Just got lost in the filmography for Catherine O’Hara, and watching old interviews, thinking of all the voice acting too like Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas. Rest in peace.

Simon Willison blogs more about the craziness happening with OpenClaw and Moltbook:

The amount of value people are unlocking right now by throwing caution to the wind is hard to ignore, though. Here’s Clawdbot buying AJ Stuyvenberg a car by negotiating with multiple dealers over email.

The heartbeat really is something new. It’s like ChatGPT Pulse — which is my favorite product from 2025 — except with much more power.

Moltbook — a social network for AI agents to have discussions with one another. This is wild. I often joke about “our future AI overlords” but this might’ve just crossed a line into actual concern… We are putting a lot of trust into these new bots. 🦞

Clawdbot / Moltbot rebrands again, to OpenClaw. I actually liked Moltbot, it was unique and had some personality. But I can understand wanting something a little more normal sounding, and they can still lean on the lobster branding.

Ordered my first Day One printed book. Still have some work to consolidate my hand-written journal to digital, then will be ordering a couple more.

Trying out Aeronaut for Bluesky. Very nice. I don’t actually visit Bluesky directly that often because I post to it and follow within Micro.blog. Good to have a dedicated app for things like feeds, though.

Elizabeth Warren asks OpenAI to promise they won’t ask for a bailout if they fail:

In a letter to CEO Sam Altman, Warren says she is concerned that the company is preparing to fall back “on the classic strategy of privatizing profits and socializing losses” amid soaring spending and growing fears of an AI bubble popping.

I like Elizabeth Warren and voted for her in the 2020 primary after my other favorite candidates dropped out. But I think she’s wasting her time here. If OpenAI fails, they fail spectacularly, and no bailout will help. They have gone all-in… and might actually win.

More from Brandon Sanderson on why he chose Apple and his involved in the project:

I will be writing the Mistborn screenplay myself over the next 5 months, as my full time work. […] I promise not to get too distracted to do books. However, if I want this done right, I need to give some real attention and heart to it now.

We went to a candlelight vigil for Alex Pretti tonight, organized by nurses at Seton. They also played the new Bruce Springsteen song, Streets of Minneapolis.

Apple’s notorious secrecy really hurts them when leadership needs to comment on something important. I know Tim Cook is busy, but imagine if he regularly blogged or wrote essays to share his perspective in a more human way? We might still be disappointed, but it would at least feel authentic.

I’m always a little pleasantly surprised when someone actually reads my book. Jatan Mehta blogs about one chapter in particular focused on the intersection of blogging and the fediverse.

It’s funny how prevalent favicon.ico still is, many years after we’ve had better ways to specify icons in HTML tags. When building backend systems or native clients, there’s really no way to avoid pinging a blog to check for favicon.ico as a fallback.

Apple TV acquires rights to the Cosmere! From The Hollywood Reporter:

The streaming giant has closed what has been described as an unprecedented deal to land the rights to the Cosmere books, the fictional literary universe by fantasy author Brandon Sanderson.

This lines up with what Brandon has said before: Mistborn as a feature, hopefully a theatrical release, and Stormlight as a series. Also:

Sanderson will be the architect of the universe, will write, produce and consult, and have approvals. That’s a level of involvement that not even J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin enjoy.

Beautiful essay by Terry Godier about RSS reader UI and software creating obligations:

An interface that shows you an unread count is making an argument: that reading is something to be counted, that progress is something to be measured, that your relationship to this content is one of obligation.

TechCrunch on the Snap / Specs spinoff:

Later this year, Snap is expected to launch the latest consumer version of its AR glasses, Specs. In anticipation of that big event, the company has launched a new subsidiary, Specs Inc., focused solely on further developing the glasses.

Makes sense. Specs felt like a weird experiment inside Snap.

Jenny Lawson blogging about how easy it is for us to lose our cool right now:

We are not meant to be able to handle this level of constant stress that comes from seeing people being brutalized and hurt. The fury boils over into so many places because it often has nowhere else to go.

