Fidji Simo blogs about companies that use AI to do more, not to downsize:

Organizations that approach AI as a way to multiply what they create will be so much more successful than those that use it to subtract.

Layoffs make no sense to me for already-successful companies. Layoffs are the mindset of private equity, squeezing out more profit instead of improving the product. Companies that prioritize layoffs will find themselves lapped by the competition.

ChatGPT Pulse is my favorite product of the year. It’s expensive, but it’s the first new thing I’ve seen in software in years. Love reading about what it’s come up for me each day. Here’s a snapshot, because it knows I’m thinking about Spain. (And if I scroll, it has actual work / code topics too.)

Ben Thomson in a long article today about the AI bubble and its potential benefits, especially lasting power infrastructure:

It’s sobering to think about how many things have never been invented because power has never been considered a negligible input from a cost perspective; if AI does nothing more than spur the creation of massive amounts of new power generation it will have done tremendous good for humanity.

Tim Sweeney on Twitter / X welcoming a Google proposal to fix exclusive app distribution and payments:

It genuinely doubles down on Android’s original vision as an open platform to streamline competing store installs globally, reduce service fees for developers on Google Play, and enable third-party in-app and web payments.

Epic’s lawsuits were derided by many, years ago, but there’s no question now on how consequential their approach has been. We’re finally seeing real progress.

Another excellent article about AI in The New Yorker: The case that AI is thinking. It captures both the fear that we aren’t that special and the inspiration for what might be possible. I continue to find AI clarifying — a signal to focus our work and lives on what are uniquely human strengths.

In addition to technical debt problems, when using AI for coding we have to be careful of feature creep. If there’s hardly a cost to adding a feature, it’s too easy to add all the wrong features.

Voting desert. 🇺🇸

Now that we have more confirmation that Siri will be powered in part by Gemini, I think Apple should address the other weakness in their AI strategy: the yearly update schedule. Decouple the cloud improvements so that server changes can be rolled out any time, not only at WWDC or a major iOS update.

Sneak peek video of next Mac version of Micro.blog with new Movies sidebar item. This will ship later this week.

Last week I posted a short survey to get some feedback on what features people are using in Micro.blog. The response was great. I’m reading through the freeform answers and they’re especially helpful. I also wanted to hear opinions about the new Movies feature we recently added on the web, and better understand how people might use better video upload support. Here are charts from a few questions. Where should the new Movies page go in the apps? Do you want to post your own videos to your blog? If you post video, how long will most clips be?

Election Day. There are lots of propositions on the Texas ballot. Kind of feel if you can’t easily memorize your vote choices, there are too many. 🇺🇸

Wind turbines, driving back from Corpus Christi.

Mural in Corpus Christi.

Working on something new for the Mac app and thinking about how disclosure triangles are sort of a lost art. We’ve web-ified most UI design.

Simon Willison blogs about doing research that leads into a new blog post:

…I poked around to answer my own questions and then wrote up what I learned as a short post. Curiosity-driven blogging if you like.

Great responses to my little survey about Micro.blog features. Thanks everyone! Really helpful. I’ll keep it open for another week.

Until today I had never tried the “best of N” feature in AI tools like Codex, where it generates multiple versions of the same feature. Fascinating shift in development. You would never ask a human assistant to code the same thing twice and pick the best one.

Everywhere we look — people walking on the sidewalk, people stuck in traffic, people shopping at the grocery store. Everyone is going through something, worried about something, seeing joy in something, feeling heartbreak from something. Remembering this can help ground us in discussions online too.

Another great Spurs game. Starting the season 5-0 for the first time. 🏀

I guess this was bound to happen. Daring Fireball:

Services now generates more revenue ($28.8 billion) than Mac, iPad, and Wearables/Home combined ($24.7 billion).

If iPhone revenue is essentially maxed out and flat, Apple will eventually become mostly a services revenue company. Very weird. 💰

I thought of a few questions about Micro.blog usage that will help us prioritize features over the coming weeks. If you have a minute, fill out this form. It’s very short.

There’s not necessarily any new info in this article in The New Yorker about AI data centers, but it does illustrate the scale. Also enjoyed the anecdote about a farmer using Claude.

Behind a fence, and past several vehicle checkpoints, the campus was a spacious expanse of nothing, except for one corner, which was populated by a row of numbered sheds. The sheds were white, narrow, tall, and several football fields in length; they reminded me of the livestock barns I visited as a child at the Minnesota State Fair.

I’m still using ChatGPT Pulse. It is remarkable how good it is sometimes. Some folks will find this too creepy, but this morning it delivered a mashup of one of my favorite book series (Stormlight Archive) and principles of Micro.blog. Here’s the transcript. To be clear, I did not prompt this.

We’ve been going through old photos this week. I always smile looking at this one of me and my mom, from around 1980. I look so funny.

Thanks everyone for the kind words on the blog post yesterday about my mom. Means a lot to me.

Crossing over the Lamar bridge.

Last weekend, my mom passed away. I had blogged once or twice that in recent months I found myself at the hospital often, as she declined in health and was in and out of the hospital and rehab. It was what inspired me to make Micro.blog free for nurses and teachers. My mom w...

In a post about safety improvements, OpenAI reveals that a stunning number of people (0.15% out of hundreds of millions of active users) discuss suicide with the chatbot. This is obviously an urgent issue and the company needs to redouble their efforts. Some people will not seek out real counselors.

Needed to get away today. Last-minute decision to drive down to San Antonio with my daughter. 🏀

Watching the Longhorns game with family today was a nice distraction from everything else going on for me right now. Great comeback win. Hopefully Arch Manning is okay. 🏈