPhone manufacturing in the United States. There is basically nothing new here; the only reason it seems to have been published is because the U.S. president farted out yet another tariff idea, this time one targeted specifically at the iPhone at a rate of 25%.

I can’t see how Tim Cook and Apple can possibly manage their way out of TACO Man’s sights. He desperately wants Apple to make things here in the states. Apple has the money to do it, but they don’t want to do it.

They could help local Community Colleges and Universities spin up training programs to teach the skills necessary to build iPhones, IPads, and other products, but that would take years and years to do and take lots of cash to pull it off.

Apple wants to make money, not spend it. Remember, it’s all about shareholder value to these folks. It’s not about helping our fellow man find a great paying job.

No Idea Blog

Your job title says “software engineer”, but you seem to spend most of your time in meetings. You’d like to have time to code, but nobody else is onboarding the junior engineers, updating the roadmap, talking to the users, noticing the things that got dropped, asking questions on design documents, and making sure that everyone’s going roughly in the same direction. If you stop doing those things, the team won’t be as successful. But now someone’s suggesting that you might be happier in a less technical role. If this describes you, congratulations: you’re the glue. If it’s not, have you thought about who is filling this role on your team?

As a Staff Engineer I’m way more valuable to my team being the glue that brings us together. I act as mentor, coding buddy, and I see projects from 30,000 feet all the way down to minute details.

I’m not nearly as smart as 99% of the developers in the world. I’ve just been around the block a few times and I’ve built lots of different things on different OS’es using a mix of languages. I’ve done everything in the development life cycle so I know how to take something from concept to shipping and know how to do it with a team. That’s my strength. Sure, I can write code, but I really enjoy doing that glue stuff. It’s often random, sometimes spur of the moment — like fixing something in our iOS app yesterday so we could submit it to Apple.

I love the mix of people I work with daily. I have excellent management surrounding me who encourage me to serve my purpose on the team. Add the amazing Software and Test Engineers I work with daily and you have the perfect formula for happiness on the job.

Given all that I’d still love to retire and work on my apps full time. Not because I hate my day job but because I desperately want to build my apps! 🙂

Ben Lovejoy • 9TO5Mac

Less than two years later, the company has announced that it’s discontinuing Arc in favor of a new app – Dia – which it is also pitching as the future of internet usage

I find this puzzling. I know so many people who absolutely love Arc! Why not keep it running to serve the people who love it? Keep a tiny crew on it, let it evolve slowly.

In the end VCs have to get paid I suppose. This is part of why we can’t have nice things or useful software. 🤣

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️ A day late!

We’ve had our granddaughter this weekend so yesterday was filled with activities. I managed to get started on this post but had to put it down and do things like play tea party and go to the lake and play a game she made up, as far as I know, called zoo keeper. I’m the zoo keeper and she was a black panther. 🥰

Anyway, we’ve had a great time and we’re both pooped out, in all the best ways.

Brent Simmons

With retirement imminent — this is my last job, and June 6 is my last day (maybe I’ve buried the lede here) — I want to thank my team publicly for how they’ve made me a better engineer and, more importantly, a better person. From the bottom of my heart.

Congratulations, Brent! Go read the post to get the full context. Brent talks about his biases going into his job at Audible and how it changed him. It’s a really great, heartfelt, tribute to his co-workers.

John Voorhees • MacStories

Today, Mozilla announced in a support document that it will soon end development of Pocket, its read-later app that’s been around since the early days of the App Store

Welp, there goes a piece of my workflow for Saturday Morning Coffee. Pocket sits at the middle of my process and tooling. I save links through the week and save them to Pocket. On Saturday I find all the properly tagged saves and use those to write these posts.

I’m not sure what I’ll move to, yet. Unread has a read later feature, I may give that a go. I’m also looking at Plinky.

I’ve had read later support on my Stream list of features for years. Just haven’t done it.

Daring Fireball

Son of a bitch Epic did it. This was like a double bank shot.

I had to go download Fortnight as soon as I saw they were back in the store. I still haven’t fully configured it yet and all I’m really interested in is seeing their in app purchase screens.

I wonder if this is John’s way of Claim Chowder’ing himself? 😄

I like John’s writing because he calls it as he sees it. I think the shock and surprise are real on his part.

David Mack • Slate

Jensen is among an increasing number of job seekers who have found themselves being interviewed by A.I. programs as part of the recruiting process. Pitched by tech companies as a cost-efficient means of automating a laborious screening process typically done by an HR representative or recruiter, this A.I. software has the capability to “interview” hundreds of candidates, whom it can then recommend for further interviews with actual human beings. But for those on the other side of these chats, the experience of auditioning for a computer can feel somewhat surreal—and leave a rather unpleasant impression of a potential employer.

This is a bit much folks. Let’s keep humans in the interview process. I know this was a screening call and all but I don’t think I’d care for it either.

As part of my interview with WilllwTree I had to record myself answering a set of predefined questions. I understood the assignment right away and was happy to do it. WillowTree is a client services company. Even developers need to be good with the client. They wanted to see how I may operate with a client. The questions weren’t tech questions. They were easy questions as I recall. All about the interaction and presentation not about my knowledge.

I got to the next round of human interviews and managed to land the gig.

Om Malik

OpenAI, made the biggest acquihire in  Silicon Valley’s history. Sam Altman and his crew  bought Jony Ive and his coterie of ex-Apple hotshots for a whopping $6.5 billion. It is an all-stock deal for io Products, a 55-person company that is building an “amazing AI device.”

