I don’t watch much hockey but now really getting into this USA vs. Canada gold medal game. 🏒

Spurs in Austin. 🏀

Rediscovering drop shadows.

I managed to go Monday through Friday without any posts about AI. So now it’s time to catch up! The Verge:

OpenAI’s first hardware release will be a smart speaker with a camera that will probably cost between $200 and $300, according to The Information. The device will be able to recognize things like “items on a nearby table or conversations people are having in the vicinity”…

I think the key things to watch will be latency and memory. Building on ChatGPT, they don’t even need to innovate that much for the product to be better than the Echo and HomePod.

Finished reading: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. Parts of the future (particularly electricity) were distracting for me because they felt implausible. Still really enjoyed it. Wish I had read it before our actual pandemic. 📚

From an article in The New Yorker about a bookstore that only sells signed books:

Even before he learned to love to read, Reiss the retail genius recognized what every real reader knows: a book is not just its contents but also, and inseparably, a special kind of object, a portal of sorts between people and places and ideas.

I’m still surprised that Mozilla shut down Pocket. Lots of competition in the bookmarking / read-later space, but that’s because it’s such an important complement to a web browser. I think the organization should’ve refocused around 2-3 great web things that work with Firefox.

Good post by Victoria Song at The Verge about distrust of smart glasses:

Meta’s glasses are great because they’re discreet. That discretion is also unnerving because it means they’re perfect monitoring tools. I’ve written this many times, but wearing modern smart glasses often makes me feel like I’m a spy. It doesn’t matter if the Ray-Ban Meta glasses have a privacy indicator light.

I’m curious how Apple (without Meta’s poor reputation on privacy) is going to handle this. Not sure it can be solved. In the future, there might be places that have signs like “take your smart glasses off”.

Got a preview from @vincent of something new coming up for Micro.blog Studio subscribers. Can’t wait to share it. It looks so good. 🎙️

CNN: “Supreme Court rules that Trump’s sweeping emergency tariffs are illegal.” A much-needed check on Trump’s power. Next up is the midterms. 🇺🇸

Downtown view from the Long Center. Just went to see Macbeth. 🎭

Recently I was drafting a post and had to catch myself as I almost inserted a jab at someone else, a callback to something from a while ago that no longer matters. That kind of post is not me. I sometimes brainstorm reactionary posts that I wish I could write, but always think better of it, staying away from extremes.

I think I’ve been listening to the pessimists too much. It’s true that some things are bad, and I’ve blogged about many of them, but the only way out is hope. Otherwise we get stuck, caught in a spiral of outrage, never moving forward.

When I quit Twitter in 2012, I was outspoken in my worry about developer-hostile, centralized platforms. I paired the dissent with advocacy for open formats and eventually built my own social network. Complaints should lead to progress, not paralysis.

There’s a new proposed lexicon for Markdown-based content in AT Proto. I could support this. The problem is that currently there’s no good way to have multiple formats, and I think HTML is still the richest, most complete way to represent blog posts.

Ceiling skylight.

Hannah Aubry writes on the Mastodon blog about community initiatives including experiments to change how new users sign up:

At first, we’re planning to recommend the closest geographic server in the correct language based on data surfaced by the app store, so it will only be available initially on the Android and iOS apps. We may also experiment with other logic for recommending a server, including random distribution.

I don’t believe this will help. In fact, it might make users more confused. My proposal remains to move away from email-like user handles.

Hearing from multiple people now (including my son!) who have gone back to buying music. Spotify burnout. I still have a huge collection of iTunes purchases and ripped CDs, just sitting there.

When I found out Current was going to ship this week, I postponed making a video preview of my own RSS reader because it would feel like I was interfering with Current’s release. Now the tables have turned. Current is so popular that I just need to stay out of its way or I’ll get overshadowed. 🤪

Last year I was often expecting unexpected calls, from doctors and nurses, so I turned off “silence unknown callers”. I’ve now officially had enough of the spam interruptions. Enabled it again. ☎️

Bono on today’s release of Songs of Ash:

The songs on Days of Ash are very different in mood and theme to the ones we’re going to put on our album later in the year. These EP tracks couldn’t wait; these songs were impatient to be out in the world. They are songs of defiance and dismay…

Always happy for new U2 songs. Listening now. 🎶

Guy Kawasaki blogs one of the more thoughtful takes on Facebook’s “move fast and break things”:

Today, what you break tends to matter. Systems are bigger, platforms are interconnected, and the consequences of failure travel farther and faster than they used to. What once felt like harmless iteration can now trigger lasting damage.

Brent Simmons wrote on his linkblog about Terry Godier’s new RSS reader, Current:

Because RSS is an open protocol, and because there are so many different possible ways to follow and read the news, RSS readers ought to be a UI playground in the way Twitter clients once were, where innovation and experimentation are normal and celebrated.

As small developers, even when we compete in the same space, we link to each other. We share something positive or unique about what the other person is working on. I exchanged a few emails with Terry leading up to Current’s release and I feel really good about what he’s bringing to RSS, even though I’m releasing my own feed reader soon too!

Current has now cracked the top 10 paid apps in the App Store. Incredible. $10 up-front pricing is such a throwback to the old App Store and I love it.

Started watching Lonesome Dove tonight. Don’t think I’ve seen it since it first came out, but I remember it having an impact. Still would like to read the book one day. 📺

The redesigned AT Proto site looks great. It even has a neat live firehose view.

A couple days ago I quietly made a rule for myself that I would not blog about AI at all this week. Halfway breaking it with a link to this AI-adjacent report from Mark Gurman about new Apple devices:

The pendant would essentially serve as an always-on camera for the smartphone that also includes a microphone for Siri input. Some Apple employees call it the “eyes and ears” of the phone.

Always listening is already a step too far for most people. Always filming? Apple’s strength is privacy, but on-device models don’t seem cut out for this right now. Will be fascinating to watch.

Thinking lately about the friends I grew up with but haven’t seen in years or decades. I’d like to reach out to a few of them. We all get so busy with everyday life that the important things sometimes slip away, indefinitely postponed.

More details about video in the new Apple Podcasts in this post on Podnews:

…this is the first time Apple Podcasts has ever announced a feature that forces you to be a customer of a few large companies to use it.

So disappointing. Micro.blog already uses HLS for video and could support this tomorrow if Apple had just used RSS. This is why open formats matter. Apple has instead chosen lock-in.

Terry Godier’s new feed reader Current is out. I had a feeling he was exploring ideas similar to what I was also working on. In an announcement post, he writes:

As items age, they dim. Eventually they’re gone, carried downstream. You don’t mark them as read. You don’t file them. They simply pass, the way water passes under a bridge.

I have a similar concept in my upcoming feed reader, that items “fade” away and change colors. If you miss them, it’s okay. But Current embraces the river and has all sorts of design ideas beyond that. Really well done.

Watching more of the Winter Olympics. Imagine if as developers we only had one try… Shipped a new app that had some bugs? Oh well, I guess improve it with an app update in four years.

Maurice Parker has released version 4.0 of his outliner Zavala. In a new blog post, he writes about sync, localization, and the decision to require iOS 26 and macOS 26.

9to5Mac blogging about a change in the iOS 26.4 beta:

In the App Store, the Search bar has been moved back to the top of the search tab. The search tab is also now integrated into navigation bar at the bottom instead of being separated in its own floating circle.

Good change. I think some Liquid Glass apps had gotten a little wonky with their tab bars, requiring extra taps to switch between modes.