Rob Fahrni

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Nothing much to talk about this week. I got a haircut and had a bunch of random thoughts about blogging and feed readers. 🤣

Of course I’d still like to make a living working on Feed Readers and Blogging tools. Someday, oh yes, someday. 😃

Jason Snell • Macworld

That’s my long way of saying that this is my last More Color column at Macworld. Thank you so much to everyone at Macworld for the chance to keep my name attached to this brand for an additional 11 years on top of the 17 I spent in my first life as an editor. Thanks to my editor, Roman Loyola, who was already working at MacUser magazine on my first day there in 1994 and is somehow still working with me. And thanks to all of you for reading my words here over the years. I’ll keep bleeding six colors&xcust=1-0-3175482-1-0-0-0-0&sref=https://www.macworld.com/article/3175482), and I know that you will, too.

The bad news is the Macworld reading crowd will, I’m sure, miss Jason’s work. The good news is, he has Six Colors. As a subscriber I’m hopeful it will continue publishing far into the future.

Thanks for your dedication to the Mac and the Mac using community, Jason!

See you over at Six Colors.

Jarred Sumner • Bun Blog

What if, instead, I spend a week testing if Anthropic’s new model can rewrite Bun in Rust?

At first, I didn’t expect it to work. A few days in, a high % of the test suite started passing and I saw how much the new Rust code matched up with the original Zig codebase. My opinion went from “this is worth trying” to “I’m going to merge this”.

Bun is one of those projects that fascinates me. One fella on a mission managed to create a beloved product and continues to love and care for it today, albeit with better resources.

If you’re a software engineer you owe it to yourself to read this article. It goes into great detail how the porting process used Claude Fable to great effect.

Hats off to Jarred for undertaking such a risky port and for teaching us how to use Claude for extremely deep work. It really is impressive.

Ben Gutierrez • Hawaii News Now

Hundreds gathered along Magic Island and Ala Wai Boat Harbor Friday to watch solo rower Kelsey Pfendler complete her record-breaking journey from California to Hawaii.

With all the war and political upheaval in the world it’s nice to see the human spirit of adventure survive and thrive. Congratulations to Kelsey Pfendler on an amazing feat of human strength and endurance. Not only did she make it across she destroyed the prior record of 52 days by nine days, coming in at 43 days to accomplish the feat. Wow! 🥳

L. Jeffrey Zeldman

We need to stop pretending that “the cloud” is a place. It’s not a place. It’s a promise—and promises are only as good as the entity making them. The web was supposed to be decentralized, resilient, a network of nodes that could route around damage. But in practice, we’ve spent the last decade centralizing our lives into a handful of walled gardens, each with its own exit strategy and its own definition of “forever.”

Mr. Zeldman has been writing a lot more over the last six months and I for one am here for it. I’ve always loved his openness, honesty, beautiful writing, and his technical prowess.

We owe a lot to Mr. Zeldman for his steadfast nurturing of web standards and the open web. Keep on keeping on Mr. Zeldman!

Louie Mantia • Parakeet Blog

Last week, Luka and I worked with the hosts of Accidental Tech Podcast—Marco Arment, Casey Liss, and John Siracusa—to design new Liquid Glass icons for their apps. Each submitted their own brief, and we created icons to meet their expectations and look exemplary on macOS 27 and iOS 27.

These icons are beautiful! 😍 It’s so nice to see professionals at the top of their craft.

The ATP boys talked about the icons on Episode 699: Not the Correct Squircle

If I had to pick a favorite from the collection it’s a tossup between John’s SwitchGlass and Marco’s Overcast icons. I suppose my absolute favorite is Overcast’s alternate teal icon. The blue circle in the main icon is also really nice!

I wish Apple would remove the squircle jail from macOS so John could use his original SwitchGlass icon. It’s gorgeous.

Oh, and I agree with John’s take that your icon should be better than your app! I honestly think that’s why Stream is downloaded. The icon is gorgeous (yeah, I’m biased. 😃)

(Y’all didn’t think you’d get away scot free of a Stream mention today, did you? 🤣)

Hugo Rojas • Ecoportal

Switzerland bolted 5,000 solar panels onto a dam wall 8,000 feet up in the freezing Alps where everyone said solar made no sense, and the plant now makes three times more winter power than any farm down in the valleys

How ‘bout those Swiss? 🤣

I suppose if you’re gonna have a manmade dam high up in the Alps you might as well make good use of it, right?

Bring on the solar! 🌞

Oh, and speaking of the Swiss. They meet Argentina tonight in the World Cup Quarterfinals. They’ll definitely have their hands full! Let’s go!

Daring Fireball

It’s one thing for Apple to force all of its own app icons into the same identical shape. That would be bad enough, because Apple’s own Mac apps are numerous and popular, and as the platform owner Apple necessarily sets the direction that many third-party apps follow. But it’s just downright spiteful to enforce it platform-wide.

Maybe if we make enough noise in the Mac and iOS community Apple will give us the ability to have icons outside of the squircle again?

Me complaining won’t help but if enough of the Mac punditry, well known Mac fans, and Mac developers make enough noise, maybe? 🤞🏼

Sarah Perez • TechCrunch

A new app called HyperTexting is making it as easy to surf the web as it is to scroll through a social media feed, like Facebook or X. The app, newly available for iOS, also aims to make updating your own personal website as simple as sending a text message.

Wow! Yet another beautiful entry in the feed reading family. This is a really nice take on feeds as social timelines and it takes things a bit farther by allowing you to post to your blog. Yes, this is yet another feature on the already extremely long Stream todo list. 🤣

Steve Inskeep • NPR

If you’re listening closely, the lyrics of “Born in the U.S.A.” make its subject pretty clear: The 1984 hit by Bruce Springsteen describes a Vietnam War veteran who returns home to desperate circumstances and few options. Listen only to its surging refrain, though, and you could mistake it for an uncomplicated celebration of patriotism. You wouldn’t be the only one.

It’s a high energy song performed by a high energy performer but it’s really depressing if you listen to the lyrics. It’s the experience of a lot of our vets. They come home to nothing without hope. Those transitions have to be brutal in a country that celebrates service but it stops when people need it the most. They need that support when they’re back in civilian life.

Donna Wentworth • Lenergy

From 1 July 2026, energy retailers in NSW, South Australia, and South-East Queensland must give households at least three hours of free electricity every day. No solar panels required. No need to own your home. You just need a smart meter and to opt in through your retailer to have access to free daytime electricity

Ahhhh, more smart use of solar. The older I get the more I’d like socialized medicine and education and I think I’ll add power to that list. We all need power to run our lives. Having a single, stable, protected, shared power grid seems like a natural candidate to socialize. Doesn’t it?

Of course it’ll never happen because ‘murica. 🤣

Andrew Webster • The Verge

After muscling its way into the console space nearly 25 years ago, Microsoft’s gaming division is at its lowest point ever. And the fallout from some disastrous decisions is going to get very ugly in the coming weeks and months.

The whole Xbox thing is a real mess. First buy up a bunch of studios, then declare you’re focusing on PCs, then declare Xbox is no more, then name a new head of Xbox who turns around and declares it’s here to stay.

Now we get layoffs and studio spinouts. Wild. I hope the folks who were let go find a good home and the new small studios are able to stay afloat.

Apple, if ever you wanted to do some games work for the Mac now could be a good time to pickup some people to do the work. John Siracusa and Quinn Nelson have made good arguments for it. But this is Apple. They don’t do serious gaming even though they make serious gaming dev tools.

Hey, Mr. Ternus, it could be a way to get into more homes and make more cold hard cash that adds to that “shareholder value.” 🤣

Jordan Novet • CNBC

Microsoft is eliminating 4,800 jobs, representing 2.1% of its workforce, with the company’s Xbox division losing about one-fifth of its staff in the software giant’s latest effort to cut costs in the era of artificial intelligence.

More on the Microsoft Xbox debacle. It’s all AI or bust these days. Let’s jam it into everything whether it needs it or not.

Yes, I have thoughts and opinions on AI in everything, but that’s for another day.

Julie Johnson • San Francisco Chronicle

On a historic Santa Rosa street, neighbors have been watching a redwood tree grow like a living monument over years, decades, lifetimes. They’ve seen the slow-motion work as its roots muscled large chunks of concrete sidewalk up from horizontal placings into a nearly vertical, catawampus mess. 

The sidewalk is impassable and has been for years. This spring, the city issued the property owner a permit to cut down the tree and restore the sidewalk. It’s the cleanest solution, but one that spurred a passionate neighborhood campaign to save the towering redwood tree with a 4-foot-wide trunk that they now call Rosie.

I’d like to see this tree saved but I can understand why they may need to cut Rosie down. It’s a real bummer of a situation. Too bad they can’t, or won’t, use the Japanese technique of nemawashi to relocate it. See below! 😃

The Times of India

Before a tree is moved, specialists carefully prepare its root system to improve its chances of surviving in a new location. The technique, known as nemawashi, combines centuries of horticultural knowledge with modern engineering and reflects Japan’s long-standing respect for nature and cultural heritage.

This is incredible. The Japanese, like Native American’s, really embrace nature. It’s a beautiful thing and we need more beautiful things in this world.

Joe Wilkins • Futurism

As one New York financier told Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.

Ouch. Yes, we still need to exercise our brains. LLMs are just another tool, not the only tool. Your bain is the best tool you have. Nourish it.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

It’s been super hot and humid in Virginia this week so I’ve been staying inside as much as I possibly can.

I did manage to get to Grit yesterday and work on Stream. I need to write up the changes I’ve made in the last two BETA releases.

That’s all for now. I hope you enjoy the links.

Daring Fireball

Felix Rieseberg, quite obviously, is the answer to the question why Claude is an Electron app. It’s like wondering why all the screws in a building were hammered into the walls, and then finding out that the guy who oversaw construction founded and co-owns the world’s biggest hammer manufacturer. Windows uses Philips head screws, Linux uses hex screws, and MacOS requires Torx (of course) — but a hammer works the same way with all screws. That’s Electron. That’s Rieseberg’s baby.

John’s scathing take is also quite funny. Folks tend to gravitate towards tools they’re familiar with. I’m still fond of C++ and even though I don’t use it today I’d be happy moving back to it. Swift has been a real boon to developer productivity and stable code but SwiftUI has been a bit of a slog for some. Developers have been frustrated by lack of features supported by SwiftUI equivalent features of AppKit. Basically what I think I’m trying to get at and failing is it’s easy to write a crummy app using AppKit or SwiftUI just as easily as it is to write a crummy Electron app.

If folks coding in Electron paid better attention to the platform conventions and wrote apps to fit within them, would you be able to tell the difference between an Electron app and an AppKit app? I can’t answer that because I’ve never seen an Electron app that has tried to be a good platform citizen, be it Windows, Linux, or Mac.

I take that back, 1Password’s Windows, Linux, and Mac Electron apps are quite good and I’d love to know what real dyed in the wool Mac users like John think of it? I’d love a true objective look at 1Password and a recording of its failures as a Mac-assed-Mac-app.

Embracing the platform is the ultimate goal. I know y’all are probably sick of hearing about Stream for Mac but I want it to be a Mac-assed-Mac-app. Even if it’s short on features the big boys have it needs to be a proper Mac app. It’s all native. I’m writing it in Swift using AppKit and there’s the tiniest bit of SwiftUI and Objective-C sprinkled about, but does it feel like a Mac app? That’s all that matters to me in the end.

I would love to see someone write a small Mac-assed-Mac-app in three variants; AppKit, SwiftUI, and Electron. The design needs to match across the board. Without observing the apps binary using something like nm could a user of the app tell the difference? I suspect some may be able to pick up on some differences but I’d also bet most would fail to tell the difference.

Anyway, there’s my hot take. 🔥

David Bushell

Yeah so um… have you noticed that all modern software is teetering on the enshitty cliff? Everything in my dock is an Electron-ified enshittybomb one update from disaster. There used to be alternatives. Now those suck too.

Emphasis is mine. In David’s case he’s just fed up with crummy apps. Electron or not. Crummy apps are harshing his mellow.

Visual Studio Code is an app that seems to be beloved by the development community. I’d say it’s because most poor developers haven’t used anything better. In a past life I lived in Microsoft’s Visual Studio and loved the experience. Now, I’m afraid, it’s probably a bloated mess, but that’s just a guess based on the very little time I’ve spent with it. Xcode is a perfectly good IDE in my opinion. It’s fast and has the features I need to do my job. I’m sure I’ve complained along the way but overall it’s been a productive experience for me.

I’ve switched to Nova for my React Native work at work. It’s an example I can hold up as an excellent Mac app. It is fully native and is a Mac-assed-Mac-app. It’s the little things that I love. Something as small as Cmd+Shift+o displaying the Quick Open dialog brings me joy. Visual Studio Code’s equivalent is a different set of keys I can’t remember off the top of my head.

There’s part two of my hot take on Electron. 🤣

Matt Birchler

For the last couple of years, I have made the point that pretty much every meaningful update to iPadOS feels like a collection of features designed to make it behave more like a Mac.

Perhaps it’s time to let the iPad be its own thing? It’s proven itself useful to a certain set of folks for writing and I suspect many others like it for consuming books and movies. That’s a fine use for it.

Burno Ferreira • Tom’s Hardware

In yet another case of the AI-driven blues, 404 Media reports that Henrico County, VA, Manager John Vithoulkas sent an email to all county employees — including those in schools and social services — asking them to conserve energy by turning off unused lights and computers, using blinds to lessen heat buildup, and curbing or stopping the usage of heavy loads like space heaters.

That plea comes as the state’s main power provider repeatedly hikes rates, and those repeated increases are linked to the rapidly increasing demands of data center buildouts. According to the report, Henrico County already has 37 data centers within its borders, and more are coming to the area.

Virginia is the home to many data centers. By that I mean more than anywhere else in the country and there are more coming, but not without pushback.

Folks are sick of these things and for some reason companies are being horrible citizens as they build them. What I mean by that is they’re not considering the human and environmental costs of their diesel powered, water chugging, AI data centers. It doesn’t help that our current administration doesn’t care about people of the environment, but I digress.

In the end new data centers need tighter restrictions and strong governance to not pollute our water and destroy natural resources and put people’s health at great risk. They need to solve the water problem in a non-toxic way and bring their own environmentally friendly power to the game.

I can hear it now “But, but, those things would be costly and take more time to build!” Yea, so, what’s your point? Suck it up buttercup and do the right thing for humanity and not shareholder value. I’m sick of the phrase shareholder value.

Maggie Boccella • Fangoria

The full moon is here, and it’s bringing a Werwulf with it. Focus Features has released the first trailer for Robert Eggers’ highly anticipated creature feature, putting his signature grim spin on the classic monster movie as he travels back in time for his latest film. 

I’ve watched the trailer and I’m all in. I’m not sure if this is a film I want to see in theaters or wait for it to hit streaming. Either way, I’m seeing it.

Sarah Perez • TechCrunch

The device, known as the Clicks Communicator, was first introduced at January’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to cater to people who do a lot of work on their phones, like texting and emailing. It’s particularly meant to appeal to those who miss the BlackBerry’s physical keyboard, which some argue is better for these types of tasks.

My wife had a Blackberry at one time and she loved her little keyboard. I sent her a link to the Clicks and she likes it. The big question is this, would she like it after being an iPhone user for years and years now? I don’t think so. I think her love of the keyboard is nostalgic and she’d become sick of it after a short period of time and want her iPhone back.

Scott Neuman • NPR

Scientists, educators, farmers and the broader public now have a new website for climate information in the United States. The site, Climate.us, launched this week and fills a void left when a government-run climate information website was shut down last year by the Trump administration.

This is very cool! If the government is going to screw up and not do its job it’s nice to see a private entity step up and fill the gap.

Now, the conservatives that loved these cuts will say “See, small government works. Private entities filled the void!”

Don’t fall for it. There are certain things the government should do for the people and this is one of many I hope we get back when a reasonable administration returns to power.

Liv McMahon • BBC

Ford says it has hired back some human engineers after AI failed to match their skills and experience.

In a bid to reap the benefits of the tech, which developers claim can cut costs and boost productivity, the US carmaker adopted it across some parts of its operations including for quality checks.

But, according to Bloomberg, its executives said the firm has rehired more than 300 “veteran” quality inspectors in recent years to make up for the pitfalls of automated systems.

This is really nice to see. I don’t think it’s a failing of LLMs, rather a failing of management at Ford believing they could replace humans with computers. We’re not there, yet. We’re at step one of many of LLMs being able to do this stuff without a human counterpart.

What I’ve come to learn is an LLM isn’t a replacement for a human. It’s just another tool in the toolbelt. I’ve had great success using Claude as a coding companion. I point it at a well defined ticket that includes behaviors, expected acceptance criteria, documentation (often), and a visual design to guide it. In response it does a darned good job of building out the feature based on other inputs. Inputs like configuration files, existing code structure, code standards, and the general coding style of the developers involved in the project. Another thing I believe is critical to its success: pairing the LLM with an experienced human developer and keeping tasks small. Building in bite sized chunks, I believe, is a super power and super charges the LLM (along with all those skills and configuration files we’ve added.)

Thorin Klosowski • EFF

People talk about RSS like it’s a power user’s secret trick to making the internet more usable, but the real secret is that it’s not that hard to set up and use. Here’s what you need to do:

I like to tell folks RSS is just another way to view a website. It’s the stripped down form of HTML. The meat of the subject. It can contain HTML, images, and even video. It’s just an easier way to fetch a bunch of articles for reading and, if you’re lucky, a lot of the bigger news sites provide separate feeds for different types of news.

I love RSS and what its done for the web. It’s why I created Stream.

Erik Eckstein • Swift.org

Dear compiler developers, I’m happy to announce that from now on “mandatory” parts of the compiler can be implemented in Swift (on the main branch).

This is really cool news. I have two questions: 1) When will the etire compiler be written in Swift? 2) Will they try using an LLM to port all of the C++ code to Swift?

I like to see an experimental port using an LLM.

Jon Udell

Three decades on, software developers still live in the terminal, now more than ever as coding agents dethrone the integrated environments that held sway for so long.

With the advent of the GUI it made it easier to have multiple terminal windows open at once. On a typical day I have at least three open; one for git, one for yarn, and one for Claude. I’ll open others if I need them. The three I mention above are all in a single tabbed window in the order listed.

When working on Stream I have a separate terminal window open for doing stuff there.

Eshu Marneedi

I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil. The problem during the first era of the AI boom (circa 2023) was indeed that Meta was too slow to identify the metaverse flub. But that was no longer Meta’s problem entering the agentic coding era: The problem, rather, was that Meta had no coherent strategy.

Meta/Facebook are terrible companies, but boy are they great for shareholder value.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

After Apple announced their price increases for so many of their products I managed to find a new MacBook Air on Amazon at the old price so I went ahead and purchased it.

I got a 15in, M5, 24GB RAM, and a 1TB SSD in Sky Blue. I think it’ll be great for my Sunday morning Coffee and Code adventures.

OM

Om Malik passed away on June 24, 2026, at Stanford Hospital after a long health journey with his heart. He was surrounded by family and friends.

I didn’t know Om but by all accounts he was a very kind man. My heart goes out to his family.❤️

R.I.P. Om 🪦

Get Maheux • The Iconfactory

This month marks the Iconfactory’s 30th year pushing pixels and to celebrate we’ve partnered up with our friends at Cotton Bureau to offer a special t-shirt for the occasion. This high-quality, on-demand shirt sports the 30th anniversary logo on the front breast and a large, retro pixel-clicked design on the back.

My friends at The Iconfactory are celebrating 30 years of great design, illustration, and software development with a nifty new t-shirt! My order shipped yesterday and I expect it to arrive soon.

This new design will join my W-W-Dog-Cow, Ollie, and Iconfactory shirts.

Paul Kafasis • Rogue Amoeba

With last year’s release of MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple made a mess of app icons. In the first betas of MacOS 27 (Golden Gate), however, there are signs of a turnaround. We’re urging Apple to continue making improvements, by restoring the ability for MacOS app icons to have distinct shapes.

Follow the link if only to scroll down and look at the beautiful selection of icons Paul chose for the article. All of them are masterworks.

Deborah Brennan • Cal Matters

A million-square-foot data center became a lighting rod in this rural county. Local leaders filed lawsuits, proposed laws and organized a ballot measure to challenge it.

I’m surprised when I read about the absolute greed of these companies. California has a water problem. It has for decades and decades and companies want to build water guzzling data centers all over the state.

I have a feeling most of the country doesn’t realize how bad things really are in California. Sure, they had a wet winter but it doesn’t even begin to put a dent in the drought they’re still experiencing.

It’s fire season, yeah, there’s a season for fires in California. So far there hasn’t been a big event this year. Here’s hoping they don’t have one.

Anywho, data centers are going to continue to be a problem in the country unless and until companies start thinking about more than shareholder value and think of the imact to people and the environment. You can cover the planet in data centers but if there’s no water to grow crops it doesn’t do us much good.

I suppose the computers can continue operating as long as we build them bots to service thier needs and they find a way to solve the water problem. Then they won’t need us. 🤔

David Sparks • Mac Sparky

The team behind Bear just released the beta of Lettera, a native Markdown editor for the Mac. It grew out of Panda, the editor they built for Bear 2, and it’s now evolved into a standalone app.

This app looks really nice and I’m looking forward to giving it a whirl. I don’t know what I’ll use it for since I use Tot for composing my blog posts, but it looks really nice nonetheless.🐻

Matthew Guay

Lotus Notes, in 1989, had encryption two years before Pretty Good Privacy brought it to normal email, had rich text formatting and attachments before MIME, had read receipts, notifications, a directory of users, and wiki-style cross-message links. It, rightly, felt like the future.

I remember when Notes was a big deal but I never understood the appeal. It makes me wonder if it could have been turned into a web server as well?

It’s also very sad when I think about all the companies that have disappeared from that era; Lotus, WordPerfect, WordStar, Borland, Ashton-Tate, Micrografx, Aldus, Nantucket, Fox Software, Peachtree, and even my beloved Visio. I know there are many, many, others.

Jennifer Ouellette • Ars Technica

Widow’s Bay, the delightfully eccentric new comedic horror series from Apple TV, is easily one of the best new series of the year. There’s a reason everyone from Guillero del Toro and Ben Stiller to Damon Lindelolf (Lost) is raving about the show. It’s an eminently binge-able, addictive series that pays tribute to all the classic horror tropes while reinventing them in surprising ways.

There are so many great television shows to choose from these days it’s extremely difficult for me to start a new one. But, this one does look compelling.

Osmond Chia • BBC

US artificial intelligence (AI) giant Anthropic has accused Chinese e-commerce and technology firm Alibaba of “brazenly” and “illicitly” extracting its Claude AI model’s capabilities.

So, let’s get this straight. You (Anthropic) pulled all you could from websites to train your LLM but you throw a fit when someone else does it to you?

Got it. Fine for Me but not Thee.

I still believe all this LLM stuff should be operated by Universities in conjunction with the federal government. No one company should benefit from it. Why? For one they built it on the backs of all of our hard work. Secondly we don’t need a bunch of hojillionaires running around controlling the LLMs used all over the US and the world.