My goodness that’s a lot of cheddar! And I can’t get anyone to throw a paltry $1MM at me to go do what I want. 😂 Namely work on Stream and Rooster(my top secret project. 😂) 🐓

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’ve had a pretty fun week. Our dev team is doing really great work for our client, got to hangout with my grandson at his very important preschool graduation, and I had my first physical therapy session yesterday.

Overall a darned good week! 😃

Mike Barnes • The Hollywood Reporter

Joe Don Baker, the broad-shouldered Texas tough guy who portrayed characters on both sides of the law, most notably Sheriff Buford Pusser in the unexpected box-office hit Walking Tall, died May 7, his family announced. He was 89.

I remember watching Walking Tall as a kid and thinking Sheriff Buford Pusser was a real badass. I think I’ll have to watch it again.🪦

Mike Wendling, Rajini Vaidyanathan & Paul Coletti • BBC

Microsoft founder Bill Gates said he intends to give away 99% of his vast fortune over the next 20 years.

This is really nice of him in today’s world of Oligarchs. He’d have been worth so much if he hadn’t started giving his money away. We need more kindness like this in the world.

Thank you, Mr. Gates. ❤️

Jess Weatherbed • The Verge

Apple is trying to dissuade Europeans from using iOS apps that support alternative payment options by making them look scary.

Apple will absolutely not give up on its 15-30% cut of each app sale in the App Store.

What I really dislike about these scare tactics is how they imply that a third party purchasing system is not safe and secure. Web payment systems have been around for years and years and predate the App Store. I’d imagine there are some questionable players out there but I trust companies like Stripe and Shopify. I’m sure there are many other trustworthy companies out there.

If Apple keeps fooling around they’re gonna get some major fines in the EU.

Michael Tsai

When I started writing apps, the availability and quality of developer tools was considered to be an advantage for native development vs. the Web. These days, I still think native APIs usually lead to better apps—though there are some awful Catalyst and SwiftUI apps that would have been better as Electron—but the Web tooling has really improved. I think many would now consider it a strong advantage.

I know this article by Michael is talking about Electron but I’ve spent the last year and a half working on a project to slowly transform native iOS and Android apps into 100% React Native Apps and it’s gone really well. Same idea, different frameworks and platforms.

The start was slow and we spent the first four to six months building our bridging strategy and coding it. Once that was in place, along with React Native code to go with it, we started replacing hunks of functionality, feature by feature.

Recently a new Expo App was created and all that React Native work we started in the hybrid app has been shared via npm packages with the brand new app. It’s completely jumpstarted the new app with many features already built and tested in isolation. I’d say somewhere between 40-50% of the new app now works just by using these packages. Our networking, UI navigation, analytics, and telemetry packages were thoughtfully created to work with the native bridge code and 100% React Native code.

Anyway, I’ve written about it. Check it out if you have a minute. It’s been a really fun project.

Zack Whittaker • TechCrunch

Crypto giant Coinbase has confirmed its systems have been breached and customer data, including government-issued identity documents, were stolen.

Whoops. Will anyone ever be able to create a website and/or service that’s secure enough to not have breaches?

I’d imagine the best way to do it is not create the website or service in the first place. 😃

Emma Roth • The Verge

Warner Bros. Discovery is changing the name of its streaming service back to HBO Max. During its Upfront event on Wednesday, the company announced that it will rebrand Max this summer, a change HBO head Casey Bloys said “better represents” its offering.

I’m glad they did this. HBO has always been a place for quality series and originals. It’s a premium brand and with the addition of the Max name says “Hey, it’s the HBO you love with this other stuff we think you might enjoy.” 😆

Chiara Mooney • Microsoft React Native Blog

Let’s first talk about why Office chose to use React Native. Office has hundreds of millions of customers who expect visual consistency across desktop, mobile, and web. Currently, there are over 40 Office experiences which use React Native to build cross-platform features such as Privacy Dialog and Accessibility Assistant.

This is fascinating and weird to me all at once. Microsoft, one of the greatest software shops of all time is using React Native in Office. Yeah, you read that right, React Native in Office.

Did you know Microsoft is the primary contributor to React Native for Windows?

Can you imagine if someone did this for Mac? Oh, Microsoft did? Wait, what! I’m not sure how good this support is, but I’d love to see how it works.

It’s too bad a dyed in the wool Mac shop doesn’t take this on. Having an AppKit expert building this would make for a better framework, in my opinion. Of course Apple wouldn’t do it, but they should. I’d continue to build apps with Apple’s native tooling because I think it makes for better apps, but having something that opens the door to thousands and thousands of developers is good for the platform and might encourage more developers to create desktop apps instead of websites.

Ulrik Egede • The Conversation

While smashing lead atoms into each other at extremely high speeds in an effort to mimic the state of the universe just after the Big Bang, physicists working on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland incidentally produced small amounts of gold. Extremely small amounts, in fact: a total of some 29 trillionths of a gram.

I wonder how much it cost to create 29 trillionths of a gram of gold from lead? 😂

It is pretty amazing. I wonder what else they’ve created in there? Hopefully not a world ending virus. 😳

Micah Toll • Electrek

Royal Enfield’s eagerly anticipated electric motorcycles, unveiled late last year under the Flying Flea brand, are now confirmed to hit the market early next year.

This is a nice looking bike. Very modern construction with the look of a bike from days long past. Not a bad option for motorcycle enthusiasts.

