Working on security this morning. Just realized I’ve been scammed out of hundreds of dollars because someone used a stolen credit card to register a bunch of domain names. For a very small business, this hurts a lot.

On the Canvas hack, Alan Jacobs blogs that universities have become dependent on big platforms which are then appealing targets for hackers:

But universities that deploy these big platforms should realize that our data — that of professors and students — as only as safe as the companies’ security practices are sound. And companies like Instructure are so deeply embedded in American university life now that they think they can’t be rejected — no matter how gross their failure to maintain security. An exploit like this is therefore easily predictable.

Yesterday I said there should be courtroom sketches from the Elon Musk vs. OpenAI trail. I did find a few, by artist Vicki Behringer. They’re not all in one place — and I wish I could legally just post them on my blog — but you can find them on Reuters pages like this one, this one, and this one.

Fun video on YouTube from Steve Wallis trying to make a huge swamp cooler. Actual portable A/C units are getting a little smaller… I check Amazon every few months for the latest and will eventually get one.

I was clicking around in App Store Connect as I wait for Inkwell to be approved. The long list of submissions and rejections is unusual for me, so thought I’d capture the table here as a blog post. Hopefully this is just about the end of it. 🤞 Status ...

I’m still listening to the OpenAI case, off and on as I work. It’s fascinating. I do wish there were courtroom sketches, though! So much money flowing through this trial — we just learned that the expert witness for Elon Musk is making 6 figures for his time — yet no one can hire an artist?

Had a great meeting with @BonnieRue this week to catch up on a bunch of ideas for the Micro.blog community and long-form blog post discovery. Also learned about The Brautigan Library. I had missed that Dario Amodei’s Machines of Loving Grace essay title was surely inspired by Richard’s 1960s poem.

Testing the next version of Micro.blog for iOS with Liquid Glass enabled. It’s looking good. Great work @vincent.

I tried not to overreact to Spurs vs. Timberwolves game 1, so not going to overreact to the game 2 blowout. But this is what I’ll say… This team has played seven playoff games so far. They’ve lost two games: by 3 points and by 2 points. None of the wins were close. 🏀

Wish I was in San Antonio tonight. Game 2, let’s go. 🏀

Amazing line from Helen Toner’s testimony while describing the ousting of Sam Altman, about Mira Murati:

She was waiting to see which way the wind would blow, and she didn’t realize that she was the wind.

I’ve recorded a short video on YouTube to demo the new features in Inkwell for Mac, especially the new post window.

Stephen Hackett blogs about the Anthropic + SpaceX / xAI news, with more questions:

Colossus 2 is believed to be up and running, at least to some degree, and xAI may no longer need the first site. Has xAI moved Grok there, leaving the original data center and its yet-to-be-built water treatment plant open for lease? How much is Anthropic paying xAI for the site? Was this a move to help bring some sanity to xAI’s books as SpaceX plans to go public?

Also with the OpenAI trial on my mind, there’s a certain perspective to the story where both Elon Musk and Dario Amodei were frustrated at OpenAI and left, at different times and for different reasons, and now they’re partners.

Michael Tsai blogging on the Siri delays settlement:

If you really did buy an $800+ iPhone because of advertised features that never shipped, getting back $25 doesn’t seem like much consolation.

Right, because tech company class action lawsuits are now rarely about the customers. They’re about the lawyers skimming some of the money. The settlement doesn’t appear to outline the fee yet, but 25% for these things is common — and matches the Apple battery lawsuit a few years ago — which would be $62.5 million here.

Anthropic has announced a major deal with SpaceX to help relieve pressure on Claude’s current infrastructure:

We’ve signed an agreement with SpaceX to use all of the compute capacity at their Colossus 1 data center. This gives us access to more than 300 megawatts of new capacity (over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs) within the month.

Colossus 1 was famously used to train Grok. My reading of this is that Anthropic now has access to essentially all of the GPUs, since 200k GPUs had been previously announced for the data center. Maybe they’ve left a handful for Twitter / X.

There’s a good discussion on the latest AppStories podcast about Codex for Mac and related tools. Federico Viticci:

I was very skeptical of the idea of a super app. But it turns out, a super app for productivity makes a lot of sense.

It also need to experiment with skills and automations more.