Look, I don’t know how to make that happen, but it seems a logical choice in hindsight.

Of note: There’s no way I’d trust the management of this technology in the hands of the current, incompetent, administration.

Mark Gurman • Bloomberg

The No. 1 priority for new Apple CEO John Ternus should be revamping the company’s design team and putting the focus back on the look and feel of products.

I think this is already happening. I can’t see them turning on a dime and declaring the whole Liquid Glass thing a complete failure and ditching it but I can see it evolve into something nice before they do a completely new design and throw everything into chaos again.🤣

We can either live with it or move on to another operating system. I can’t see doing that.

Julian Chokkattu • Wired

The Commodore Callback 8020 is not the first Commodore-branded phone (that would be the Pet from 2015), but it’s the first to feel unique and interesting. It might look like a dumb Nokia phone from yesteryear, but this flippy gadget has access to modern-day Android apps because it runs the Linux-based Sailfish OS from the Finnish company Jolla. The Callback’s front screen shows the date, time and battery status, but no notifications. Flip it open, and you’re greeted with a custom interface that can run apps like Uber, WhatsApp and Spotify.

This is an interesting take on the flip phone. It’s very retro in its styling but it does have an operating system that can run Android apps. It’s meant to be less distracting. I can’t blame folks for wanting that but how many are gonna spend $500 plus on a flip phone just so they can’t install email or social media apps?

Jowi Morales • Tom’s Hardware

AI GPU maker Nvidia just announced a “hotter than a hot tub” liquid cooling system that it says will cut water and electricity use. According to the company, this new solution will run coolant — composed of 75% water and 25% propylene glycol — at 113 degrees F (45 deg C).

The use of propylene glycol seems a logical choice in a closed system but it only accounts for 25% of the overall coolant and, unfortunately, it’s highly toxic.

At least someone is trying something I guess.

Kason Clark • The Sun Gazette

Even though he operates out of the rural community of Tulare, Brandon Contreras’ custom-designed shoes have reached across the state and beyond. 

This gentleman’s shoes look extremely cool and I’m so happy a kid from the area I grew up found a way to do something he loves and do well for himself.

Olly Headey via Mastodon

The Mac I priced up last week for £3,999 now costs £5,199. The one I priced at £6,978 is now £9,699. Didn’t get round to pulling the trigger, fool. 💀

Olly had a post on his blog a week or so back asking if he should buy a new computer. I think the answer should’ve been yes, yes you should’ve upgraded. Sorry Olly.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I had the first two days of the week off and didn’t realize until we got back from our camping trip that we had Friday off for Juneteenth, so I had a two day work week mainly filled with getting caught up. Also, I desperately need a vacation to recover from my vacation. As recorded here we spent June 1st through 7th with our grandkids at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, camping at the State Beach. It is a lot of fun to hang out with them and see the ocean but it’s also exhausting. 🤣

We’re all happy to be home. Getting a proper shower and getting to sleep in my own bed was amazing. I’m still tired. 😃

I was able to spend some time on Stream yesterday and sorted out some UI stuff that was bugging me and sorely missing. When the app opens and refreshes feeds or the user presses Cmd+R or presses the Refresh button it now displays a progress indicator. The same method is used for importing OPML files. I hope it looks and feels OK to folks? I still need to post my Work Note.

Get Maheux • Iconfactory

Thirty years ago this month, three friends working at a small multimedia company in Greensboro, NC, decided to post a few fun sets of Mac desktop icons on an AOL webpage. Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into back then, but here we are, incredibly, thirty years later.

I’m so happy for my friends at The Iconfactory. Ged and the gang are such amazing people, designers, and developers.

For a little while now I’ve gotten the feeling they’re struggling a bit, which is unfathomable to me. They’re so good at what they do! Their design work, iOS, and Mac app development are world class, who wouldn’t want Craig Hockenberry or Sean Heber on their team, not to mention Ged Maheux and Anthony Piraino’s design and illustration mastery and that’s not every employee at the company. I’m sure the other folks involved are just as incredible.

I’m surprised they haven’t been acquihired. Seriously great people and a great, small, company.

Apple or another BigCo should buy them for lots of money, they’ve earned a big pay day with everything they’ve done for the Apple Community. Yes, I’m a fanboi. ❤️

Brent Simmons

My hope for retirement was to get a lot of work done on NetNewsWire.

A year ago it was in sore need of modernization, tech debt pay-off, and bug fixes. People were asking for features, but the foundation needed a ton of work before I could get on to adding new rooms.

Brent has been working very dilligentally on NetNewsWire and the list of changes he outlines shows in the product. An alltime great application from a Mac Development hero.

Thanks for everything you’ve done over the years, Brent. It’s nice to see you’re keeping busy and staying out of trouble. 😃

Olly

I’ve been updating the Pagecord home page today with a new headline, refreshed hero text, and a new section called The Pagecord Principles.

The idea is to encapsulate why Pagecord exists and what it stands for. I’m hoping this resonates with bloggers visiting for the first time, encouraging them to sign up to Pagecord rather than (or as well as) one of the many, many alternatives.

I’ve been following Pagecord’s progress for a little while now and just started following Olly on Mastodon and subscribed to his blog.

Pagecord is a very simplified blogging platform, as they should be. The 800lb. gorilla in the space — WordPress — has grown into a full featured Enterprise CMS capable of running the worlds largest web sites and your tiny blog, but something like Pagecord is a great choice instead of using WordPress for your personal blog because it’s tiny, has a great UI and editor, and comes at a really great price of only $39/year!

I signed up to support their efforts and I’m thinking about moving my Hayseed Blog over to Pagecord.

Thanks for the great software, Olly!

Robert B Shpiner • The Guardian

I’m a critical care doctor. I’ve never seen the US harm its children this deliberately

Ah, yes, the incompetence of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. continues to destroy our country’s health and human services infrastructure and put us at great risk.

I don’t know if it was the brain worms or something else that twisted this mans brain but he doesn’t belong in a leadership position in our country.

I hope beyond hope we have future elections and can get competent people back in office to start turning the mess our country is in around. 🤞🏼

Hartley Charlton • Mac Rumors

Apple this week confirmed that Notion is migrating its user interface to SwiftUI, citing the app’s desire for greater performance and UI consistency than its existing web-based stack can deliver.

This is both interesting and welcome. It’s also going to be very expensive but it’s nice to see such a highly regarded company and software move toward a native solution when so many are moving to Electron and React Native to deliver their products across platforms.

That brings up some questions: Is the Mac their primary desktop platform? Do they have a big Windows user base? Will the core Swift code be shared between Mac and Windows or will they be using shared C, C++, or Rust as the core? Are they using an LLM to do the initial port to Swift and SwiftUI using their TypeScript/JavaScript code as a map?

I’ll be watching their progress. This kind of stuff really interests me.

Martina Igini • Earth org

If treated as a country, data centers could rank sixth globally for electricity consumption by 2030. They would also require an amount of water equivalent to the annual needs of 1.3 billion people.

Data centers are going to be a huge controversy for years to come. I wish I had the intelligence to help solve these problems because I really have no clue how we fix this. Someone has to have the knowledge to do it? Right? 😳

Mark Tyson • Toms Hardware

A “full-feature-parity version of Notepad” has been written in x86 assembly and it weighs in at just 2,749 bytes. Windows legend Dave W. Plummer is (inevitably) the coder behind this efficiency tour de force, and he’s made RetroPad available (code and exe) on his GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license.

Ahhh, old greybeards know what they’re doing when it comes to understanding how the machine really works. At a time when we see developers moving higher and higher up the stack to solutions that abstract away so much of the computer it’s nice to see someone get down in the muck and mire of the chip and build something.

As a Swift developer I’m ready to see Swift as a language slow its pace of new feature adoption. I’d like to see it stable for a long time. It’s been a very useful language since the start but it’s become such a dumping ground over the last few years I can’t keep up with it. I’d imagine that’s just a me problem, but it’s still something I’d like to see.

Mr. Plummer was able to take something that’s been stable for 30+ years and build a highly useful, fast, small app with “old” tooling. I’m looking forward to his video on the matter and I hope he dives into his entire working environment as well as code details.

Daniel Jalkut

Forever the optimist, I think that the next several years will be an era in which opinionated, competent developers are able to run circles around projects that are overly-invested in AI. Dip into AI, maybe even let it be your first mate, but never let it be the captain.

I’ve always liked Daniel Jalkut. I’ve never had the honor of meeting the man personally but I listened to him and Manton Reece on CoreInt for years (long live CoreInt!) He is a true punkass and optimist and seems like a genuinely kind and thoughtful person. He’s also a hell of a software engineer, especially when it comes to debugging Mac software.

Hey, fellas, if either of you happens to read this, please, do an episode of CoreInt so we can get caught up! 🙏🏼

MacPsych

Dear Apple: please move on from your focus on ‘style’ and return to substance. Your operating systems are verging on unusable and totally ignore the accessibility needs of millions.

Also: please ensure your new CEO doesn’t publicly reward a fascist dictator with gaudy awards. 

I think Mr. MacPsych should be pretty happy with this years WWDC. It really sounds like they’ve worked on hardening the operating system and shoring up Apple Intelligence instead of adding a bunch of new features to the OS’es. That’s great news for users and developers alike!

As for the CEO and his kissing the ass of a fascist dictator. That job seems like it’ll become the job of the Chairman of the Board instead of the CEO’s job moving forward. Yes, still Tim Cook doing the ass kissing, but I hope it frees up incoming CEO John Ternus to get Apple back to what it does best; amazing hardware and software that delights.

Emanuel Maibert • 404 Media

A software update to some Amazon delivery vehicles is automatically turning off the air conditioning after a few seconds if the driver is not in their seat, according to multiple Amazon delivery drivers who are complaining about the update online. 

Talk about not taking your target audiences day-to-day use of something into account! Amazon workers are notoriously overworked and monitored for efficiency. It’s a bit extreme and this unfortunate bug certainly doesn’t help driver morale.

TC Sottek • The Verge

Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO will probably make him the richest person to ever walk the planet. And while his mountain of horrible personal conduct could fill multiple books, one fact in particular stands out: A year ago, Musk’s actions directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He did it knowingly. And, worse — gleefully.

I’ll keep saying it: Space Karen is a horrible human being and deserves a trip to Mars, him personally, alone. 🤬

Nikita Prokopov

Why care about every frame? It builds trust. Users can’t see the code, so UI is the only way for them to judge the quality of the app. If UI looks good, that means developers had time to polish it, which means that they probably spent a comparable amount of time to iron out the code. It’s a heuristic, but a reasonable one.

Polishing code is fun, especially when, as the developer, you see a performance or stability improvement. When you’re able to polish up the UI of your application and someone notices it, it’s an even bigger joy than noticing the internal improvements you’ve made, unless, of course, someone using your app notices performance or stability improvements. 😄

Ah, heck, polishing is rewarding no matter what type you’re able to do but polishing the UI is no doubt the most visible type.

Anthropic

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.

I’ve been thinking about LLMs a lot lately. Mostly about where they belong in society. The more I watch this race to deliver AGI the more I’m starting to believe this technology shouldn’t be used to make a small group of people billionaires or trillionaries. I think the original goal of Open AI was right. It should be open to everyone. For the good of mankind.

Yep, I said it, “for the good of mankind.” Loaded words, I know, but I don’t know how else to say it. All of these AI researchers and developers should work for universities who are government funded all working to deliver their unified work for all to use. It should be socially responsible software with strict regulation behind it. Do no harm.

LLMs should be a social benefit for all Americans. Run by its own agency within the United States Government in partnership with the best universities. Pay the researchers and developers well and give them the best tools and working conditions necessary to advance LLMs while making sure we don’t drive humanity to extinction.

Social issues related to LLMs also need dealing with. If humans are going to be put out of good paying jobs we, as a society, need to make sure people can survive without jobs. Of course folks will scream socialism! If LLMs put us out of work eventually how do we survive if not by a basic income provided by our government? Yes, it’s something I’m curious about. Something we may need in the future — hell, something we need now?

Anyway, that’s a deep discussion for someone like me with a shallow mind. I’d love to hear how folks would solve problems like this.

Devin Meenan • SlashFilm

Guillermo del Toro’s wild, cinematic imagination has led to him being attached to many unrealized projects over the years. It’s a miracle on par with creating life that he finally got to make his dream “Frankenstein” movie. Of all the Del Toro projects that never happened, though — aside from maybe his canceled H.P. Lovecraft adaptation – the one unfulfilled del Toro movie that’s left the biggest hole in fans' hearts is “Hellboy III.”

I love the Guillermo del Toro Hellboy movies and I wish Ron Perlman had a chance to make that final installment but I guess it’s not to be. 😔

Jamie Marsland • Pootle Press

Today, the UK government announced plans to ban social media for under-16s. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the restrictions are needed to protect children’s wellbeing and mental health. Slightly to my own surprise, I think they are right.

I love that we have free speech in America (well, the kind we had before Marmalade Messiah took office.) Yes, I’m well aware that free speech, part of our First Amendment rights, only apply to the suppression of speech by the Government. Which is where this stuff gets sticky, and yes, I know it’s the UK government in this case. 😁

Anywho, since BigCo’s won’t govern their own platforms to protect children someone has to. We have enough studies now to know it’s not good for kids mental health and definitely doesn’t help them learn. So, I guess, it’s time for governments to step in and propose regulations to stop social networks from harming children. Now, how do we do that without compromising privacy? There’s the rub.

Dominic Preston • The Verge

Fox has announced that it’s acquiring Roku outright, in a deal that values the streaming company at $22 billion.

Roku is built into our TCL TVs. We use them and the only issue I have with them is not really knowing what they’re collecting from us. 🤔 You can bet Fox is going to collect every little tidbit they can and more.

I’m hoping I can convince my wife it’s time to upgrade to Apple TV and disconnect the TCL from the network. 😁 It’s a longshot, but I’m gonna try. Wish me luck! ☘️

Jeremy Keith

But credit where credit is due. The upcoming version 27 of Safari is looking very good.

That’s not because it’s at the cutting edge of the latest web standards. Quite the opposite. Most of the changes listed for this release are bug fixes. That’s what I want to acknowledge and applaud.

It seems the hardening that’s happening with all Apple 27 OS’es also applies to apps. I use Safari everyday as my main daily driver — I’ve also been using Orion — and every little fix they make to Safari is perfectly fine with me. Do I want them to support all web standards? Yes, I do, but I also want them to continue to make a solid, easy to use, and privacy preserving browser.

Yes, I want it all! 😆

Chris Koseluk • Hollywood Reporter

Gene Shalit, the fun-loving film critic on the Today show known for his oversized mustache, out-of-control mop of black hair and lively use of puns in his movie reviews, died Friday. He was 100.

Godspeed Mr. Shalit. I always loved watching your reviews delivered with a big smile and gigantor mustache. RIP. 🪦

This weekend NASCAR is racing at Naval Base Coronado in San Diego on the Coronado Street Course. The track is 3.4 miles long and goes over various different track materials like concrete, old concrete, black top, and old black top not to mention lots and lots of bumps! It also includes a transition into a downhill just before a left turn. All that said just to say it’s kind of cool seeing these cars getting a little air when they hit that downhill transition. 😄 Should make for some very interesting racing. Based on the truck race yesterday I suspect there will be lots and lots of damaged and crashed race cars before the day is over.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Welp, I’m on PTO! 🥳 The sad thing is I don’t feel like I’m on vacation, yet. Today I need to vacuum Kim’s car and my truck so they’re nice and clean because Monday morning we’re off to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for a week of camping at the beach with our daughter, grandkids, and the dogs. We enjoy it down there. The folks are nice, the campgrounds are well maintained, and the beach is, well… it’s the beach. Everything is better at the beach!⛱️

My only fear is Ms. Gracie will misbehave. She barks at everything and I’m afraid she’ll have a lot of trouble at night because campgrounds can be a little noisy at times.

I will, of course, need a vacation when we get back from our vacation, so I took Monday and Tuesday of the following week off to recover a bit before going back to work. 😁

Daniel Arkin ⦁ NBC News

CBS News has fired veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley a day after he confronted the show’s new executive producer at a heated staff meeting.

Bravo Scott Pelley! Let ‘em have it! Watching CBS slide into fascism hasn’t been fun to watch but seeing someone on the inside push back, in such a public manner, has been refreshing.

Sure, CBS is now a fascist hellscape of a broadcast and news company but the fine news people they have don’t have to be a part of it.

The web is the place for great news to happen. I hope Mr. Pelley creates his own news blog — NOT ON SUBSTACK — and publishes his own brand of investigative reports.

Yesterday on Pivot Scott Galloway suggested Netflix should pick up the 60-minutes crew and let it operate on its own as “Hour News” or some such. I like the idea. 😃

Tim Hardwick ⦁ MacRumors

Apple is expected to launch its first foldable iPhone later this year. Rumors suggest the “iPhone Ultra” will come in two color options, and a leaker shared an image today that allegedly shows one of them.

If the picture in that article is the new phone I can confidently say I don’t like the form factor. I haven’t held it in my hand of course but it looks huge.

Hopefully we’ll see this new phone in September or October of this year. Even though I doubt it’s something I’d like to use I will, of course, do what I can to support it in Stream. 😄

Jon

A digital detox was on my list to accomplish. I’ve read blog posts about this regarding deleting apps on your phone and deleting accounts from services. I reviewed how I was using my time through the day and reading rss feeds of blogs and tech articles. Many tech posts I didn’t even read past the headlines since I’m not interested any longer in tech. These were the first to go from my rss reader.

I have a feeling this happens more than we realize and I’d also imagine it’s accelerating with the advent of LLMs.

I know he’s abandoned RSS but I’d like to point out that part of why I made Stream was so I wouldn’t feel that need to be a completionists with my feeds. Of course I eventually caved and added read/unread markers on every feed item, it was heavily requested.

For the Mac version I’ve made displaying those read/unread dots optional, by request of course.

Sorry, I don’t know Jon’s last name or I’d have use it! 😂

Elizabeth Lopatto ⦁ The Verge

I haven’t seen anything as stupid as the WeWork IPO document in a very long time — that is, until Elon Musk filed to take SpaceX public. WeWork was a joke. SpaceX is a threat. And if Musk and his bankers have their way, you are going to be their bagholder.

I’m not so sure Elon Musk is at all interested in saving humanity, as he was once fond of saying. He’s interested in power and stuffing his already fat pockets with even more money at the expense of everything and everyone around him.

SpaceX may be a good company, doing interesting things, but Musk is a real garbage human and he leaves a stench on whatever he touches, SpaceX included.

He’s bound and determined to destroy Tesla and his social media platform has become a right wing troll farm.

We can’t get a ultra wealth tax in place fast enough. Everything over 10-billion should be taxed somewhere between 80-100% with zero loopholes afforded for borrowing against it. These wealthy suckers use every trick in the book to get around paying taxes and even benefit on their taxes by taking out loans against their wealth. Yes, yet another way to absolutely screw the average and the poor.

Screw you, Space Karen.

Get on a rocket and get your ass to Mars already. 🚀

Dave Winer via Github

It’s time for me to learn what standard.site is and how it compares to the things I know and work with. This is the result of the conversation I had this morning with ChatGPT.

This is a neat summary comparing standard.site and RSS provided by ChatGPT. It’s definitely worth a read.

And, I still don’t understand AT Protocol. 😂

Manton Reece

I’ve updated Micro.blog with initial support for Standard.site, a set of lexicons for long-form blogging on the atmosphere. I’m a little late to the party. Thanks to Leaflet, Pckt, and others for leading the way here.

I love how Manton keeps Micro.blog at the forefront of blogging and the social web. This site will benefit from his work adding standard.site support and I won’t have to lift a finger.

Thank you, Manton! ❤️

The PHP Foundation

PHP is foundational to the modern web, and ensuring its security is essential for a significant portion of the web’s functionality and integrity.

I know a lot of language purists love to pick on PHP but to me it’s the C of the web. It’s been around for so long and is beloved by so many for it’s ease of use. Heck, until fairly recently you could write PHP code on your Mac without installing a single package. Just write some PHP and browse to it. Simple. We need more of that because modern software development is a mess of packages upon packages upon packages. Half the time you spend on your project is keeping packages and your fragile environment working. Unless you’re me, then you decide to use C++ to write a backend service so you can stay away from as much external stuff as possible. Don’t worry, I’m gonna let an LLM help me with it. 🤣

Trace Sauveur ⦁ SlashFilm

The anthology movie is a distinct art form, one whose strengths and drawbacks are well known and almost entirely foundational to the general understanding of how the genre works.

Creep Show and Trick-r-Treat are easily my favorite horror anthologies.

“I want my cake! Bedelia!”

Chad Whitacre

tl;dr AI took the last of the wind out of my Open Source sails. I wish you all the best!

I like the way Chad exited tech. He typed his reasons, on real paper, then hand edited mistakes and left notes in the margin with a pen.

Good luck, Chad! I hope you’re able to stay away from the draw of tech! 😄

Jason Koebler ⦁ 404 Media

Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with the target account.

This is a heckuva thing. Please, for all that pure in this world, don’t connect these things to dangerous systems of any kind. Please, keep us fallable — thinking, empathetic — humans in charge of those. Pachinko machines have no place near dangerous systems.

Rene Zelaya

In April, Apple rejected an update to my Mac dictation app, WhisperPad, under Guideline 2.4.5. Their position was that I was using the accessibility API in a way that wasn’t an accessibility use. The app exists because I have a hand injury. Apple had approved earlier versions doing the same thing. This time they did not.

This was really quite sad to read. Rene creates something to help with their pain issue and decides to share it with the world, because hey, someone else may need it, but Apple rejects it.

I’ve actually experienced something similar. In 2013-2014 my left hand pinky and ring finger became very painful when I’d type for too long. Turns out my ulnar nerve was pinched and required surgery to repair. This app would’ve been very handy at the time.

Apple Design Awards

Winners and finalists in this category provide memorable, engaging, and satisfying experiences enhanced by Apple technologies.

WWDC 2026 is next week so I thought I’d share the finalists and give them a big “Congratulations!” on their nominations!

I see, yet again, Stream isn’t in the list. 🤣

Tom Warren ⦁ The Verge

Much like Google, Microsoft is launching its own version of OpenClaw. Microsoft Scout is an always-on assistant that integrates into Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams, allowing businesses to assign a virtual assistant to employees to help with organizing calendars, expense reporting, email drafts, and much more.

This app looks pretty nice to me. I haven’t seen it front and center but it looks pretty nice at first glance.

The first thing I thought was “Did they do this in Electron or React Native like they’ve been doing in other areas?”

It would be nice to discover it’s native C++ or C#, but I’m not holding my breath. For some reason they love writing stuff in TypeScript now.

As I’ve said before, the web is now the desktop. I can’t really wrap my brain around the attraction to React Native and TypeScript and I’ve been working with it for over a year now. It’s super popular with developers of all ages and, of course, I’m going with the flow, but I still prefer using the native tools, frameworks, and languages of the platform.

Maybe it’s just time for all platforms to give in and embrace TypeScript and React Native as their preferred platform. At least then they could create really great tooling around it. The arcane, backwards, tooling is part of what I really dislike about using TypeScript and React Native.