Tom Warren • The Verge

Microsoft is redesigning the Start menu in Windows 11 this month with a new, wider design that finally lets you disable the recommended feed of files and apps. While the new Start menu looks different to what exists in Windows 11 today, this design refresh could have looked a lot different as Microsoft has now revealed in concept images.

Finally. 👍🏼

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

My struggles continue with sciatica. Thankfully it is much better than it was a week ago but I have a ways to go. Physical therapy is just under a week away and I’m hoping they can help me get this darn impingement un-impinged. I’m getting three to four hours of decent sleep a night then I get restless.

It’s gonna get better. I know it.

I had a really great time at work at the end of the week. I was called on to help some of the iOS Devs on our team to fix a few bugs. It was a blast pairing, what a great way to end the week.

Zac Hall • 9to5Mac

Looking for a weekend escape? The first two episodes of Long Way Home, the latest installment in Apple TV+’s best travel series, have just dropped — and it’s the perfect watch if you’re craving a scenic adventure.

The Long Way series on Apple TV have been so much fun to watch. Highly recommended. 👍🏼

Stephen Clark • Ars Technica

Kosmos 482, a Soviet-era spacecraft shrouded in Cold War secrecy, will reenter the Earth’s atmosphere in the next few days after misfiring on a journey to Venus more than 50 years ago.

So this hunk of space debris is supppsed to crash down soon, if it hasn’t already, and it’s supposed to fall on land. Duck! 🛰️

JR Farr • Lemon Squeezy Blog

This is a big step forward. Stripe Managed Payments is designed to handle all the heavy lifting for digital businesses from sales tax and fraud prevention to global compliance and customer support. Simply put, you can focus on growing your business.

When I read this I wondered if it could be used as a new in-app purchasing system for iOS Apps that want to bypass using Apple’s payment system? I bet it can.

Vanessa Romo • NPR

The small creatures look like oval mini-sailboats that can grow up to 4 inches long. Their gelatinous bases can range in color from vibrant blue to deep purple, and they have transparent triangular “sail” on top. It’s what allows them to be blown across the surface of the open sea where they typically live — and with strong enough winds, onto coastal sands.

I lived in California for over 50 years and I’ve never heard of these. They’re beautiful. ⛵️

Kevin Purdy • Ars Technica

Many horses, including Spotify and Amazon’s Kindle Store, have already left the barn. But Apple is moving quickly to shut the external payments door opened by last week’s ruling that the company willfully failed to comply with court orders regarding anticompetitive behavior.

I didn’t think it would take long for big companies to flip that switch.

Now we wait and see if Apple can get the courts to overrule the judgement. I can’t see that happening but I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV. 💸

Charlie Chapman • Revenue Cat

Within hours after the news broke, our team shipped a Web Paywall Button. A new component you can drop into any RevenueCat paywall to whisk users over to a RevenueCat-hosted web checkout, complete the purchase, and then unlock access in-app as if it were a native buy flow.

That sure didn’t take long.

It makes me wonder if anyone is going to use Apple Pay for their payment system? 😃

Heck, if Apple switched their payment system to charge something like 5% I’m sure folks would use it.

I’d put money on that happening if the ruling remains in effect.

Andy Matthew’s • News Thump

Doctors uncover link between increasing number of children getting measles and their parents being gullible morons

What a headline! I couldn’t resist! 😂

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Mike Barnes • The Hollywood Reporter

Ruth Buzzi, who was so hilarious as the lonely spinster Gladys Ormphby, the lady who swung her handbag as a lethal weapon, on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, has died. She was 88.

I’m old enough to remember Laugh-In and Ruth Buzzy was a hoot.

R.I.P. 🪦

Sarah Perez • TechCrunch

The judge ruled that developers should be able to link to other ways to make purchases from inside their apps, so they could process payments via their own website and payment systems. In doing so, developers should have been able to forgo paying Apple’s 30% commission on in-app purchases.

Some developers are already making changes to use their own payment system. I’ve read that Spotify is preparing a new release and Epic wants to return to the store with their own payment system. John Grubers hot take on Epic returning is a good read and one I hadn’t considered. I just figured it was a done deal, it might be?

Reuters

Danish consumers are boycotting Coca-Cola, Carlsberg (CARLb.CO), opens new tab CEO Jacob Aarup-Andersen said on Tuesday, noting that the brewer, which bottles the drink in Denmark, had seen Coca-Cola volumes decline while local rivals gain share.

It makes sense that other countries are abandoning American products. Prices are being driven up and who wants to pay a huge tax to buy something they can get locally?

Blabbermouth.net

“When we started working on ‘Moving Pictures’, everything came along just so effortlessly,” he continued. “We were well prepared, we’d written all the material, we knew what we were doing. We went in, we got sounds. We did things a little differently.

I’m pretty sure the Rush video for Limelight was recorded during this studio time. I wore that cassette tape out, it was so amazing.

CawsnJaws

Race and Commercial Breakdown of the 2025 Jack Link’s 500

Total minutes of complete race broadcast: 212 Minutes of race broadcast: 187 Minutes of traditional commercials: 25 Minutes of side-by-side commercials: 36

I’ll be checking this site out after each race this season. The total time we saw full screen racing was 186 minutes, which feels much longer than I recall.

The total commercial time was 61 minutes! An hour of commercials! One third of the time watching the race was commercials. Their side by side commercials, which they think is the cats meow, suck. The commercial takes up most of the screen and we get commercial audio.

I’ve seen action happening on the track I’d love see and hear full screen.

