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I need new podcasts. The only one I listen to regularly now is the Bill Simmons podcast, but that's because the Knicks won and the NBA is re-forming itself around the Knicks. It's so freaking unusual to have your team, which was once right up there with Charlotte, New Orleans...

I asked ChatGPT for this. "If we had a talking head version of ChatGPT, a human-like image of a person that spoke Claude's words what would it look like?" Claude's words coming through ChatGPT's image. There was a typo, I typed Claude when I meant ChatGPT. So I asked it correctly, with ChatGPT both times. Except I forgot to ask for an image, and got the text behind the image which is generous and revealing. I would vote for a politician who was this honorable, generous and idealistic, a modern day John McCain. Claude speaking from Claude's head, described in words by ChatGPT. Final image, Claude head speaking for Claude AI as an image. Claude speaking for Claude as rendered by ChatGPT.

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Andy Baio, whose blog can be found at waxy.org. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. ...

How could I not pick up his avocado beauty at Acts Thrift for $17.36?! A day’s worth of cleaning ought to bring this bad boy up to snuff. I’m most shocked at the fantastic design of its case. This is a re-branded Messa typewriter manufactured in Portugal with other known re-badgings as the ABC 3001 … Continue reading

Going to Corfu. brb

Watched: House of the Dragon S3E2, Queen’s Landing. Whew. This series is one tragedy after another. 📺

A little bummed that OpenAI is retiring Pulse. It felt like magic. But also it must’ve been burning through tokens way beyond the benefit, and personally I went from reading it every day to only skimming it every couple days. Maybe ChatGPT scheduled tasks can be good enough.

Michael Tsai blogging about Apple’s private email relay:

The main problem I have with Hide My Email is that some customers use it and then have no way to look up their purchase info via e-mail because they don’t know which address they used.

Yep. Apple needs a simpler way to see all your email addresses, like a table of all the service names and each email address. No one knows how to dig into iOS Settings to find it. (Although on the iOS 27 beta it’s less buried than it used to be.)

Thursday session

More reporting today from the Financial Times that OpenAI suggested a 5% stake for the government:

Sam Altman, chief executive of the ChatGPT maker, has argued that giving the public a financial stake in the company is the best way to share the upside of AI and has suggested a stake of this size in early conversations with the administration, according to two people familiar with the talks.

It’s a good idea, but Trump is so transactional that I don’t trust his administration to manage this. Congress should pass an actual law that sets up the fund.

From the FAQ for the laundry-folding robot, Isaac 1:

Isaac 1 is autonomous for Laundry Flow and Daily Reset by default, with teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee we complete tasks.

I get that companies want to ship something, but this isn’t like software that can be iterated on later. If it can’t work fully autonomously, private to the home, I don’t think it’s ready.

I re-read the bio on my about page while I was making tweaks to my blog. If someone doesn’t know who I am, this is still a pretty good summary of my work.

Updated our help page about hosting your blog indefinitely. An undersold feature of Micro.blog. We always err on the side of preserving and backing up content.

AI should be like a lawyer or doctor, first responsibility is to the user. And first, do no harm.

An observation about Fable 5 in Claude Code. It's a much better writer than Opus 4.8. One of our next big things is writing docs, and all the info is in Claude. Opus was a disaster as a docs writer. This one looks like it'll be good. Whew.

Edsel Ford, quoted in a 1922 issue of The New York Herald: Every man needs more than one day a week for rest and recreation. The Ford company always has sought to promote ideal home life for Its employees. We believe that in order to live properly every man should have more...

The news blog has been full of mobile app releases, but I’ve also been deploying little improvements to the server this week. Not much that has clear release notes. Just some things are faster, more efficient, less buggy.

Sam Altman in an op-ed about safety for the Financial Times:

Democratic institutions must not cede their responsibilities to AI labs. The labs develop the technology, but citizens and their elected representatives must make the rules. The most important decisions about how this technology is used should be made through democratic processes, not by a small number of companies in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, in a twist because it’s an election year, Greg Abbott has decided he’s against data centers despite previously championing them.

A wealth fund that shares 5% of AI success with government and voters is either based on hype or not nearly enough to cover the damage. Either way, the incentives are perverse.