John Voorhees blogging at MacStories:
Apple’s exploration of AI-based search is not terribly surprising either, but I do hope they cut a broader deal with Anthropic instead of Perplexity.
Should Apple acquire Anthropic? It would cost $60 billion, a ridiculous jump over the $3 billion they paid for Beats. Mix in some cash and some stock. It would set Apple up to be at the forefront of AI for the next 10 years. It sounds crazy… until the iPhone is disrupted by a new device.
Two weeks on the road and then other distractions, this morning is the first day in a while that I’m back to my routine of walking to the coffee shop. Feels good. Ready to write some code. ☕️
Let’s do a Micro.blog photo challenge in June. It’s been a while so we’ll keep it simple… I’ll come up with a list of daily prompts and post them later this month. Feel free to send me your own words if you’ve got any! For inspiration, here’s a collection of photos from last year.
I blogged recently about experimenting with local LLMs inside the Micro.blog for Mac app. This is useful for post categorization and other things. It works, but it’s not as good as I’d like without requiring everyone to have an M4 with 48 GB of RAM. Might put it on the shelf for a bit.
There are all sorts of interesting quotes from Eddy Cue’s testimony today in the Google trial. From Mark Gurman’s reporting in Bloomberg:
“You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now as crazy as it sounds,” he said. “The only way you truly have true competition is when you have technology shifts. Technology shifts create these opportunities. AI is a new technology shift, and it’s creating new opportunities for new entrants.”
Really happy for Dan Moren to make his Jeopardy appearance today. Congrats! I’ve set it to record. ☕️
FediForum has regrouped and is coming back, June 5-7. I might be traveling those days but I’ll be joining as internet connectivity allows. They’ve also got an impressive new advisory board.
Raining at Lazarus. ☕️
I increasingly throw my blog post drafts into ChatGPT as a check for major problems. When it comes back with nitpicky changes that I have to admit would make my writing better, I sort of get defensive. “Hey, leave me alone, it’s my writing! Who asked you?” 🤪
Mike Rockwell with more thoughts on the Epic v. Apple ruling:
If they want to have more control over the situation, they should just let us install apps from elsewhere. Even if it’s disabled by default and annoying to enable like it is on the Mac. At least then they’d have something to point to when the government comes knocking.
Yep. I’ve been saying this for 14 years now. The end is almost in sight.
Also: Dan Moren tests the new “Get Book” button in the Kindle app.
Seth Godin blogging about how it used to be only a relatively few people who could publish music and make movies, and now everyone can. Which leads to:
The number of people writing software tools and games is on the very same curve. We’re going to go from hundreds of software companies to millions, in just a few years.
I wonder how this will affect competition for current software companies. Possibly not much, because there are always a thousand ideas that no one currently has time to build.
Great segment about Epic v. Apple on the latest Upgrade. In summary: the judge gave Apple a chance to allow competition with external payments and instead Apple concocted a scheme (27% fee, scare sheets) to make it impossible to use, so now Apple has forfeited all control over external payments.
Crashed to bed early last night after the 3rd quarter of Nuggets / Thunder, just watched the final couple minutes. Wow. Nuggets stole that one, down 7 when I started watching again. Thunder with strange fouling late only helped the Nuggets. 🏀
Sometimes I wake up thinking of the old friends who passed away long before their time. People who I knew when I was much younger and lost touch with over the years and decades. Life is short and precious.
Gregg Popovich addresses the media after officially stepping down, with Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili standing with him. There will never be another coach like him. Go Spurs Go. 🏀
Looking forward to reading through Evan Prodromou’s story on the Protocol Oral History Project. The whole site looks great. There are probably lots of bits of history that aren’t well-documented elsewhere.
4o hallucinated for me today and it struck me that I haven’t seen ChatGPT make anything up in weeks, even though new models are supposed to be worse. Must be because most of my queries now use o3 or o4-mini with web search. If AI can do a web search, it seems to drastically improve the results.
Good timing, it started pouring rain a few minutes after I got home. Listening to the rain now as I settle back into work. 🌧️
First full day back at work after a couple weeks on the road. I work a little every day, even when traveling, but a day hopefully without any distractions is always nice. Starting with coffee at Cosmic. Server deploys for in-progress changes. ☕️
Warriors putting the Rockets away. Can’t help but admire what Steph Curry is still able to do. He wasn’t even really needed in the first half. 🏀
Making slow progress experimenting with local LLMs in the Mac app. Smaller models are a challenge because they are so much worse and unpredictable than what I’m used to with frontier cloud models. I’ve tested a few flavors of Gemma 3, think I’m settling on 4 billion params, Q5.
Watched Runaway Jury. Really good. Sadly nothing has changed with gun control in the 20 years since this was filmed… It’s actually worse now since the assault weapons ban expired.
Working on a few different random things today. Also really looking forward to Nuggets / Clippers game 7! 🏀
Finished reading: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson. This is the first of his books that I’ve re-read, listening to the audiobook this time. Still great. 📚
Hello again, Austin. It was about 3500 miles round-trip, driving to New York and back. Good couple weeks but glad I won’t have to be on the road tomorrow.