The coverage is very substandard. I hope Amazon does a better job than The CW and Fox. I’m not holding my breath.

Metal Hammer

Jerry Cantrell lends his voice to a song on the soundtrack to new vampire film Sinners.

It’s a nice little article and we get some insight into the directors mindset around the music for the film.

Daring Fireball

3 billion users = $15–$20 billion is not real math. It’s just bullshit. The users are only valuable right now because they perform a lot of Google web searches within Chrome. Chrome users also make money for Google by using other Google properties that show ads, like Maps and Gmail. And Chrome encourages users, in general, to use Google properties and services like Docs. If you try to work out how valuable Chrome is to Google, it’s seemingly worth a veritable fortune. But that doesn’t mean Chrome holds any value of its own, on its own.

Before reading this I was wondering how a company who forked WebKit to create Chromium is worth anything? As John points out it’s basically Google Search and Marketing. They also have great online services in Gmail and Google Docs. Read John’s piece he says it all.

Ben Smith and Liz Hoffman • Semafor

JC Chandor likes to joke that you could trade off the viewership data of Margin Call, the 2011 film that tells the story of an unnamed bank’s catastrophic 24 hours during the 2008 financial crisis.

I watch Margin Call once in a while and it’s loaded with amazing talent. Great film. It makes you realize how fragile our entire economic system really is.

Politics

Jamie Zawinski

So I guess we’re reaching the point where if you want to remain vaccinated against COVID, you’ll have to figure out how to buy an illegal import from this “dark web” I’ve been hearing so much about.

I’m digging the name Bobby Brainworms. I never ever thought our nation would ditch science for conspiracy theories.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Yesterday Kim and I were looking at homes on acreage. We’re hoping to find our final home and have enough land our kids could build on it if they want to. It’ll also be the perfect place to setup for the coming zombie apocalypse! 🧟‍♂️

Hope you enjoy the links.

Aisha Nyandoro, Ph.D. • Forbes

You come into a lot of money suddenly, and it’s like you’ve won the lottery. I had to think a lot about, “what is the purpose of money?” Why do we have money, and how much money is enough? The more I looked at it, the more I thought the money should be actually out there working to make the world better in some form. I didn’t see the purpose of holding on to a bunch of wealth if it’s not doing anything.

There are some extremely wealthy people who are empathetic to the human condition and want to help. See, not all of them are building dick shaped rockets or trying to take over the United States. 👍🏼

Ben McCarthy

For a long while, I’ve felt that the design of iOS is too top heavy. While our phones seem to grow larger every year, our hands do not and so interface elements are pulled ever further out of reach.

Reading tealeaves is not my thing any longer, but this is a really great take on what the next version of iOS may hold for us. 👩‍🎨

Ruben Cagnie • Toast Technology

At Toast, we believe that GraphQL is the right technology to build efficient web and mobile applications.

I know a lot of shops really love GraphQL for its flexibility, but I’ve never had the pleasure of working with it. It is my understanding Twitter was using GraphQL for the updated Twitter API that Space Karen scrapped.

Sujita Sinha

In a groundbreaking step for the future of construction, the first-ever 3D-printed Starbucks is taking shape in Brownsville, Texas.

How cool is that? I wish I could’ve seen the machine during the process. You can see the layers in the pictures and see a very visible seam or rib where it came together. Overall it’s extremely cool and it’s supposed to be less expensive than traditional construction. I hope these become options for young folks getting their first home.

Volt, Paper, Scissors

This magical DIY Book Lamp teaches kids about creativity and electronics. It combines paper crafting and paper circuits using conductive tape. The materials used are simple, but the result is truly fascinating.

This could be a really fun project for me and my grandchildren.

L. Jeffrey Zeldman

DESIGN WAS so much easier before I had clients. I assigned myself projects with no requirements, no schedule, no budget, no constraints. By most definitions, what I did wasn’t even design—except that it ended up creating new things, some of which still exist on the web.

This is how I’d imagine most indie software developers feel. I know when I work on Stream or RxCalc or Arrgly or [top sekret project] I find the most joy there because I don’t have to worry about someone looking over my shoulder to make sure I’m coding thing the proper way. I’m just coding, crafting an application the way I see it. I don’t have to use all these different latest creates frameworks or new patterns. I can be my curmudgeonly self and use tried and true methods of old because I’m the only one who needs to worry about it. 😃

Skip Rhudy • Texas Observer

I’ve got a post-graduate certificate in artificial intelligence (AI). I’m also an author, and I believe writers and publishers should not use AI in publishing. So that’s why I was disturbed when a reviewer asked if I had used AI in writing my recent coming-of-age novel, Under the Gulf Coast Sun.

I won’t go as far to say you should never use AI, even though I won’t on my personal projects, but you need to understand your craft so you can make an educated decision about the quality of any code you use from a third party. You do this with third party code you get from whatever packages you use, right? Why should AI be any different. In fact AI generated code should get more scrutiny than human written code. Don’t vibe your way to poor quality. 🌹

Tom Warren • The Verge

Nvidia’s GPU drivers have been a disaster over the past four months. It all started when Nvidia released its drivers for the RTX 50-series cards in January, and introduced black screen issues, game crashes, and general stability problems for new and existing graphics cards.

When I hear about something like this my brain always asks “I wonder if they rewrote the driver code.” That could definitely be a huge mistake. I don’t know if that’s what they did or if it was just rushed to get it to market but it’s not good to break something so many folks rely on. Software development is just plain difficult. All the best fixing your drivers, Nvidia!

