Google announced a million things at Google I/O yesterday. I thought it was interesting that Demis Hassabis closed the keynote, putting everything in context. A small part of it:

AGI is now on the horizon, and it will be the most profound and impactful technology ever invented. If built right, it could propel human progress and flourishing beyond our imaginations. We’re in a moment of immense promise, but also enormous responsibility. […] When we look back at this time, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity.

Love to see another OT game! Knicks come back big in the 4th quarter. I thought they were toast. 🏀

I’m coming around to not wanting any Tahoe-style icons in my menu items. Not sure yet if it should be a preference for my Mac apps, or always hide them in the way that Brent Simmons and Rogue Amoeba have done.

I’m fine with unified Mac toolbars that have a few buttons in the title bar, but some apps take this too far, introducing friction in just figuring out how to drag a window around. There should probably be at least 50% of the window title bar available in the middle for average-width window sizes.

Sometimes I’ll switch Codex to Extra High and /fast. Yesterday for a long-running task (45 minutes) I came the closest to depleting tokens, hitting about 40% remaining for the first time. Must’ve been how Claude users feel, living on the edge all the time. 🤪

I submitted Inkwell for iOS to Apple for review on April 21st. It has gone through numerous rejections, code changes, resubmissions, clarifications, one phone call, and one appeal to the review board, which I’m still waiting to hear back on. What’s the hold up? I’ve hinted a...

Fortnite is back in the App Store. From Tim Sweeney on X:

This is a critical moment in the battle against the App Store empire to win freedom for all developers and consumers, and we’ll continue the fight in every jurisdiction worldwide until competition is restored to digital stores and payment markets everywhere.

Upcoming accessibility improvements from Apple sound good. A natural use of LLMs. From MacStories:

Rather than requiring a defined set of commands that need to be memorized to control a device, the feature will allow users to invoke actions with natural language, such as, “Tap the orange folder.”

Nothing is better than listening to NBA podcasts the day after an epic Spurs win. What a game. 🏀

Absolutely incredible game. Spurs win in double OT. That long 3 from Wemby when they were down, the late block, dunk… Can’t believe that was only game 1. 🏀

In 2023 I started winding down use of the Twitter API after they moved to a $100/month developer plan. X has now switched to a $0.01/tweet pricing model for posting. I could add the feature back, with some limits, but not sure it is worth it. Somehow, X still trudges forward in some communities.

Debugging a glitch that only happens in WebKit, I briefly considered bundling Chromium into my app just to avoid the issue. But that would take the app from 10 MB to over 100 MB. Too many apps are so huge now.

The original Transformers movie from the 1980s is returning to theaters in remastered 4K. I will probably have to see this again. I’ll never forget the experience in the theater as a kid… It left quite an impression.

After all the drama, the jury decides that Elon Musk loses the OpenAI case because of the statute of limitations. Not quite as satisfying as a clear yes or no on merits, but I think it would’ve been the same.

From the judge: “There is a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury’s finding.”

Alexa+ can now generate audio conversations about any topic:

Alexa will pull together the relevant information, give you an overview of what it plans to cover, and let you adjust the length and direction conversationally before generating anything. Once you’re happy with the plan, Alexa creates a recording with AI-generated host voices.

Amazon shouldn’t call these podcasts. One of the strengths of real podcasts is the human connection we feel with the hosts. What Amazon has built is useful, to get an entertaining AI-generated report, but they should call it something else.

Listening to the latest The Talk Show with Adam Lisagor. Really fun conversation about using AI. But also a little painful whenever I hear how much someone is paying Anthropic… This is why the Zed + OpenAI news is a big deal, because it can use a ChatGPT subscription instead of paying per token.

Ben Thompson makes the case in today’s article that AI data centers should pay local residents, a sort of corporate-run UBI:

I do get how ridiculous this sounds, but ridiculous is how we do things in America.

🇺🇸

At the beginning of the NBA season, this was my guess to @cheesemaker about the standings. I thought Spurs at 3 might be a stretch. And here they are tonight at the west finals… Let’s go!

1. OKC
2. Lakers
3. Spurs
4. Rockets
5. Denver
6. Warriors
7. Wolves
8. Blazers
9. Clippers
10. Grizzlies

🏀

Rainbow on the drive home. 🌈

Fortune cookie. Unforeseen circumstances will pave the way for transformation.

Just noticed (and fixed) that I had accidentally put May 2027 in some of my release notes. The opposite of writing last year’s date on checks. 🤪

The new Siri will offer auto-deleting transcripts:

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the more chatbot-like Siri set to debut in iOS 27 will include the option to autodelete chat histories. Users will be able to save conversations for 30 days, one year, or forever.

It’s a trade-off. A short history will make for a slightly worse product. I feel like Apple is still catching up to where the tech was two years ago.

Thinking about John Gruber’s post about AI as a technology, not a product:

Does AI “threaten to disrupt the entire iPhone ecosystem”? It’s possible, but it doesn’t seem nearly as likely to me as Levy asserts. Changing the iPhone ecosystem? Sure — that’s already true. Obviating the iPhone ecosystem? I don’t see it.

To his later point about wireless networking, it’s true that wireless enabled a whole bunch of new mobile apps. But AI is not just a supporting technology. It’s inseparable from the new products that it enables. Makes sense to build new devices around AI assistants in particular.

Listed an item on Facebook Marketplace for the first time last week. May not do this again, it’s a lot to manage messages from dozens of people. Perhaps worse for something free because there’s no commitment, no follow-through. Kind of interesting view into Meta’s business, though.

Just released an update to Epilogue for iOS with some fixes and a better posts list, which now includes your movie and TV show blog posts.

Yellow flowers and crape myrtle. Yard work today for one of the last visits to my mom’s house.

Working on server upgrades. Hosting costs have ballooned out of control again, good opportunity to rethink the right balance of memory and storage. Some servers have really high uptime and can be replaced.

The New Yorker on the border wall in Texas around Big Bend:

The construction strikes many locals as both unreasonable and unstoppable. “You’ve got desert and high mountains and rugged, rough country and no water and no roads,” Bill Ivey, the president of the Brewster County Tourism Council, told me. “The easiest part of getting to the United States would be scaling the wall. We just don’t see people cross the border out here.”

OpenClaw is run like the bleeding-edge project you’d expect it to be. An excerpt from of a longer post by Peter Steinberger on X:

Part of what excites me so much about working on OpenClaw is that I’m trying to answer the question:

How would we build software in the future if tokens don’t matter?

We constant run ~100 codex in the cloud, reviewing every PR, every issue. If a fix on main lands, clawsweeper will eventually find that 6 month old issue and close it with an exact reference.

Spurs vs. Timberwolves game 6 tonight is going to be big. Nice article at ESPN on the organization’s culture and longevity:

On any given day at the facility, a current Spur can walk into a room filled with championship players from the past. It’s not uncommon to go to lunch and find Ginobili dining with three-time champion Bruce Bowen, whose No. 12 jersey is retired in San Antonio. Duncan, who once had a space in the coaches’ locker room at the old facility, is a fixture at the new spot, too, along with two-time champ and 10-time All-Star David Robinson and Sean Elliott…