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.)

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. 🌧️