Addy Osmani

Yes, AI-assisted development is transforming how we build software, but it’s not a free pass to abandon rigor, review, or craftsmanship. “Vibe coding” is not an excuse for low-quality work.

Ah, I mentioned this above. Check those outputs for accuracy and fix problems so you don’t get bit. ‘Nuff said.

Mark Andrews • WIRED

The Sakura might be Japan’s best-selling EV (indeed, strong demand led to Nissan having to pause sales in late 2022 because it had too many orders), but it has the potential to be far more than that. It is the EV that many city EV drivers have been crying out for.

This is a really cute little car that would be perfect for city dwellers. Heck, I drive one these to work and back daily if I could convince my wife I needed it. 🤣 As it is I work from home and need a truck for towing our camping trailer and hauling dirt and rock. (You’d be surprised how often we used to do that!)

Finally got a bunch of tattoos on my laptop. I ordered a case for it so I could keep my stickers and make it easier to cleanup the laptop when I have to turn it in. 😃

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Sippin’ on my coffee, sittin’ on the couch, typin’ this post out on my iPhone. Like most mornings the house is quiet so it’s a perfect time to write, or post a bunch of links.

The week has been good overall. Work was fine. Pretty quiet. Our Canadian and Brazilian brethren were off yesterday for Good Friday. I suppose that had a lot to do with it, well that and No Meetings Friday. 😃

Anywho, I hope you enjoy the links.

Gus Mueller

I hope someday we’ll get a version of Swift that isn’t chasing whatever the hot new coding paradigm currently is, and isn’t weighed down by ever expanding complexity. I think that could be pretty nice.

I understand Gus’ sentiment. Swift feels, to me, like a dumping ground for programming language nerds.

Apple had pushed it as a simple language to learn. Sure, the basics may be simple, but overall it’s an extremely complex language, especially all the new Swift Concurrency stuff. Does anyone really understand when to use @MainActor?

I’m behind the curve when it comes to fully embracing Swift Concurrency. I currently have one place in Stream for Mac that uses it, and it’s nice, but I’m not implementing any Sendable types, just taking advantage of Task() and Async/Await.

NASCAR

Get a first look at Daniel Suárez’s Telcel-Infinitum scheme as he makes a homecoming to Mexico at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez on Sunday, June 15

This is cool! NASCAR is headed back to Mexico! I’d actually love to attend this event but I didn’t plan for it this year and I’m not sure how much Kim would appreciate me going all the way to Mexico to watch a NASCAR race when NASCAR is mainly a south-eastern thing. I could drive 45 minutes to Richmond Raceway if I wanted to see a race. 😃

I still think Daniel Suárez should try to get Papas and Beer onboard. 🍻

Randy Parker

After growing up using Commodore and Atari computers, the first PC I bought with my own money (as a college student) was a “Macintari” in 1987. Proper Macs were super expensive, so instead, I purchased a Mega ST series Atari computer, which ran the same CPU as Macs of that era (the Motorola 68000). If you installed a Macintosh ROM (or EPROM) chip, you could boot into Macintosh System Software (as macOS was known at the time) and use the Atari hardware as if it were a “real” Apple Macintosh computer.

I had no idea you could run MacOS on an Atari computer!

If you’re interested in one persons observations about moving from Windows to Mac, this is a good one. It’s interesting to me how much third party software Windows users use today.

I have no idea how muchuva pain it would be for me to go back to Windows. Ive been gone for so long and it’s changed so much since 2006.

Steven Vaughn-Nichols • ZDNET

Specifically, Schleswig-Holstein is dumping Windows and Office for Linux and the popular open-source office suite, LibreOffice. The Schleswig-Holstein cabinet made this decision not because of Linux and LibreOffice’s technical superiority, but because it values “digital sovereignty.”

This is another way our fascist regime has affected American companies.

On the flip side this year will be the year of the Linux Desktop! 😜

Mike Monteiro

Sister Anita eventually gave up, mostly because she couldn’t make out the chicken scratch that my right hand was coming up with, and I guess she just decided that she couldn’t save us all, and I would be an acceptable sacrifice to Satan. For which I was thankful.

Of course I latch on to the left handed thing. My folks converted me from left to right handed when I was pretty darned young because “The world is made for right handed people.”

Mateo Wong • The Atlantic

The madness started, as baseball madness tends to start, with the New York Yankees: At the end of March, during the opening weekend of the new season, the team’s first three batters hit home runs on the first three pitches thrown their way. The final score, 20–9, was almost too good to be true. And then, everybody noticed the bats.

This is a great read and why we need science in the world. 😃 Leave it to a physicist to redesign, of all things, the baseball bat. Something that hasn’t really changed in well over 100 years. Progress! Hopefully the Majors doesn’t outlaw them.

Moira Donegan • The Guardian

There are some spectacles of US decadence and decline that almost seem too on the nose – the sort of orgies of vulgar provocation or fantastic lack of self-awareness that exceed the limits of parody, so that if they were in a novel, you’d think the writer was laying it on a little thick. Among these is the all-women flight by Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-owned rocket tourism company, which on Monday launched a phallically shaped pod full of women – including the pop star Katy Perry and Bezos’s partner, Lauren Sánchez – on a brief trip into space.

The Blue Origin trip into space with a bunch of crazy rich people definitely seems a bit tone deaf.

At least it didn’t blow up like Space Karen’s rockets do.

L. Jeffrey Zeldman

Beloved reader, I spent 90 minutes on hold with Con Edison yesterday, getting my power turned back on after a billing contretemps.

