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. ☕️

Warriors putting the Rockets away. Can’t help but admire what Steph Curry is still able to do. He wasn’t even really needed in the first half. 🏀

Making slow progress experimenting with local LLMs in the Mac app. Smaller models are a challenge because they are so much worse and unpredictable than what I’m used to with frontier cloud models. I’ve tested a few flavors of Gemma 3, think I’m settling on 4 billion params, Q5.

Watched Runaway Jury. Really good. Sadly nothing has changed with gun control in the 20 years since this was filmed… It’s actually worse now since the assault weapons ban expired.

Mark Zuckerberg said something in the Stratechery interview last week that paints a clearer picture of what the future of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads is going to look like. Meta is leaning into the TikTok-ification of all their social platforms. I think it’s going to be...

Working on a few different random things today. Also really looking forward to Nuggets / Clippers game 7! 🏀

Finished reading: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson. This is the first of his books that I’ve re-read, listening to the audiobook this time. Still great. 📚

Hello again, Austin. It was about 3500 miles round-trip, driving to New York and back. Good couple weeks but glad I won’t have to be on the road tomorrow.

So tired of gatekeepers. Only realized this week that the Micro.blog web browser extension was removed from the Chrome store. Re-submitted some verification documents to Google, hopefully can get it back within a few days.

Once apps like Spotify, Kindle, and many others are officially approved with external payment links, I don’t see Apple putting the genie back in the bottle. The company needs to let this go. Developers have had to put up with Apple’s tax and convoluted rules for too long already.

I disagree with Ben Thompson’s update today that Apple might have a legal right to charge for their “intellectual property” by using external link payments. They already do charge developers with the developer program! The judge is saying you can’t take a cut for simple links. I think this’ll hold.

By “polish” I don’t mean the design, necessarily. I mean all the little details that differentiate a good app from a great one. Extra things that busy or lazy developers (like me!) don’t always make time for. Here’s an example from this week. I’m experimenting with a new fea...

Two updated iOS apps this week: Micro.blog 3.4.6 and Epilogue 1.8.3. Android versions are lagging a little behind but hope to get those updated soon.

Old train bridge viewed from the Bill Clinton presidential library. It’s a pedestrian bridge now, but it lines up perfectly with the former Choctaw Route Station on the park grounds, even if the rails are long gone. 🚂

Jason Snell blogging about the new App Store linking judgement:

Not only did Apple attempt to find ways to circumvent the injunction, but it fatally hid their discussions from the judge. While Phil Schiller gets credit from Gonzalez Rogers for sitting through the trial and reading the final decision, the judge suggests that his colleagues at Apple did not. Most troubling is the behavior of Apple’s Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, who the judge says “outright lied under oath” multiple times.

Apple will not win on appeal. They flaunted their power instead of complying. This is settled.

Fidel & Co. A little more time in Little Rock before hitting the road again. ☕️

Simon Willison on the continual misuse of the term vibe coding:

It means “generating code with AI without caring about the code that is produced”. See Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding for my previous writing on this subject. This is a hill I am willing to die on. I fear it will be the death of me.

Fighting the good fight. Words matter.

Marc Andreessen doesn’t think AI will take his job. But venture capital is barely a real job. All money, all talk. 🤪 I would rather actually create something even with the risk that AI might obsolete part of what I do.

Micro.blog bookmarks are a significant part of my workflow now. I have over 1000 bookmarks stored, mostly web pages that Micro.blog will also archive, and enough tags to filter through them. Probably about time to import my old Pinboard and Instapaper bookmarks.