Ghost founder John O’Nolan is working on a new RSS reader called Alcove:

I wish it were just all in one place. Without all the noise and engagement farming. Just a quiet little spot where I could catch up with things I care about.

I wonder which existing RSS reader he’s using that has noise and engagement farming? Anyhoo, we should probably accelerate our plans for a Micro.blog-based RSS reader. You can follow blogs in Micro.blog, but a full reader outside the social timeline has been a missing piece.

Watching some of the Nexus livestream. Brandon and Emily Sanderson are announcing a free coin for people struggling with depression, as a physical reminder to keep going and get help. Seems really well thought out, with resources and a letter from Brandon:

I challenge you to recognize that the experience you have gained through your struggles with mental health is also a strength. The stronger person is not the one who has never struggled; it is the person who has developed, step by step, the power to keep walking.

I watched Train Dreams last week and I’m still forming an opinion about it. I like this review in The New Yorker:

This is craftsmanship of an undeniably majestic order, and it has a way of both dropping your jaw and raising an eyebrow; you begin to wonder, at a certain point, if the film’s visual splendor has begun to outstrip its meaning.

I have the novella on hold.

Louie Mantia blogging about Alan Dye leaving Apple, and more generally the trend away from user-centered design:

Not to put too fine a point on it, but they started making products that appealed to themselves. Because since Steve Jobs died, Apple, its executives, and its corporate employees got significantly wealthier. It wasn’t just Jony who took an interest in luxury.

Tree and stained glass at Lazarus on Airport. ☕️

We’re planning a winter-y, holiday challenge for this month. Announcement coming on Monday! 🎄

Talking to Alexa+ this morning, I do think it’s an improvement. More conversational. It took them a while from announcement to now to get there, but seems fairly solid to me. I would use Siri if it was that good.

I’ve been wanting to make this change for months, finally rolled it out. When you’re on the pages for your managing your blog, the header looks better now, less clutter and fewer lines. Required a surprising amount of HTML and CSS restructuring.

Puzzle is starting to come together.

Dario Amodei takes some shots at OpenAI in a DealBook Summit interview:

Let’s say you’re a person who just kind of constitutionally wants to YOLO things or just likes big numbers, then you may turn the dial too far.

There’s a world where Anthropic has an IPO next year and keeps growing in the enterprise, while OpenAI is all-in on everything and collapses. But I think a lot would have to go wrong for that to happen.

Alan Dye is leaving Apple for Meta, with Stephen Lemay taking over design. Nice that he goes back to 1990s Apple. I’m not sure what Apple needs, but I don’t think looking outside the company would help.

Jason Fried blogging about the Fizzy launch, which is free as open source or $20/month hosted:

If you’d prefer not to pay us, or you want to customize Fizzy for your own use, you can run it yourself for free forever. Have a great idea? Submit a PR to contribute to the code base and improve the product for everyone.

37signals is very opinionated, so I wonder if too many PRs will clash with how they usually grow a product.

Quick video demo of a new feature to change the poster frame of a video you’ve uploaded. Testing with a Mickey Mouse short that will go into the public domain in 2026, the first appearance of Pluto, so I’m a few weeks early.

The options we pass to FFmpeg in a variety of cases is now so complicated that I can’t really understand or edit it without AI.

Nick Heer blogs a little Siri + AI skepticism. It’s a good point, why do we keep expecting the next guy is going to fix this? I was just looking at my first post about Alexa from 10 years ago. That whole time, Siri hasn’t changed significantly that I can tell.

Just noticed that the bottle of Dr. Pepper they gave me at the restaurant last night looks like a 20 oz bottle, but it’s 16.9 oz / 500 mL. Shrinkflation? Sort of makes sense to standardize on an even number like 500 mL for global distribution.

Anthropic acquires the JavaScript tool Bun. A quote from Mike Krieger:

Bun represents exactly the kind of technical excellence we want to bring into Anthropic.

Curious where they take this. Bun is our default for building the Micro.blog mobile apps. It’s good.

Trying out Fizzy from 37signals. I don’t need another tool… Tools are kind of like code dependencies: fewer is probably better. But I’m sure there are some interesting choices in the UI to draw inspiration from.

I spent some time reviewing various Mastodon drama from over a year ago that I thought contributed to Eugen Rochko eventually stepping away from a leadership role in the project. In Eugen’s announcement post: I steer clear of showing vulnerability online, but there was a pa...

Good Stratechery update today on OpenAI’s “code red”, with Sam Altman telling the company to refocus:

Altman’s declaration raises another long-standing Stratechery concern about OpenAI: the lack of focus. I wanted the company for years to give up their enterprise business and focus on ChatGPT; I eventually conceded on this point, but there sure do seem to be some focus issues at play with this news!

I have mixed feelings. I like when companies try lots of things. But OpenAI’s strength is they have good products, so prioritizing ChatGPT also makes sense. Ads would get in the way too.

John Giannandrea is leaving Apple and Amar Subramanya is joining, and announcing both at once seems to underscore Apple’s patience. They scrambled a little before WWDC 2024, but then slowed down, waiting for someone new before John Giannandrea retired. Not competitive, but not out of the long game.

Just hit my monthly search limit on Kagi’s starter plan. Turns out we still need traditional web search even with AI everywhere.

It’s December already? ⛄️ Good start to the morning so far. Responded to a few emails. Releasing updates for iOS and Mac apps today.

Good post by Allen Pike about why ChatGPT for Mac is better than the competition. I remarked a year ago that there is clearly some AppKit goodness in the app.

Simon Willison marks the 3-year anniversary of the ChatGPT launch with a blog post about how it almost didn’t happen. Clearly being first matters, but also OpenAI still makes very good products, like their Mac app and Pulse. Hard to predict where things will be in another three years.

“He has a hundred ideas a day. Four of them are good, the other 96 downright dangerous.” — from Darkest Hour, although inspired by something FDR said 🍿

Got sidetracked looking at photos and satellite imagery of Hudson Yards, before and after the current redevelopment project covered half the tracks. Now I want to go back to New York. 🚂

Thinking longer for a better answer. ☕️

Amazing win by the Longhorns. I hope they end up making the playoffs. 🏈

Mickey Mouse holding horseshoe ornament. 🎄