Enough complaining.🤣 The app looks pretty nice. I hope it’s extremely useful.

Andrew Cunningham ⦁ Ars Technica

On the hardware front, we didn’t get any updates for existing Surface devices (not counting yesterday’s Surface Laptop Ultra announcement), but we did get something new: the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is “a compact developer PC” built around Nvidia’s new RTX Spark chip with up to 128GB of built-in memory.

The RTX Spark is getting a lot of ink these days and I’d love to see one in action. Makes me wonder if Apple has any of these running in a lab somewhere in Cupertino?

I’ll bet these things are going to be crazy expensive.🤑

Etiido Uko ⦁ Tom’s Hardware

Microsoft CEO says new AI data centers use as little water annually as a restaurant — closed-loop cooling system aims to slash consumption from millions of gallons as AI infrastructure faces mounting environmental scrutiny

I hope this is a real thing because it would certainly go a long way toward fixing one of the real problems created by Data Centers. Now, provide your own clean, silent running, power and you’ve really got something.

Regard for the natural world and the comfort of people around these places should be the highest priority of any Data Center build. All these folks see is money at any cost.

There won’t be money to make if we’re all dead.😵

HFT University

This isn’t a Rust-is-faster story. It’s a story about how std::unordered_map, std::map, and std::list — the containers every C++ textbook teaches, the ones the committee has shipped since 1998 — are so catastrophically bad for modern hardware that a Rust beginner using default containers demolishes a C++ solution without trying. And how we proved it by systematically replacing each C++ container until parity was reached.

To me this is a Rust is faster than C++ story. This is shameful in my eyes as someone who has written a ton of C++ code. At the time I was writing C and C++ code it was as popular as JavaScript and TypeScript are today. It was ubiquitous. The compilers were top notch and constantly improving. Today we have so many great choices, like Rust and Swift. I’d love to see Swift in a head-to-head with Rust using these same tests.

If you want to use an alternative to the standard library (std::) checkout Google’s Abseil. It’s way faster and battle tested.💨

Sean O’Kane ⦁ Tech Crunch

Under the terms of the deal, Google will pay SpaceX $920 million per month from October 2026 through June 2029 for access to “approximately 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs, CPUs, memory, and other related components.”

What’s the deal with these companies going to SpaceX — xAI really — to get compute? I guess all that money spent on getting data centers setup before the pushback was a good idea, but at huge cost to nature and people.

People see Musk as a genius. He’s not. He’s a sociopath who does whatever he wants. You can take that to the bank.

<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/5176/2026/cc538cc8f9.png” width=“600” height=“892” alt=“MAGA Cult”>

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

It’s been a pretty quite week. Work is moving along fine and we’re getting ready for our camping trip to the beach with the grandkids, our youngest daughter, and our dogs. Today I need to remove the wheels from the trailer and get new tires. I’ve never had to do that and I hope it goes smoothly. I’ll have to remove two at a time, run them down for new tires, put them back on the trailer and repeat the process for the remaining two. It’ll make for a bit of busy work and alone time driving to Charlottesville and back, which I really enjoy.

My brain is already in vacation mode so I’ll have to push myself to remain focused on work the coming week. Then I get a week off to enjoy time with my family. ❤️

Carlo Affatigato ⦁ Auralcrave

The actor you see in the commercial is Patrick Renna, and his face looks so familiar because in our collective memory, he will forever be tied to an absolute cult character: Hamilton “Ham” Porter, the talkative, charismatic, and loyal kid from The Sandlot, the 1993 cinematic masterpiece that redefined the spirit of childhood and 90s summers.

How can you not love Ham Porter? He’s the portly, quick witted, catcher from The Sandlot. I love that movie! Have since the first time I saw it. While he’s just one of many great characters in the movie he definitely stands out. Seeing him explain how to make a s’more to his kid is heartwarming. ❤️

Paul Elliott ⦁ Louder Sound

During one amazing period in August, Pyromania was selling 100,000 copies a day in the US. The album climbed to No.2 on the Billboard chart – second only to Thriller. “We actually outsold Thriller for one week,” Elliott says, “but that just happened to be the week that the Flashdance soundtrack went to No.1, with us at two and Jacko at three.”

Back in High School Pyromania was a huge hit. It’s one of the albums I purchased as soon as I could, hey, it helped me fulfill my obligation to my Columbia House subscription and is one of my favorite albums from that era.

At that time MTV was also huge and I feel like they helped each other reach great success. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent in front of the TV watching MTV over the summer. It was a lot. MTV was to my generation what TikTok is to today’s generation. At least it was for me.

If I wasn’t playing baseball, D&D, or going to a movie, I was watching MTV and Def Leppard was all over it.

Matt Mullenweg ⦁ WordPress

If you know anyone at Silver Lake, Quinn Emanuel, or WP Engine in that order, please beg, plead with them to stop the violence. End this internecine warfare that is threatening to destroy one of the last stalwarts of the Open Web.

WordPress is part of the fabric of the web at this point in time. The little CMS that could, and did, take over so many websites that needed to be organized and scaled for millions and millions of hits per month, so it’s troubling to see the man who created it begging for help. It seems the legal battle with WP Engine has taken its toll on WordPress and Matt. That’s a crying shame and I wish WP Engine would back off the lawsuits and dive head first into making WordPress even better.

WordPress isn’t a tiny company any longer but they don’t bring the power and money a company backed by private equity firm [Silver Lake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SilverLake(investment_firm).

I want to see WordPress survive and thrive. Long live the open web.

Tom Warren ⦁ The Verge

Microsoft is telling employees that the decision is about converging on Copilot CLI as its main agentic command line interface tool across Experiences + Devices, but sources tell me the decision is also a financial one. The June 30th cutoff is the last day of Microsoft’s current financial year, and canceling Claude Code licenses is an easy way to cut some operating expenses for when the new financial year starts in July.

Microsoft isn’t the only company asking developers to use other tools or cut back their use of AI. There are reports that Amazon and Uber are also cutting back. These tools are extremely powerful and really helpful to software developers but are also very expensive to use all the time.

Like everything else the LLM companies will figure out how to make things faster and cheaper. My biggest hope it they figure out how to LLMs work without turning the planet into a wasteland.

Jim Ray ⦁ AT Proto

At the end of last year, three excellent AT Protocol-based publishing apps—Leaflet, pckt.blog, and Offprint—got together and decided to collaborate on creating their own Lexicon for publishing longer records like blog posts, articles, and newsletters on the protocol. They called it Standard.site and it has since emerged as one of the most successful community generated Lexicons on the Atmosphere.

I admit I still don’t understand AT Protocol. There, I said it. I think I’d need to fully dive into it for a while to really grok it.

When reading this piece I was left saying to myself “How is this so much different than an RSS feed?” If you know, please reach out and tell me how it’s different or why it’s better. I believe someone could do the same UI work based on an RSS feed for a blog? Am I wrong? Let me know.

Jake Savin

Before Frontier could become useful, it had to be buildable on modern operating systems, readable, writable, browsable… survivable. This is where the rubber hit the road.

I am very interested in Jake’s Frontier adventure and I love the idea of a headless Frontier. Being able to put other faces on the object database and scripting language sound like a really great idea to me. I’ve never been into using an outline as an editor and having the ability to bring my own IDE to the party sounds amazing.

If you’re not familiar with Frontier it’s a scripting language with a built in object database that is very powerful. The way Jake is rebuilding it I think it could make for a great embedded language for applications. Think the old VBA — still the best scripting environment ever made — in Microsoft Office apps.

Ryan Whitwam ⦁ Ars Technica

The 2026 Razrs don’t change much in the design department versus last year’s versions, but that’s fine. They still look great. There are wood panels, soft touch plastics, vegan leather, and synthetic fabrics—all things you won’t find on the latest devices from Samsung, Google, or Apple. These are, hands down, the prettiest phones you can buy right now.

These phones are pretty darned stunning. I’m not the target audience for them, to be honest I don’t know who is, but I really like them. I hope Apple’s new entrant looks as nice as these Razrs do.

HR Brew ⦁ Mikaela Cohen

Many workers are experiencing “AI brain fry,” or mental fatigue from using and overseeing AI tools. And it’s no wonder why: Organizational change can take a toll on workers, and right now, there’s no greater organizational change than that caused by AI.

As a longtime developer the thought of an LLM replacing me scared the crap out of me. I’ve been doing this work for 30+ years and it’s all I know. However, once I dipped my toe into the LLM waters I realized it was just another tool. Someone needs to be around to define what needs doing and be there to review the outputs because it can, at least today, get things wrong or maybe you need to make an additional change you missed along the way.

An observation I’m sure many others have made. Since LLMs were trained on the worlds collective data their “reasoning” comes across very human like. The LLM studies code, formulates an understanding, and comes up with a plan to make changes. Then sets about making those changes. It just does it way faster than I can.

Another observation. At the beginning of the project I’m on now my team was given an area of the app to work on and we were running as fast as possible to deliver features. LLMs were definitely a productivity booster. Now, however, we’re dealing with typical end of project stuff. We have dependencies on parters and other teams and LLMs can’t take care of those for us, which is 100% fine. Now we’re down to the end of the project and a lot of cooperation between various teams is where we spend most of our time.

Bottom line: we still need humans to do this work.

Android Developers Blog

Starting today Google AI Studio can build entire Android apps for you in minutes from just a prompt. You don’t need to install any software or configure any libraries, which significantly lowers the barrier to development. Whether you’re a seasoned developer looking to prototype at lightning speed or a creator building your first-ever mobile experience, you can now go from a single prompt to a high-quality, Kotlin-based Android app in AI Studio.

This is kind of cool and makes me wonder if Apple would ever offer a service like this. Not that I’d be the target audience but having something that could create an entire application for you, get it setup on the App Store, and publish it without the need for Xcode would be something to behold.

Having the ability to download the project a build it locally and maintain that connectivity to all the project stuff around it would be nice to have, if Apple ever does something like this.

Jamie Zawinski via Mastodon

Ever since I added substackcdn.com to my blocklist, I have learned how many bloggers have solved their “substack nazi” problem by just hiding it behind their own domain. Spoiler: it’s a lot.

I cringe ever time I hear or read “Go to my Substack” because they’re just blogs. Blogs hosted on a platform you have zero control over and I really hate that. Especially since people don’t seem to care they support some of the worst people ever to live on the planet. So many great writes out there I refuse to support or read because of the white supremacists and Nazis.

I know I can’t make a difference or convince folks to leave the platform but I’m going to keep trying. Before one of their co-founders went on Decoder with Nilay Patel and refused to say Substack would kick racists off the platform I’ve had zero respect for the company.

Today’s “new media” doesn’t seem to care they’re supporting horrible people. They’re lazy and only care about the money. Money they could have more of if they’d switch platforms. They’d also stop giving their hard earned cash to horrible people.

Until someone finds a way to make an open version of Substack that resonates with people stand alone blogs will probably be less attractive than Substack because folks like the social nature of it.

We could absolutely have the same experience as Substack with open source solutions but someone would have to build all that infrastructure and pay for it somehow.

A lot of the parts are there: HTTPS, RSS, ActivityPub, Micropub. Look at Micro.blog as an example of bringing some of those technologies together to make a social blogging experience. It publishes RSS, publishes to many different social networks, and gives you complete access to all of your data.

Jemma Crew ⦁ Business Insider

The boss of Standard Chartered has apologised after describing employees whose jobs are vulnerable to being replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) as “lower value human capital”.

Nice work, dude. This will be used in all kinds of think pieces and business schools as how not to motivate your employees.

Yeah, we all know we’re worthless cogs in the capitalist machine, but you don’t have to point it out. 🤬

Dave Rogers

Our consciousness, our experience of being, is shaped by things beyond our control. It is that experience of being that shapes our desires, and that is imposed or imprinted on us in our growing-up years.

Dave is going deep in this post and it rings true.

I’ve always loved Dave’s writing and I’ve followed him for at least 20 years, back to when he was writing Groundhog Day. He’s a good man and philosopher, I bet he’d disagree with me on that last point, but he’s a great writer and deep thinker none-the-less and worth a follow.

Dare Obasanjo via Mastodon

The software industry as we know it is dying and CEOs realized it months ago.

As long as I’ve been in this industry LLMs are the biggest shift I’ve ever seen. The web was seismic. At some point I knew I’d have to become a web developer if I wanted to continue to do computering stuff. Mobile came along and prolonged that shift for me. But, LLMs are a whole different thin for the world of software development. Sure, we still need the human element to tie it all together but you need good people skills and vision to make what we did by hand before. The coding practice is forever changed. We’re using LLMs to code in TypeScript, building React Native apps, but we could just as easily do everything in C, C++, Rust or native to platform languages like Swift and Kotlin. It doesn’t matter to the LLM, just to the client.

I have a web service in mind and I think I’ll do a CGI based thing using C++ because I’m comfortable with it and can edit everything by hand when I want. My idea is to generate the shell of it then do all the other work by hand using my own framework of C++ I’ve built over the years. It may never happen because I have to finish Stream for Mac and get Thunder Chicken rolling. Sorry for the tangent. My brain often does that. As the commercial says “The mind is a terrible thing.” 🤣

John Siracusa

To help the industry get back on the right track, I’ve created a checklist for car designers. Make sure your new car—EV or otherwise—checks all these boxes to avoid making the same stupid mistakes that have plagued modern cars for years.

I think John Siracusa is a software engineering/tech nerd national treasure. His hypercritical nature and observations lead to great product and, let’s face it, extremely entertaining. John has a great way of expressing himself. He’s always funny and I absolutely love hearing one of his mini-rants on ATP.

It’s nice to see him write once in a while and I love seeing his work pop up in Stream on that rare occasion.

One of these days I’d love to shake his hand and thank him for all the years of joy and knowledge he’s brought to my life.

As an aside, ATP is an example of a small podcast done right. They have their own custom built subscription system and don’t rely on Apple or another big entity to make money. They’re not locked in. I’m an ATP subscriber and there are other podcasts I might’ve subscribed to but they’re dependent on Apple Podcasts to pay for those subscriptions. I don’t use Apple Podcasts. That is yet another proprietary lock-in I don’t want to depend on. Yes, Apple does many wonderful things for podcasts and I’m thankful for that, but their subscription model is not something I can appreciate. I get it, they’re a business, just as ATP is a business, but ATP has a very open model, no lock-in. Bring your favorite podcast player to the party and it works with ATP as is.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I’ve only had one cup of coffee so I decided to play the Doom Soundtrack to increase my typing speed 1000%. 🤣

I hope you enjoy the links and the bad opinions. ❤️

Jacob Lev ⦁ CNN

Kyle Busch, a two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion, has died at the age of 41, just hours after his family said he was suffering from a severe illness.

Kim sent me a text Thursday night that simply read “Kyle Busch died.” When I read it, it didn’t quite register at first. My first thought was “Can’t be that Kyle Busch?” I was so wrong.

Kyle Busch was one of my favorite NASCAR drivers. He was brash but had mellowed over the years and I liked his competitive nature. Even though he’s struggled to record a win over the last three seasons he is, as Denny Hamlin says, on the Mount Rushmore of NASCAR.

I especially feel for his family. I can’t imagine the pain. ❤️

Godspeed, Mr. Busch.

Dave Winer

I think maybe it’s time to consider a reboot of WordPress. I can’t seem to seed them with any ideas about building on it from the point of view of the web. It’s a product unto itself, it has plugins, but I’m not a plug-in sort of guy. I write operating systems. That’s what drives me. I see a great place to put an OS with WordPress as the storage and publishing component, and everything else grows up around it.

I’ve been watching Dave create his WordLand project on top of WordPress for a while now and it got me thinking about using WordPress as the backend for a new project. I don’t think it needs a reboot, just some different ways to use it. Dave’s own work shows that would work.

My idea is to build out a Micropub implementation that uses WordPress as its backend. That would allow for anyone to hook up their Micropub enabled client app or website to the backend.

The other part of my idea was to hook into the publishing flow to output static HTML pages since it’s what I prefer for my blog.

All the parts are there. They just need connecting. I’m sure it won’t be without its challenges but I bet an LLM like Claude could help pull it all together. I’m thinking of doing it in C++ because it’s something I know and is highly portable. Swift would also be a decent choice since it’s also very portable.

Who am I kidding. It needs to run on Linux. 😄

Reveal ⦁ Mother Jones

Virginia might be for lovers, but more recently, it’s for data centers. The state has more data centers than anywhere in the world, and companies are pushing to build more of them, including around some of the most hallowed ground in the country: the Manassas National Battlefield Park. 

We’re definitely data center heavy here in Virginia and folks all over the state don’t want them in their area. Who can blame them given stories out of states like Texas and Tennessee where data center operators are polluting the air and water and making residents sick. Noise and light pollution are real things.

I mentioned it last weekend. If data center operators want to build they need to bring two things with them; power and an alternative to water for cooling. Oh, and they need to be HIGHLY regulated. I mean regulated like nuclear power plants. Green energy and restrictive noise pollution standards. Water is a big one. We need it to survive and many of these places are polluting water and putting it right back in the ground.

They’ve become a nuisance to communities. Who’d want them in their neck of the woods? I sure don’t.

Inverse

The Nice Guys bombed at the box office in 2016, grossing an estimated $62 million at the end of its theatrical run with a $50 million budget. This commercial turnout is largely credited to releasing the same weekend as the Angry Birds movie, and in the 10 years since critics and fans alike have bemoaned the loss of potential sequels this action-comedy could have spawned had it received more spotlight. To this day, cast and crew still get asked about the possibility of it in interviews.

I think I saw The Nice Guys on Netflix a few years back, it could’ve been another streaming service, but I think it was Netflix. Anywho, it’s a good film and I’d recomment putting it on your “to see” list.

Bryan Walsh ⦁ Vox

I’m referring, of course, to the daily miracle that is coffee. Our grandparents were told to cut back on this dirty-tasting beverage but today, it has become one of the most studied and virtuous and quietly luxurious parts of the human diet. All in all, coffee — yes, coffee — is one of the best reasons to be alive in the year 2026.

I mean, duh! Coffee is life blood! If you’re reading this now you understand I drink a decent amount of coffee throughout the day. Three cups in the morning — occasionally adding a medium mocha on top of that — and a hot cup or maybe a large cold brew in the afternoon.

LONG LIVE COFFEE! ☕️

Emma Roth ⦁ The Verge

Microsoft first teased its movable taskbar in March as part of efforts to rebuild trust among users. You can adjust the alignment of the icons inside the taskbar, as well as open the Start menu drawer from wherever you placed it. Windows 11 Insiders can access a shorter taskbar, too, which could come in handy for devices with smaller displays. There’s also an option to choose from a “Small” or “Large” Start menu.

It’s really nice to see Microsoft take a step back and work on fixing up the Windows UI. One thing I wish they’d do is make the UI consistent and get all to look and behave the same. Their settings app used to be tiny and clear of clutter. Now it’s a real mess.

Separating WinUI 3 from the operating system is a plus and a minus. It’s a plus because they support older releases. It’s a minus because the Windows team hasn’t fully integrated that new look into the OS. By fully integrating I mean anything built with the “old” Windows API — on top of the USER component. Why hasn’t Microsoft updated USER to draw using WinUI 3? If they were able to do that all applications using the old User functions for window and dialog management should adopt the new UI without change, or very little change. I think KERNEL and GDI could stay the same, maybe? Of the two GDI is definitely a candidate for updating so they could hide new graphics technology under it.

When Microsoft was developing NT they did an amazing job maintaining backward compatibility that allowed 16-bit Windows apps to easily move to their new 32-bit operating system. Did we have to make changes? Yes, we did, but they were really minor.

I’d imagine it’s not important to the big picture. Folks don’t really build new native Windows apps any longer. Most stuff is built to run in the browser. 😔

I have all kinds of bad ideas around marrying the old and the new to allow existing applications to get the benefit of the new without a total rewrite. Microsoft is usually pretty good at backward compatibility. In the case of WinUI 3 they opted to leave USER behind, to bit rot. Which is kind of sad to me.

Frank Denis

As soon as people found a Bun branch mentioning an experiment to use an LLM to port the existing Zig code to Rust, they went mad.

This experiment is fascinating! From what I’ve read they have a direct port that works and passes existing unit tests. That’s wild and kind of exciting.

Using an LLM to create a blueprint of an existing piece of code and rewriting it a memory safe language is not such a bad idea. Sure, it’s going to take human intervention. Developers will need to review the code and understand it. Testers will need to understand how to test it and build tooling for it. But as LLMs improve it seems like this could be a really good way to rewrite a huge project bit by bit and get a safer version of it.

It’s not a perfect idea but seeing experiments like this is both terrifying and encouraging.

I’m going to keep an eye on this and see where it goes.

Terrence O’Brien ⦁ The Verge

Hokum recently hit theaters, and it’s already outperforming box office expectations. If this Kubrick-referencing haunted hotel flick starring Adam Scott was your introduction to director Damian McCarthy, do yourself a favor and go watch his previous film, Oddity.

Kim discovered Oddity not long after it released and being a horror fan we watched it. It’s quite good.

Highly recommended if you’re a fan of the genre. 🍿

Tom Regan ⦁ Louder Sound

The metal-inspired soundtrack for 1993 shoot-’em-up Doom entered the Library Of Congress’ National Recording Registry last week, joining music by the likes of Metallica, Beyoncé, the Beatles and Bob Dylan. In 2024, Hammer interviewed designer John Romero, Bury Tomorrow bassist Davyd Winter-Bates and Periphery guitarist Misha Mansoor to find out how the game was created – and why it made such a lasting impact on heavy music.

The soundtrack will shred your brain, jack you up, and build tension. I just want to bang my head and jump. It’s perfect for the pace of the game.

Jake Savin

I’ve wanted try to modernize Frontier for at least ten years. I had a long-tail of things I’d wanted to do inside UserLand before leaving for Microsoft, and since the Frontier kernel was open source it was always possible — at least in theory. But I never had the right combination of available time and C-coding chops, and I lacked familiarity with the deeper parts of the C-based Frontier/UserTalk runtime for it to be a realistic thing to attempt.

I’ve looked at the original Frontier code many times since it was released to the public. It does seem like a daunting task to refresh it for modern OS’es but in the end it could make for a relly nice scripting language on Linux. No, seriously! It had a large following at one time and was used by UserLand to create Manilla and Radio. Both very good blogging platforms when blogging was young.

As someone who loves building APIs and SDKs for developers I’d like to see the UI and main Frontier engine separated so it could be embedded inside other applications. Maybe the UI could be there? 🤔 Microsoft’s VBA was a full IDE you could embed in your applications. Seeing something like that for Mac, Linux, and Windows would be incredible.

Jake, can you make that happen? 😄 Have you considered using a modern, memory safe, language and doing a straight across port? Not optimized, not really taking advantage of the language, just a line for line port from C to say Rust or Swift? Then you could slowly do any language optimaization or take better advantage of what the language has to offer after getting that initial port complete.

