Listening to Hillary Clinton on the news this morning. It’s always like a glimpse into what might’ve been. She actually knows things. Thoughtful, measured. 🇺🇸

Jason Snell blogged about all the Apple news today, including the slightly controversial Apple Watch recording feature:

Our culture may ultimately reject even the most privacy-focused AI recording features, whether they come in camera glasses or attentive smartwatches. But if there’s any valid, non-creepy case to be made for this sort of technology, someone needs to make it.

I’ve long wanted an easy way to record quick notes that are transcribed and synced, but I don’t want to record other people. Perhaps a better place to start would’ve been for it to ignore all voices except our own.

I sort of tuned out during the Apple Watch part of the presentation today. Catching up on Siri Recap and Live Rewind. How it works (PDF) is interesting… It’s pretty clever. Jumping through a lot of hoops for maybe not-great transcription, though.

Not sure who created these, but I’m starting to notice a couple bridges from specific X accounts to AT Proto, so you can follow people on Bluesky (or in Micro.blog) without visiting X. Here are two: John Ternus and Tibo. There are probably more.

It looks like Apple has knocked it out of the park with the Duo. Really impressive, from the way it looks to the little details in UI layout. And Apple pencil! Jealous of people who are going to get one. 💰

“But actually, there is one more thing…” 🤯

Surprising to include this. It also had its own spin on the phrase, though, almost downplaying it instead of hyping it. Interesting first keynote for John Ternus.

Watching the Apple event. John Ternus is a great presenter who would do really well live. Maybe next year.

During breakfast I usually turn on CNN just to make sure the world hasn’t burned down yet. Today’s headline was an Anthropic employee posting on X there’s a 10% chance AI will destroy all humans. Yikes. Seems a bit high.

New day. New coffee. What should we work on? Current priorities: wrapping up the new mobile app bug fixes, updating Wavelength, but open to other side quests this week. ☕️

Jason Snell blogged a reaction to the latest rumors that the foldable will be called the iPhone Duo! Great name, I really didn’t think Apple would go for it. Also happy to see pencil support:

I’ve been wondering about Apple Pencil support on the iPhone for some time now. This product does sort of make sense for it, given the larger canvas of an interior screen.

I know I’m really late to this show, but because of the new spinoff we’ve been watching The Big Bang Theory for the first time. A few seasons in. 📺

Got this spam text today, just in case there was any question that data centers are going to be a big issue in November:

Manton, if you live at [my address], Republicans have supported a Data Center within 15 miles of you.

Feels like the AI world is balancing on a knife’s edge. On one side, the worst of big tech’s social media addiction machine and an even greater concentration of power. On the other side, the democratization of intelligence and an abundance that lifts all of society. Either outcome seems possible.

OpenAI announced a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, which I had never heard of because I’m not a mathematician, but which is apparently a very big deal:

The question of whether smooth three-dimensional fluid motion can break down has remained unresolved for roughly 90 years.

There is some controversy over whether two human researchers (one at Anthropic) working on similar problems might’ve accidentally influenced the OpenAI model. It doesn’t sound like that’s true, but it does feel a little unfair regardless, where credit likely means so much to people.

Did a little Redis housekeeping, cleaning out orphaned records that were sitting around wasting memory. Down to 23 GB of RAM on a 48 GB machine. Still probably too much.

I had a nap yesterday and a late Dr. Pepper, so my sleep was all off. Caffeine really affects me late in the day. Woke up at 2am worried about all sorts of business and social things I can’t control.

Let it go. 🎶

Might be about time to get a Switch 2… Ocarina of Time remake looks good. 🕹️

Ben Thompson in today’s Stratechery blog post:

AGI is AI that learns continuously. That’s not the case with current large language models.

I agree with Ben’s definition of AGI, but LLM memory is so good now, it’s almost indistinguishable from learning. My ~/.codex/memories folder is 7 MB, which doesn’t sound like much, but it’s only small Markdown files. It’s incredible how much it knows. That doesn’t even count ChatGPT’s dreaming memory system and computer history.

How am I just now hearing this interview with Jensen Huang? “You’re not talking to someone who woke up a loser.” 🤣

This could be really good. Trailer for a new documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about Elizabeth Holmes: You Can See Everything. Amazing cut to the wider shot at the end.

Today I updated the Micro.blog web interface with better links and icons in the timeline, and a new context menu for editing your own posts or muting a conversation. There are a lot of related design fixes too. Just a better design and more room for us to build new things on.

Reflecting on the Astra launch… It was a killer business instinct for Greg Brockman to say, “yeah, this is basically AGI.” Dario Amodei is much more cautious. He’s not going to say that about Fable. But it works because it actually feels true. Marketing not based on truth is just bullshit spin.

I wanted to quote a couple things from this OpenAI blog post on alignment by Jakub Pachocki: The fundamental challenge of AI alignment is generalization. As machines become smarter, they find themselves working on higher-level concepts, and placed in environments increasing...

With the 40th anniversary re-release of the original Transformers movie coming up, I finally watched the 2007 Transformers. I had skipped it because it looked all wrong. The design doesn’t look like Transformers to me. Also watched Bumblebee, which it much better, just a better feel, better sound.

Nitter and XCancel are back online after being shut down for a couple weeks following a cease and desist letter from X. I’m a little surprised. From the GitHub project page:

Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.

Working on some web timeline design tweaks that will go live in the morning. I’ve been stubbornly insisting on text labels for Reply, Bookmark, etc. where every other network uses icons only. Going to mostly keep that, but the new version looks way better.

Worrisome reporting from Mark Gurman:

Ternus and services chief Eddy Cue want to make even more money from the App Store and figure out ways to raise margins and squeeze additional recurring revenue from the platform. Schiller, on the other hand, seems to believe that such moves will only further irk developers and governments. While there was no internal blowup or anything like that, it’s something he wanted no part of.

John Gruber adds:

I sure hope that’s not true, because that would be awful — making a bad situation worse — and pretty much the exact opposite of what Apple ought to do.

I think I would really like the foldable iPhone. But at over $2k, I can’t justify blowing that much money on a phone. It would be a crazy business expense when I could put that money back into Micro.blog hosting or paying people. Other folks may have different priorities, and that’s fine! 💰

Pretty thorough article at The Economist about whether AI is creating or destroying jobs:

Add it all up, and The Economist estimates that AI has so far created around 1m new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles. America’s AI infrastructure splurge has created many of them.

You could argue that construction-related jobs are temporary, but I don’t think so. There’s going to be demand for years.

I got some great feature and bug fix suggestions on Friday. Over the weekend I’ve implemented several of them (some shipped already, some need client app updates).