Ben Thompson goes philosophical about the Claude watermarking:
What the E.U. is doing is stealing the last thing humans have — creation — and demanding it be bundled with substantiation, effectively giving AI the credit. That the human gave AI the text to proofread — or even the prompt to generate writing — doesn’t matter to the bureaucrats.
Apologies to blog readers who are sick of all the AI-related posts! New Micro.blog stuff coming later today.
Is anyone else surprised that Gemini has 1 billion users? I’ve only met one person who uses it instead of ChatGPT or Claude. But maybe I don’t know enough Android users. People go along with whatever defaults they’re given… Browser, maps, AI.
One day I’m going to work up the courage to ask AI to rewrite every old jQuery call to use simple DOM manipulation and fetch instead. But not today.
If you run a tech company I hope you didn't lay off most of your programmers last year when that was the hype. Don't wait too long before you fire your human developers. I'm now doing my second big project with Claude Code, not an experiment, and we're going through the same mess we went through last time. I know what I want, I can show it what I want, give it docs for what I want, and it keeps leading me into different corners that have nothing to do with it. When it clicks, it can go faster than a thousand programmers and it's a miracle, and when we can harness it to the job we want to do it's incredibly economical. $100 for $1 million of work. That's why you see me full of gusto for that mode. What I haven't written about how when you slow to nothing, back and forth, and you get no closer. I hate this kind of work, esp the role I have to play in it.
Blink and you’ll miss it, but apparently I was in a BBC news report from Belfast last week:
Matt Mullenweg
• Matt
Beeper has some fun new features where you can merge chats with the same person across multiple networks, polls, labels… Very exciting work happening on that product.
Chris Aldrich
• Chris Aldrich
After some bug fix juggling that wasn’t going anywhere, decided to throw a problem at GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra, which I had never used before because it churns through tokens quickly. It spun up a few subagents to handle different facets of the problem. Fascinating.
John Gruber isn’t buying the Claude watermarking either:
What happens if you copy my text and quote it in something you write, by hand? Now you’ve got a watermark in your prose, invisible characters or something, that implicates that your prose is AI-generated? Even though you didn’t use AI and just copy and pasted text from me? Madness.
Maybe the watermark won’t work on short sections of text, like a blockquote, because there aren’t enough words to detect a pattern (unless every word is shifted with the algorithm, which seems insane). But who knows, because how it really works is a secret.
how the poem slows
time — of day and night.
how the poem flows
words — all in sight.
how the poem shows
mirrors — reflections of light.
how the poem knows
conditions — ours alike.
Following up on my comment yesterday, I now have Codex → OpenClaw working, so I can chat with my bot in the same place I have other AI chats. Codex wrote a plugin for itself to handle the connection, plus some setup on the OpenClaw server. 🤖
▶️ watched and finished the rest of Silo season 1 and all of season 2 over the weekend. Superbly well written.Previously: https://tantek.com/2026/218/t1/watched-episodes-silo#Silo #SiloTV #AppleOriginal #AppleTV#Blaugust #Blaugust2026
Exactly one of these ridiculously deep holes in the Earth is dug by hand.
