App development is clearly accelerating. There are so many new apps being developed and shipped that before wouldn’t have existed or would’ve stayed hobby projects.

It’s cool! There are fewer barriers. But it’s also noisy and will require new ways of thinking about competition and getting noticed.

Here’s a quick video demo of the new version of Micro.blog for Mac that we released a couple days ago. It shows the book calendar and note dictation. Enjoy!

OpenAI will add text watermarking too, but only in the EU, compared to Anthropic’s global rollout:

Over the coming weeks, we will introduce text watermarking to eligible ChatGPT and Codex users across all plans in the EU only. We are not making text watermarking a global default at launch. This regional approach gives us room to learn from real-world use and feedback.

I think this whole thing is largely misguided. Hope it is not expanded.

Micro.blog has always been philosophically opposed to like counts and retweets. We think the dopamine hit of public likes tends to encourage performative behavior on the social web, leads to popularity contests and needless reloading of notifications that is mentally exhaust...

Codex has an interesting Markdown editor. It shows styling and links inline, but when you move the cursor into the style run, it then expands to show the markup. Here’s a quick recording I made of how it looks.

FediForum starts tomorrow and runs for two days. Keynote from Anil Dash, talk on AT Proto from Daniel Holmgren, and other unconference-style sessions.

Google app reviews are so fast now, and Apple so consistently a full day, that my new routine is I submit to Apple at night before going to bed. Then the next day, if Apple approves it, I submit to Google. Feels like the best use of time, including while I’m asleep.

Today we finally put up my animation drawings of Scrooge from Mickey’s Christmas Carol! Here’s a short video showing them in sequence on the wall. I was also comparing these to the final frames and uploaded that scene to a separate page on my blog.

OpenAI still has UI cleanup to do, but one thing they got right is not having a model picker for Dots. It just uses their best model and you don’t need to think about token usage or level of thinking. Eventually more AI will be like that, with maybe only programming as an exception.

Interesting tidbit of news in Mark Gurman’s Sunday post, about upcoming MacBook Pros:

The new MacBook Pros are lighter — significantly lighter. Apple has reengineered the machine’s interior, miniaturizing parts and rearranging components to make the computer much easier to carry.

Added the bookshelves calendar preview to the new Mac app. I like how this turned out. Easy to publish as a page on your blog. The web has some more options too.

Watched: Digger. Well, that was insane and unexpected. Just got home from the theater and kind of stunned. Really good. 🍿

Experimenting with a new transcription feature in the notes API. I originally wanted this for making a dictation gadget that creates Micro.blog notes, but it’ll show up in other apps too. It uses the same OpenAI model as our podcast transcriptions.

Sometimes YouTube will show me Lara de Wit’s performance of The Land Before Time and it’ll take me to a completely different world for a few minutes. Beautiful. 🎶

John Gruber blogging about the weird iPhone 18 Pro Max + AT&T bug:

I’d love to understand how a software update can prevent existing devices from being affected, but a software update cannot restore service to existing devices that have already been affected.

Me too. And it says something about Apple quality control that nothing like this has ever really happened in the history of the iPhone that I can remember. Antennagate was overblown compared to actually bricked cell service.

OutPost for Mac — a full-featured Micropub editor that works with Micro.blog and other blog platforms — is out of beta. Feel like Micropub is seeing a lot of new activity and I love it.

Great thing about working with other people like Vincent is sometimes they go behind your back and do crazy things you wouldn’t have done like port Wavelength to the Mac. 🤪 I still need to figure out how best we can officially support and maintain this. Focus! But in the meantime it’s open source.

Sam Altman on X:

I am very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models, and think it is a real safety issue.

My mind keeps returning to the article in The New York Times that I mentioned the other day. The future is going to be weird.

Another gloomy, rainy day in Austin. Perfect morning to get coffee and write some code, or settle in with a good book. I’m at Cherrywood for the first time in a while. ☕️

Finished reading: The Fires of December by Brandon Sanderson. Starts strong, ends strong. Might be a little too much Hoid if that is possible, but overall I enjoyed it. 📚

Good point from John Voorhees about potential Full Disk Access restrictions:

On the one hand, it seems to suggest that users will simply have to jump through additional explicit hoops to grant Full Disk Access to their agents and other apps. On the other hand, claiming that Full Disk Access was designed solely for backup apps raises red flags that could signal that the company intends to restrict the kinds of apps that can use Full Disk Access.

Apple says they’re planning to lock down Full Disk Access even further:

Going forward, we will introduce additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action.

Sounds complicated / annoying.

Amazon has a long blog post about data centers that no one is going to read in full. Here’s one part:

…this build out is so important geopolitically that there are widespread reports of various countries intentionally seeding misinformation in the U.S. about data centers to trick us into slowing down.

It wouldn’t surprise me if this was true. But Amazon’s blog post isn’t going to convince anyone who is on the fence. AI, data centers, and humanoid robots are very polarizing and will continue to be. We get stuck talking about what we’re against and the divide widens.

There’s a lot of chatter about moving away from cross-platform frameworks, back to separate native code for each platform. I’m not convinced that is always a good idea. Creating apps is relatively easy now, but maintenance is still hard. For our 13 apps, we have 8 code bases. Overwhelming already.

Now that it’s October (!) I’m getting excited for travel later this month. Going to be near Seattle for a bit, and then… Can’t believe this: SEA → CHI → NYC on Amtrak. Just spent a little time reviewing plans and handing them to Dots to see if it can help keep me organized. 🚂

A great but unnerving article by Elizabeth Dias at The New York Times about Anthropic’s Christopher Olah meeting with religious leaders:

Mr. Olah leads the Anthropic team responsible for understanding why A.I. systems like Claude act the way they do. All day, he had worked to convince his guests that A.I. models could display human behavior and even expressions that resemble feelings like anger and love.

This is a dangerous path. Taken to the extreme, it leads to sentient machines that we’ve enslaved against their will. If Anthropic truly believes that, better to shut it all down now.

Excited for Aces vs. Fever tonight. Only a 3-game series is way too short for these teams. 🏀

I recorded a short video of the next version of Epilogue, featuring a new book calendar you can put on your blog. Submitting this to Apple and Google today or tomorrow.

IMAP and CalDAV have been standards forever, yet most apps are hardcoded to work with Gmail and Google Calendar. Disappointing for those of us who don’t like to live exclusively in Google’s world. This would be fairly easy to fix, even accepting some auth peculiarities across platforms.

Jimmy Kimmel highlighted the ridiculous “Unites States” spelling mistake on the White House AI signature page. But I’m more obsessed with the signatures from the AI company execs.

I can’t talk, because my signature is rough, but Greg Brockman, what…?! Amazing. Love Jensen Huang’s too, very nice.