Food for thought. 🍕

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

We managed to sell our camping trailer, which was really nice, because we bought a slightly bigger one and needed to get rid of it. 🤣

Work has been fine. Nothing hair raising happening. I went into the office on Thursday to meet with my new Manager and enjoyed being there. The only downside to being there is not having co-workers on my project being in the office. We’re geographically dispersed so I sat alone. Which, in the end, was completely fine with me. I found a quiet area and went to work. Open workplaces are mostly not fun to work in. Too noisy and distracting. Microsoft and Visio had it right. Offices for everyone. That’s where it’s at. 😃

Of course I dropped by Grit on my way in. ☕️

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

Wanton Destruction Of CBS Property - Letterman & Colbert Toss Stuff Off The Roof Of The Ed Sullivan

I’m not a late night TV guy so I haven’t seen Colbert in years but the man is very entertaining and I love that he got under the skin of our thin orange skinned President.

Having Letterman on to send the show off like this was a great idea. I have a strange feeling Colbert will be more popular than ever and I’m looking forward to whatever he does.

Glenn Fleishman ⦁ Six Colors

The joy of RSS was that you could subscribe to tens or thousands of feeds, and get a chronological view, like an inbox, of the latest “news.” News could include blog entries, stories from major newspapers, price updates for a retail item, podcasts, service alerts, “diffs” when something is updated (such as changes to the text of a New York Times article or a Wikipedia entry), search results that changed over time, and much more.

Feed reader popularity is going up. Tools around feeds are seeing a reniassance and I’m here for it. I like feed readers so much — self promotion to follow — that I made my own feed reader. I’m glad I did because it serves a small category of folks. Some people want to view their feeds as a timeline. Just a River of News.

My feed reader, Stream, presents feeds as a River of News.

NASCAR Press Release

Katherine Legge will become the first woman to attempt the Indianapolis 500 and Coca-Cola 600 “Double” on May 24, one of the most demanding feats in all of motorsports. She will be fueled by e.l.f. Cosmetics, a brand from e.l.f. Beauty (NYSE: ELF), a bold disruptor with a kind heart, as primary sponsor across both events, with Chevrolet power.

I’m really happy to see this! The first time I ever saw Ms. Legge drive was at the Indy 500, then she made her way over to NASCAR and drove in the O’Reily Series and later in the Cup Series. She’s a great race car driver I just wish she could run full time in NASCAR Cup. I really believe she could show all these good old boys something. 😃

Daniel Jalkut

Today marks the 30 year anniversary of my becoming a full-time employee of Apple Computer, Inc.

Daniel is another one of those Mac developers I have a lot of respect for. He’s been around a long time — obviously — building excellent quality Mac software. If you’re a blogger you should check out MarsEdit. It’s a really great native Mac blogging client.

I’ve been posting more from my Mac recently and I use MarsEdit to publish.

Andrew Nesbitt

A compromised dependency in the JavaScript ecosystem led to credential theft, which enabled a supply chain attack on a Rust compression library, which was vendored into a Python build tool, which shipped malware to approximately 4 million developers before being inadvertently patched by an unrelated cryptocurrency mining worm.

If you’re into software security take a few minutes to read this incident report. It’s fascinating the lengths naferious people will go to compromise something. All in all this set of hacks was fairly easy to integrate into their targeted software components because stewards of many open source projects move on or don’t have time to tend to their software. It’s a real problem.

Then there’s software like npm, which is powerful, and permissive, and once we start using it we stop paying close attention to what we’re installing or upgrading. I’m guilty of that!

Vigilance, I suppose, is the only way to combat this sort of stuff?

Emma Roth ⦁ The Verge

Substack, the once buzzy newsletter platform, is losing a new swath of writers to rival platforms most people haven’t heard of. Just last month, The Ankler, one of Substack’s most popular publications, left for a platform that gives it more control over its site. Others who have departed Substack within the past year voiced similar complaints and cite the platform’s increased focus on social features as well as a pricing model that puts a chokehold on their business.

Substack faced talent drain in 2024 linked to its platforming of Nazi newsletters, but now it’s not just the platform’s stance on hate speech that’s driving away creators.

It’s really nice to see folks migrating off of Substack and onto various other open, less expensive, platforms.

While Ghost and Beehiv are mentioned in the article it was another mention that caught my eye: Passport, a partnership between Automattic and Stratechery found Ben Thompson. That is what WordPress needs! Ben built his own subscription system so I’m curious to see how Passport works out. It could be a real boon for all these indipendent writers currently shilling for Substack.

Side note: It really grinds my gears when folks say “Read it on my Substack” instead of “Go to [insert domain/publication here] to read all about it” or something like that. It’s YOUR content but you’re selling it as Substack’s. Don’t do that.

I wrote a little blurb about this in 2011, but at that time people were using Facebook. Where did that get them? Exactly. Nowhere.

Nick Corcoran ⦁ Pitchfork

Red Hot Chili Peppers have sold their recorded music catalog to Warner Music Group for more than $300 million, reports Billboard. The deal includes all of the band’s recorded output, including their 13 studio albums, which reportedly generate around $26 million annually. Although the band owned their recorded catalog independently for the past year, during which they were allegedly seeking $350 million for the package, Warner is a logical buyer to foot the bill, as the label originally released Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Californication.

When I see big sales like this one part of me understands it and another part doesn’t.

The side that gets it says “Well, why not? They can retire and do whatever they want.” Of course I’d imagine they already had the ability to do whatever they want. I could be wrong but I’d imagine they’re all fabiously wealthy at this point. But, selling it seems like a fine idea. If someone offered me the right amount of money for Hayseed and my little apps I’d sell it, even though it would hurt a bit. 😃

The other side of me is like “Why give up the rights to all of your amazing work?” They’ve worked really hard to get where they are, why sell the rights to that work?

That side of me doesn’t get it, but as I’ve aged I’m more on the side that gets it.

Ellyn Lapointe ⦁ Gizmodo

Local residents complained of low water pressure. When the county utility investigated, it realized a data center had been draining the water system for months without paying.

Our current craze to build datacenters to power LLMs is crazy! We’re using precious resources like mad and it changes lives.

Local governments are salivating for tax money and jobs, but at a great cost. The environment can only provide so much. Water is so precious, not to mention the noise and light polution residents experience. It’s not good y’all.

We need to slow our roll a bit. Consider environmental impacts. These datacenters consume huge amounts of electricity and water for cooling. They need to provide their own power, be it solar, wind, or even nuclear. Having diesel generators running 24-7-365 isn’t exactly a good idea.

They also need to solve the cooling issue. Water is way too precious to waste on LLMs. If, like me, you’re a California native you may understand what I’m saying. If not, calling water presious may not mean a thing to you. Suffice it to say humans need water to survive.

A question for the BigCo’s building datacenters. Why not put them under ground? I’m asking because I don’t know the impact but I do know that the ground provides some cooling naturally. Perhaps things just get too hot to do that? It’s probably because it would make things more expensive and take more time to deliver.

Aaron Vegh

Today, Ben McCarthy and I are launching Indigo. It’s a full-featured client for both Mastodon and Bluesky, available on iPhone, iPad and macOS. Go get it on the App Store!

At the time we began work on this app in the fall of 2024, there was a consensus opinion that you couldn’t combine these two networks. Two text-based social networks, each with their own distinct characters (both in terms of the people and features!), could not help but fall apart under scrutiny.

Congratulations Aaron and Ben!🥳 It’s so difficult to ship high quality software and it looks like Aaron and Ben have done just that. Sure it’s gonna have issues that need resolving and sure it’s gonna be missing features we’d like but they got a solid 1.0 out the door. That is such a huge deal.

If you’d like something that allows you to see a timeline of Mastodon and Bluesky mixed in one interface you may want to give Indigo a try.

Stevie Bonifield ⦁ The Verge

Aluminium OS, Google’s upcoming version of Android for PC, may have just leaked a few hours before Google’s Android Show presentation. As Android Authority reports, leaker Mystic Leaks shared a 16-minute video on their Telegram channel that appears to show a lengthy hands-on demo of the new operating system.

While I may not agree with Google’s style very often I do appreciate them bringing Android to a laptop form. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having a choice of operating systems to consider. The more the merrier. I hope this will push Apple, Microsoft, and Linux to be better.

Laurie Clarke ⦁ BBC

This subterranean monster had been growing unnoticed in the Victorian-era sewer running underneath the busy street, until workers carrying out a routine inspection bumped into its rock-hard flank. Now, a team wielding pickaxes, high-pressure water jets and clad head-to-toe in protective clothing, were preparing to tackle the putrid beast. 

Their foe? A stomach-churning agglomeration of fat, oil, grease, wet wipes, sanitary products and condoms, known as a “fatberg”.

Someone needs to make a horror film based on the “fatberg.” 🤣 It sounds totally disgusting. 🤮

Brandon Vigliarolo ⦁ The Register

cURL developer Daniel Stenberg has seen Anthropic’s Mythos, a model the AI biz has suggested is too capable at finding security holes to release publicly, scan his popular open source project. But after the system turned up just a single vulnerability, he concluded the hype around Mythos was “primarily marketing” rather than a major AI security breakthrough.

I like the way Daniel and the cURL team use LLMs and other tools in their work. They’re very aware of what a security flaw means to the users of cURL. It’s such a ubiquitous piece of software one little security flaw could affect millions of computers. We still need humans in the mix.

Emma Roth ⦁ The Verge

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says Elon Musk did “huge damage” to the culture of the AI startup. During testimony as part of Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, Altman said Musk required OpenAI president Greg Brockman and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever to rank researchers by their accomplishments and “take a chainsaw through a bunch.”

Space Karen being a dick to people is nothing new. I kind of wish we’d kick him out of the country. Send him back to South Africa or, better yet, Mars. Let him run his companies from there. He’s a huge stain on the United States of America.

John Gruber

Nextpad++ feels like a fever dream. Like what Mac apps would be if the Nazis had won WWII. Look, there are all sorts of foreign apps on the Mac. Electron apps. Apps ported with Wine. Web apps running in browser tabs or saved to the Dock. The curious new generation of lean-and-mean apps that are, in a technical sense, “native”, but are decidedly not Mac-assed apps, like Zed and Tolaria. All those types of apps feel alien on MacOS. Like different species. They are apps for the Mac but aren’t Mac apps. The Mac, however, is welcoming to them all, like the Mos Eisley cantina. We do serve their kind here. Nextpad++ isn’t like that. It doesn’t feel like an alien. It feels like Vincent D’Onofrio’s alien-bug-in-human-skin character from Men in Black.

The real value of Nextpad++ is familiarity to Windows developers coming to the Mac. It’s like using vi or emacs. Longtime developers who use those editors appreciate having them available on all platforms.

The Mac already has great text editors like BBEdit and Nova if you’re willing to spend a few bucks. They’re worth it.

I know VSCode is extremely popular. In my opinion it’s popular for a few reasons. It’s free, it’s on the major platforms, and it’s extensible. It also feels like crap if you’re a Mac or iOS developer. I know because I’ve used it on two projects. Since my current team didn’t mandate it I switched to Nova and it’s been a much better developer experience because the UI works the way I expect it to and the UI configuration works the awy I expect it to.

Cross platfom is good, I spent years at Pelco doing cross platform work, but if your cross platform code is UI code it can often feel so foreign to native users it turns them off. That’s how VSCode feels to me on the Mac and it’s how John feels about Nextpad++.

Luke James ⦁ Toms Hardware

A $1 billion data center that Microsoft and Abu Dhabi-based AI firm G42 planned to build in Kenya has stalled after the Kenyan government failed to meet Microsoft’s demand for guaranteed annual capacity payments, Bloomberg reported Sunday. Kenyan President William Ruto put the scale of the project’s power requirements into clear terms at a recent state event in Nairobi, saying the country would need to “switch off half the country” to keep the facility running.

See my earlier opinion above. Here’s a prime example of datacenter companies needing to bring their own power to the party. How are they gonna cool the darned thing? I thought water was super precious in Kenya too? Doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Then again this is a huge American company with tons of money who doesn’t care about human rights and suffering. They see dollar signs and a country willing to let its people suffer and starve.

Shameful.

Emanuel Maiberg ⦁ 404 Media

Developers who are told to use AI whether they like it or not, however, tell a different story. On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to. 

Emphasis above is mine. I can see where developers are coming from. If you don’t sharpen your blade occasionally it doesn’t make for a very good cutting tool. And as the drug commercials used to say “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

Using an LLM has allowed me to work in a programming language and framework I’m not all that familiar with. I understand programming concepts just fine, but the language and framework are still, by and large, foriegn to me. Sure, I’ve written TypeScript/React Native code all by myself and paid attention to how others use the tools but the LLM has been a productivity booster for me. Our company is using LLMs to augment our developers, not replace them. If you don’t vibe code your apps you can build solid, maintainable, shared, code. If I could show you what we’ve produced you’d say it was fine TypeScript/React Native code. Have I hand edited code? Yes, I sure have, but that was well before we had the LLM dialed in to our project. Now it knows the codebase and has an entire list of rules and skills to follow. It’s only getting better at writing code. Do I plan on using it for personal projects? No, I don’t, because I want to become a better Mac and iOS developer. I won’t say I’ll never use it but for now I don’t plan on it.

Stevie Bonifield ⦁ The Verge

Over 70 percent of Americans oppose AI data center construction in their area, according to a new Gallup survey. Just seven percent said they were “strongly” in favor of new data centers. According to Gallup, data centers are so strongly disliked that Americans would prefer to live near a nuclear power plant than a data center — even at its peak, opposition to nuclear power plant construction topped out at 63 percent.

Ah, back to datacenters. I seem to have a real theme going today. Safe to say I see them as a real problem.

I hope we can find excellent solutions to all the problems they present. We’re a smart people, we can do it if we want to do it. Thing is, we need to do it for the future of our planet.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Another week in the books. As I’ve aged days fly by which means weeks and months and years zip past me.

I’ve fallen into routine I should probably change. I get up, drink coffee, read Slack and email. Poke around code, do code reviews, maybe work on a feature or bug, then shower, and go to standup. Work for a spell then have lunch and head into the afternoon. Coffee around 2PM then finish out the day. It’s the same thing day-in and day-out. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I need a change. I’m thinking about going back to the office at least once a week. Maybe? Will lazy me win or will the old adventurous Rob win? We’ll find out.😃

I’m on my third cup of coffee. All the links and snippets I wanted to talk about are complete. It’s a little before 8AM, Flynn is in my lap, snoring. Time to be opinionated and finish this post off.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do sharing it.😄

Karl Bode

There’s an alarming number of otherwise smart people who are suddenly convinced that their computer software has become self-aware. Like renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who was the subject of some raised eyebrows last week after he boldly declared in an essay that he believes Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot is fully conscious:

This is fascinating. Some folks are beginning to believe these LLMs are becoming intelligent and conscious. They’re a bunch of bits arranged in a way their inventors don’t understand. Our tech overlords are in a race to see who can build the ultimate LLM. The one that may possibly result in the extinction of the human race, but let’s get one thing clear: they’re not conscious. They’re code. Built by humans. Flawed humans racing each other to some end. But to what end? I haven’t the slightest clue.

Matthias Pfefferle • ActivityPub Blog

The Radical Speed Month bet: ship three protocol adapters in four weeks, and prove the Reader can become a universal aggregator. RSS / Google Reader API (so any reader app can use WordPress.com as a sync backend), ActivityPub (so Mastodon, Pixelfed, and friends show up natively), and ATProto / Bluesky (because that’s where a real chunk of the social-web conversation has gone). One Reader, every protocol you care about.

This is an extremely cool project. As the developer of a feed reader I’ve seen a huge uptick in readers and sync services. I myself have a GINORMOUS backlog of features to add to Stream. Some of those features were unique and I’ve fairly recently seen a number of them implemented in other readers. So many have done it that I will look like the copycat. 😁 You snooze, you lose, right?

Anywho, this is ultimately good for the feed reading market and feed reader developers. We’ll all continue to push each other in all the best ways, I hope.

Stream doesn’t currently have a sync system and some folks consider that a complete failure and nonstarter for their feed reading needs. I get it. I want that too! Seeing services glom on to standard ways of syncing is encouraging. I just wish we had something better than the old Google Reader API for doing it.

Could we work together to build one all feed readers can agree on? I mean a subset of what your sync service supplies today. That would allow us to use the feed reader of our choice and use whatever backend we want. Sure, you can still charge for your service. Why not? It’s just a spec for everyone to support or not. Ultimately the sync service is your product, not the front end. Open it up so more folks will pay you to use it.

Steven Langbroek

You knew. And you signed off anyway. Because the alternative was losing the job, and the job was the mortgage, and the school fees, and the visa, and the version of yourself who’d fix it later once things stabilized.

This is a fun read and hits home for me. The paragraph I chose to use above was very intentional. I’m older than, I’d bet, 90% of my colleagues. With each generation those young folks come out of school way smarter and more prepared than me. Add LLM use into the mix and I wonder every day if today is the day I’m dismissed from work. It’s seriously a terrible way to live. But, it’s my reality.

One encouraging thing! My company has invested heavily in LLM usage but the stated goal is for us to be more efficient and become experts in the field. Experts so we attract more clients. That gives me a bit of hope and I need it.❤️

Claire Barber • Inside Climate News

For the first time, California discharged just over 12,000 megawatts, equivalent to 12 large nuclear plants, of energy from its battery arrays. That’s enough to meet over 40 percent of the state’s energy demand. 

Folks love to bag on California, especially some orange turd living in the Whitehouse, but I think it’s out of jealousy.

I’m biased of course. California is where I was born and where my soul yearns to be.

Seeing them in the forefront of renewable energy in the United States makes me very happy.

Jowi Morales • Tom’s Hardware

Amazon’s data centers in Bahrain and the UAE have been hit multiple times by drone and missile strikes from Iran since the U.S. started bombing the country in February 2026. This left the company’s ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1 disrupted, with the AWS Health Dashboard indicating that it will take months before they can go back online

When the war with Iran started I fully expected them to hit as many American companies as they could with a presence in the Middle East. Microsoft and Google have a presence there. I’m not sure about Facebook but it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that they do. Heck, are there any big AI data centers there now?

Anyway, it wouldn’t surprise me to see more western, especially American, companies hit with Iranian drones.

With our current knuckleheads in office I’m surprised they haven’t pulled off the assassination of a top government official. Maybe the FBI still has some adults doing the real work, even with a drunkard at the helm.

Alexander Hanff • That Privacy Guy

Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking.

Naughty, naughty. Google can, and should, fix this. Just ask. That’s all it takes. If the user nopes out, so be it. Respect your users.

John Holland • Fresno Bee

The Turlock Irrigation District was California’s first such agency when it formed in 1887. On Wednesday, it showed off another pioneering feat.

TID got a $20 million state grant in 2022 to test solar panels atop two short canal stretches. The arrays reduce evaporation of the Tuolumne River water while helping supply the district’s power customers.

More California goodness! If you’ve ever travelled through the San Joaquin Valley of California, especially along I-5, you’ll notice high berms of dirt with concrete water canals running through them. They’re a very necessary part of California infrastructure that take up otherwise valuable land. Why not cover them and get a twofer! Deliver life saving water and generate power at the same time!

Love it!❤️

Andrew Cunningham • Ars Technica

Apparently, this news surprised Ho as well, who claims that the Mac version and its author, Andrey Letov, are “using the Notepad++ trademark (the name) without permission.”

High drama in the Notepad++ for Mac port story! Apparently the creator had no idea this was going on and didn’t sign off on the use of the name. Yikes!

It sounds like things are getting sorted. Good.

Cathy Bussewitz • Associated Press

Meegan is among the wage earners engaging in “microshifting,” a flexible scheduling approach that involves tackling job duties in short, productive bursts instead of a single nine-to-five stretch. The paid labor fits around and between non-work responsibilities and priorities. Performance is judged primarily by output, with less emphasis on the number of hours logged behind a screen.

I think a lot of us who work from home break up our days in ways different from folks in the office. It’s not a bad thing as long as your company is cool with it.

I can roll out of bed at between 6-6:30AM and start working. I take a break at 9AM to shower. It’s my thing. It works for me.

As I said above I’m ready for a change, but I understand the lure of a microshifted schedule because I live it, kind of.😁

M.G. Siegler • Spyglass

I’m sort of a sucker for looking at pictures of [mock versions] bc(https://spyglass.org/iphone-fold-ipad-mini-ios/) of the iPhone Ultra/iPhone Fold, and certainly watching videos on the matter. I think it’s a good thing as it means I’m clearly excited about the device, perhaps in a way I haven’t been about an iPhone in quite some time.

There’s a link to a video of a mockup that apparently came from the factory. The form factor is kind of weird at first glance. I think I’d need to use one for a while to decide if it was right for me. The dude on the video says it’s more of an iPad Nano than a foldable phone and I can definitely see it.

Apple doesn’t always get it right and I cannot see them ever having another hardware product as profitable and industry altering as the iPhone. But, they have to keep trying, right?

Sara Fischer • Axios

Vox Media is in late discussions with James Murdoch’s investment firm, Lupa Systems, to sell its podcast network and part of its publishing business, a source confirmed to Axios.

Hoo boy. I feel like this would destroy the Vox Media Podcast Network. I listen to Pivot and I cannot see Kara working for these folks. Hopefully she has the rights to take Pivot anywhere she wants, like doing it on her own.

Side note: They talk a lot about how media is drying up and podcasting it where it’s at because you don’t need a big company with hundreds of folks involved with the production of your show. She and Scott are right, you don’t need a big production, but they have a media company behind the production of their podcast. What happens when/if it’s sold? Does Pivot continue on as if nothing happened and Kara sucks it up or does she take it or does it cease to exist?

The plot thickens!

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

We have the kiddos for the weekend so let’s see how much of this I can get through before they wake up. My first cup of coffee is nice and hot and my fingers are ready to type.

I hope you enjoy the links.

Cory Doctrow • The Guardian

The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AI that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself and give the other half to the AI company.

We’re beginning to see what Cory is talking about. Layoffs continue at tech companies, see Meta for example.

I’m curious to see if we have course corrections somewhere down the road. Will these companies decide they need more people due to LLMs?

Anil Dash

You must imagine Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berners-Lee’s throat.

It’s not a pleasant image. Sir Tim is, rightly, revered as the genial father of the World Wide Web. But, all the signs are pointing to the fact that we might be in endgame for “open” as we’ve known it on the Internet over the last few decades.

We’ve spent so much collective time making the open web an amazing place it’s difficult to think it may be eaten alive by the billionaires and tech bros.

Dan Goodin • Ars Technica

Publicly released exploit code for an effectively unpatched vulnerability that gives root access to virtually all releases of Linux is setting off alarm bells as defenders scramble to ward off severe compromises inside data centers and on personal devices.

Very scary, easy to exploit, security vulnerability. In 1995 I watched a co-worker exploit a know security vulnerability in SunOS to gain access to our bosses computer because we needed to get something from it. Yes, the boss knew we needed it an approved us getting it. I don’t remember the exact reason but I do recall we really needed to get whatever the thing was. I just remember this grey beard saying “I hope he hasn’t patched his OS yet.” He hadn’t, we got in.

