Nice story on the Spurs in The New Yorker:

Last season, the team had traded for De’Aaron Fox, an All-Star guard in his prime, which appeared odd to some—wasn’t he too old to be on Wembanyama’s timeline? Now it seemed like a stroke of genius.

Game 1 tonight vs. the Blazers. Excited. Nervous too. 🏀

Terry Godier blogs about the growing disconnect between the traditional paid-up-front App Store and all the new features that free with in-app purchase apps get:

Apple offers you no mechanism for what is arguably the most natural transaction in software: paying for major upgrades. The only option is to create a new app listing or to use an IAP. There’s a strong disadvantage to creating a new app listing, namely losing your accumulated reviews and visibility.

It’s a theme that reminds me of Marco Arment’s blog post from 2009, although that post was focused on cheap quick-hit apps.

I walked so much in Europe. Trying to stick with walking more places now that I’m back home. Cars are embedded into every part of life in Texas.

Related, watched a video this morning about high-speed rail progress in California. As a country we should be embarrassed about this. Come on already. 🚂

Talisman Coffee.

This new TED Talk from Peter Steinberger is a great introduction to why OpenClaw exists and what impact it might have. He’s having a lot of fun and I think that excitement rubs off on everyone in the community. 🦞

Panic announced that the Playdate Catalog will no longer accept games that use generative AI for content such as art and dialog. AI for coding is okay, for now, but you can tell Panic isn’t happy about it: For the time being, we will allow Catalog titles that have used AI a...

First beta of Inkwell for Android was rejected by Google, re-submitted. But good news they’ve approved a round of bug fixes in the Micro.blog app for Android.

Ben Thompson on the latest Dithering:

I do feel one of the challenges I have with people talking about how AI is making them so much more productive, is because these were some of the most unproductive people in the world previously.

🤣

Federico Viticci blogs about the new Codex app from the perspective of his early preview of Sky last year: It also helps that computer use in Codex is exquisitely designed – not a surprise given OpenAI’s design team and the pedigree of the team behind this feature. The flow...

John Gruber commenting on a blog post from Terry Godier:

Imagine being in a restaurant, and in the middle of your entree, the server comes to your table and hands you an iPad and asks you to rate the joint on Yelp. That’s what using most apps is like.

We are pretty close to that restaurant reality already! Rating prompts are out of control.

I’m bringing a new server online today to improve background queue performance. If you see Lilly in the logs, that’s it. Follows our train naming theme.

The new Codex for Mac update is really good. There are a bunch of new features, but computer use is particularly well done. Some great Mac-specific touches. Ari Weinstein worked on it — from the original Workflow team, and Shortcuts at Apple.

Jeffrey Zeldman blogs about taking time to edit now that text is free and abundant:

Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement. When everything around you is excessive by default, choosing fewer words takes courage. It says: I thought about this.

Updating version strings today, so here’s my official guide to acceptable version numbers:

❌ 0.1
❌ 1
❌ 1.0.0
✅ 1.0b1
✅ 1.0
✅ 1.0.1
❌ 2
✅ 2.0
✅ 2.0.1
✅ 2.1
✅ 2.1.1
❌ 2.1.10
❌ 2.123
❌ 2026.1.2
❌ 2026.123456789

I’ve been versioning apps like this for 30 years. It’s just how it is. 🙂

Inkwell beta for Android is now in review over at Google. Feeling good about 1.0 on both mobile platforms, will ship fairly soon. All the client apps are open source too — web, mobile, Mac.

Time for a home screen update. A few recent changes: Inkwell beta, Duolingo, Orion. Dock row is Hey plus our Micro.blog suite of apps: Epilogue, Strata, and Micro.blog.

Inkwell for iOS is now available as a beta! You can join TestFlight here. We’ll be improving a few things this week, getting it ready for an official release on both iOS and Android.

This profile of Sam Altman in The New Yorker is extremely long. I read it on the train and while standing in line at Disneyland Paris. But for all the research the reporters did, it’s essentially just a rehashing of the “not consistently candid” argument against Sam from ove...

First coffee back in Austin in about a month! Glad to be home. Still miss Europe a little too.

Internet Archive quietly continues to do great work. TechCrunch reports on digitizing Aadam Jacobs’s personal collection of taped concerts:

Within the collection, you can also find previously unknown recordings from influential artists like Sonic Youth, R.E.M., Phish, Liz Phair, Pavement, Neutral Milk Hotel, and a whole bunch of other punk groups.

So cool to see this kind of thing preserved.

Another very good analysis of the AI market from Ben Thompson. OpenAI has invested heavily in compute, which will help them, but they are also squeezed by Anthropic on the enterprise side and Meta on the consumer side. It’s hard to compete with everyone.

Back in the United States after my extended trip across the ocean by ship, around Spain and France by train, and back to Malaga for Release Notes. Had an incredible time. I feel very lucky to be able to do this.

I also got a bunch of work done. Inkwell for mobile is looking great, beta this week.

Early morning in Madrid. The moon still out and train station on the left.

Steve Troughton-Smith posts about Apple’s software quality:

The story around the decline in software quality around macOS is the same as it’s been for years: Apple doesn’t have the bandwidth to maintain two copies of every app, one for macOS and one for iOS, and keep feature parity. That’s why they embarked down the road of Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI.

A related question: why does Apple have so many apps? Certainly they should have Safari, Mail, and Pages. But what about Journal, News, and Freeform? A bloated lineup of apps is like an app with too many features — difficult to maintain.

This new essay by JA Westenberg about pessimism comes at just about the perfect time, relating to many things in the current tech world:

Whoever can list the most reasons something won’t work gets treated as the smartest person in the room. If you say “I think this could go well,” you get ~the look. That slight tilt of the head. Optimism is treated like a belief in astrology.

And:

When pessimism becomes the default in public conversation, it starts building the world it claims to be describing. People who believe nothing can be different don’t vote, don’t volunteer, don’t start companies, don’t run for office, don’t build the thing that might have mattered.

I always want to be the naive optimist who believes in people and believes in ambitious new projects that probably won’t work. Everything good I’ve done is a result of that.

Another view from Malaga. Had an amazing time here for Release Notes. @DazeEnd has also shared some fun photos from the last couple of days.

Just released an update to Micro.blog for iOS that addresses a bunch of little bugs. Glad to get this one out there. We’ll get an Android version ready soon to sync up with the changes.

Playa de la Malagueta. 🏖️

Peter Steinberger temporarily blocked from Claude:

When multiple people asked him why he’s using Claude instead of his employer’s models at all, he explained that he only uses it for testing, to ensure updates to OpenClaw won’t break things for Claude users.

I think there is one of two things going on, maybe both:

• Anthropic is generally less open, as I blogged about last week.
• Anthropic is constrained by limited compute, so they optimize for profitable users.

OpenAI’s massive investment in new infrastructure will look either foolish or brilliant depending on how the next year plays out.

Castillo de Gibralfaro. 🇪🇸