I’ve always been impressed by Mr. Zeldman’s willingness to write about his life. You will find many posts labeled My Glamorous Life where he shares personal life stories. He’s a great writer, technologist, and by all accounts and amazing human being. I wish him nothing but the best. ❤️

Dylan Beattie

Probably the single most important lesson I’ve learned in my career, the thing that I would argue is the hallmark of “experience”, is understanding just how much work it takes to turn a working program into a viable product. It’s why developer estimates are so notoriously optimistic - and why experienced developers are so notoriously cynical.

I like this take. I’ve had numerous junior developers say to me something along the lines of “I can’t wait to see what you have to teach me.” Oftentimes that comment is met with a blank stare. 😳 The “teachings” will mostly come organically. I’ve just been around long enough to know how to build software from concept, to development, to shipping, and everything in between. I’ve had great mentors along the way and suffered through issues that seem to crop up in every product I’ve ever worked on. Experience is just age, repetition, and pain, but I do love sharing my experiences of only to help others avoid the pain.

M.G. Siegler

We all know the saying “success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan,” but reading a couple new reports about the current inner-workings of Apple, it almost feels inverted at the most valuable company in the world.

All monster companies eventually experience problems scaling up. Oftentimes it’s because they believe that standardization on some methodology is going to save them. Well, that and people.

We’re still going through growing, and transition, pains at WillowTree since the TELUS acquisition. The cultural and systems transitions haven’t been easy on anyone.

Someday I’ll write about it a bit more.

John Scalzi

A few years ago, we bought a church building. Since then, every time I mention it online and/or on social media, someone always responds, “wait, you bought a church, what” and then asks some standard questions. At this point it makes good sense to offer up a Church FAQ to answer some of those most common questions. Let’s begin!

The remodel turned out really nice and it’s great to see them embrace the community by opening the doors for events. John Scalzi is one of those folks I wish I could know personally. He’s just so down to earth I imagine he’d be a great friend.

Jan Wildeboer

Forced RTO (Return To Office) is unacceptable, that is no discussion. But please also don’t forget how privileged many of us are to be able to work from home. The factory workers, the people working in grocery stores, doctors, nurses, truck drivers — the majority of the workforce out there — never had this luxury. I have always kept that in mind. They made it possible for people like us to actually be able to work from home.

The forced return to office put in place by many companies has been hard on folks and companies alike. WillowTrees CEO likes to have folks in the office. He likes the buzz and the randomness of bumping into folks. I can appreciate that and I also appreciate working from home. I must give him props for not forcing folks to return to office because he easily could have. ❤️

Would I go back if everyone was required to return? Yes, absolutely. There is a part of me that misses it.

Andres Thoresson

Thanks to the openness of Mastodon and Bluesky, it’s possible to follow accounts across network boundaries.

And that’s the kind of openness that Tapestry, Reeder, and Surf are built on.

There is a new class of software that spans open networks and closed networks. I’ve thought about doing this for Stream ever since I learned more about ActivityPub. Folks can follow Mastodon feeds via RSS so it’s made it less important to write code to connect to ActivityPub directly, so I haven’t bothered.

The fine folks at The Iconfactory have created a pretty ingenious way to connect to any source material you’d like by writing a plug-in to Tapestry in JavaScript! Neat, right? 🙏🏼

Begs the question: What does native mean? 🤔

Anton Shilov • Tom’s Hardware

Last year it turned out that Elon Musk’s xAI had to install additional ‘portable’ generators near its facility adjacent to Memphis, Tennessee, to power the Colossus supercomputer with over 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs as local power grid could not support the load. Now it turns out that these generators were not exactly legal, yet they can keep running, reports The Guardian.

Musks genius is being a narcissist and a sociopath. He doesn’t give a crap about anything or anyone who stands in his way. He and our President are one and the same. Ignore the law and do whatever they want. 🤬

WHO DID THIS!

You deserve a medal! 🏅

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’ve been informally working with a co-worker answering questions about building out hybrid native applications and it’s been wonderful. I also had opportunity to work on more React Native to iOS code with another developer. Total blast. It hit all my happy buttons.

All that happiness was destroyed later Friday afternoon, but that’s a story for another day. Don’t worry, I’m fine, my family is fine, everything’s fine.

Gus Mueller

Without going into details (that’s what the technote is for), Acorn’s file format is a SQLite database, with a simple three-table schema, containing TIFF or PNG bitmaps to represent bitmap layers, and a plist to represent shape layers. Acorn has kept this simple format since version 2.0 back in 2009.

At some point I’d opened an Acorn file in Base, my database editing app of choice, and realized it was actually a SQLite database. Nifty!

Given Gus is the creator and maintainer of FMDB it kind of makes sense. 😃 (I use FMDB in Stream.)

The Onion

Warning that even the slightest dent, knick, or scratch would henceforth be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Tuesday that Raymond Pratt, a 54-year-old resident of Chula Vista, CA who bumped a Tesla while parallel parking, had been sentenced to death.

The Onion’s articles, like this one, put a smile on my face.

Yahoo!Finance

Google lays off hundreds of employees in Android, Pixel group

I’m afraid we’re going to see more and more of this over the next handful of years.

I’m sure I’m living on borrowed time. Who knows, I may end up working at Starbucks?

I love being a software developer but the new world order is ready to trade craft for expediency. I hate that. I hope I can continue to be a software craftsman.