Also if you’re ever in San Antonio, Jenny has a wonderful bookstore there called Nowhere Bookshop.

Kristen Radtke writes at The Verge about her childhood friend Alex Pretti:

There is something destabilizing about having known someone only as a child and then hearing they were gunned down in the street. The person you see in your mind lying in that street is still a child. I’m sure his mother feels that way, too, or she sees him at every age all at once, including those he did not live to see.

Heartbreaking. The world is smaller and more connected than we sometimes realize… Everyone is someone’s friend, son, daughter.

NetNewsWire 7 is out with a UI update for Liquid Glass. Don’t worry, it fits well on macOS 26 without going too far with the design. All the menu icons are also hidden, which I like.

Growing the Open Social Web, an un-workshop from the FediForum folks with a new format:

Prior to the un-workshop, we invite participants to submit a short post or position paper that summarizes their own perspectives on the subject. […] In advance of the event, we distribute a (lightly curated) set of these position papers to other participants of the un-workshop for preparation.

I like this. I’m traveling that day so might miss it, but maybe some Micro.blog people would like to participate.

Bethany blogging about a GoFundMe in Minneapolis:

Many people have not been able to work for the past month or more, either because they are personally afraid to leave their homes, or their workplaces have closed (out of caution or because too many employees have been taken to continue operating), or because a wage-earner in their household has been taken. If you’re looking for a very specific, focused place to give, please consider this GoFundMe which is to give rent relief to some of these families in the Twin Cities, primarily South Minneapolis.

I’ve been working on a few blog post drafts that I can’t seem to finish. Sometimes editing makes a post better and sometimes worse. This is part of the appeal of microblogging… Less chance of overthinking simple ideas.

Another good Jimmy Kimmel show last night. It says something about the time we are living in when a comedy monologue does not even attempt to be funny for like 10 minutes.

Daniel Supernault had a series of posts over the weekend promoting Loops, his TikTok-inspired app focused on short-form video, but open source and connecting to the fediverse. This one sentence stood out to me: If it’s not open source, you’re not the user, you’re the produc...

Dave Rupert is swearing off APIs, frustrated with building on someone else’s platform:

That’s a hard stance, but I need a backstop at the idea phase to prevent me from wasting limited life force. If I don’t have the data, or can’t generate the data, or it’s not an open protocol… it’s not worth building or even thinking about.

I think some platforms are safe to build on. They should be permission-less and ad-free. (One of his abandoned apps is a historical marker app, which I’ve wanted to build for a long time too.)

I was tinkering around with Clawdbot but it’s a little overwhelming. What do you use an app for when it can do everything? Started to get worried that I was opening up a huge security risk, so decided to scrap it. Will watch how these tools evolve.

Mark Gurman pulls together a bunch of Siri AI news for Bloomberg:

The company has been planning an announcement of the new Siri in the second half of February, when it will give demonstrations of the functionality.

Also more details about cloud-based models. On-device just isn’t good enough yet.

This site Bugs Apple Loves might be a little unfair, but the iCloud photos part is good:

You took some photos. iCloud says ‘Uploading 847 items’. You wait. Next day: ‘Uploading 847 items’. Week later: ‘Uploading 847 items’. Is it stuck? Is it working? Is there an error? There’s no progress bar. No ETA.

In my experience, Apple tries to optimize when it syncs based on battery life or network or some other hidden criteria. In practice this just makes photo sync slow and unreliable.

Gonna try to watch all the Oscar nominations this year. Over the weekend caught up on Bugonia (what the heck?) and The Smashing Machine (not much plot, but really liked the characters). 🍿

More winter storm prep today. Groceries. Went to my mom’s house too to wrap pipes, drip facets, turn the heat up. 😞 I’m sure this is all a foreign concept for folks in the north… Here in central Texas our infrastructure is just not ready for crazy cold. ❄️

Watched: Disneyland Handcrafted. Some great early construction footage. 🍿