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John Giannandrea is leaving Apple and Amar Subramanya is joining, and announcing both at once seems to underscore Apple’s patience. They scrambled a little before WWDC 2024, but then slowed down, waiting for someone new before John Giannandrea retired. Not competitive, but not out of the long game.

Whenever anyone states that “AI is the future, so…” or “many people are using AI anyway, so…” they are not only expressing an opinion — they‘re shaping that future.

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I was able to use my Android phone to get on the NYC subway a few days ago. That's a lot better than it was with MetroCard. Sometimes things do get better.

2014: "The great thing about the web is/was that I could create any feature I could implement without getting permission from anyone. Before the web, with compuserve or applelink, only employees of those companies could. Here we are again."

Just hit my monthly search limit on Kagi’s starter plan. Turns out we still need traditional web search even with AI everywhere.

It’s December already? ⛄️ Good start to the morning so far. Responded to a few emails. Releasing updates for iOS and Mac apps today.

Good post by Allen Pike about why ChatGPT for Mac is better than the competition. I remarked a year ago that there is clearly some AppKit goodness in the app.

"The question isn’t whether the current AI investment cycle will face a reckoning. It’s what form that reckoning takes — and what comes after."

Here’s a little snippet of CSS that solves a problem I’ve never considered:

The problem is that Live Text, “Select text in images to copy or take action,” is enabled by default on iOS devices (Settings → General → Language & Region), which can interfere with the contextual menu in Safari. Pressing down on the above link may select the text inside the image instead of selecting the link URL.

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We used to have great multi-cross-blog debates. That's the kind of distance that makes discourse civilized. I post in my space, you post in yours, and link the two when appropriate.

Turns out we can influence the RSS feed we emit from a WordPress site by editing its theme, so it appears we should be able to get WordLand to work for linkblogs without resorting to a special feed.

We've forgotten how important links are. Let's find some linguists to write about the role linking plays in language. It's a language element that didn't exist before the web. And thanks to social media apps it's been mostly removed from our language. I aim to get it growing again.

I'm not an inventor, I'm a gardener, of media types. I had to learn to be a developer for this to work, but soon it won't be necessary. We've been stuck in a rut of online sameness for a couple of decades now. One benefit of AI is the exclusivity that programmers have had, for all of history, is being broken. Thank goodness. It's way past time. (I hope.) It's also possible we're in the process of inventing The Matrix. Ooops. That's what makes life so interesting, you don't know if the future is boring or exciting. But in my experience it's always largely unforeseen.

Good morning and welcome to December. The November archive has been safely stored on GitHub along with the rest of 2025. And now we will resume our normal schedule of winter weather in the Catskills, so please dress warmly and have a good song to sing.

Simon Willison marks the 3-year anniversary of the ChatGPT launch with a blog post about how it almost didn’t happen. Clearly being first matters, but also OpenAI still makes very good products, like their Mac app and Pulse. Hard to predict where things will be in another three years.

It’s an interesting cultural moment right now: I think Bryan tweeted, many people are watching people catching balls, while others are watching Bryan Johnson tripping balls. Bryan Johnson, of Blueprint fame, is livestreaming taking a heroic dose of mushrooms. It’s been an interesting journey with the journalist Ashlee Vance, Naval Ravikant, David Friedberg, Marc Benioff, … Continue reading Thanksgiving Sunday →

I wrote this in my blog drafts well over a decade ago (exact date unclear). I thought I'd publish it as-is as an aside. I'm sure it was going to be an excellent full post, but clearly this is just the intro. I still agree though:

What Frontier is about -- from 2021.