Watched: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Enjoyed this more than I was expecting. Good show. 📺

Mountain laurel.

So nice to work on a brand new Mac app, Objective-C, not much code yet. Builds and runs practically instantly.

I’m continuing to tinker with OpenClaw to see how it could be useful to me. For the last week, I’ve had it wake up once an hour and pick a small change to make to a new, experimental project. It’ll track what it’s working on, fix something, then push the change to GitHub for me to review.

White House press briefing on TV in the background while I’m working. They really have no coherent message for why we’re at war, or how to determine when the mission is over. 🇺🇸

The Washington Post reporting on how Claude is being used for the Iran war:

As planning for a potential strike in Iran was underway, Maven, powered by Claude, suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance, said two of the people. The pairing of Maven and Claude has created a tool that is speeding the pace of the campaign…

On social media, we like to pick sides and oversimplify. OpenAI vs. Anthropic! But war is tragic and complicated. I have mixed feelings about all of this.

Naming is hard. New Kickstarter for Build Awesome, the renamed Eleventy. Both names are a bit awkward:

With Font Awesome, we made icons easy. With Web Awesome, we unlocked framework-independent web components. With Build Awesome you can now quickly build and maintain your entire web site — the full (stack) enchilada.

Apple’s pricing this week is interesting to me. Doesn’t matter the size or purpose of a device, everything is the same price:

• iPhone 17e: $599
• iPad Air: $599
• MacBook Neo: $599

Jason Kottke:

Steve Jobs famously said that computers are a bicycle for the mind. What does that make LLMs? An e-bike for the mind? A car for the mind? A jet plane for the mind?

Good question. I think bicycle still works, though.

I had to back the new Brandon Sanderson crowdfunding campaign. Opted for just the new novel.

Brent Simmons blogged last week about why Objective-C. I still prefer Objective-C and plan to continue to use it. One change I’m thinking about making, though… Going all code for UI instead of XIBs or Storyboards, to make it easier to diff when working with AI.

Cosmic. Everything would be perfect about this morning except I just opened my AirPods case and… it was empty! Accidentally left them at home. ☕️

MacBook Neo! I love that Apple might be trying a totally new name.

Back in Austin, voted this morning. I had meant to early vote last week but too much was going on. James Talarico vs. Jasmine Crockett might end up being close! Very curious how it shakes out and if the party can come together united. 🇺🇸

Ben Thompson’s article about Anthropic and the Pentagon is worth a read, although not everyone is going to be satisfied with it. Anthropic is an interesting company because it feels like they don’t fully believe in their own product. Like Dario Amodei kind of wishes he was working on something else.

Good morning, Atlanta.

Steve Troughton-Smith blogged about the projects he worked on over the last month with Codex 5.3:

It didn’t just blow away my expectations, it showed me the world has changed: we’ve just undergone a permanent, irreversible abstraction level shift.

Blazers in Atlanta. 🏀

I cancelled my NYT subscription two years ago in part because it felt like they threw Joe Biden under the bus, but they really do have good reporting most of the time. Some background details on the Anthropic / OpenAI and Pentagon negotiations:

Mr. Michael, who was on a call with Anthropic executives, demanded that the company’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, get on the phone to hash out the language, the people said. But Mr. Michael was told that Dr. Amodei was in a meeting with his executive team and needed more time.

Sad to hear about this shooting in Austin. It’s also weird to be out of town when something like this happens:

Three people died, and at least 14 others were injured in a shooting on West Sixth Street overnight Saturday into Sunday, according to Austin-Travis County EMS.

East 6th is more crowded and generally a little crazier, although I wouldn’t consider it unsafe, so perhaps this could’ve been worse. Too many guns.

Centennial Olympic Park.

Strange juxtaposition with the war in Iran happening at the same time as the controversy around Anthropic, OpenAI, and the Pentagon. OpenAI has a post with the details of their agreement, which also includes red lines on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons:

We think our agreement has more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI deployments, including Anthropic’s.

I’m confused about how Anthropic’s proposed contract differs from the contract that OpenAI has shared. If the Pentagon offered the same agreement to Anthropic, would they accept it? Lots of questions.

World of Coca‑Cola. 🥤

Aviator Coffee. ☕️

Congress needs to reclaim its rightful role in declaring war. We all know this and yet somehow we’ve let one man control far too much. 🇺🇸

Airport train in Atlanta. Here for the weekend!

Traveling this weekend, going to send details about the RSS beta in the morning. If you signed up on this form, note that I didn’t consider asking for a Micro.blog username… Make sure you use the email address registered on Micro.blog or you won’t be able to access it.

Last day of early voting in Texas. Looking at my sample ballot and got super confused for a minute reading the propositions… A few of them are strange, then realized I was accidentally looking at the Republican side. 🤪

I’ve been critical of Instagram forever, and stopped posting on principle 9 years ago, but still it’s good to see Meta’s new work on alerting parents to a teen’s search about self-harm. The way Meta is handling this seems reasonable. Might’ve saved lives if it was in place years ago.

Open letter from employees of Google and OpenAI in support of Anthropic:

They’re trying to divide each company with fear that the other will give in. That strategy only works if none of us know where the others stand. This letter serves to create shared understanding and solidarity in the face of this pressure from the Department of War.

The leadership of all the AI companies is fascinating to me. Dario Amodei perhaps the most so. I thought his essay Machines of Loving Grace was excellent, but I’ve watched many interviews with him and I sometimes come away kind of depressed about the future.