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Just heard the sad news about Moya Brennan passing. Some of the first records I ever bought were by Clannad—Macalla, Magical Ring, Legend.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam.

Internet Archive quietly continues to do great work. TechCrunch reports on digitizing Aadam Jacobs’s personal collection of taped concerts:

Within the collection, you can also find previously unknown recordings from influential artists like Sonic Youth, R.E.M., Phish, Liz Phair, Pavement, Neutral Milk Hotel, and a whole bunch of other punk groups.

So cool to see this kind of thing preserved.

Another very good analysis of the AI market from Ben Thompson. OpenAI has invested heavily in compute, which will help them, but they are also squeezed by Anthropic on the enterprise side and Meta on the consumer side. It’s hard to compete with everyone.

Back in the United States after my extended trip across the ocean by ship, around Spain and France by train, and back to Malaga for Release Notes. Had an incredible time. I feel very lucky to be able to do this.

I also got a bunch of work done. Inkwell for mobile is looking great, beta this week.

Monday session

Written in Gutenberg: With great respect for Claude.

We reached a milestone this morning, we completed the project to add a Gutenberg version of the wpEditorDemo app. Claude did the programming on the new version. It required changes to the server app, which I made. It took 2.5 days to do the work, which was more than I thought it would. A lot of was learned. Now I'm figuring out what my next project will be.

Screenshot of the Gutenberg demo app.

Heard a report on NPR re why the Dems might win the mid-terms in November. They mentioned gas prices but not concentration camps for immigrants. They mentioned inflation but not the military occupation of Minneapolis and DC. They also forgot to mention that he keeps threatening to nuke Iran.

Early morning in Madrid. The moon still out and train station on the left.

Subject: need someone in san diego Joe, i’m a developer in %REDACTED% and can’t talk to us clients directly – language thing gets in the way. got 9+ years under my belt and a solid plan for landing us it work. technical side is locked in. what i’m missing is someone who can handle the...

The logic of Cory Doctorow's enshittification model applies to government too. Both parties view the electorate as sources of money or people who are manipulated by ads and PR bought with the money. The wants and needs of people, in both government and social media, have a...

BTW one thing you haven't heard is that as you get deeper into the AI environment the user gets smarter. Not just better informed, that's what the web has been doing for us. Can it help us work better together? Remains to be seen. Perhaps each of us is forming our own multi-billion dollar company, and training the people we want working for us.

The demo for Gutenberg is at demo.gutenberg.land. Easy to remember, and makes the point. If you want Gutenberg instead of WordLand, you can have it. Hopefully this reinforces what my goals are here. I do not want to favor any one kind of editor. I want every kind of editor here. I want there to be a web of great editors that runs on the web.

Steve Troughton-Smith posts about Apple’s software quality:

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.

A related question: why does Apple have so many apps? Certainly they should have Safari, Mail, and Pages. But what about Journal, News, and Freeform? A bloated lineup of apps is like an app with too many features — difficult to maintain.

BTW, when playing around with Gutenberg, I wonder why it doesn't allow me to move blocks around, as if it were an outliner? Or maybe it does and I don't know the UI for that?

I've now done two projects with Claude Code, I added a feature to the server running behind WordLand, and adapted wpEditorDemo to work have a second example, using Gutenberg as the editing user interface. Haven't released the Gutenberg app yet, that should happen today, Murp...

This new essay by JA Westenberg about pessimism comes at just about the perfect time, relating to many things in the current tech world:

Whoever can list the most reasons something won’t work gets treated as the smartest person in the room. If you say “I think this could go well,” you get ~the look. That slight tilt of the head. Optimism is treated like a belief in astrology.

And:

When pessimism becomes the default in public conversation, it starts building the world it claims to be describing. People who believe nothing can be different don’t vote, don’t volunteer, don’t start companies, don’t run for office, don’t build the thing that might have mattered.

I always want to be the naive optimist who believes in people and believes in ambitious new projects that probably won’t work. Everything good I’ve done is a result of that.