If I could retire today, I would. That would allow me to focus on Stream and [top secret project] all the time. 😀

Kate McCusker • The Guardian

Protective helmets were donned and sledgehammers wielded as Elon Musk Space Karen critics vented their frustration at the Tesla boss and billionaire by smashing up a disused Tesla bound for the scrapheap.

Oh, how much would you love to do this? I know I would.

Have you heard of the abandoned mall parking lots being used to store Tesla cars and trucks, weird, right? It would be a shame if a pack of drones flew over them and bombed them into oblivion, wouldn’t it?

[Ruben Cagnie • Toast Technology Blog]

At Toast, we believe that GraphQL is the right technology to build efficient web and mobile applications. This did not happen overnight. In this blogpost, we will cover the adoption of GraphQL at Toast, from its early days to the recent paradigm shift towards GraphQL Federation.

I love the Toast app! ❤️ It’s one of my favorite apps on my phone because it’s darned handy! There are four restaurants we love to eat at but sometimes we’d like to get takeout. That’s where Toast comes in. Their idea to build a generic ordering app was super smart. Love it! ❤️

It’s nice to see how folks build their infrastructure out. Reading articles like this is like reading about a motor rebuild. There’s always something new to learn.

I’ve always wanted to try GraphQL. Maybe one of these days I’ll get a chance at the day job? 😃

Alexander Lee • Digiday

Former Substack creators say they’re earning more on new platforms that offer larger shares of subscription revenue

Good! Nazistack needs a mass exodus of great writers.

I need to write a piece with a list of the wonderful writers I follow there, via RSS of course, so anyone who reads this can go encourage them to leave Substack. 🤬

Jason Koebler • 404 Media

This weekend, U.S. secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick went on CBS’s Face the Nation and pitched a fantasy world where iPhones are manufactured in the United States:

I’m sure Tim Cook would love to have a factory complete with worker accommodations that drives folks into the ground for pennies a day.

Maybe our new Administration plans to do away with the minimum wage too?

Mike Pearl • Mashable

It’s downright strange how little we know about the hacker or hackers who exposed the identities of over 30 million Ashley Madison users in 2015.

I watched a documentary on Netflix called [Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies, & Scandal(https://time.com/6977627/netflix-ashley-madison-documentary-true-story) a couple nights back and it was absolutely fascinating.

As far as I know the person or persons behind the hack have never been found! That is just amazing to me. Their saving grace is they did it for cultural reasons, not for money. After making their demand for the company to shut down they simply delivered on their threat to release the data they’d stolen. No money demand.

It’s worth a watch.🍿

Mitch Wagner

Mitchellaneous: Excellent protest signs

I threw this in here because I love seeing the interesting signs folks come up with for protests. There have been a lot of good ones since Marmalade Messiah took office.

Sarah Perez • TechCrunch

Tapestry, a new app designed to organize the open social web, is adding a valuable feature to help people who are keeping up with multiple social networks: It will now remove duplicate posts from your feed. That means if you follow the same person across social networking services like Bluesky and Mastodon, you won’t have to see their post appear twice in your feed if they’ve shared it in multiple places.

I remember Craig Hockenberry being asked if Twitterrific — long live Ollie! — was coming to Mastodon. He said that The Iconfactory was exploring something different. Something more for the open web.

Well, Tapestry is that app and it was brilliantly executed.

I’m looking forward to what they do with the Mac version. 😍

Oh, one more thing! Hire The Iconfactory to do your design work, I did, and the results were brilliant!

The Iconfactory is one of those wonderful companies in my list of small companies I’d work for in a heartbeat! 🥰

Matthias Endler

I have met a lot of developers in my life. Lately, I asked myself: “What does it take to be one of the best? What do they all have in common?”

Great piece. I’ve met my share of absolutely incredible developers in my time. From so many developers at Visio, too many to name, to the many excellent developers at WillowTree, hi Nish!

I like Matthias’ take on the matter.

David Eaves, Hillary Hartley • Lawfare

In March, the U.S. government shut down 18F, the digital services team tasked with modernizing government technology and services. 18F was perhaps best known for helping the IRS create a free direct-file tax website that makes it fast and free for Americans to file taxes.

This group was full of kind, caring, compassionate, designers, developers, and project managers with the goal of making world class websites for the government.

Folks like Ethan Marcotte went to work there. Yes, that Ethan Marcotte, the guy who created Responsive Web Design. Now think of an entire engineering team like that!

Phil Windley

Cory’s right, using an RSS reader will make your digital life better. I’m wasting less time scrolling past stuff I don’t care about and more time reading things I enjoy. That’s a win.

Yep, yep, yep! There are plenty of excellent RSS readers on the market, but I think you should use Stream! 😁

Aria Desires • Faultlore

C is the lingua franca of programming. We must all speak C, and therefore C is not just a programming language anymore – it’s a protocol that every general-purpose programming language needs to speak.

This piece will take a little time to read but I really appreciated the technical detail and the authors take on so many things C. Nicely done! 🙏🏼

Ghost - Building ActivityPub

Last week we explored some Threads compatibility updates, how to find and follow people across the Fediverse, and the progress of the social web beta launch. This week, we’ve got more fixes and updates to share, as well as a painful and embarrassing story that we wish had never happened.

This is Ghosts place to talk about how they’re building ActivityPub support into Ghost. It’s nice to see other blogging tools support open standards.

To my knowledge, Micro.blog, WordPress, and Ghost support ActivityPub. I’m looking forward to seeing more!👻

Cory Dransfelt

All of Apple’s services are abysmal

I’ve heard this from so many people over the years. Creating web services is hard. Especially when you’re servicing millions and millions of people, but shops like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook manage to pull it off. Why can’t Apple?

