FeedCity

Heartbreaking to hear that Om Malik has passed away. I can hardly believe it. Even just this year, it felt like he was doing some of his best writing. Very thankful for the time he gave us at Micro Camp 2023… I was so excited to talk to him. Rest in peace.

When I announced that I was open-sourcing a quiz maker earlier this week, I noted that there were several limitations to what I had built. Most importantly, my quiz maker was a Python script, which substantially limits how many people can use it. After writing the blog post,...

The Spurs picked up 4 new players in the draft. Lots of potential. Some folks are annoyed with De’Aaron Fox, but he was a big part of the Spurs getting 62 wins and making it so far, even if it’s weird that he’s gonna make so much more money than any other Spurs player. 🏀

I bet Ward Cunningham is really good at using Claude, he is a big believer in pair programming. I even did a session with him in Frontier, doing stuff with the outliner.

Due to the rising costs of memory and storage, a standard Micro.blog subscription will remain $5 for the foreseeable future. 🙂

Settled into a perfect routine while away on vacation over the last week: walk or bike for coffee, work a couple hours, picnic at the beach with family, lots of book reading, nice dinner out. 🏖️ Working a little each day actually makes me more relaxed. Got updates to Epilogue and Inkwell ready.

Apple price increases are significant. Now that I see them, it does make sense to change the prices for all the Macs and iPads at the same time. It would feel out of balance to have e.g. the Air stay low and the Neo increase.

I have a nice M3 MacBook Pro and plan to keep it for a couple more years.

"It really is just that simple. The way that you can attack these systems is usually so much dumber than you think it is, or than you think it needs to be."

"That is not leadership. That is control. And it creates dependency, not growth."

I prefer more open systems, so of course I lean toward supporting the EU’s DMA. Third-party marketplaces on iOS represent real progress that wouldn’t have happened without regulation. But what about Siri AI? It is not coming to the EU because Apple doesn’t trust other develo...

Content warning: This poem is about the ongoing heat in Europe. I strike an optimistic tone toward the end, but if you would prefer not to read about the heat, I offer you one of the Scottish poems I have written in stead. Nature’s weary tears fill the air; invisible, warming. Relentlessly, days proceed. Hours pass; Celsius rises. Midnights: warm like day. We stay inside. Blinds closed, water glasses full, cookers off. Flowers bloom early. Eyelids weigh; we yearn for rest that does not come. Heat ravages the continent. London is Rome. Roads reduce to liquid, power lines sag: infrastructure is under stress. Headlines depress. Hope: We come together, reaching with open eyes. Her resiliency: Our future?

Claude is a brain, very different from ours and when we work together we humans have access to capabilities that work really well with building large software products. And that's a huge understatement. Most remarkable thing. I am a programmer with 50+ years experience. Most of the discussion between people who use the AI tools and those that condemn them are not productive because the opponents of AI don't have understand how these things actually work, or if they do that understanding is not reflected in their arguments. I recommend starting an academic dialog, among people who don't have conflicts of interest, to accurately record this discussion based on facts, for the record, so when people ask how we did this transition, there will actually be some footprints to follow.

Good morning sports fans!

The Bear season 5, the show's last season, premieres on Hulu at 9PM EST today.

Last week I took some days off for a family event. It was a lovely trip. It’s commonplace to dread flying in the United States these days, and so it was terrific that it was uneventful. In addition to family time which I won’t share, Kelly and I got to tool around D.C. and Virginia...

Love that this bookstore (Sundog Books) had too many books to fit properly on the shelves. 📚

Maestros of Irish mandolin: Macdara, Marla, and Sean.

Wednesday session in Cork

It took a week and a half on the waitlist, but I’ve now got new Siri AI enabled on my phone. Seems to work so far. Not totally sure what to use it for yet.

When writing code with Claude you really have to be skeptical when it says it just found the problem, but you have no idea what it's saying, chances are pretty good it's just a word salad excuse for not reading all the code necessary to have an opinion that matters. Actually debugging software isn't about opinions, it's about proof. When you start clutching at straws until one works you just added another level of bug that will eventually bit you in the butt and you'll still have to solve the original one. Uncorrected I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want to trust the code it writes, but I guess that's why people have two or more instances playing different roles? For now I'm the one that questions its sanity, more politely though. ;-)