I don’t think I realized that you didn’t need to be in the EU to distribute apps via AltStore PAL. If Apple relaxes their notarization review in the future, I might use this to ship early iOS builds to the EU.

There are many challenges for the web and web publishers as AI upends search, but the only way to believe that the open web itself will be destroyed is to no longer believe in web browsers. As big as AI is, it’s not as big as the web. We’ll navigate through this.

“What we make stands testament to who we are.” — Jony Ive, in an interview at Stripe Sessions

Bill Gates writes about accelerating his plan to give away his wealth, winding down the Gates Foundation in 20 years:

People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that “he died rich” will not be one of them. There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people.

Funny how people change. In the 1990s, I was a teenager learning to program the Mac while complaining about Bill Gates and Microsoft. Now I admire Bill and complain about Apple.

Reading through Apple’s motion to pause the external purchase ruling. A quick comment on this part:

A federal court cannot force Apple to permanently give away free access to its products and services, including intellectual property.

No one said that. Developers have been paying $99/year for this privilege since the beginning of the App Store.

Apple lawyers can spin this however they want. It will always come back to this: it’s absurd to take a cut of developer revenue that is not processed by Apple just for adding a website link in an app.

Realized last night while listening to music on our record player, which is connected to our Amazon Echo as a speaker… We have a couple newer Echos, but this one is the original Echo from 10 years ago. It’s the oldest gadget in our house still in regular use.

I was unexpectedly caught up in the news about a new Pope. Reading a little about him and translated bits of the inaugural address — an American, speaking of love and peace, not division.

John Voorhees blogging at MacStories:

Apple’s exploration of AI-based search is not terribly surprising either, but I do hope they cut a broader deal with Anthropic instead of Perplexity.

Should Apple acquire Anthropic? It would cost $60 billion, a ridiculous jump over the $3 billion they paid for Beats. Mix in some cash and some stock. It would set Apple up to be at the forefront of AI for the next 10 years. It sounds crazy… until the iPhone is disrupted by a new device.

Thanks to Kev Quirk for the kind words about migrating his Mastodon account to Micro.blog. Micro.blog is always a work in progress, and our fediverse support will continue to improve, but it’s gratifying to read that our approach is resonating with him: Thinking of it in th...

Two weeks on the road and then other distractions, this morning is the first day in a while that I’m back to my routine of walking to the coffee shop. Feels good. Ready to write some code. ☕️

Parker Ortolani makes a great point about potential lock-in for AI products that know a lot about you. Portability would be a good thing to work on early: Memory should be exportable and importable from every provider. We do not need a new kind of proprietary format or anyt...

Let’s do a Micro.blog photo challenge in June. It’s been a while so we’ll keep it simple… I’ll come up with a list of daily prompts and post them later this month. Feel free to send me your own words if you’ve got any! For inspiration, here’s a collection of photos from last year.

I blogged recently about experimenting with local LLMs inside the Micro.blog for Mac app. This is useful for post categorization and other things. It works, but it’s not as good as I’d like without requiring everyone to have an M4 with 48 GB of RAM. Might put it on the shelf for a bit.

There are all sorts of interesting quotes from Eddy Cue’s testimony today in the Google trial. From Mark Gurman’s reporting in Bloomberg:

“You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now as crazy as it sounds,” he said. “The only way you truly have true competition is when you have technology shifts. Technology shifts create these opportunities. AI is a new technology shift, and it’s creating new opportunities for new entrants.”

Really happy for Dan Moren to make his Jeopardy appearance today. Congrats! I’ve set it to record. ☕️

FediForum has regrouped and is coming back, June 5-7. I might be traveling those days but I’ll be joining as internet connectivity allows. They’ve also got an impressive new advisory board.

Raining at Lazarus. ☕️

A wild story in Rolling Stone: People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies. I use ChatGPT throughout the day and it’s hard to imagine it going off the rails this badly: …anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supe...

I increasingly throw my blog post drafts into ChatGPT as a check for major problems. When it comes back with nitpicky changes that I have to admit would make my writing better, I sort of get defensive. “Hey, leave me alone, it’s my writing! Who asked you?” 🤪

Mike Rockwell with more thoughts on the Epic v. Apple ruling:

If they want to have more control over the situation, they should just let us install apps from elsewhere. Even if it’s disabled by default and annoying to enable like it is on the Mac. At least then they’d have something to point to when the government comes knocking.

Yep. I’ve been saying this for 14 years now. The end is almost in sight.

Also: Dan Moren tests the new “Get Book” button in the Kindle app.

Seth Godin blogging about how it used to be only a relatively few people who could publish music and make movies, and now everyone can. Which leads to:

The number of people writing software tools and games is on the very same curve. We’re going to go from hundreds of software companies to millions, in just a few years.

I wonder how this will affect competition for current software companies. Possibly not much, because there are always a thousand ideas that no one currently has time to build.

Great segment about Epic v. Apple on the latest Upgrade. In summary: the judge gave Apple a chance to allow competition with external payments and instead Apple concocted a scheme (27% fee, scare sheets) to make it impossible to use, so now Apple has forfeited all control over external payments.

Crashed to bed early last night after the 3rd quarter of Nuggets / Thunder, just watched the final couple minutes. Wow. Nuggets stole that one, down 7 when I started watching again. Thunder with strange fouling late only helped the Nuggets. 🏀

Sometimes I wake up thinking of the old friends who passed away long before their time. People who I knew when I was much younger and lost touch with over the years and decades. Life is short and precious.

Gregg Popovich addresses the media after officially stepping down, with Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili standing with him. There will never be another coach like him. Go Spurs Go. 🏀

OpenAI is keeping the non-profit, transitioning the for-profit side to a public benefit corporation (PBC). Sam Altman writing on the OpenAI site: We want to be able to operate and get resources in such a way that we can make our services broadly available to all of humanity...

Looking forward to reading through Evan Prodromou’s story on the Protocol Oral History Project. The whole site looks great. There are probably lots of bits of history that aren’t well-documented elsewhere.

4o hallucinated for me today and it struck me that I haven’t seen ChatGPT make anything up in weeks, even though new models are supposed to be worse. Must be because most of my queries now use o3 or o4-mini with web search. If AI can do a web search, it seems to drastically improve the results.

Good timing, it started pouring rain a few minutes after I got home. Listening to the rain now as I settle back into work. 🌧️

First full day back at work after a couple weeks on the road. I work a little every day, even when traveling, but a day hopefully without any distractions is always nice. Starting with coffee at Cosmic. Server deploys for in-progress changes. ☕️