TMNT Robatello!

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Pat Saperstein • Variety

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 🪦

Namanyay Goel

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. 🧠

The Onion

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. 😃

Ashur Cabrera

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? 🙏🏼

Alan Ohnsman • Forbes

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.

Gus Mueller

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. 👍🏼

Tasha Robinson • Polygon

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. 🦸🏻‍♂️

Sarah Perez • Tech Crunch

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. ❤️

Matt Birchler

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. ❤️

Matthew Haugey

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.

Emma Roth • The Verge

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.

Joan Westenberg • The Index

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.

Sharon Waxman • TheWrap

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.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Tom Warren • The Verge

PS5 owners really want to play Xbox games, as Microsoft tops Sony’s preorder charts

From an outsiders perspective this makes sense given Microsoft’s move to purchase extremely popular game studios. They should absolutely make sure everything they create is playable on PlayStation. It’s kind of been Microsoft’s M.O. all along. Write software that runs anywhere. 👨🏻‍💻

JanerationX

The other day, I was reading an interesting article about moving away from social media siloes and getting back to basics with a domain and a web page. (Neocities is also a nice place to learn HTML markup and put up a home page.) I liked the article and was looking forward to leaving a comment, BUT when I got to the bottom of the post, I was confronted with a prompt to sign up for a membership. Really? To leave a comment? Especially on an article about the small web?

Of course this is about Substack. It is, along with X, an internet Nazi bar and it’s full of amazing writers supporting it.

Money talks, I guess. 😞

Alana Loftus • Irish Star

A major Tesla investor has called on Elon Musk to step down as head of the company as a nationwide boycott causes stock prices to plunge.

Ross Gerber, who owns an estimated $105 million in shares of Tesla stock, called on Elon Musk to step down as head of the company, saying that he “destroyed” the company’s reputation

Does anyone know what Tesla is up to anymore? It’s just sitting there, not making progress. It was once a bright shining star. Now it’s a losing afterthought. Wonder why?

Tesla board, fire Musk.🔥

Chris Medland • Racer

Red Bull only has itself to blame for its driver mess

It’s really incredible to see Red Bull panicking over two races with, in essence, a rookie driver. They fire Danny Ricardo and Sergio Perez in favor of Liam Lawson — over Yuki Tsunoda — and expect the man to be top 10, or better, on day one. Absurd.

Red Bull has competition, that’s it. McLaren has caught up and Mercedes is show some of their old spark. Not to mention Alex Albon keeping Williams in a good spot.

I’d expect Ferrari to show some teeth soon. It’s gonna get really interesting! 🏎️

Fiona Jackson • TechRepublic

Once upon a time, landing a job at the likes of Amazon, Google, or Microsoft was seen as the golden ticket — offering generous salaries, four-day work weeks, and nap pods. Over the last few years, though, that image has been transformed into one that is far less idyllic, marked with mass layoffs and employees sleeping on the office floor.

Basically the BigCo’s are returning to the way they used to be. When I was at Microsoft everyone worked long hours moving as fast as we could to meet deadlines. My nap pod was the floor under my desk where I’d grab some shuteye as I worked overnight. I’d imagine I worked an average of 60 hours a week for months on end.

It’s not a good way to live. It’s hard on you physically and mentally and if you have a family it punishes them.

I do not recommend doing it.

InfoQ

Rebuilding Prime Video UI with Rust and WebAssembly

This link is to a video and slides for the presentation. I didn’t watch it but I thought I’d share it because I do find this interesting.

The browser as operating system feels more than a bit odd. Folks like Apple, Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft really need to put way more effort into tooling to make it better for developers. As a developer I want a full IDE with real debugging support, no matter the language I choose. Perhaps they’re already there and I’m just naive?

I’m still a bit bitter WebAssembly was chosen over a CLI implementation — ECMA-335 — that runs in the browser. But, at least we have something common for browsers and languages to target.

It is strange to take this low level language and spit out WebAssembly. ⚒️

Noor Al-Sibai • Futurism

Researchers have found that ChatGPT “power users,” or those who use it the most and at the longest durations, are becoming dependent upon — or even addicted to — the chatbot.

It was inevitable, right?

The Eclectic Light Company

Each new version of macOS has increased the complexity of launching apps, from the basics of launchd, the addition of LaunchServices, to security checks on notarization and XProtect.

If you’d like to see a really nice overview of how macOS launches apps, this is for you! 🚀

It’s not crazy technical, an intentional choice by the author, and will give you an understanding of how things work when you start up your favorite application.

Steve Yegge • Sourcegraph

In this post, I assume that vibe coding will grow up and people will use it for real engineering, with the “turn your brain off” version of it sticking around just for prototyping and fun projects. For me, vibe coding just means letting the AI do the work. How closely you choose to pay attention to the AI’s work depends solely on the problem at hand. For production, you pay attention; for prototypes, you chill. Either way, it’s vibe coding if you didn’t write it by hand.

Vibe coding is the new way I guess.

As someone who has spent over 30-years struggling to become better each and every day I find this depressing. I know I’m an ok developer. Not the worst and certainly not the best, not even close. But to spend a lifetime at something only to see folks produce more output without even trying is extremely discouraging.

Craftsmanship goes out the window in favor of expediency. It is the new way and we’re all going to have to get used to it or be left behind.

I’ve finally become a dinosaur. 🦕