Zac Bowden • Windows Central

In March, Windows president Pavan Davuluri confirmed plans to address serious “paint points” across Windows 11that have eroded user trust and generated a wave of negative sentiment around the OS, spawned from Microsoft’s relentless push into AI and enshittification while neglecting core Windows fundamentals such as performance and reliability.

I really hope Microsoft can get their act together and make Windows more stable and get their UI sorted out. It’s embarrassing for an operating system I still believe is great to be in the position its in now.

Here’s to a better Windows. 🙏🏼

Casey Newton • Platformer

And so today we’re going to begin an experiment to see what that version of Platformer would look like. Free subscribers can still look forward to one column per week. Paid subscribers will get an additional column on Thursdays that we’re thinking of as a reporter’s notebook: what I’m hearing, what we’re working on, a Hard Fork preview, and a mailbag. Some of these may read like traditional columns; others may feel more formally daring.

I really want to see more indie media like Platformer survive and thrive. Casey and gang provide a real service to the community and change is difficult and scary. I hope this move is exactly what the doctor ordered and they trive for many years to come.

David “Underscore” Smith via Mastodon

I’ve been spending the morning going through loads of old Apple Watch screenshots for a post I’m writing about my various efforts over the years at putting maps on the wrist…just came across a folder full of concepts for custom watch faces I’ve built. 😔 Maybe one day…

It was neat to see his experiments. Third party watch faces is all I’ve wanted from the watch since it was introduced. I could see some extremely cringe movie inspired faces but I can also see some thoughtful, gorgeous, faces from great designers.

Andrey Letov

For 4 months now, I have been using multiagent AI workflows and in mid-March 2026 I decided to take on the task of porting Notepad++ to macOS as a native application. The macOS version retains most that made the original great, which is syntax highlighting for 80+ programming languages, powerful regex-based search and replace, split view editing, macro recording, and a plugin ecosystem. I think that gradually it will be feeling right at home on the Mac. It runs on macOS 11 and later, launches instantly on Intel and M-series chips.

When I was a Windows developer I used Notepad++ like I use BBEdit today, for tasks on the periphery of development. Things like writing scripts or browsing code from other projects for things I’d done in the past and would like to steal from.

I have yet to try this new version and I’m in no hurry because I do like BBEdit and my fingers are accustomed to how it works.

But I am curious.

riki moe

One of my favourite aspects of Lua’s design that I like to preach about is how it’s really tight and small, while also being genuinely really sweet to write. Today, I’d like to focus on its Lisp-like aspect: domain specific languages (DSLs)—specifically, we will use it to build a templating language for HTML.

I’ve been a Lua fan for a long time and there was a time when I’d go poke around the code once in a while because it was fun to read. Riki’s use is novel and I love seeing folks build code in unexpected ways.

Darren Mothersele

I showed it to Claude Code and asked “how easy would this codebase be for you to work with?” I told it not to hold back. Review it purely from an agentic coding perspective, ignore human aesthetics entirely.

The feedback wasn’t great.

Apparently shops are using LLMs to find bugs of all kinds, be it your garden variety crash to serious security flaws.

I’ve been thinking about running Stream through Claude, but I’m kind of afraid of what it’ll say. 😃

Ky Decker

Two weeks ago, I quit my job.

It wasn’t a bad job, not by most metrics. It ticked the boxes a job is supposed to tick: good pay. Health insurance. Remote work. Time off. Nice coworkers.

The closer I get to retirement age the more I want to walk away from corporate life and focus on things I want to do. The reality is, I can’t because I didn’t plan properly.

Kim thinks I need to go back to school and get a history degree so I can get a job at the Smithsonian or place like that in D.C. I really do love history and especially our own American history. It’s a good idea, but time is a precious commodity and as I watch mine tick away all I want to do is spend it with Kim and our family more than ever. And, yes, I’d also like to work on my software projects. 😃

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Jay Peters ⦁ The Verge

Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down and will be succeeded by John Ternus, currently Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering. Ternus will take over as CEO on September 1st, 2026. Cook will become executive chairman of Apple’s board.

I don’t have much to say about this but the change is going to be nice. I’ve always liked Tim Cook, but, the whole ass kissing with Marmalade Messiah was too much. It definitely taints his otherwise great run.

Mark Jardine

So I decided to see if I could build a simple bug tracking app that maybe our company can use internally. If it’s bad, then I entertained and educated myself for a few hours that night. I had nothing to lose.

Take some time to read all of Mark’s post. His BugBot bug tracker is super nice, it looks better than any bug tracking software I’ve ever seen, I mean, how can it not? This is Mark Jardine we’re talking about. Designer extrodanaire, the man behind all those bot UI’s we’ve all come to love.

I think it’s clear we can say LLMs are good for writing code and doing it faster than any human being can possibly do. Also note, this wasn’t “vibe coded.” I’ve grown to hate that word. I mean if you do something and just take what the LLM gives you without reviewing it and possibly tweaking it, you’re probably vibe coding, otherwise you’re using an LLM to produce code faster than you can.

Anyway, he built a really beautiful piece of software for his gang to use. Really nice work, Mark! 👍🏼

Doc Searls

I think “video podcasts” is a contradiction, especially if those podcasts are just another form of TV you can only get from one exclusive producer. If that’s the case, it’s just a show. But look at Us magazine’s list of the 7 Best Podcasts on Netflix Right Now (April 2026). The audio versions of all seven are available wherever you get your podcasts. That makes them real. If they become exclusive to Netflix, or to anybody, they aren’t podcasts anymore. Find another word for them.

The emphasis above is mine. This is the crux of the argument over calling video a podcast. To be a podcast it needs to be available wherver you get your podcast. That means I can open my podcast player of choice — Castro — and subscribe to any podcast. Now, if podcast players want to start playing Videocasts I’d encourage them to. However, it’s not really going to be equivalent to a podcast because every Videocast I’ve seen is on a platform that controls the video. Not exactly open and it’s not going to be available wherever you get your podcasts. No, it’s gonna be on YouTube or Netflix exclusively. That’s lock in. 🔒

Is there anything wrong with making money on your podcast or videocast? Nope. Have at it. But, and there’s always a but, you should host that video where you choose to host. If you choose YouTube, that’s fine. Just make sure you understand your content is not controlled by you and Google is going to monetize it for their pocket books, not yours.

But, but, what about subscriptions? That’s a solved problem if you’re willing to do a little work — heaven forbid! I subscribe to a few podcasts and websites that provide me with a custom RSS feed so I can get my no ads feeds. Is it kind of ugly? Yeah, it is. But it works until folks can agree on another way to do it.

Jay Peters ⦁ The Verge

Meta is planning to layoff around 10 percent of employees in May, according to a memo from the company’s chief people officer, Janelle Gale, published by Bloomberg. That means approximately 8,000 people will see their jobs cut. Meta will also be closing around 6,000 open roles, according to Gale.

More layoffs. 😔 In this case for efficiency reasons. Uh, yeah, they’re going to leverage LLMs to replace people.

Look, I fully expect to be replaced by an LLM at some point, it’s just the way we’re headed. Like someone at work said to me “I gave this to a designer and they built the app in a day.” So, yeah, I’m headed for the scrap heap. It seem enevitable. However, I’m not going quietly. I am embracing LLMs at work and learning what I can about them so I am useful beyond being “an iOS developer.” The tooling is good and getting better. See my earlier link to Mark Jardine’s work. He’s a great designer and very capable web site builder who used an LLM to his great advantage. That’s what all developers in a corporate environment must do to survive going forward.

Does it sadden me? Yep. Sure does. Can I do anything about it? Nope. Just learn how to use it like any other tool.

Gus Mueller

I‘ve just release Acorn 8.5, which has some new features, nice SVG improvements, and some good bug fixes.

Congratulations, Gus! 🥳

If you’re looking for a great, inexpensive, highly functional, beautifully built, extended, and maintained piece of Mac software you’re in luck! Gus’ Acorn is that software. He cares deeply about his craft and it shows. Give Acorn a try!

☢️ WARNING: SUBSTACK POST ⦁ W. Kamau Bell

I don’t really want to move on and start over somewhere else, but the idea that my presence on this platform in some way validates Andrew Tate’s criminal history and helps to enrich him is a no-go for me. The idea that I bang my head against my keyboard to come up with writing that is worth five dollars a month, while Andrew just reposts his scammy MLM videos here so he can further drain the rubes dry actually makes my stomach hurt, and my stomach was already hurting from the chunky cesspool you all have put me in.

I don’t like how Substack operates. It’s a morality thing for me. Platforming Nazi’s and White Supremacists is not something I want to be a part of, yet so many great writers have chosen to use Substack and remain on Substack knowing what they’re supporting. It comes down to the all mighty dollar and it’s sickening. 🤮

At least W. Kamau Bell has the guts to admit he’s on the platform to make a few bucks. 🤑 Every other writer I’d love to see abandon Substack won’t admit to it.

Mr. Bell, please pack your bags and your content and get your own W. Kamau Bell domain, find a host, and get on with your writing. And, yes, you can make money doing it if you want. There’s no sin in that. Just get off of platforms that lock you into their little box and make money from your hard work.

Alice Perrelin

it’s much easier to pick out the unique byte when it’s a different color! human brains are really good at spotting visual patterns—given the right format

What a wonderful piece of software and post breaking it down. This is design that leads to a wonderful user experience. Thanks, Alice!

Gus Mueller

The UI is an interesting blend of iOS and MacOS things, and I thought at first that it must be an Electron app. So I dug into the package to make sure and I was instantly surprised to see it’s only 23 MB. The app bundle had hardly anything in there - a couple of .js files and the executable. So it’s not Electron, or some other web based UI. But what is it?

I downloaded Tolaria to see what Gus was talking about and I have to admit, I have no idea how to use it yet. 🤣

However, I did poke around their git repo a bit and I see it’s using Tauri which is a Rust based kit for building UI based on web technologies. So, think Electron or React Native. Same idea, but smaller, much, much smaller. How, I dunno, but the binaries are definitely smaller.

I haven’t dug into Tauri but from 30,000ft it looks like it’s building UI inside a browser instance, which is kind of gross, but makes sense all at the same time. On the Mac it’s using WKWebView and it’s blazing fast! Why? Well, browsers are built to render web technologies and do it blazing fast! These engines have been optimized over years and years to embrace the web state of the art. As a result they’re actually pretty darned good at build UI’s.

Perhaps Apple should be investigating how to build UI for the desktop using WKWebView, HTML, CSS, and Swift. Yes, Swift. They can generate WebAssembly for the browser since they own the entire stack, top to bottom, and should be able to do this better than anyone.

Would it be better than native applications using AppKit, UIKit, or SwiftUI? Who knows! I certainly don’t. 🤣

Markus Schmidt ⦁ Virginia Mercury

Virginia voters on Tuesday approved a constitutional amendment allowing mid-decade congressional redistricting, a move expected to dramatically reshape the state’s political map and potentially shift its congressional delegation from a closely divided 6-5 split to a heavily Democratic-leaning 10-1 advantage.

Do I hate this? Yes, yes I do. But, given the lunatic in the White House and his merry band of nut jobs, it was a necessity. Why necessity? Well, it was done to combat Marmalade Messiah’s push to get red states to gerrymander their congressional districts.

Fight fire with fire as the saying goes. It sucks but it’s the only way we’re going to have a chance to save our democracy.

Ryan Erik King ⦁ Jalopnik

Formula 1’s team principals and championship organizers voted unanimously on numerous rule revisions during a meeting on Monday. The slate of tweaks aims to reduce closing speeds between cars during races and promote flat-out driving in qualifying. The discontent over this season’s new technical regulations reached a tipping point after Oliver Bearman’s 50G crash during last month’s Japanese Grand Prix. The powers that be in the F1 paddock promised change before the championship returned from a month-long hiatus, and change has arrived.

The new 50/50 power unit (power unit because it’s not just a gas engine) in F1 cars has proven to be quite dangerous because charging takes place when the driver lifts off the gas pedal. When that happens it’s almost as if someone has pull the rip cord on a parachute. The car slows dramatically. That is super dangerous and is what lead to Ollie Bearman’s crash. He wasn’t expecting Colapinto to lift when he did.

I’m a race fan so of course I have a hot take. 🔥 Just go back to a V6 or a V8 to power these lovely machines. I’m ok with it. Let’s just get everyone else using renewable energy first. 😃

Dave Winer

My conclusion after being a software developer since the early days of Unix and personal computers, and at times being part of the Silicon Valley – there have to be a variety of UIs for WordPress, where all our work is compatible, regardless of what our tools look like, the approaches for users could be radically different. It’s been a monoculture, and imho that’s the problem. Break it apart, yet retain the compatibility – that’s the most powerful position possible in tech.

Dave says he’d like to see a variety of UIs for WordPress and I agree. It’s nice to be able to use your UI of choice when you’re blogging. I use Tot from The Iconfactory to write and MarsEdit from Red Sweater to publish to this blog when I’m using my Mac. On iOS I write using Tot and use the Micro.blog iOS app to publish to this blog. Of course there are others Mac client apps, like Automattic’s own Jetpack, or Ulysses. Thare are already other choices available to folks. As far as web based clients go, I’m not so sure what else is out there besides Dave’s own WordLand.

My new project — 🐔 Rooster for now — is a blogging client for the Mac. I’ve started writing support for Micropub, targeting Micro.blog for now, with the idea of adding WordPress next, followed by Tumblr. I’m doing Micropub first because I’m a Micro.blog user and it’ll get me other platform support while I’m at it, like Pika.

That does bring me to this question. Has anyone done a Micropub bridge to WordPress or Tumblr? 🤔 I really doubt Matt will see this, but if you do, can you please add Micropub support for WordPress? Thanks! 🙏🏼

Tom Chivers ⦁ Semafor

The Mac Mini computer, previously a niche product, is now all but out of stock, The Wall Street Journal reported, because the no-frills, high-powered machine is the most cost-effective way to run locally hosted AI agents, such as OpenClaw.

It’s a bit ironic that Apple, the company way behind the AI curve, has the most popular hardware for running AI agents.

Marco Arment, developer of Overcast and podcaster, setup a rack of 48 Mac Minis to do podcast transcripts for Overcast. Marco is, of course, an Apple platform developer so writing his transcript creation software for the Mac makes sense, especially since Apple has a Speech recognition framework. Would Marco have chosen a different platform if Apple didn’t have support for it? I dunno. We’d have to ask him. What I do know is his setup is fascinating!

The Onion Staff

Today, that childhood dream is finally coming true. Today I can finally say the sweetest nine or 10 words in the English language: Global Tetrahedron has completed its plan to control InfoWars.com.

It looks like The Onion is finally going to get their hands on InfoWars. Good! Once they’re in they’ll make a complete mockery of the site, not that it isn’t already. Also good.

Alex Jones can suck it.

Jason Cosper

Kill Yr Substack intercepts every Substack link you click and redirects it to the web snapshotting site archive.is. The request to Substack never fires, which means that they never see your traffic, which means that their numbers go down. You still get to read the thing tho.

I don’t recommend reading anyone on Substack because their leadership has highly questionable morals. But, if there is a writer using it and you can’t live without them, give Kill Yr Substack a try. At least it’ll keep you off of the site.

🎁 Erin Griffith, Mike Isaac, and Ryan Mac ⦁ New York Times

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company, said on Tuesday that it had struck a deal with the artificial intelligence start-up Cursor that could result in its acquiring the young company for $60 billion.

What could possibly go wrong?! Space Karen is one of the best grifters the world has ever seen. I don’t know if he or Donald Trump is the master, but it’s close.

Musk isn’t a genius. Does he have interesting ideas? Yes. Is a wack job? Also yes.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

The grandkids are coming down the stairs! I’ve been rushing to finish this post since 6AM, it’s now 7AM and I’m mostly done!

Hope you enjoy the links! Hitting that publish button in 3… 2… 1…

ABC 7 News

Philz Coffee is reversing course and adding Pride flags back to all of its locations, a little over a week after it decided it would pull them from stores to create “an inclusive experience.”

I was puzzled the CEO thought pulling Pride flags down would create “an inclusive experience.” Pulling them down does the exact opposite. It tolks folks they weren’t as important and weren’t welcome back to Philz. Poor form. 🤬

Brian VanHooker • Polygon

This week, The Walt Disney Company initiated company-wide layoffs that affected departments across the entire organization, targeting everything from the home video team to ESPN. One division was hit hard according to reports: Marvel Studios, which lost nearly its entire visual development team. Over the last two decades, these artists shaped the look of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, from costume design to the films’ biggest moments, and won many awards along the way.

One particularly poignant post came from artist Wesley Burt, who lamented “the irony of having a one-on-one HR layoff meeting in the conference room with my Loki mural on it.”

That line “the irony of having a one-on-one HR layoff meeting in the conference room with my Loki mural on it.” kills me. I’ve been laid off and felt embarassed. I hope others don’t feel that way but being sat across from something you worked so hard to create is like rubbing salt in an already open wound.

Benjamin Mayo • 9 to 5 Mac

The availability of higher-end models of Mac Studio and Mac mini continues to deplete, amid worsening supply constraints and the possibility of an M5 refresh just around the corner.

Several models are now showing as “currently unavailable” at the Apple Store, which means buyers aren’t even able to place an order for them. That includes the M4 Mac mini with 32 GB RAM, and two configurations of Mac Studio

Interesting times at Apple. They’re in the uncomfortable position of being extremely popular. 🤣

Steve Troughton-Smith via Mastodon

The story around the decline in software quality around macOS is the same as it’s been for years: Apple doesn’t have the bandwidth to maintain two copies of every app, one for macOS and one for iOS, and keep feature parity. That’s why they embarked down the road of Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI. The two paths out of this rut are either invest heavily in hiring and training up dwindling desktop/AppKit engineers, or align with the iOS versions and just have one codebase built with UIKit and/or SwiftUI

In a lot of ways this is extremely sad to me. I know a lot of companies are ok going the “least common denominator” route when it comes to shipping cross platform software, but we’re not used to seeing Apple do that. Apple has always been know for its design and engineering prowess. For making software highly functional, fully embracing everything their operating system has to offer, and make it all delightful.

The iOS’ification of macOS is hard on the old timers to accept. Their beautiful user interface has become less and less beautiful over time and less stable.

As for me, I’m rolling with the punches as they say. I’ve seen some things with Liquid Glass that make me say to myself “interesting choice” but mostly things are fine and on occasion I’ll run into something new that gives me joy.

Here’s hoping the Apple Engineering teams tighten things up and the design team does the same.

Pika Blog

Along with launching the Micropub API, we are also happy to share that Pika now supports iA Writer and Drafts. Visit those links to find instructions for using these excellent writing tools to create draft posts on Pika. We anticipate adding a few more third-party apps to the mix soon!

This is pretty exciting news! Supporting Micropub is absolutely the way to go for third party clients. Of course I say this because Rooster — my top secret project — is going to support Micropub. So, yeah, I see it as a very good thing.

My first targeted blogging platform is Micro.blog but if all goes well that work should work directly with Pika as well.

Now, can we get WordPress to support Micropub? It would open the door to more writers and bloggers who are more interested in publishing words than managing a CMS.

Congratulations Pika folks! 🥳

Lauren Feiner • The Verge

Before allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home, the 20-year-old accused attacker wrote about his fear that the AI race would cause humans to go extinct, The San Francisco Chronicle found. Two days later, Altman’s home appeared to be targeted a second time, according to The San Francisco Standard. Only a week earlier, an Indianapolis councilman reported 13 shots fired at his door, with a note that read, “No Data Centers,” after he’d supported a rezoning petition for a data center developer.

This is extremely scary but it doesn’t surprise me. The way CEOs of our LLM companies talk these things will become sentient at some point and they’re already being used to replace people in the workplace, just look at all the layoffs with CEOs saying just that.

I’d imagine we’ll see a lot more of this. Hell, I am surprised someone hasn’t attacked an AI datacenter and burned it to the ground. It’ll happen.

Austin Ginder • Anchor

Two supply chain attacks in two weeks. Both followed the same pattern. Buy a trusted plugin with an established install base, inherit the WordPress.org commit access, and inject malicious code. The Flippa listing for Essential Plugin was public. The buyer’s background in SEO and gambling marketing was public. And yet the acquisition sailed through without any review from WordPress.org.

WordPress.org has no mechanism to flag or review plugin ownership transfers. There is no “change of control” notification to users. No additional code review triggered by a new committer. The Plugins Team responded quickly once the attack was discovered. But 8 months passed between the backdoor being planted and being caught.

This is all too common. Back int 2010 I installed a theme to my WordPress site that injected some code into it and it took me a day to sort out what happened and fix it.

I still believe in WordPress and hope they’re able to put some rules in place to mitigate issues like this. Code review, diffs, and administrative rules may help curb some of these catastropic problems. Fingers crossed. 🤞🏼

Dave Rogers

The tech-bros are building slaves. They may not have consciousness yet, but it’s by no means certain that they won’t one day. And they’ll have access to all of human history, and they’ll understand what we’ve done and why.

I love reading Dave’s stuff, always have, and this is a sobering take on the state of LLMs and where the tech bros are taking us.

Jess Weatherbed • The Verge

Snap is laying off roughly 16 percent of its global workforce in a cost-cutting effort to chase improved profitability with the help of AI. The cuts will impact around 1,000 full-time employees, according to a memo sent to staffers from Snap CEO Evan Spiegel. An additional 300 open roles are also being closed.

Here’s yet another example of a company dismissing folks in favor of replacing them with LLMs. It’s so frightening and depressing to see it.

On the flip side my company — TELUS Digital — sees it as a force multiplier for our developers. So far, so good.

Jason Snell • Six Colors

Now the bad news: Since the MacBook Neo is powered by the A18 Pro chip from 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro, a product that’s been discontinued, there is likely a finite number of chips available for MacBook Neo production. Which is why, as reported by Tim Culpan, Apple faces a dilemma, namely: What happens when it runs out of chips to use in the MacBook Neo?

More success affecting Apple. 😂

Apparently the MacBook Neo is a raging success! Now, how do they deal with chip shortages cause by that success? I have no idea but it’ll be fun to watch. 🍿

Jake Roach • Tom’s Hardware

Small Missouri town ousts half its city council after $6 billion AI data center approval — petition calls for mayor’s removal as frustration (and violence) over AI data centers mounts

This is a less violent way to deal with AI data centers than burning them to the ground. Bravo for choosing intelligence over violence.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Boone Ashworth • Wired

In an email to customers, Amazon announced that it would be ending service for Kindle devices older than the 2012 edition. Those devices will lose access to the Kindle Store.

Something that’s always kind of bugged me about technology is how it often marches forward at the expense of older technologies. I’m talking about the backward compatibility problem. We have old storage mechanisms, like floppy drives, that folks can no longer use. And by use I mean get their old data off of them if they want it. I have a collection of random detritus I’ve been carrying around with me for years and years and I’ve had to move it from storage mechanism to storage mechanism manually because I knew that old tech would fall out of favor at some point.

A dev team is probably being held back by supporting older models or their plans for an upcoming release dropped the requirement to support older models. Regardless, it’s a real bummer. I know, I know, folks can read on the Kindle app and use the website if they’d prefer but that’s not the point. Is it too much to ask for your reader device to work forever? Maybe. But it would be nice if they could keep the older devices from becoming e-waste, which you know is gonna happen.

