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.

Allen Pike has a great post about user interface input design in an LLM world:

As we start to see new interfaces that support these more humane controls, it will seem increasingly inhumane that we once chose “Helvetica”, “Semibold”, and “36pt” from three separate dropdowns. It is inhumane – it’s an artifact of the past, back when computers needed us to chunk up our inputs into separate dropdowns for them, lest they be confused.

Huge new ruling by the judge in the Epic Games case. Hope to take advantage of this as soon as possible in Micro.blog to let people subscribe from the iOS app. Finally a clear voice of reason in the App Store.

It ended up being a good idea to stop overnight in Little Rock and wait out the storm. Went to a restaurant across the street and there was a jazz band playing, a bit of peace and beauty as the wind and rain picked up outside.

Watched some more highlights from last night’s Bucks / Pacers. Bucks should not have lost that game. Feel bad for them. 🏀

NPR has an article on whether the Google search remedy should include somehow crippling Google’s growth in AI:

In his opening statements last Monday, David Dahlquist, the acting deputy director of the DOJ’s antitrust civil litigation division, argued that the court should consider remedies that could nip a potential Google AI monopoly in the bud. “This court’s remedy should be forward-looking and not ignore what is on the horizon,” he said.

I’m still at a loss for what should be done. Splitting off YouTube would be good too, but it doesn’t really fit the crime.

Bookshelves at Nexus Coffee & Creative in Little Rock. ☕️

Parked at The Root Cafe in Little Rock. Lunch and plotting a change to my route stops so I don’t drive directly into a storm and tornado watch. 🌪️

Last night at the hotel, in between basketball, I tuned into some of the Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella conversation at LlamaCon. At one point, Satya said “the web was born on Windows” and it struck me. Digging a little, apparently he has said this before. Hmm… What about NeXT?