There’s now an audio livestream for Elon Musk vs. OpenAI. Listening to Greg Brockman on the stand.

I follow news of the App Store guidelines pretty closely, but I can’t even keep the rules straight anymore now that they are fragmented across countries or held up in court appeals. I can’t believe all of this confusion is worth it to Apple. So much wasted time.

Nice story at Bloomberg about book reading retreats:

At Boutique Book Breaks, which take place at spa hotels across the English countryside, participants practice yoga, visit bookstores and explore the area when not quietly reading.

Reminds me of Silent Book Club, too. 📚

Watched: Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2 📺

Losing my patience after another rejection for Inkwell. This is a nice app for people to read blogs. I’m not trying to trick anyone or take over the world. Apple is out to lunch with their tight control.

I don’t even want discovery in the store. I just want to let my existing users install an app.

With the higher GPT-5.5 pricing, I wasn’t sure if in practice it would matter, so I preemptively disabled /fast in Codex. Seems like a non-issue. I can’t get anywhere close to using half of my tokens. Whenever I check it’s at 80% or higher remaining.

I’m now back to running “high” and /fast for everything. If I think a problem is difficult, I’ll bump to “xhigh” and won’t think twice about it.

Michael Tsai quoted this from X:

I have a friend in apple.

He has over 200 dollars credit on claude everyday to spend.

I find this difficult to believe. Even though Claude Code is more stingy with tokens than Codex, $200/day seems outrageous. If this is even close to true, it’s no wonder Anthropic is making so much money. But the popular opinion about Claude might be a trailing narrative, before everyone notices how good GPT-5.5 is.

Another review of the X3 e-reader, this time from TechCrunch. I keep seeing reviews of this and each time I come this close to ordering one. I love my Kindle but I don’t always have it with me.

The new image generation in ChatGPT is really good for iterating on app mockups. Like asking for visual ideas on dark mode improvements. I’m going back and forth with image gen, scribbling and color changes in Acorn, then pasting into Codex to update code.

Now 11 days since my initial Inkwell submission to Apple. By far the longest and most-rejected of any app I’ve worked on. Seriously considering a perpetual TestFlight or AltStore for Europe and Japan at this point.

Some people are moving away from GitHub. Kev Quirk is thinking about it too: It’s like leaving Facebook - when I was thinking about it, I was worried if I’d miss my friends or be out the loop. It’s been over a decade at this point and I don’t miss it one bit - no regrets wh...

Watched: The Devil Wears Prada 2. Fun movie. Before it started I had to quickly read a recap of the first one, it has been a long time. 🍿

Just when you think the OpenAI folks have refocused on their core business, the Codex team has added a Hatch Pet skill that creates a little virtual companion that can appear on screen while you work in the app. Silly! Or maybe ingenious because hatching a pet also demonstrates how sub-agents work.

Continuing to have some random errors in publishing today. I’m upgrading one of our servers now to address it.

The thing about having a blog for 24 years at the same domain name (and 17 years of podcasting) is that it should be clear what I believe in by now. I’ve never deleted or significantly edited a post. My life and work are either a very long con, plotted out half my life ago, ...

More good reporting from The Verge folks in the courtroom:

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers started asking Birchall questions herself, and it clearly was making Birchall nervous. Birchall said he doesn’t remember discussing the xAI bid with Musk or Shivon Zilis or any other principal of the Musk organization. It sure sounded like Musk’s lawyers hadn’t given OpenAI proper discovery on this topic in the depositions, and so we were doing a fast and dirty deposition with the judge right then.

Back when I launched Tweet Marker, it was originally called Tweetmarks, but I got spooked by a trademark and renamed it. While I don’t regret that necessarily, I think I overreacted. I mention this because there are similar issues with Inkwell, a very common name, and I’m trying to be careful.

Good update on the progress in fediverse UX in this report by Tim Chambers and Sean Tilley. I like this intro to instance selection paralysis:

New users arrive ready to escape Big Tech, and we immediately hit them with 8,000 servers named like medieval taverns crossed with startup pitches.

A longer walk today, then decided to get a few groceries and took a Waymo back. Eventually this isn’t going to be noteworthy. As humans we normalize so many things that once seemed insane.

Gentle thunderstorm rolling through Austin. 🌧️

Still following The Verge coverage from the Elon Musk vs. OpenAI trial. Lots of bizarre moments:

Judge Gonzalez Rogers asks Musk to sum up the plot of Terminator in one sentence. “Worst case situation is AI kills us all I suppose,” he says.

There’s a lot of hype about AI becoming like an employee that you can just trust to do things. Much of that is overblown. But I had an experience with OpenClaw this week that is close to that, after months of it sitting idle on a server without much of a purpose. I’ve been w...

Apparently I still don’t know how to join a Zoom call without being muted first. It’s always a surprise what is going to happen when I connect. Camera on? Audio? Who knows!

Vincent Ritter has launched Build with Micro.blog, a new unofficial site with API documentation, example apps, and much more. Our official documentation is so sparse that it’s not obvious how far-reaching the scope of the API actually is. This site really shows it.

An update on Inkwell for iOS: still working through review problems with Apple, a week later. I’m trying to be patient. Anyone can install the app via TestFlight.

I’m still really impressed with computer use in Codex. Every couple of days there is a problem that is well suited to letting the agent just iterate. In this example screenshot, it clicks around in Inkwell to reproduce and then fix a bug. This is after I confirmed some assumptions in the debugger.

Good point from John Gruber about Elon Musk controlling the media for his own trial, as NYT reporter Mike Isaac uses Twitter / X to post notes:

It’s a little weird though that he’s posting these on Twitter/X, a site that is privately owned by one of the parties in the lawsuit. Musk’s empire is so sprawling that separate pieces inevitably collide.

Automattic has launched a new WordPress theme and posting interface for microblogging. It sounds similar in spirit to Micro.blog: Here’s what makes this different from a social app: every quick thought and every reblog is a real WordPress.com post on a site you own, and eve...

Go Spurs Go! Excited for game 5. 🏀

Only just realized that SNL UK is available on Peacock. The full show, not just the selected clips that are on YouTube. 📺

On a more serious note… My last post is such a cheap shot, I sat on it for 15 minutes and almost didn’t post it. Would’ve scrapped it if it was anyone else but Elon Musk. Which isn’t fair, but also he’s created a social presence that draws chaos. Easy to get pulled in.