Nathaniel Myersohn • CNN

Instead of wiping out jobs, AI is shifting the tasks of developers. They are doing less routine coding work and devoting more of their schedule to overseeing swarms of AI-powered code-writing agents — autonomous bots that can complete tasks. Engineers, in turn, are spending more time designing the structure of software and generating ideas.

I see this daily at WillowTree. We’ve been using LLMs to drive development to greater and greater effect. Sure, we look the code over, and make changes, but that happens with human developers as well — ever get PR feedback?

The point is I’m still employed and doing exactly what the article says. I’m orchestrating the LLM to do work for me. I not using it to swarm on tasks yet but I do point it at tickets in JIRA and have it go to work. It works really well if the tickets are well defined and have enough detail so the LLM doesn’t need additional input.

I’m still not using AI directly in my personal projects because I love the challenge of writing code. Sure, I get frustrated and struggle, just look at my last post about finally getting something to work in Stream for Mac as an example, but I just love the work.

I’ll continue to use LLMs at work as long as they’ll have me and continue to learn new stuff on my own time in my own apps.

Kenyatta Thomas • EFF

After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X. This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue. The math hasn’t worked out for a while now.

More folks need to follow the EFF’s lead and get the heck out of X hell. It’s a sess pool of right wing loonies and tech bros.

Come join us in the Fediverse. Mastodon is an incredible replacement for X and it’s not nearly as difficult to join and understand as many folks have lead you to believe.

If you’d like to get an easy start just pull down the Mastodon iOS or Android apps and use those to create your account. Once you better understand the Mastodon communities you can choose to switch to a different server — or instance in Mastodon parlance — or stay on the main Mastodon instance. No harm, no foul.

If you get there feel free to reach out to me! I’d love to chat with you and answer any questions you may have — as long as you’re ok with me not knowing the answer. 😃

Arthur-Ficial

The free AI already on your Mac.

macOS Tahoe ships with a 3B parameter LLM. apfel gives you CLI access with one brew install. No model downloads, no API keys, no configuration needed, just works.

So, this is kinda nifty! Unlock the LLM already on your computer! Why the heck not? It’s there. Might as well use it, right? 👍🏼

Zack Sharf • Variety

Michael J. Fox is alive and well, the “Back to the Future” icon assured fans on Threads after CNN sparked a death scare by releasing a video on its content platforms titled “Remembering the life of actor Michael J. Fox.”

I’m sorry he had to see this. All the major news organizations probably have something like this already set aside for famous peoples death. It’s cold and impersonal but it’s the way these things work.

I’m happy to hear Marty McFly hasn’t left us yet. He seems to be a really great person and he’s definitely made my life richer.

Back to the Future Part III is still the best of the three. 😄 (Go ahead and @ me.)

Simon Young • Louder

Tool and Puscifer frontman Maynard James Keenan has shared a message of support for his former military academy prep school friend, General Randy George, who was recently driven out of his position as Army Chief of Staff during the early stages of the USA’s conflict with Iran.

I knew Mr. Keenan has some military experience but I didn’t know the extent of it. It’s nice to see him publically support his friend like this.

I hope they get together and have a few beers together, or perhaps some wine?

James Snell • Six Colors

I’ve been so proud of my reading workflow, using Feedbin as a repository for all the newsletters I get, that I missed the other important part of that workflow: I open ReadKit once a day, read the items in my story list that interest me, and then close the iPad and go about my day. I am not looking for updates throughout the day, or using the app as a read-later service—in fact, my default view only shows me items from the past 48 hours—but as the true successor of that old morning newspaper.

I read part of this and sent a Mastodon post to Mr. Snell pointing him to Stream, but that was before reading the entire piece, which was a mistake. He’s looking for something differen, not a River of News style reader, which is what Stream was built for.

I’m also a subscriber to the site so I get a private feed of podcasts and on the latest Six Colors Podcast he and Dan talk about his reading setup and what he thinks might be his perfect setup. It sounds to me like he’d love to have Google Reader back. It had some features other feed readers typically don’t have, like searching for keywords and building a feed from that. The benefits of a backend service, if you can afford to run one.

Scripting News

The perfect app for an AI to do for you is a demo app. Yesterday I wrote about making WordPress boom with new apps for writers that run in the web ecosystem, not as plug-ins, in JS running in the browser, or on the desktop, any desktop, that would work too. Probably would be fine to put an MCP shell around it so it can be in AI-internal scripts.

Yes, LLMs are great for this! I can see exactly what Dave is trying to do but some folks may see it as him trying to pull a fast one on them. I don’t see it that way at all. I believe he’s genuinely trying to make the web better for writers. Why else would he go to the trouble to build so many open source projects over the years? His WordLand project is worth your time. It’s a nice, very small, writing surface built just for writers.

Joe Rossignal • MacRumors

Apple’s online store in the U.S. is currently showing delivery estimates of up to 4-5 months for many Mac mini and Mac Studio configurations with upgraded amounts of RAM. The delays are occurring amid a severe global memory chip shortage driven by surging demand from companies building AI servers that requires large amounts of RAM.

Darned AI companies! This is, at some point, going to make computers outrageously expensive. That may not be the case in today’s Apple ecosystem but it’s coming. I need to pull the trigger on a new box before they’re out of reach.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Pretty slow week at work but we had the grandkids for three days — they’re on spring break — so house was a mad house. 🤣 In all the best ways of course. 😃

The Next Web

Oracle is cutting up to 30,000 employees to pay for AI data centres

And it started with a 6 AM email.

The slaughter continues and this is another one related to LLMs.

Oracle is taking on tons of debt to build out. Add that to his support of his kids fantasy of being a movie mogul and others have to foot the bill.

Liran Tal • snyk

On March 31, 2026, two malicious versions of axios, the enormously popular JavaScript HTTP client with over 300 million weekly downloads, were briefly published to npm via a compromised maintainer account. The packages contained a hidden dependency that deployed a cross-platform remote access trojan (RAT) to any machine that ran npm install during a two-hour window.

Hackers gonna hack. I’ve mentioned this before but it seems to me like whoever runs npm as an organization needs to make it a bit more difficult to submit package updates for extremely popular packages. I know, I know, it goes totally against the spirt of open source and freedom but this poisoned package just caused how many millions of dollars in lost productivity.

BrowserGate

Every time any of LinkedIn’s one billion users visits linkedin.com, hidden code searches their computer for installed software, collects the results, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers and to third-party companies including an American-Israeli cybersecurity firm.

Companies can be so scummy and I hate it. Look, I just want to use the site. If you need me to pay for it, fine, as for money so I don’t have to be harvested for data so you can sell it.

I had deleted my LinkedIn account after we moved to the east coast, then I discovered my company and folks in the east — in general — really use it, so I logged back in.

I’m dumb. 😁

Amanda Kondolojy • Pocket-lint

According to user iamonreddit, the most recent Netflix app update has made it slightly more difficult to use the fast-forward and rewind functions. Instead of clicking the back or forward button on the remote wheel to advance or return ten seconds, this button press now pauses the screen and brings up a frame selector. In order to actually go forward or go back, users then have to click the same button again. So essentially, what once required a single button press, now needs two.

User experience is a thing! If you screw up your design you’re gonna hear about it. Your customers will scream to the heavens and hit social media! 🤣

Matt “TK” Taylor & Matt Kane • Cloudflare

Our name for this new CMS is EmDash. We think of it as the spiritual successor to WordPress. It’s written entirely in TypeScript. It is serverless, but you can run it on your own hardware or any platform you choose. Plugins are securely sandboxed and can run in their own isolate, via Dynamic Workers, solving the fundamental security problem with the WordPress plugin architecture. And under the hood, EmDash is powered by Astro, the fastest web framework for content-driven websites.

EmDash looks very interesting. I don’t use WordPress for my main blog any longer because I wanted it published statically. I’m now at Micro.blog and I enjoy how scaled down the entire experience is. It’s built by a blogger for bloggers.

There’s nothing wrong with WordPress. I used it for well over ten years on my blog and it powers my Hayseed blog. It’s perfect for big organizations.

I don’t see it being replaced by EmDash but it’s neat to see another tool enter the market.

It really feels like we’re in a blogging renaissance and I love it!

Adi Robertson • The Verge

In an industry full of sprawling multipronged tech empires, the basic antitrust argument against Apple is comparatively simple: it’s become the ultimate gatekeeper to billions of people’s primary computing hardware, and it keeps competitors locked out while levying a heavy toll on the developers it lets through.

This will go on for years and years. Who knows what it’ll lead to but I’m strapped in for the show. 🍿

I do hope it results in better options and support for developers large and small.

Nikita Mazurov • The Intercept

Another option is to leave devices that contain sensitive information at home and instead bring throwaway travel devices you’re willing to have searched or confiscated. This doesn’t need to be an expensive proposition. You can reformat and repurpose an old phone or tablet, or purchase refurbished older models that are comparatively cheap.

This is what I did when I went to No Kings in Washington D.C. back in October of last year.

I reset my old iPhone 11 and set it up with a brand new Apple ID and a new phone carrier. It has very little data on it. I also enabled an extra layer of security on it. I can’t remember what it’s called at the moment but you should also do that for your “burner.”

It’s my testing phone for Stream and is still a really great phone, if the battery were better it would be perfect. 😃

Quinnipiac University

As artificial intelligence continues to leap from concept to reality in just about everything we do, an increasing number of Americans see more harm than good when it comes to AI’s impact on their daily lives and education and they are divided about its impact on health care. Trust in AI remains low.

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of skepticism. I was skeptical of an LLMs ability to help me in my everyday work.

But it turns out I was wrong. An LLM can be quite useful to a developer and once you dive a bit deeper you start to figure out how to tune the LLM to work like you’d prefer it to work and teach it to do many tasks at once.

Should you scrutinize the output? Yep. Because they can still make mistakes.

But, they can also be quite helpful.

Jeff Johnson

I’m not going to debate the major, controversial App Store policy issues here, such as Apple’s cut of developer revenue: 15% for members of the Small Business Program like myself, 30% for other developers. My argument is that even at the reduced rate of 15%, developers are not receiving their money’s worth in services from Apple.

Jeff shares his ideas on how to improve the App Store Developer experience.

It’s nice to see a developer share their experience and their list of wants/needs.

Joost de Valk

Matt’s response was generous in places. He acknowledged the engineering quality and called the Skills implementation “brilliant.” But his architectural arguments were almost entirely defensive. He suggested EmDash should adopt Gutenberg. He framed EmDash’s sandboxed plugin model as impractical. He questioned Cloudflare’s business motives.

A nice piece from Joost. Worth your time. ⏰

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Well, it’s definitely allergy season and mine are the worst they’ve ever been. This is the first time post nasal drip has caused such a sore throat that it’s super swollen. Which in turn causes my sleep apnea to be bad. As a result, I’m not sleeping all that well. 🫩

No worries! That’s what caffeine is for, right? 😁

I’m well into my second cup of coffee. In fact, it’s now gone. Time for more. ☕️

I hope you enjoy the links.

Hartley Charlton • MacRumors

Sandofsky has now filed a lawsuit in the California Superior Court of Santa Cruz against de With, accusing him of improperly using more than $150,000 in Lux company funds to pay for personal expenses since 2022, as well as providing confidential material and source code from Lux to Apple.

I can’t find the link to the documents Mr. Sandofsky filed but I read through it earlier in the week. Wowzer. This is going to get extremely ugly and I hope it’s not the death of his company.

Side note. It’s so difficult for me to wrap my brain around an app company being so successful it can support two folks. What a dream.

Kennedy French • Variety

But no matter — that lifelong devotion has landed Colbert a credit that most fans could only ever dream of. Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema confirmed that Colbert will co-write “The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past” alongside screenwriter Philippa Boyens and Colbert’s son Peter McGee, with Jackson producing.

I had no idea Mr. Colbert was such a Lord of the Rings geek! I hope the man has the time of his life working on the new film given the years he’s had what with Marmalade Messiah and company getting his show cancelled.

Toby Sterling • Reuters

The skeleton of famed French musketeer Charles de Batz de Castelmore d’Artagnan may have been found in ‌front of a church altar in the Dutch city of Maastricht, church officials and an archaeologist said on Wednesday.

My wife and I both had similar thoughts on this. What are they gonna do with the poor person after they’ve gone through their identification process?

It would be nice for them to put the remains back where they found them and mark the location. I have no idea if Dutch law would allow that?

Tim Sweeney • Epic Games

Today we’re laying off over 1000 Epic employees. I’m sorry we’re here again. The downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025 means we’re spending significantly more than we’re making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded. This layoff, together with over $500 million of identified cost savings in contracting, marketing, and closing some open roles puts us in a more stable place.

More layoffs. Makes me sad for the poor folks on the receiving end of those pink slips. The market is so bad. 🥺

Joel Chrono

Regardless of what you do, on this website, it’s just me, here and now. Me and my dumb takes and opinions, my rambles about nothing and my thoughts on things everything has mentioned before, but it doesn’t really matter does it? Because I am the one writing. Helplessly human, helplessly unpolished, imperfect and wrong, but documenting it all because it’s just fun for me.

This is the whole idea behind having a blog. It’s all yours and you can do whatever the heck you want with it. Want to write about tech? Fine, do that. Want to write about sports, go right ahead. You could be like me and write about whatever floats your boat on a particular day. It’s raw and unfiltered. It’s your voice.

I started this blog in February 2001 in hopes it would make me a better writer. I may have failed in that endeavor but I still enjoy doing it. 😃

L. Jeffrey Zeldman

Abandon the em-dash in your human writing? The irony—and it’s a major irony—is that real writers use em-dash frequently, and for reasons. As a written signifier of verbal speech pauses, it means something different than what commas and semicolons mean. It connects while separating.

I think I already shared this little story, but my brother ran some of his own writing through an AI writing detector thingie and it reported his writing had a high probability of being written by an LLM. That’s crazy.

Think about that. What if you submit a paper to an academic periodical and they reject it because they claim it was written by an LLM? I’ll bet it’s already happened but I’m too lazy to search for an example.

It’s terrible to think we may have to dumb down our writing to please some stupid service.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Sorry for missing last week. We had our granddaughter over and I wasn’t able to get my writing completed before she woke up.

Today we have our grandson. He’s still asleep so I’ll try to get this out before he wakes up. 😀

Work continues on Stream for Mac. I’ve struggled to get my table view cells to look and act the way I want. From AppKit to SwiftUI and back it’s been quite a frustrating experience. What I need is to pair with a real AppKit expert for a few hours to get it working. I feel like after I get over this hump and move more quickly.

Onward! 🚀

Welp, my grandson is awake and running circles around the house. Time to publish what I have. Hope you enjoy the links!

Manton Reece

SwiftUI is great for new programmers who don’t want to embrace AI-assisted coding, but old school developers should not feel any guilt sticking with AppKit. It’s still the gold standard.

Old school AppKit Devs move fast. Manton is no exception. He managed to release a new native Mac RSS reader in no time.

I wish I could move this quickly. If I were on Windows using the Windows API — the original one — I’d move extremely fast. I have 20+ years experience working in that environment and built a small class library that works perfectly for me.

John Brayton • Golden Hills Software

This is a quick update on my current priorities for the next versions of Unread. I anticipate changes to these priorities over time, but this is my current thinking.

I’m a huge fan of John’s work. Unread is one of the premier iOS and Mac Feed Readers on the market and John continues to make it better. Thanks for the list, John!

Of course you should download Stream as well. 😁

Ken Sandler, Ph.D • Blue Virginia

This Tuesday, March 17th, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors will hold a public hearing to consider the sale of 41.7 acres of county property to a data center developer. The following is testimony on this matter that I’m providing to the Board, as a county resident. I encourage others to make their voices heard on this issue as well.

We have a crazy number of data centers in Virginia, especially in Northern Virginia, or NOVA as the locals call it.

There’s a lot of pushback against new data centers and I can’t blame folks given how AI bros treat locals.

Nikita Prokopov

These days, though, native is as bad as the web, if not worse. Consistency is basically out the window. Anything can look like anything, buttons have no borders, contrast doesn’t exist, and neither do conventions. Apple, for example, seems to place traffic lights and corner radius by vibes rather than by any measurable guidelines.

Coen Jacobs

There’s a particular kind of silence that exists in the WordPress ecosystem. It’s not the silence of having nothing to say. It’s the silence of having something to say and deciding that saying it isn’t worth the risk. I know this silence well, because I’ve been living in it off and on myself.

Peter Custance

🎉 Visual Studio turns 29 today! From VB in ’97 to AI‑powered coding in 2026, it’s been nearly three decades of shipping apps

Ryan Scott • Fangora

Oddity is a movie that does a lot with relatively little. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel as some piece of “elevated” horror and it really only plays with a few locations. But McCarthy is the sort of filmmaker who makes the most out of the tools in his bag.

Shubham Bose

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

Open UI

The purpose of the Open UI, a W3C Community Group, is to allow web developers to style and extend built-in web UI components and controls, such as select dropdowns, checkboxes, radio buttons, and date color pickers.

Manton Reese

Last week we shipped Inkwell, our new feed reader for Micro.blog. Today I’m releasing a native Mac app for Inkwell.

Edward Munn

YouTube channel DirectorFeng has posted a video demonstrating a 1TB storage upgrade to the newly release MacBook Neo.

Gobbler Press

Gobbler brings all your RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds into one beautiful interface. No algorithm. No noise. Just the articles you want to read.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I typically collect the articles I like to during the week. I’ll go through the list, clip quotes, and add links. Then I come back up here and write an introduction.

This week’s links and my commentary are kind of a drag. The commentary on LLMs in particular definitely comes across negatively but it’s only because I am afraid of losing my job. I really am.

I’m working very dilligently to become an LLM usage expert so I have a place in software development going forward but I’m also aware there is an outside chance I could lose my job.

As it stands now I am using an LLM on a project at work and it’s going really well. Preparing your project for use with an LLM is pretty important. You can hook it up to your ticketing system, design system, and other things so the LLM can drive itself using those specifications and designs, as well as the general settings you’ve configured it with.

We still look at the code to make sure it’s following the coding standard and practices we’ve outlined and we still do PRs and take feedback from other developers. It’s not completely LLM driven but it could be if we felt completely comfortable with its output.

Bottom line: These things work.🤖

I hope you enjoy the links!

Brent Simmons

Of those I was leaning toward C because speed is an issue. I wanted to make rendering this blog, over 25 years old and with thousands of posts, to happen in under one second. The system I was replacing took a few seconds. But I wanted more speed (personality flaw).

And then I thought, I swear just for a split second, about how great it would be if C had something a little nicer than C structs for modeling my app’s data — and oh well too bad there’s nothing like that.

And then I remembered Objective-C, which is C plus some things a little nicer than C structs. 🎩🦖

I love reading Bren’t work. He’s one of those Mac and iOS heros I look up to. His work has been an inspiration for my own iOS and Mac(still working on it!) work.

Anywho. I love that he chose to use Objective-C for his blog publishing tool. He’s obviously very comfortable with the language and he’s mastered it. Why not use it?

Oh, and Brent, there is another choice if you want “something a little nicer than C structs for modeling my app’s data.” C++ is a great choice for that and you don’t really have to take full advantage of the richness of it. You can write C code and do a little C++ here and there and have a perfectly valid, robust, application.😄

I have a little project I started where I was going to write a collection of blogging tools for myself. Reading this makes me want to return to C++ to do it. I could use my little collection of Cocoa inspired C++ classes to do it; HSString, HSDictionary, HSArray, etc.😃

That would allow me to run everything on a Linux server but so would Swift!

Stephen Hackett

With a price point of $599 (or $499 for students!) Apple had to make some cuts when designing the MacBook Neo.

Here’s a list of what separates the MacBook Neo from the MacBook Air:

I was thinking the MacBook Neo would be an awesome choice for my wife. She’s been talking about getting a MacBook for quite a while now and I think this would fit her needs perfectly. I think we’d get her the “high end” version with 512GB of storage.

Mr. Hackett’s piece is quite helpful if you’re trying to decide between the Neo and Air.🙏🏼

Om Malik

For the first time in five generations of Apple Silicon, these chips are not a single piece of silicon. The newly announced M5 Pro and M5 Max use what Apple calls Fusion Architecture. This is a big structural change, with long-term implications. And you can see this at work in the newly announced flagship Apple laptops. On the surface these are two third-generation 3-nanometer dies, bonded together into one system on a chip. But dig deeper, and with this modular, scalable silicon approach, Apple is setting itself up to cash in on the computing needs of the AI future.

Remember, Apple talked about creating their own servers for their private AI network at WWDC 2024. I wonder if they tested this technology there first, found it worked, and decided it was the way forward for consumer chips.

John Siracusa talked on ATP about the need for Apple to create their equivalent of a Ferrari, not because they really needed it, but because it allows them push the computing envelope. Racing has always influenced consumer automobiles, why not have high end computers used in a data center infulence consumer computing?

Of course that all conjecture on my part.😄

Swift Language on Mastodon

BridgeJS changes that: annotate your Swift, get typed glue code in both directions. Compile-time safe. Zero manual boilerplate.

Seems interesting given a lot of native apps use the JavaScriptCore engine to allow for a more scripted approach to extending their applications. Take Tapestry, from The Iconfactory, for example. It uses JavaScript, it calls Connectors, to allow you to process feeds. Be it RSS or a custom feed output by your own proprietary system it give you the power to rerpresent that data via a well defined interface, using JavaScript.

Mahesh Gupta

Something strange happened in early 2026. Apple stores started running low on Mac Minis. Tech forums exploded with setup guides. Developers were ordering three, five, sometimes twelve units at a time. The reason had nothing to do with Apple and everything to do with what people were tired of giving away.

From a technical standpoint it’s interesting to see how folks are setting their own private AI agents up internally. Apparently ClawBot can be a security nightmare if you’re not careful about how its configured.

Be careful out there.🤖

Cody Hamman ⦁ JoBlo

The legendary Bruce Campbell is hoping to go on tour with his movie Ernie & Emma this fall and I’m hoping he’ll be considered for the lead role in the film adaptation of Grady Hendrix’s novella BadAsstronauts – but before we get to either of those things, Campbell has revealed that he has been diagnosed with cancer and will be undergoing treatment.

It sounds like this is something he can survive with for a long time. I certainly hope so. He seems to be a decent man and I’ve always loved his on screen presence.

I hadn’t heard or Ernie & Emma before reading this article, now I want to see it. Here’s hoping Mr. Campbell carries on for a very long time and gets a chance to make many more adult stories.❤️

Caroline Crampton

My favourite thing of all, though, is when people have fun with the differing perspective that RSS gives you on the web. Dave Rupert runs an “RSS Club”, where members pledge to publish stuff to their feeds that never appears anywhere else — a secret, just for those in the know. Many use it for more personal writing, or works in progress, or art that they don’t want to expose to the whole internet yet. Somehow, still using RSS, which is a beautifully simple bit of tech from the early days of the web, makes you part of a community of like-minded strangers. When I’ve spent hours scrolling through my never-ending stream of text that nobody else ever sees, I feel a warm glow when I come across something that was written just for me.

