Michael Tsai blogging about Apple’s private email relay:

The main problem I have with Hide My Email is that some customers use it and then have no way to look up their purchase info via e-mail because they don’t know which address they used.

Yep. Apple needs a simpler way to see all your email addresses, like a table of all the service names and each email address. No one knows how to dig into iOS Settings to find it. (Although on the iOS 27 beta it’s less buried than it used to be.)

More reporting today from the Financial Times that OpenAI suggested a 5% stake for the government:

Sam Altman, chief executive of the ChatGPT maker, has argued that giving the public a financial stake in the company is the best way to share the upside of AI and has suggested a stake of this size in early conversations with the administration, according to two people familiar with the talks.

It’s a good idea, but Trump is so transactional that I don’t trust his administration to manage this. Congress should pass an actual law that sets up the fund.

From the FAQ for the laundry-folding robot, Isaac 1:

Isaac 1 is autonomous for Laundry Flow and Daily Reset by default, with teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee we complete tasks.

I get that companies want to ship something, but this isn’t like software that can be iterated on later. If it can’t work fully autonomously, private to the home, I don’t think it’s ready.

I re-read the bio on my about page while I was making tweaks to my blog. If someone doesn’t know who I am, this is still a pretty good summary of my work.

Updated our help page about hosting your blog indefinitely. An undersold feature of Micro.blog. We always err on the side of preserving and backing up content.

Edsel Ford, quoted in a 1922 issue of The New York Herald: Every man needs more than one day a week for rest and recreation. The Ford company always has sought to promote ideal home life for Its employees. We believe that in order to live properly every man should have more...

The news blog has been full of mobile app releases, but I’ve also been deploying little improvements to the server this week. Not much that has clear release notes. Just some things are faster, more efficient, less buggy.

Sam Altman in an op-ed about safety for the Financial Times:

Democratic institutions must not cede their responsibilities to AI labs. The labs develop the technology, but citizens and their elected representatives must make the rules. The most important decisions about how this technology is used should be made through democratic processes, not by a small number of companies in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, in a twist because it’s an election year, Greg Abbott has decided he’s against data centers despite previously championing them.

Amazing, but please no one else try this:

Two people who reached the top of the antenna on the Empire State Building in New York City on Wednesday afternoon are in custody, according to the New York Police Department.

The masked individuals also appeared to get engaged while atop the building.

More photos and videos from these crazy lovebirds on Instagram.

Wow, NBA summer league is almost here already, starting on Friday. I like re-signing Harrison Barnes and Julian Champagnie. Plus the new rookies, great roster, don’t mess with what worked last season. 🏀

Testing the redesigned Wavelength app that @vincent has been working on and it looks so nice. The original app hasn’t gotten much attention. The new app is a modernized rewrite and we’re bringing it to Android too.

Federico Viticci blogged about how well suited the Mac is to AI agents, even running headless, compared to the more sandboxed iPad:

What’s different in 2026 is that these powerful agentic tools that are redefining coding and knowledge work, and which are centralizing productivity inside so-called “super apps”, aren’t coming to the iPad, but not for political or financial reasons: they’re Mac-only because only macOS is mature and open enough to support them.

Siri AI attempts to get around this limitation with an API that is only available to Apple, creating a kind of personal data silo.

LeBron James is moving on from the Lakers. LeBron has won an NBA championship with every team he’s played on. I’m curious to see how he wants to close out his career. 🏀

A thoughtful blog post from Vlad Campos about a sort of “paradox” with Micro.blog’s integration with the fediverse. Most software design is a series of tradeoffs, and while imperfect I think the decisions we’ve made are right for Micro.blog. But we can evolve too… Trying to keep an open mind.

Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship. Seemed obvious, but you never know these days. NPR:

…as Chief Justice Roberts observed, the men who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution after the Civil War defined citizenship in broad terms on purpose, rejecting the views of those who wanted to limit citizenship. The resulting language of the amendment says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

🇺🇸

Food delivery robot trying to navigate a tight space. I thought for sure it was going to get stuck.

Thanks Dave for the kind words. There’s a lot to do but I know we’re on the right path. Still digging! 🙂

Not a great time for my car’s A/C to start failing, driving back from Dallas. Way too hot out. Wish I was back at the beach.

Village Burger Bar. Ginormous onion rings.

My focus is making Micro.blog a great blogging platform. But on the social side, I also love that it’s maybe the last social network that is ambivalent to metrics and engagement. Every other platform — even Mastodon — has algorithmic feeds or trends. That’s fine for them, but not what I want to do.

I’m not much of a meme person, but this Frog and Toad + Claude is hilarious and true. “Cookies” is an all-time great story. 🍪

I loved seeing this: Why Inkwell is so useful while on vacation. Inkwell tries to have an interface that works for staying current with everything today but also for skimming through things you might have missed that are important. Good for vacations or taking breaks from the internet.

I’m a broken record on the futility of TestFlight beta approvals, but I was reminded of it again when I considered doing a new beta for Epilogue over the weekend. If it requires Apple approval, now I have another thing to manage, in addition to all these apps. Might as well just ship to everyone.

John Gruber in a comment linking to more Om Malik blog posts:

If you’re going to get into something, you ought to pursue it to its full extent. If you’re not interested enough to do that, don’t bother getting into it. Find the few things you love; don’t waste your time on the many things you merely like.

Rush. 🎸

Dave Winer puts out a call for others building tools that support RSS and especially inbound RSS:

If you’re working on a social web app that supports inbound and outbound RSS, I’d like to help, so our products can interop beautifully. That’s the reason I’m doing this work, to establish a baseline for interop in the social web. RSS is the obvious candidate. If we didn’t have it, we’d have to invent it.

I’m actually not aware of any social platforms that support inbound RSS except Micro.blog. It would be great to have more.

Another beautiful remembrance of Om Malik, highlighting his photos on Glass:

It’s not lost on us that Om’s photography, often taken in frozen lands in or around the arctic circle, was the polar opposite of his personality. While he focused on subtle shapes and hidden landscapes, he was the sun of any group he was in.

Watched the first episode of Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness. Funny. Great to have Larry David back on TV. 📺

I’m testing a Liquid Glass update for Epilogue, but I almost don’t want to ship it until iOS 27 because the translucency on the tab bar is so bad with book covers behind it. I’ll likely work around it, though, so it doesn’t hold up any other features.

Mark Gurman reporting for Bloomberg that Apple’s vice president of Vision Pro and smart glasses is leaving for OpenAI:

Paul Meade, a vice president, is set to leave Apple by next week and will then start at OpenAI’s hardware unit, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Meade will work on OpenAI’s upcoming family of AI-powered devices, said the people, who declined to be named discussing unannounced personnel moves.

Interesting that he’s leaving before the Apple smart glasses announcement. I’ll be a little surprised if we even hear about the glasses this year.