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From the erratic behaviour of the seagulls on my street, I was able to deduce that it was Flying Ant Day.

In preparation for my jaunt to a Greek island, I figured it would be good to have some Greek-adjacent reading material with me to peruse on the beach. So I scoured the shelves of my local library to find a modern retelling of a Greek myth that I hadn’t already read. That’s where I found Medea by Rosie Hewlett.

The book attempts to rehabilitate—or at least give context to—one of the women of Greek legends who has been cast as a villain. See also Clytemnestra, Elektra, and more.

On the face of it, the book succeeds. We get to see how Medea’s actions were driven by her circumstances. But while it’s entirely believable that that Medea was manipulated by a conniving Jason, this framing takes away her agency somewhat.

The writing is perfectly fine if a little bodice-rippy at times. It was a perfectly good beach read.

Three short fiction pieces

“I’ve got one idea that I’m especially psyched out of my mind about. You know, it’s one of those ideas where you’re just like… Yes!” — Miles Finch

There are really two very different ways of coding with AI. One is to quickly iterate with small changes. The other is letting an agent go off and work on a hard problem or high-level goal, where it churns for minutes or hours. For the first, model speed is almost everything.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Standing in the fresh warm summer’s air, I found my breath slowing, and deepening. I wandered as I transitioned from the feeling of indoors to the Nature of outdoors. Trees and bushes and the light sounds of Nature accompany me as I put one foot forw...

I was down in Sesto a few days ago for Apparat’s concert. The new album is great, attending the event with family and a few friends was a very enjoyable experience, and the atmosphere was very blue!

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I love having a personal website. Here, I share reflections, stories, thoughts, ideas, and more. Because I have a website, I always have the idea in the back of my mind that there is a place for my writing. I can write a story and share it with friends, and even the world. W...

Lights! Camera! Action! Todd Spangler at Variety writes: Automattic’s ‘Code for the People’ Documentary Is a Rallying Cry for Users to Fight for the Open Internet, from the NYC premiere last week. I’m looking forward to the San Francisco premiere of the documentary, and then tomorrow everyone can stream it for free on codeforthepeople.com! Appearances … Continue reading Code for the People →

I’ve been thinking about typewriter stationery and carbon copies lately, as has our friend Joe Van Cleave. Has anyone used or had NCR paper stationery made for themselves? I tried some half-sheet stationery at the International Printing Museum not long ago and that seemed like a lovely way to write and keep copies of typewritten … Continue reading

During tonight’s pub quiz we won a free drink, bottle of wine, Caesar salad and entry into a super league for penultimate pub quiz losers. Not bad for 2 hours of brainteasing.

Thinking about the impact of GPT-Live announced today. Two things…

First, Apple farming out Siri’s foundation to Google puts them in a weird in-between state where maybe they can’t technically build something like this, but also they can’t just use someone else’s model. As if they’re trapped.

And second, I’m sure GPT-Live was architected for the Jony Ive device. I’ve had a hunch for a while that it could be something special. No one has cracked the AI voice assistant device / wearable because for it to be great you have to start by rebuilding everything. GPT-Live is like the first generation iPhone’s multitouch.

Figured out how to publish the AT Proto schema for blog.micro.content. Neat. The schema is just a PDS record, with a DNS entry to resolve the name.

Added a page to document some of how Micro.blog works with Bluesky, including Standard.site compatibility. I’ll add more to this as I think of implementation details that are useful to know.

Alex takes issue with my post giving kudos to Apple for concentrating on bugfixes in the latest version of Safari, and he brings receipts. He makes a very compelling case, backed up with data.

But when it comes to Chrome’s shipping of the half-baked prompt API, I’m not sure he gets just how badly it has soured the developer community’s feelings towards Google. This isn’t something to be countered with data; it’s much more visceral than that. Alex says:

So if Jeremy has a problem with specific features, I hope he’ll come to us with a critique of their qualities, rather than their optics.

In this case though, the optics are really, really, really bad.

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Exactly one year from now, UX London 2027 will be wrapping up. Mark your calendar: July 6th, 7th, and 8th, 2027. If you really want to be ahead of the curve, you can grab a very limited super early-bird ticket now before the price goes up. I’m about to start putting the 20...

Cleaned up a few things in the web interface for books this week, including a new popup menu for switching bookshelves. Here’s a quick 12-second screencast video.

Daniel Jalkut and I had hoped to record a bonus post-WWDC podcast, even scheduled it, but now it has been weeks… There’s always something going on. Amazing that we used to record a weekly show for a decade or more!