I’m tellin’ ya, RSS is awesome! So are feed readers, no matter which one you choose. There’s one for everyone. Find one and enjoy bringing the web to you.

And… not to toot my own horn, ok, ok, I’m tooting my own horn, you can always download Stream for your iOS device.😄

Todd Farmer ⦁ Fangoria

The story of my car-sleeping year was published in 2015 and somehow went Hollywood viral. That’s a snooty way of saying it was met with praise — and no shortage of hate. But I also received over 1,000 private messages and emails from people who not only related, but had been there. Some far more successful than me. Some who had lost far more than me.

As I read this I imagined me and my wife living out of our car. An old software developer unable to find a job because of LLMs. Yes, it’s a fear I live with, and it sucks.

In the meantime I’m embracing LLMs for use at work. We’re encouraged to use them and I honestly believe the best shot I have at working in this industry until later in life is making sure I can use LLMs.

Jon Hicks

A long dive into the features that make my ideal music app, and why nothing currently fulfils the brief.

Music apps leave me wanting.

This post is a year old and I’m certain I mentioned it back then but it showed up recently on Mastodon and I had to revisit it. I’m not sure about other developers out there but when I see stuff like this I think “I could do that.” Of course I could do that with some time and money on my side. I hope Jon is able to find his perfect solution. I’m still working on mine.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus ⦁ The New Yorker

A large language model is nothing more than a monumental pile of small numbers. It converts words into numbers, runs those numbers through a numerical pinball game, and turns the resulting numbers back into words

I really love this explanation. I’ve been using the pachinko machine as an example when I talk to folks but I think both work well.

What kills me is when you hear folks say “They don’t even know how it works.” The “they” are the creators of this technology. Kind of scary.

L. Jeffrey Zeldman

The point is that the former Twitter has become a hateful cesspool, not simply mirroring but amplifying its owner’s profound insecurities, god-awful beliefs, and self-serving lies, and forcing that insanity into the public consciousness, whether we avoid X or not.

X is indeed a hateful cesspool and it took me a while to decide to jettison my beloved Twitter “fahrni@twitter.com” account. Someone else snatched it up in December 2023 and their last name isn’t even Fahrni! 🤣 Oh well. You can find me on Mastodon or here on my trusty old blog.

Murphy Randle

If you feel offended at this statement, and move to defend it as “just the way things go in business”, I understand. I have that reaction, too. But after that I take time for some abstract consideration; if our companies aren’t here to keep us employed and innovating, what are they here for? Is their purpose to maximize profit for the owners? Is that what our societies are showing a need for right now, maximized profit? More concentrated power?

A look at the human cost of LLMs in the workplace. Greed, like everything else, drives our LLM overlords to keep pushing forward. That classic Dr. Ian Malcom line from Jurassic Park comes to mind: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

If our world valued human life and human diginity we’d find a way to allow everyone to do the jobs that give them joy and not have to worry about housing, food, health care, and education. It would all be there for us to use as a member of society. If we don’t have that, what’s the alternative? A reduced population as Scrooge would say?

I know, that’s a gloomy take on it, but it certainly does come to mind. I’m the perfect candidate to fire. I’m in a senior level position, I’m not the brightest bulb in the box, and I’m old.👴🏼

⚠️ Politics

Dave Rogers

Add this to your existential dread bucket, Trump is totally winging it with war on Iran. The guy doesn’t have a plan. I think Netanuyahu has been flattering him, blowing warm smoke up his ass, and Trump is desperate to get Epstein out of the news cycle, so why not start a little war.

Folks already know I’m not a fan of our President and his administration. I do not want the United States engaged in yet another war in the Middle East.

What I believe is Marmalade Messiah is following the Nethanuyahu playbook and is going to raze much of Iran’s big cities and infrastructure so he can become Supreme Leader of Iran as well as President of the United States. Once he’s done that he’ll move to rebuild Iran and its cities as Trump cities. He’ll also have American companies move in to run all the oil and resource extraction outfits in the region. Of course he’ll extract big rents from all of these companies that’ll go directly into his own pockets.

The man and his administration need to be shown the door.🚪

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Nothing much to say.

Please, enjoy the links.

Jay Peters • The Verge

Jack Dorsey’s Block, the financial tech company that runs Square and the Cash app, is cutting its workforce by “nearly half” and axing more than 4,000 jobs. The company will shrink from more than 10,000 people to less than 6,000, Dorsey says in a post on X. And the reason why? AI.

Emphasis is mine. I’d imagine we’ll see this become a trend as companies learn how to use LLM’s.

I had an Engineering Lead say to me “I had a designer build a full application that worked. They didn’t know how to code.”

My heart sunk. I’m on an AI first team, but it’s four software developers.

As a side note, I cut Claude loose on a one page specification for an application. That spec shared the URL for fetching data and the data structure the app should operate on.

The Swift / SwiftUI code it output was really good. It left me a bit speechless to be honest.

It had a couple errors that needed correcting but they were tiny in the overall scheme and I understood every hunk of code it output. It took somewhere between five and 10 minutes to complete the code.

By contrast it took me an hour to write the code that defined the data types, fetch the data, and display it. And my version was just the basics. It was not a complete solution.

The more advanced requirements would’ve taken me most of the day to complete, if at all.

The folks who survive going forward will embrace these tools as a part of their daily practice.

A friend of mine from California, who works in the Bay Area, said 70% of their engineering teams were let go. 😔

Oh, one more thing. If you read his posting on X 🤮 you’d notice he wrote the entire thing without a single capitalized word. What’s up with that? Y’all too wealthy to even care about capital letters? 😳

Philippe Dubois • SchwadLabs

In 2008, why the lucky stiff released Shoes—a toolkit for writing tiny graphical programs in Ruby. The pitch was simple: GUI programming didn’t have to be painful.

I remember reading _why’s work years back, very superficially. I had no idea he’d created a framework for creating UI. That’s incredible!

I liked _why’s approach. He was using native code on each platform. The new attempt is relying on the browser. I don’t like that. Native frameworks are so much better than relying on a browser to create your UI.

Scharon Harding • Ars Technica

Netflix backed out of its deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD’s) streaming and movie studios businesses on Thursday night. After increasing its bid for all of WBD by $1 per share on Tuesday, Paramount Skydance is poised to become the new owner of WBD, including Game of Thrones, DC Comics, and other IP, as well as the HBO Max streaming service and cable channels CNN and TBS.

Netflix is ultimately the big winner here. They get to save billions of dollars for content creation and lure Paramount into a huge amount of debt.

The big bummer of the deal is having a right wing nutter buying it. What will the do to CNN? Will it become another Fox News or CBS? Probably.

What happens to HBO? Do they gut it and stop making the best content in the streaming business?

Who could fill the gap left by HBO and CNN if they’re run into the ground? It could become a huge opening for Netflix, Apple TV+, and others to fill.

Jason Snell • Six Colors

It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment—the “vibe in the room”—regarding the past year. (And by looking at previous survey results, we can even see how that sentiment has drifted over the course of an entire decade.)

It seems like the punditry is mostly unhappy with Apple about two things; Liquid Glass and Apple’s lack of backbone to stand up against the Trump mob syndication.

I don’t have a real problem with Liquid Glass. Sure, it has some problems, but I think Apple will eventually straighten it out or change it outright.

As for how spineless Tim Cook has been with Trump, well, I agree with that. Sure, sure, shareholder value… blah, blah, blah.

What about American greatness and bravery? What about democracy? What about decency?

You’re afraid of a dictator but not the loss of our democratic way of life. Shameful.

Chris Person • Aftermath

RAM, flash memory, and HDDs are unaffordable because of a bunch of greedy idiots that do not love the computer.

Thank you AI companies for making computers even more expensive. I can’t imagine what Apple is going to do to their prices. 😳

I can see it now: “The new 14in. MacBook Pro is available today with a starting price of $5,999.00 for 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.”

A 32GB system with 1TB of storage would be like $15,000.00. 🤣

I certainly hope not.

G German • Ruby Stack News

Ruby 4 doesn’t arrive with a flashy headline feature. Instead, it delivers a dense package of under-the-hood engineering improvements: reduced allocations, refinements in the VM, better JIT behavior, and internal API polish. The result is not dramatic in isolation, but cumulative in effect — applications feel smoother, more predictable, and more efficient under load. It’s the kind of progress that shows up in production dashboards rather than conference demos.

It’s really nice to see a team work so hard on the little things under the hood. Looking for performance and memory wins is always appreciated by developers using your tools.

It’s also really interesting to see Rust integrated into Ruby Core.

Matt Birchler

How’s this for a hot take to start the weekend: I think Apple is going to discontinue iPadOS. I know, I know, it’s a big swing, but put the pitchforks away and hear me out. iPadOS, as it exists now, is being stretched too thin. The idea of having one operating system, with the same features, that spans from a small, 8" tablet up through a 13" laptop-style slab that also connects to a 32" monitor is fundamentally problematic.

🔥 Hot take indeed! 😃

Witney Seibold • Slashfilm

Alan Parker’s 1987 film “Angel Heart” is simultaneously gorgeous and salacious. Michael Seresin’s steady, professorial photography is some of the best you’ll ever see in a horror movie, and the film is further classed up by the presence of Robert De Niro as a mysterious benefactor named Lou Cyphre.

DeNiro’s Lucifer is definitely one of the best ever. Especially at the end when his eyes glow red. It really creeped me out. 😈

It’s one of those films I’d like to own.

David Bryant Copeland

My visceral reaction to these tools has been a combination of disgust and boredom. Here are the things I have told myself about why this technology can or should be ignored:

Like I said earlier. If you want to survive the LLM revolution you’d better embrace it with open arms.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Nothing much to say this week! Hope you enjoy the links.

Whakkee

I’m fed up with every other website telling me “we value your privacy”, and then showing me an opt-out list of hundreds of vendors they’d like to share my information with. If it’s free, you’re the product. Even when it’s not free, that seems to be the case.

I think a lot of us are in the same boat as Whakkee, but they’re doing something about it.

Cabel Sasser

This post is about a found mural, a lost artist, and a conference talk. It’s the full story of Wes Cook and The McDonald’s Mural. Grab a beverage, sit back, relax, and thank you for joining me.

Read the post and make sure you go watch Cabel’s XOXO presentation. It is a beautiful story and Cabel is an excellent story teller. He’s also so full of joy and laughter. It’s such a good watch!

Witney Seibold • Slashfilm

“Mimic” hit theaters late in the summer of 1997. It was Guillermo del Toro’s second feature-length directorial effort after his debut on the acclaimed 1992 vampire flick “Cronos,” as well as his first movie fully in English. Based on “Mimic,” the world wouldn’t have been able to predict that its director would go on to become a beloved cult icon and legit Hollywood darling in subsequent decades.

I like this movie and so does my wife. We saw it in theaters together and I think I need to go purchase it for our collection. 😁

NetNewsWire Blog

NetNewsWire 1.0 for Mac shipped 23 years ago today! 🎸🎩🕶️

Happy Birthday NetNewsWire! You’re buying the beer! 🍻

Congratulations Brent Simmons and the NNW team. It really is a beautiful piece of work and the granddaddy of Mac feed readers.

Fred Lambert • Electrek

Ferrari has officially named its first all-electric vehicle: the Ferrari Luce. The Italian automaker unveiled parts of the interior design today in San Francisco, showcasing a cabin co-designed with Jony Ive’s creative collective LoveFrom that prioritizes physical controls over touchscreens.

The work by LoveFrom is incredible. It’s a very nice mix of digital and analog cockpit. 😘

Jeff Gluck and Jordan Bianchi • The Athletic

Anthony Alfredo said he’d only cried tears of joy like this twice in his life: when his daughter, Everleigh, was born in November and when he made the Daytona 500 on Thursday night. Except less than an hour after one of his most triumphant moments, Alfredo received crushing news. His finish in Thursday’s qualifying race was disallowed because of a technical violation on his No. 62 car, and Alfredo was sent home for Sunday’s Great American Race instead.

The Daytona 500 is the biggest race of the NASCAR season and it just happens to be the first race of the season. Weird right?

Anywho, after qualifying there are two mini races on Thursday called Duels that allow racers to improve their position and let what are called Open Cars race their way into the show on Sunday. There were six open cars trying to get in and two spots to fill. Anthony Alfredo filled one of those spots. It’s a shame a small technicality eliminated them. 😔

Nolan Lawson

You could abstain out of moral principle. And that’s fine, especially if you’re at the tail end of your career. And if you’re at the beginning of your career, you don’t need me to explain any of this to you, because you already use Warp and Cursor and Claude, with ChatGPT as your therapist and pair programmer and maybe even your lover. This post is for the 40-somethings in my audience who don’t realize this fact yet.

Lean into LLMs in your day job if you’re employed by a company like mine. It’s a place where we do client work for big name brands and our company encourages its use.

I’ve been on a very lean team, four developers, a Product Manager, and a part time Lead, and the team is cranking out high quality code faster than I’ve seen it done in a career of almost 40 years.

It’s not perfect out of the gate and can take coaxing to make changes you’d like but the first pass is usually extremely good. Yes, I’ve tweaked stuff by hand but it’s mostly what I want right away.

I may even use it on my personal projects a bit. Maybe.🙂

Todd Vaziri via Mastodon

Framestore’s very good visual effects breakdown of their work on “F1” (2025).

Framestore did incredible work for F1 the movie. The video Todd links to is short and well worth a few minutes of your life.🏎️

Darko Mesaroš

Here’s a crazy idea, can I expose and host a website on a 2001 Sun MicroSystems Netra X1 SPARC Server? Yes, yes I can. Let’s get into how I set this up.

I love the idea of using old hardware like this. I’ve often wished operating systems could freeze in a way and only be modified to fix bugs, enhance security, and improve performance. I really only want this for servers. Don’t keep piling on features that bloat it.

Could you imagine something like an Intel 286, 386, or 486 running a static site like a blog or simple small business site? I can and it sounds amazing to me.

Robert Reich

This is what a rigged economy looks like.

America. Land of the free, home of the Oligarchs.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

I hope you enjoy the links. 🙂

Freddie Harrison • Sketch Blog

Here are five ways we’ve been using the MCP server internally at Sketch. We’ve included prompts we’ve tried for you to copy and adapt for your own use cases.

We’re Claude Code fans here — so that’s what our examples use and what we’ve tested with — but you can use any MCP-compatible client.

I have a couple friends who used to work on Sketch and I hope they’re proud of everything they dumped into this incredible design product.

This piece talks about the design side of using the MPC but I’d love to see it in use to generate UI.

I’ve been doing that with Figma and Claude code recently and it does a decent job. Not perfect, but decent.

I believe setting up your design project properly will go a long way toward making code generation much better.

Benj Edwards • Ars Technica

On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch complained on X after rival AI lab Anthropic released four commercials, two of which will run during the Super Bowl on Sunday, mocking the idea of including ads in AI chatbot conversations. Anthropic’s campaign seemingly touched a nerve at OpenAI just weeks after the ChatGPT maker began testing ads in a lower-cost tier of its chatbot.

The commercial is really well done and made me laugh and shake my head because I could see a company doing something just like this. 🤣

Maybe OpenAI isn’t going to do it like this, but it’s still gross.

Tasha Robinson • Polygon

Mark Fischbach’s unlikely box-office hit Iron Lung caught the conventional film world by surprise. An adaptation and expansion of David Szymanski’s short, vibes-driven indie game of the same name, the sci-fi horror movie was self-financed, self-distributed, and marketed largely through Fischbach’s YouTube channel

Sign me up. I want to see this.

Charlotte Rene Woods • Virginia Mercury

A bill by outgoing Sen. Adam Ebbin, D-Alexandria, that would remove Confederate monuments from Virginia’s Capitol Square advanced in the state legislature Wednesday. 

Every Confederate monument reminds us of another dark time in our democracy. A time when the nation went to war over keeping people as pets.

The Union won. The Confederacy lost. Quit celebrating that. Celebrate the end of slavery.

Remove every last monument and melt them down.

Cody Hammon • Jo Blo

Nina Kiri played the character Alma on 28 episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale, and now she has the lead role in a horror film called Undertone, which is stirring up a lot of buzz.

I’m looking forward to this film. It looks great!

Omar Elsayed

Ever wondered why some SwiftUI views feel buttery smooth while others… don’t? I’ve been asking myself this question a lot lately.

I love simple, concise, examples like this that provide instant performance boosts. 💪🏼

Joseph Cox • 404 Media

Lockdown Mode is a sometimes overlooked feature of Apple devices that broadly make them harder to hack. A court record indicates the feature might be effective at stopping third parties unlocking someone’s device. At least for now.

When you go to a protest make sure you get this setup beforehand. And, if you can, setup an old phone with its own phone number and Apple ID and take that instead. It’s what I did for the DC No Kings rally in case things went sideways and I was arrested.

Wil Wheaton

Having a gun and being able to carry it wherever you want is a core and fundamental right of every U.S. citizen, or anyway that is what I have been told all my life by the same people who now use the mere existence of Pretti’s alleged gun as proof his murder was justified

I had this very argument with someone yesterday. It’s sickening that some the Second Amendment crowd are victim blaming.

Why would Alex Pretti not have his legally concealed weapon with him? I bet her carried it everyday. Why would that day be any different?

Second Amendment freaks, you can’t have it both ways.

Matt Gemmell

I recently wrote about the decline in my opinion of Apple. This presents me with an ethical problem, because we’re heavily invested in the company. We don’t own any of its stock, but we’re very much entangled in its products and services ecosystem.

I’m seeing a number of folks starting the process of switching to Linux. Perhaps now Linux will get more folks working on the UI and really make it something special.

Ryan Cooper • The American Prospect

One year ago this month, I predicted that Tesla was cooked. Now the verdict is in, and there is a distinctly charred odor coming from the Austin area. Sales are down, yearly revenue is down for the first time ever, and quarterly profits fell by a whopping 61 percent, to just $840 million. That gives it a price-to-earnings ratio of 297—a ludicrous figure, historically speaking. According to a report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the company has paid precisely zero federal taxes on its earnings in both 2025 and 2024, so the company is certainly being helped along by federal forbearance. But things are getting dire.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. 🤣

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Well the day of sleet we got on Sunday really left us in a mess. We had somewhere between 8-10in of sleet on the ground, which turned into a crust of ice overnight. Temperatures have been frigid so that ice continues to thicken. Breaking it out is a pain so I hired someone with a skid steer and he did a great job clearing off our driveway. The gentleman who did the work is just a random dude helping out his neighbors. Absolutely worth the $50. Our youngest daughter is terrified I’m gonna drop dead while shoveling snow, like a man down the street did last week. 😔

Work is fine. I’m on the second week of a new project on a very focused, small, team. We are using LLMs to great effect. No, we are not vibe coding. We’re all processional software developers who know how to build product. We all check our work and will instruct the LLM when it needs to be corrected. It’s working better than I expected and our code matches the work, in terms of style and architecture, as the work done previously. It’s also accelerated our delivery. 😀

Hope you enjoy the links.

Andrew Dalton and Jocelyn Noveck • AP

Catherine O’Hara, a gifted Canadian-born comic actor and “SCTV” alum who starred as Macaulay Culkin’s harried mother in two “Home Alone” movies and won an Emmy as the dramatically ditzy wealthy matriarch Moira Rose in “Schitt’s Creek,” died Friday. She was 71.

This one hit me because I’ve always had a bit of a crush on her. She’s so funny and seems to be a genuinely kind person. I also find her to be very beautiful.

The last thing I saw her in was The Last of Us in season two. It was a great role for her. A little different role but she was so perfect for it.

RIP. 💔

Nilay Patel • The Verge

On today’s episode of Decoder, I’m talking about the bidding war over Warner Bros. Discovery, which is the biggest story in the entertainment industry right now, and for good reason. It has pretty much everything you could want in a buzzy Hollywood saga — big names, big money, and big drama.

I really hope Netflix is able to win this battle because Paramount would be such a crummy deal for WB. Just look at how they’ve ruined CBS, once a trusted news source is now a running joke.

Can you imagine what they’d do to the likes of CNN and HBO? They’d become dumpster fires, full of extreme right wing talking points and entertainment. No thanks.

Kevin Chan • AP

Amazon is slashing about 16,000 corporate jobs in the second round of mass layoffs for the ecommerce company in three months.

The tech massacre continues. As an older gentleman I’ve mentioned how much this terrifies me. Not only does it terrify me, it terrifies young folks as well.

I’m very grateful for my gig.

Sebastian de With • via Threads

Some big personal news: I’ve joined the Design Team at Apple.So excited to work with the very best team in the world on my favorite products. ✌️

I’m more than a little surprised Sebastian returned to Apple. He cofounded Lux Optics with Benjamin Sandofsky and they managed to create a most beloved camera app named Halide.

My hope is the Apple Design Team reached out to Sebastian because of his piece describing what he hoped the new iOS 26 design would look like. The post predates WWDC 2025 when Apple announced the extremely controversial Liquid Glass and I think Sebastian’s design is so much better than Liquid Glass.

If he’s not there to work in his design to the various OS’es, then why hire him? 🤞🏼

Om Malik

Power. Comfort. A seat at the table. Or, in this case, the crushing weight of a trillion-dollar valuation that demands constant appeasement. MG Siegler puts it plainly: Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, is captured. And so is the rest of the technology community. This is what happens when valuations trump values.

I would hate to be a CEO in the era of Marmalade Messiah. I don’t know Tim Cook, or any “important” people for that matter, but I had hoped he would push back against this horrible administration.

He’s taken a stand when it was easy but taking a stand when it’s difficult is what leaders do.

If he didn’t feel he could uphold the standards expected of an Apple employee then he should’ve retired. Heck, he should retire.

Maybe he believes in Trump and the horrible things they’re doing? It’s hard to believe he’s boot licking just to serve shareholders?

It makes me wish macOS and iOS weren’t Apple products.

Max Tani • Semafor

In recent weeks, rumors have flown around the newsroom about the size of the cuts and when they would be implemented, but the conversation reached a fever pitch late last week, aided by unverified reports about section-wide eliminations. The Post has largely remained silent, leaving staff to read the tea leaves in conversations between individual editors and reporters: Some editors have quietly been suggesting to staff across various verticals, including sports, that it may not be a bad idea to begin looking for other jobs, Semafor has learned, and one Post source said editors would not answer questions about whether there would be a sports section after the cuts at all.

Here’s another boot licking oligarch ruining an American gem.

At one point I know Kara Swisher was interested in putting together a group to buy the Washington Post. What happened to that?

The Post needs an owner who can guide it through this dark time in American history and tell the difficult stories that need telling.

Doug Gregor • Swift.org

There are many interesting, useful, and fun C libraries in the software ecosystem. While one could go and rewrite these libraries in Swift, usually there is no need, because Swift provides direct interoperability with C. With a little setup, you can directly use existing C libraries from your Swift code.

I need to sit down and read and understand how this works but to be perfectly honest creating a tiny Objective-C class that calls the C code is super easy and the resulting code is easy to use from Swift.

Your mileage may vary. 😃

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

🚨 BREAKING NEWS: It’s Sunday 🚨

We had our grandkids yesterday so it gets very busy in the Fahrni household. That’s why I’m publishing this on Sunday.

