FeedCity

So tired of gatekeepers. Only realized this week that the Micro.blog web browser extension was removed from the Chrome store. Re-submitted some verification documents to Google, hopefully can get it back within a few days.

Once apps like Spotify, Kindle, and many others are officially approved with external payment links, I don’t see Apple putting the genie back in the bottle. The company needs to let this go. Developers have had to put up with Apple’s tax and convoluted rules for too long already.

I disagree with Ben Thompson’s update today that Apple might have a legal right to charge for their “intellectual property” by using external link payments. They already do charge developers with the developer program! The judge is saying you can’t take a cut for simple links. I think this’ll hold.

By “polish” I don’t mean the design, necessarily. I mean all the little details that differentiate a good app from a great one. Extra things that busy or lazy developers (like me!) don’t always make time for. Here’s an example from this week. I’m experimenting with a new fea...

Two updated iOS apps this week: Micro.blog 3.4.6 and Epilogue 1.8.3. Android versions are lagging a little behind but hope to get those updated soon.

Old train bridge viewed from the Bill Clinton presidential library. It’s a pedestrian bridge now, but it lines up perfectly with the former Choctaw Route Station on the park grounds, even if the rails are long gone. 🚂

Jason Snell blogging about the new App Store linking judgement:

Not only did Apple attempt to find ways to circumvent the injunction, but it fatally hid their discussions from the judge. While Phil Schiller gets credit from Gonzalez Rogers for sitting through the trial and reading the final decision, the judge suggests that his colleagues at Apple did not. Most troubling is the behavior of Apple’s Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, who the judge says “outright lied under oath” multiple times.

Apple will not win on appeal. They flaunted their power instead of complying. This is settled.

Fidel & Co. A little more time in Little Rock before hitting the road again. ☕️

Simon Willison on the continual misuse of the term vibe coding:

It means “generating code with AI without caring about the code that is produced”. See Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding for my previous writing on this subject. This is a hill I am willing to die on. I fear it will be the death of me.

Fighting the good fight. Words matter.

Marc Andreessen doesn’t think AI will take his job. But venture capital is barely a real job. All money, all talk. 🤪 I would rather actually create something even with the risk that AI might obsolete part of what I do.

Micro.blog bookmarks are a significant part of my workflow now. I have over 1000 bookmarks stored, mostly web pages that Micro.blog will also archive, and enough tags to filter through them. Probably about time to import my old Pinboard and Instapaper bookmarks.

Allen Pike has a great post about user interface input design in an LLM world:

As we start to see new interfaces that support these more humane controls, it will seem increasingly inhumane that we once chose “Helvetica”, “Semibold”, and “36pt” from three separate dropdowns. It is inhumane – it’s an artifact of the past, back when computers needed us to chunk up our inputs into separate dropdowns for them, lest they be confused.

Huge new ruling by the judge in the Epic Games case. Hope to take advantage of this as soon as possible in Micro.blog to let people subscribe from the iOS app. Finally a clear voice of reason in the App Store.

It ended up being a good idea to stop overnight in Little Rock and wait out the storm. Went to a restaurant across the street and there was a jazz band playing, a bit of peace and beauty as the wind and rain picked up outside.

Watched some more highlights from last night’s Bucks / Pacers. Bucks should not have lost that game. Feel bad for them. 🏀

NPR has an article on whether the Google search remedy should include somehow crippling Google’s growth in AI:

In his opening statements last Monday, David Dahlquist, the acting deputy director of the DOJ’s antitrust civil litigation division, argued that the court should consider remedies that could nip a potential Google AI monopoly in the bud. “This court’s remedy should be forward-looking and not ignore what is on the horizon,” he said.

I’m still at a loss for what should be done. Splitting off YouTube would be good too, but it doesn’t really fit the crime.

Bookshelves at Nexus Coffee & Creative in Little Rock. ☕️

Parked at The Root Cafe in Little Rock. Lunch and plotting a change to my route stops so I don’t drive directly into a storm and tornado watch. 🌪️

Last night at the hotel, in between basketball, I tuned into some of the Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella conversation at LlamaCon. At one point, Satya said “the web was born on Windows” and it struck me. Digging a little, apparently he has said this before. Hmm… What about NeXT?

Daniel Jalkut blogs about the Help Scout pricing changes. We use Help Scout for Micro.blog too and our costs will go up with this change. Like Daniel, I think the pricing is a mistake. I don’t like costs that are hard to predict.

I was hoping someone would write a post like this one from Andy Masley about AI energy and water use, via Simon Willison. From Andy’s post:

You can use ChatGPT as much as you like without worrying that you’re doing any harm to the planet. Worrying about your personal use of ChatGPT is wasted time that you could spend on the serious problems of climate change instead.

Models are also generally becoming more efficient and cheaper. We shouldn’t ignore the increase in demand for energy, though. It’s an opportunity to reevaluate nuclear and other clean sources of power.

City & State, morning in Memphis. Looks like there’s gonna be bad weather today heading west. ☕️

Dan Moren in his final article for Macworld:

Being a fan of Apple as a company means necessarily grappling with the reality of business itself. Apple is a moneymaking machine in a society built for and around moneymaking machines, and it is in some ways itself trapped in that system.

Model train at the Casey Jones Home & Railroad Museum. I visited the museum today, nearly perfectly timed. Tomorrow is the 125th anniversary of Casey’s death. Seeing the sign for the museum on the drive east last week, went down a deep rabbit hole of Dumbo, Disney, and Casey Jones history. 🚂

The New Yorker: The End of Children. This essay was from earlier in the year. There are some stories in it that are a little stunning to me. I knew about South Korea already, but I did not know that the average number of children in the United States had dropped recently. Not yet a crisis, maybe.

Remedy Coffee in Knoxville.

Upgrading another server today! Also a few little code optimizations.

Pigeon Forge, Tennessee is extremely strange. Should’ve done more research before stopping here. Feels like Vegas but more spread out and no gambling, I guess? Also the Great Smokey Mountains are nearby.

In used to be that I avoided using Siri except in a few specific cases while driving: Read and respond to text messages. Map driving directions. Dictate a note. If I ventured outside these tasks, the experience was unreliable and frustrating. So I just haven’t bothered to ...

Listen to the contrarians. They’re sometimes wrong, but when they’re right, they’re right years before everyone else.