Major new version of Inkwell for Mac today. Now you can start a new blog post directly in the app, or use the built-in new post window to quote a post you’re reading. Here’s a quick screenshot.

Over the last few days, I’ve been seriously considering renaming Inkwell to something else. Inkwell is a common word, used in a bunch of things. That’s sort of good and bad.

As part of this brainstorming, I’ve used ChatGPT to sanity check a bunch of ideas. Pretty insightful statement from it:

I suspect your hesitation about the replacement names may be telling you something.

Catching up on WordPress.com Reader news, interesting that they based sync on Google Reader:

Any Google Reader-compatible app can now point at WordPress.com and use it as a sync backend. […] This wasn’t directly Fediverse work, but it’s part of the same idea: the Reader as a backend, not a destination. If your reading habit lives in a different app, that’s fine. Your subscriptions still live on WordPress.com.

When I bulit the API for Inkwell, I decided to pattern it after Feedbin’s API instead of Google Reader. Just seemed right.

John Gruber expanding on his reaction to Adobe’s new UI to connect Nilay Patel’s “software brain” concept with the loss of creativity and craft in software:

You might think it counterintuitive that a movement obsessed with software would be spearheading a severe decline in the design quality of software, but in Patel’s definition, there’s no concept of software as art, as a practice, as a craft. Software brain is purely an obsession with software as a medium in and of itself. A means with no consideration for the end.

Paul Haddad on Mastodon:

I think Apple AI’s strategy should be do the thing only they can do, local AI but not the crappy little models made to run on phones. Focus on getting models running on only high end Macs with high (but reasonable) amounts of RAM first. Train it/them to work well for iOS/Mac coding and OpenClaw like work. Don’t worry about being “frontier” just good enough when running on >= 64GB of RAM.

This could work, but so few people have that much RAM. I don’t think Apple expected the cloud frontier to be so far ahead.

Still following the OpenAI trial. Crazy:

“I thought he was going to hit me,” Brockman says of Musk. “I truly thought he was going to physically attack me.” Musk was angry that no one wanted to agree for him to have majority equity. As he was storming out of the meeting, Musk asked Brockman and Sutskever when they planned to leave OpenAI. They were confused.

I think most Elon Musk’s detractors probably admire his long-term vision with EVs and space, but he’s clearly erratic. This story is believable to me. Losing his cool, unconcerned with personal relationships, just the big picture.

My doctor is using an AI dictation app for health providers that (with patient permission) can summarize and organize notes from a visit. Because I’m fascinated by this, he let me look at the notes and they were really good. It fits with my essay this year. More time with patients, less busywork.

Interesting article in The New Yorker about “Disney adults” and going into debt: So-called Disney adults have become a subject of online fascination, with many people now questioning how much it costs to be one. Almost two million people have watched a video, posted in Nove...

Micro Social got a big update, with a new Activity tab for blogging about movies, games, music, and check-ins. Looks great. Just trying out the new version now.

Wow, had a chance to win it at the buzzer. Spurs only shooting 28% from 3-point range is just too low, though. Wemby 0-8 from 3 but amazing otherwise. 🏀

Looks like this might be a tough series. Spurs and Timberwolves tied with only 45 each at the half. Anthony Edwards is fine. Wemby already has 7 blocks! 🏀

So tired of Apple’s tactics with this Epic case that started five years ago. How many billions of dollars have they made while these decisions are in limbo?

In a filing sent to the Supreme Court today, Apple is asking the court to stay the Ninth Circuit’s mandate, which would send the case back to the District Court to determine what commission it can charge on off-App Store purchases.

Meanwhile I’ve been trying for a week to get Inkwell approved. One of the holdups is Apple wanting me to add in-app purchase so they can skim their 30%.

Took me a while to realize why I’m enjoying fewer articles online, at first thinking it was the paywalls. Or maybe it’s because tech journalism has become so cynical. Probably not intentional — just a natural result of the growing distrust in big companies. But I’d like to be inspired sometimes too.

Listened to a bunch of the Greg Brockman testimony. Really interesting to hear the lawyers at work. First part, Greg probably came off too guarded. Second part, more in his element retelling OpenAI’s founding story. (I still don’t see how Elon Musk can win this case.)