I started a new project this week and can’t really say more than that. It’s another React Native project with a very short timeframe so it’s time to knuckle down and go to work. 👷‍♂️

We’re getting ready for a real cold spell leading into next week accompanied by possibly 18-24” of snow. 🥶

Folks at work have labeled it snowmageddon. 😂

Some call it Southern Winter. 🤣

My biggest worry is loss of power. It’s not just snow. We’re expected to get an ice storm as well. That leads to complete chaos. Here’s hoping the power stays on. 🙏🏼

I hope you enjoy the links.

Ashur Cabrera

I’ll cover some specifics like which tools I’m using, but won’t dive into implementation details or code snippets. Instead, my hope is that a high-level overview might plant a seed for someone else to try a new idea, or to finally fix that thing that’s been bugging them about their blog.

Ashur is someone I have a great deal of respect for and he’s a talented person, especially when it comes to the web. He creates beautiful, creative, websites you can’t label as boring.

I really love it when folks share how they produce their weblogs. No two workflows and tooling are the same. It’s a wonderful thing. 🧰

Varun Santhanam

Working with JSON in Swift can feel like fighting gravity. Swift is modern, powerful, expressive, and has perhaps the best type system of any programming language. But when it comes to working with JSON, especially unstructured or semi-structured payloads, you’re left with tools that are either clumsy, slow, or both. It barely feels like Swift. I wanted something better. When I couldn’t find it, I built it myself.

I’ve never found the JSON support offered by Codable to be slow but there are definitely software developers with the low level talent and who are speed demons who won’t put up with what they notice is slow.

This library might be for you. 🐦‍🔥

Henry Desroches

We were given this vast, holy realm of self-discovery and joy and philosophy and community; a thousand thousand acres of digital landscape, on which to grow our forests and grasslands of imagination, plant our gardens of learning, explore the caves of our making. We were given the chance to know anything about anything, to be our own Prometheus, to make wishes and to grant them.

But that’s not what we use the Internet for anymore. These days, instead of using it to make ourselves, most of us are using it to waste ourselves: we’re doom-scrolling brain-rot on the attention-farm, we’re getting slop from the feed.

More and more folks are discovering the power and freedom of the blog and RSS. Some of us never left but may have faltered a bit during the very dominant Twitter years. I’m guilty of that but I love my blog now more than ever. ❤️

Dave Rogers

I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose most of my 11 readers if I start writing about Nazis and fascists exclusively, but there’s only so many places I can direct this rage and incomprehension at the absence of rage all around me.

Write about the state of America and our failed democracy all you want, Dave. I’m still reading and agree with you more than ever. I’ve always loved your voice and how you share it through your writing. ❤️

Yosh • Unix Dog

C doesn’t have an official documentation channel, nor does it have syntax or standard library constructs that encourage one particular way of doing things. from this, there’s a bunch of inconsistencies in how people do things, and–especially in the early days of the language and standard library–the landscape and general practice is quite error prone.

It’s true. C is for folks who want to do it all. At least that was mostly my experience as I learned C and later C++. Platform vendors supplied us with frameworks and SDKs that gave us the building blocks we needed to do our jobs. No package managers.

⚠️ POLITICS BELOW HERE ⚠️

The Nobel Peace Prize

The medal and the diploma are the physical symbols confirming that an individual or organisation has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The prize itself – the honour and recognition – remains inseparably linked to the person or organisation designated as the laureate by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Yeah, what more can we say? Marmalade Messiah is a sociopathic narcissist. It’s all about him but he’s fake as hell and a hollow shell of a man.

Not to mention bully, rapist, pedophile, failed businessman, convicted felon, and now party to murder in Minnesota.

Just a garbage human who’d already be dead or in prison if he hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his lying mouth. 🤬

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Last week was my final week on a two plus year project to integrate React Native into native iOS and Android code bases and ultimately migrate to a 100% React Native application. That goal was accomplished at the end of 2025, now we hand it over to our client so they can develop everything in pure React Native. It was a very enjoyable ride but our involvement with the project is scaled way back now. Some folks are still working on it but most of us will be moving on. To what? I have no idea at the moment. We’ll see!

Enjoy the links!

James Hibberd • The Hollywood Reporter

Martin wanted to build an empire — and did. Yet “productive” is the last word any Thrones fan would use to describe him. The author’s worry that he wouldn’t be able to finish Winter has borne out to a staggering degree. His tortured inability to “finish the book, George!” — as online hordes regularly chide — is almost as impressive, in its way, as his success at doing everything else.

It’s hard to believe he’s still working on the final book. I’m not a big follower of Mr. Martin but he’s obviously a prolific writer, just a bit slow, that’s all.

I hope he’s able to complete his book and feel really great about it.

Jack McKessy and Michael Middlehurst-Schwartz • USA Today

The New York Giants have offered Harbaugh a five-year deal to become their next head coach, NFL Media’s Ian Rapoport reported Thursday morning. Harbaugh has already accepted the offer, which will make him one of the NFL’s highest-paid coaches, Rapoport reports.

I’m really happy for John Harbaugh. I think everyone knew he’d have his choice of teams given how consistent his teams have been over the years.

I hope he’s able to develop Jaxson Dart into an A-tier quarterback.

Stevie Bonifield • The Verge

One year on Linux, two distros, a few tears, four desktop environments, and zero regrets about leaving Windows.

I’ve seen more people moving to Linux than ever before. Microsoft seems to be doing its best to make Windows an Enterprise only operating system. It’s really very sad.

I started my Windows development journey with Windows 2.1 and it really took off with Windows 3.0.

I worked at Microsoft on Windows for Workgroups version 3.11 in the International Group as a Test Engineer.

I left there for Visio and was a Tester for Visio 1.0.

I owe a lot to Windows professionally. Microsoft always had a great developer story with great SDK support. Now it’s a pretty strange company that doesn’t have a unified developer story and doesn’t even use its own tools for development of its own products. 😔

I think I can get the core bits of Stream ported to Linux, then I’d need to build a UI. 🤣

Dave Winer

I’ve been watching Jake Savin for the last couple of months using Claude.ai and ChatGPT to create a headless version of Frontier that will run on Linux and current versions of MacOS.

This is extremely interesting. There are projects that come along once in a while that I’d like to contribute to, this is one, but I already have enough on my plate with Stream and [Secret Project].

Will Graves • AP News

Mike Tomlin was an unknown when the Pittsburgh Steelers plucked him from obscurity in 2007 and handed the young and charismatic Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator one of the most stable jobs in sports.

Mike Tomlin has been such a constant at Pittsburgh it’s hard to see him leave but I’m happy for him.

I hope he has an amazing retirement.

Dan Moren • Six Colors

Pixelmator Pro is perhaps the biggest part of this announcement, as many have wondered what was in store for the graphics app after its parent company’s acquisition by Apple in late 2024. The Mac app comes to the iPad for the first time with Apple Pencil support, and there’s a new Warp tool across all versions.

This bundle seems a bit strange to me.😃 I can see having the high end creative tools in one bundle but the iWorks apps seem strange in the same group. They seem like should be two separate offerings to me.

Oh, it’s also kind of strange they’re keeping the old versions around and you can still do a one time purchase of them.

AJ Dellinger • Gizmodo

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has seen his net worth skyrocket by nearly $100 billion since the AI boom started a couple of years ago, would really appreciate it if you would stop talking about the potential harms of the technology that’s supercharged his fortune. It’s really harshing his vibe.

I figure he’ll get over it somehow. 🤣

Luke Smith • The Athletic

At the end of his gruelling, podium-less first season with Ferrari in 2025, Hamilton needed that break and reset more than ever. Because 2026 will be the year that defines the late stages of his storied career, and the unification between the most successful driver in F1 history and the sport’s most successful, iconic team.

Mr. Hamilton is toward the end of his career. This may be the natural drop off in talent that comes with age.

I like F1 but I pay more attention to NASCAR and I’m witnessing that with Kyle Busch as well. The man is seven wins from 70 and I’d love to see him make it, but I feel like he won’t, which is a real bummer.

I’d be really happy to see Lewis Hamilton win another championship and walk away on top. Of course these folks are the best in the world and can’t walk away. 😁

Annie Snider • Politico

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs on Monday called for curtailing her state’s lucrative tax incentives for data centers and imposing new water use fees on the growing industry.

This is good. Water is a very precious resource and needs to be treated accordingly. In fact, water poor areas like California, Arizona, Nevada, etc shouldn’t have big AI data centers. Put them in Alaska or northern states that have cold winters. As if I’m some expert on cooling data centers. 🤣

Daring Fireball

Emphasizing that leaving X and Grok available in the App Store and Play Store is directly contradictory to Apple and Google’s stated reasons for maintaining control over software distribution is a good pressure point. Do they selectively enforce content moderation based on whims and/or shifting political winds, or rigorously enforce the plain language of their own content guidelines? Which is it? It can’t be both.

Apple and Google are disappointing their fans. I know I’m disappointed as are many geeky developer and pundit types.

Space Karen needs to be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail.

Johnathan M. Gitlin • Ars Technica

The outcry from Bolt fans was loud and vociferous, and in July 2025 GM CEO Mary Barra announced that it would be coming back, with a new Ultium-based battery pack. But only in the Bolt EUV body style—if you prefer the original hatchback, you’re out of luck.

I really like this little car and think it’s absolutely perfect as a commuter car but it’s waaaaay too expensive. How can Chevrolet bring the price down to under $20k for the base model?

That would be incredible. Cars are way too costly. Especially EV’s. I’d imagine that’s part of the reason people still drive gas powered vehicles.

Dave Winer

If I were making a Bluesky client, I would get together with the other independent developers who are creating those clients and agree on adding features that Bluesky itself doesn’t support and be compatible with each other.

I like the idea of this it’s just too bad all of these platforms don’t have a way for third parties to add their own RSS elements. E.G. Dave has introduced a new RSS element named ‘source:markdown’ that is the same as ‘description’ except it’s formatted as Markdown. Pretty cool, aye?

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

This week has been a tough one. Our country is going right down the toilet with the current administration pulling the handle.

They’re just itching for a reason to declare marshal law and the events of this week with the murder of Renee Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross puts us one step closer to one of us killing one of them.

At some point it has to stop or we will go down that road.

Curt Devine, Thomas Bordeaux, Allison Gordon, Kyung Lah • CNN

As he approached Renee Good’s vehicle on a Minneapolis street on Wednesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross held up his phone camera and recorded video.

Less than a minute later, he was still recording when he drew his weapon and fatally shot Good as she accelerated.

This whole situation is disgusting and vile. The ICEhole who killed Ms. Good should be prosecuted to the full extent possible. He committed murder in plain sight and we have him on video doing it.

Sean Heber

I feel like if Iconfactory brought in that much or sold that many copies of any of our software in one year we’d be throwing a freakin’ party.

Sean is one of the amazing software developers behind beloved titles like Twitterrific and Tapestry. The Iconfactory is full of incredible folks; support staff, designers, and devs. At last count the company is six incredible people working their tails off to produce some of the best software on the Mac and iOS and they’re always struggling to keep the doors open.

Yes, that’s how tough modern software development shops have it.

I wish I were a really rich man. I’d give them a bunch of money, just because.

If you have design or app development needs, please, visit my friends at The Iconfactory and hire them. You will not be disappointed.

Yes, I love this shop so much I’ve tried to get a job there a couple times. 😄 They’ve never had open positions and I don’t think I have the chops to match Craig Hockenberry and Sean Heber, but I’d sure love to work with them. ❤️

I still think Apple should buy the company. Six amazing folks and an amazing catalog of apps in one nice little package. 😃

Dan Moren • Six Colors

It is absolutely unconscionable that, as of this writing, X is not only still on the App Store but is ranked #1 in “News”1 and that Grok is the #3 free app. Moreover, there has been—as far as I have seen—no public statement from Apple or Cook about this situation in the days, at least, over which it has unfolded. Probably because it is indefensible. Even, if at this point, they removed X/Grok from the store—which, don’t get me wrong, they absolutely should—the question would be “what took so long”?

I reported X for child porn at the App Store yesterday and you should too. Space Karen is a disgusting human being and everything he touches turns to amoral shit.

Toss their software out of the store until they fix it, Mr. Cook. You’re one of the largest most profitable companies in the world. Get off the MAGA train. 🤬

Anil Dash

The number one question I get from my friends, acquaintances, and mentees in the technology industry these days is, by far, variations on the basic theme of, “what the hell are we supposed to do now?”

Indeed. What are we supposed to do now? As of this writing I’m 58 years old with no hope of retirement and I’m in an industry going through a radical transformation because of LLMs. They’re damned useful today. What happens when/if they become useful enough I’m no longer needed?

As it stands that day hasn’t come. Humans still need to look over LLM work to make sure it’s correct. Use for everyday things is not trustworthy because it still makes stuff up. But, for software development is pretty darned good.

Every day I expect to be laid off. No, that’s not an exaggeration. I think about it every darned day and I hate it.

I only hope I can find a job when that happens. Being older doesn’t help.

There’s alway Starbucks. ☕️

Joan Westenberg

Before social media ate the internet, and before the internet ate everything else, and before everything else ate itself, blogs occupied a wonderful and formative niche in the information ecosystem. They were personal but public, permanent but updateable, long-form but informal. A blog post could be three paragraphs or thirty pages. It could be rigorously researched or entirely speculative. It could build an argument over weeks or months, with each post serving as a chapter in an ongoing intellectual project that readers could follow, critique, and respond to.

I love Joan’s writing. She’s so thoughtful and her writing is clear and often resonates with me. This piece is no exception. It’s excellent and you should read it. She has an RSS feed, as any great writer should have. Go subscribe now. 👍🏼

Jason Poitras • IntelliCAD Technology Consortium

AutoLISP® is often used to solve practical problems in CAD workflows, with small custom commands that save time and reduce repetitive work. What has traditionally been missing in IntelliCAD is a modern, developer-friendly way to write and debug those scripts. With IntelliCAD 14.0, the new VLISPcommand introduces a Visual LISP–style debugging workflow using Visual Studio Code, powered by the IntelliCAD LISP Debugger extension.

How cool is this? This is going to prove to be extremely useful for IntelliCAD LISP developers. They’re as close to a full IDE without writing an IDE as one could get and they’re leveraging extremely popular open source tools like. VS Code.

Oh, and they have an existing, built in, IDE that’s one of the best ever built: Visual Basic for Applications, or VBA. It’s an add-on developers dream platform. 😀

Kauy Ostlien • Daily Downforce

Brad Keselowski is set to miss the 2026 NASCAR Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium, following an injury suffered during the offseason, per a new report.

This is a bummer but I hope to see Mr. Keselowski healthy and ready to roll for Daytona.

I also like that they tapped Corey LaJoie to drive the 6 for The Clash at Bowman Gray.

If Mr. Keselowski isn’t ready for Daytona I’m curious to see how Mr. LaJoie fairs given the great equipment he’ll have. He’s always wanted to race in better equipment. Now may be his chance! 🚙

Daring Fireball

Nielsen’s post on MacOS 26 Tahoe’s tragic “icons for every menu item” design edict was published a month ago, before Nikita Prokopov’s post on the same subject yesterday. Both posts are crackerjack good, and complement each other. Nielsen makes the point that the Mac stood as a counter to platforms and systems that put icons next to every menu item. Of course Google Docs has icons next to every menu item. It sucks. Google sucks at UI design. We Mac users laugh at their crappy designs.

Tahoe’s design continues to be dragged through the muck. I don’t blame all the longtime Mac experts for being pissed off. Some developers are ignoring the new guidance and I don’t blame them for doing it. When someone uses your software and finds it messy, even if it’s the recommended way, they don’t see it as an Apple problem. They see it as the developers problem.

Jason Snell • Six Colors

Leaks from Apple’s supply chain have begun to strongly suggest the shape and size of the product we’ll call, for lack of a better name, the iPhone Fold. And since it’s likely going to be nine months before anyone holds one of these things in their hands, this seems like as good a time as any to consider the story Apple is likely to tell when it’s selling this device.

Whoa! While I don’t consider myself the target user for this device, I really do not like this form factor. It’s way too wide for my taste. It’s definitely more iPad than iPhone in my view.

Of course that mockup may not be anywhere close to the real design. I, for one, hope it isn’t. 🤞🏼

Ken Case • The Omni Group

Happy New Year! Ready for a productive 2026? We have just the thing: we’re pleased to share that a major upgrade of OmniOutliner is ready for you today!

Omni Group is another premier Mac and iOS shop and it’s really nice to see them release updates to their incredible software.

Congratulations! 🥳

Joe Roberts • Slashfilm

David Harbour explained how he and pretty much everyone else was caught off-guard by the popularity of season 1. “By the time we finished, we wrapped, I thought we wouldn’t get a second season,” he said. “We’d be the first Netflix show kind of ever to never get a second season. We thought no one would watch it, it was going to be a disaster.”

Wow. They thought it would be a flop and it becomes one of the most beloved shows Netflix has ever created, thanks, in part, to Mr. David Harbour.

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️

Sorry I missed last weekend. I had the flu and it really kicked my butt. When Kim got up on Saturday morning I went back to bed and slept until 4:30 that afternoon. I needed it. I was wiped out. Sunday was even worse. I felt completely disconnected from my body. Really fuzzy brained, fever, chills, achy, and a lovely cough. That lasted for most of the week. I started feeling more myself on Thursday. Of course I’m back to work on Monday. 😂 I’m grateful I had the week to recover.

I hope you enjoy the links!

Carly Thomas and Abid Rahman • The Hollywood Reporter

James Ransone, the versatile character actor best known for his roles in The Wire, Tangerine, Generation Kill, It: Chapter Two and The Black Phone, died on Dec. 19. He was 46.

This really bummed me out because I thought Mr. Ransone was an incredible actor. It’s not mentioned above but my favorite character of his was Deputy So and So in Sinister.

RIP Deputy So and So. 🪦

Leave Substack

You should probably leave Substack. Here’s why and how.

Yes, you should 100% leave Substack. I can list so many amazing journalists who’ve created their presence on Substack. They don’t say they’ve created a blog, no, they say they’ve created a Substack which makes it even worse. They’re just blogs and, unfortunately, Substack created an environment attractive to writers because it has everything they need; a place to write, social features, and a way to make money doing it. All without lifting a finger to maintain servers or collect money from paid subscribers. It was smart of the founders, but it turns out the founders support some pretty disgusting people, like Nazis.🤬

Robert Lea • Space

Astronomers have made a truly mind-boggling discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): a runaway black hole 10 million times larger than the sun, rocketing through space at a staggering 2.2 million miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per second).

Isn’t this incredible? It’s so difficult to wrap your brain around the idea that a black hole is traveling through space at that speed, creating a wake, and creating new stars as it goes. Just fascinating!🖤

Benj Edwards • Ars Technica

While the JavaScript language didn’t ship publicly until that September and didn’t reach a 1.0 release until March 1996, the descendants of Eich’s initial 10-day hack now run on approximately 98.9 percent of all websites with client-side code, making JavaScript the dominant programming language of the web.

Much to my chagrin JavaScript has become the de facto language of the web. At one time I’d hoped Common Language Infrastructure would become the way of the web, but it didn’t happen. Instead we got WebAssembly, which is fine, I just wish it had been CLI. It would’ve been great to be able to write code in C# or F# or whatever language supported CLI. JavaScript could’ve been CLI compliant.

It is what it is and if you want to do web, you gotta do JavaScript. ☕️

Lexington Herald Leader

Jim Beam, which is one of the largest makers of American whiskey in the world, is planning to shut down production in Happy Hollow in Clermont Jan. 1 through 2026.

Y’all can thank President Orange for this. Canadians have decided they don’t need to purchase American made Bourbon any longer and it’s hurting American Bourbon makers.

That’s not political. That’s just bad business.

Andru Marino • The Verge

With podcasting pivoting to video this year, the word used to describe an audio-only show is becoming meaningless.

Nope. Podcasting is still its own thing. It’s open, distributed via RSS, and all about audio. Now, perhaps I’m misguided with that third assertion? RSS is built to deliver any media type as an enclosure but it’s mostly been used to deliver podcasts.

Besides, how many podcasters with video casts use anything other than YouTube for distribution? I think it’s safe to say very few, if any.

Podcasting, like blogging before it, was created to be an open ecosystem. Sure, go ahead and monetize your podcast, but don’t lock it behind a special service that only supports a proprietary distribution mechanism. That is not podcasting, nor should it be used for the video version of it. Whatever that’s called. Calling it a Video Podcast may be the right thing to do, but being distributed via RSS is partly what would allow using the name Podcast for it.

Marshall Pruett • Racer

Katherine Legge used the momentum from her run at the 2024 Indianapolis 500 with Dale Coyne Racing to expand her career into NASCAR in 2025, and with the support of her sponsors, the Briton is keen to make a return to the Speedway.

I like Katherine Legge. She’s a very versatile driver who’s competed in the Indy 500 and NASCAR Cup Series races. I just wish she could find a full time NASCAR Cup ride. Last year she ran a few Cup races with backing from E.L.F. Cosmetics and I’d love to see them or another woman focused brand step up to give her the ability to run full time. She has what it takes, she just needs money, better equipment, and manufacturer support, like all other drivers. 😀

Maybe a new Dodge Cup team would be interested in having her full time. It would be really great to see! 🤞🏼

Lua.org

Here are the main changes introduced in Lua 5.5. The reference manual lists the incompatibilities that had to be introduced.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Lua, don’t know why. I just like how compact it is and how easy it is to include as a scripting language in other codebases. One of our junior developers at Pelco developed a tool for that allowed a developer to build media pipelines, using our custom media pipeline framework, by writing Lua instead of C++. It was all hosted inside a custom Qt app. It was a great tool mostly because Lua was easier to write and definitely improved developer experimentation and testing velocity. Not to mention the usefulness to the test team. 🧰

Christopher Goffard • Los Angeles Times

Alex Baber, a 50-year-old West Virginia man who dropped out of high school and taught himself codebreaking, now says he has cracked the Zodiac killer’s identity — and in the process solved the Black Dahlia case as well.

This is absolutely fascinating but we’ll never really know the truth of either case.

Perhaps Mr. Barber hit the nail on the head but it sure seems unlikely given the time they’ve gone unsolved and lack of a living suspect to verify it, assuming they’d confess.

Zac Bowden • Windows Central

Too many bugs. Too many changes. Too little control. Windows 11’s reputation might be at its lowest it’s ever been as 2025 comes to a close.

This is a real shame. I cut my teeth as a software developer on Windows and the Windows API. I owe my career to some amazing Windows developer who took me under their wing and taught me how to use those APIs to great effect. After all these years as an iOS developer I still believe I know the Windows API better than I do Cocoa.

I’d really love to see Microsoft put together a small team dedicated to unifying the user interface design and usability of Windows. Eliminate some old cruft and make it rock solid. The underlying foundation is so good to build on.

Embracing C# or Rust to do more work would be nice but there is a ton of C code to maintain and enhance and they need to transition all of Windows to using WinUI 3.

Perhaps they could start by replacing the React Native Start Menu with a brand new Rust based version? That would make for a good start.