FeedCity

[Jason Snell at Six Colors] "In the most recent financial quarter, Apple generated $24.4 billion in revenue from Services. The Mac, iPad, and wearables categories together generated just $22.3 billion. Only the iPhone is more important to Apple’s top line th...

Still a little puzzled by the link handling in Threads posts. Every character in the URL counts toward the total, even though the URLs are shortened when displayed anyway. I don’t want to run a URL shortener in 2024 but it would help.

Good post from Jason Snell about Apple services:

Apple is building an enormous business that’s based on Apple customers giving the company their credit cards and charging them regularly. And that business is incredibly profitable and is expected to continue growing at double-digit percentages.

Another thing that struck me about Tim Cook’s comments on the earnings call: no mention that I noticed of App Store revenue. And yet that is a huge part of services. As a developer, it feels like Apple doesn’t want us to think about how profitable they are based on third-party apps.

Blogrolls, in the 90s, were the beginning of the social web. In the 20s, they can bring today’s social web into blogs.

Dan Murrell blogs about how he uses ChatGPT to add features to his iOS app:

Why should I spend time writing all the code when I could instead describe what I want, and evaluate and adjust minor bits instead?

This is going to become more and more common. Importantly, you can’t blindly follow AI coding advice. A human still needs to be in charge who understands the code.

Here’s an example screenshot in the Mac app of how I use bookmark summarization. I bookmark things I might blog about and get a nice summary of the story. Then later I might add tags or make highlights and use those as quotes in blog posts.

From the M.b news blog, bookmark summarization via our future robot overlords is now available to everyone. I love this feature.

New for everyone: when you bookmark a web page, Micro.blog will automatically include a summary of the page in your bookmarks list. This was previously just for Micro.blog Premium customers. Of course it’s skipped if you disable AI in your account.

Micro.blog News https://news.micro.blog/2024/08/02/new-for-everyone.html

Made a tweak to how timelines in Micro.blog are stored, especially helpful for our poor servers when there are lots of inactive accounts. Our memory usage for Redis servers continues to be out of control, gotta chip away at it.

Lots of news in Vincent’s weekly update, including the end of Gluon, work on M.b, and handing off Sublime Ads… I like the new name: Shameless Plug. Good luck with it @michal!

Great journalism from The Washington Post this morning on a suspicious $10 million withdrawal in Egypt and the investigation on whether it was linked to Trump. This should be a movie:

According to the bank records, employees assembled the money that same day, entirely in U.S. $100 bills, put it in two large bags and kept it in the bank manager’s office until two men associated with the account and two others came and took away the cash.

Hope we eventually know the truth about this.

I was trying to find Tony Kahn on the web for a friend doing a documentary on the origins of podcasting, and came up empty. I just stumbled across him on Facebook and that led to this autobiographical site where he tells his story of podcasting. Tony was the person who brought NPR into podcasting in 2004. A major contributor who isn't often credited. He was at WGBH at the time.

Going to Cork. brb

First alphabetically and first in importance is the HTML <a> element. The <a> element is what makes the World Wide Web a Web that is both Worldly and Wide. It puts the dub, the dub, AND the dub in the dub dub dub. Sometimes, the <a> is referred to as a hype...

Reading House Of Odysseus by Claire North.

Thursday session

Best podcasts for Democratic voters?

There isn't a whole lot of love in this 39-year-old man. I worry for his kids, esp if either of them don't have kids.

This list at The Washington Post of each person freed today is really good, with details on each one. Great day for the families. Joe Biden is good at his job. 🇺🇸