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Anthropic has posted a more technical explanation of watermarking. This analogy with Monopoly made me laugh:
On each turn, each player moves a random number of spaces around the board according to the roll of a die. Suppose that, instead of rolling the die to get this randomness, we decided to use a book of the digits of pi.
Replied to Apple about the latest rejection, including a video of where to find features in the app. I think app review is clearly overwhelmed or has new hires that are confused about obvious things. The whole system needs to be rethought. What sort of worked in 2008 no longer works.
John Voorhees has an initial look at ChatGPT’s Computer History feature. I enabled it this morning, but only for a few select apps like my web browser and text editors. It works well. I think I’ll keep it disabled for chat apps, since that’s a privacy can of worms that I’m not comfortable with yet.
I’ve made the first round of improvements to Micro.blog’s somewhat-complicated Sources page, now called Connections. A few things have been moved around and renamed. Should generally be a little simpler. Probably more to do later!
Craig Mod using AI to research his family history:
The article she saw, that led to that decision, that led to me having “Michael” as a middle name on my original birth certificate. A scan of the newspaper was in some obscure database and Claude ran it down like a pack of bloodhounds digging up a sack of livers in the backyard.
Congrats to Marco Arment on releasing his new app, Unforgetful! I love this part of the intro blog post:
Despite constantly being told that I’d never get a good job, computers provided a lucrative career path filled with even worse academic performers who couldn’t care less about my grades. What a stroke of luck! I’d be mediocre to terrible at most jobs, but I turned out to be very good at using computers to turn coffee and Phish into money.
Even for developers who’ve had some success, releasing a new app is no small thing. The app was hung up in app review for a while too.
Apple has proposed to the court a 15% link-out fee, 5% for small businesses. Still too high. The correct percentage for linking to a website is 0%.
Fun video with John Pomeroy talking to Andreas Deja and Aaron Blaise and Beauty and the Beast and Lion King. Some neat stories I hadn’t heard before.
We’ve rolled out a big update to listening to audio in the Micro.blog timeline. If you start listening to a podcast episode, it can now keep playing it in the corner as you scroll the timeline or browse other parts of Micro.blog. Thanks @vincent for all the work on this! It just looks way better.
ShieldFont is very clever, using a custom font to visually change what humans see vs. what bots see. But I strongly feel we shouldn’t make the web worse to combat AI. This font will break accessibility, search, and all sorts of other things.
Heads-up for Micro.blog folks: I’m been thinking about feedback on the poorly-named “Sources” section of Micro.blog. It used to be called “Sources & Cross-posting”, which was slightly better. Leaning toward a rename to “Connections” with sub-pages for inbound RSS and cross-posting.
Wavelength 2.0 was rejected for a second time. I don’t even know what to do with Apple anymore. Do I need to switch to Android and Linux? App review is so deflating.
Meanwhile the Epic case has dragged on nearly five years. Apple got another 24-hour delay today.
Both the web and Mac versions of Micro.blog were updated today with auto-saving drafts. If you start writing a longer post, Micro.blog will quietly save a draft to the server. This makes it less likely to lose any text if something goes wrong. For manually saved drafts, Micro.blog will still keep track of each version if you need to roll back.
I’ve tried to design it so that it gets out of your way:
I also fixed a few bugs in the Mac version. See the full release notes or download the latest version on the help page.
Linking to a post from Daniel Jalkut about fixing things, Caleb Hailey blogged:
Will more people than ever before write software, or make websites, or even make an app? Yes!
Will a significant portion of these new developers go back to paying for the very same apps they hoped to replace after they realize how much time they are spending fixing things? Also yes.
Tesla might be finally doing something good again. TechCrunch reports:
Tesla intends to build a massive solar panel factory 45 minutes southwest of Houston, according to documents filed with the state of Texas. […] The factory would create about 9,700 full-time jobs, Tesla said.
Solar is so obvious for Texas. If this helps get the costs down, good things will happen. At least I like it better than their plan to build robots.
Took a little time to go through most of my podcasts in Overcast, unsubscribing from a bunch of shows that I no longer listen to regularly. I have a “Favorites” playlist that shows recent episodes from select shows. Also: most podcasts are just too long now.
Ben Thompson goes philosophical about the Claude watermarking:
What the E.U. is doing is stealing the last thing humans have — creation — and demanding it be bundled with substantiation, effectively giving AI the credit. That the human gave AI the text to proofread — or even the prompt to generate writing — doesn’t matter to the bureaucrats.
Apologies to blog readers who are sick of all the AI-related posts! New Micro.blog stuff coming later today.
Is anyone else surprised that Gemini has 1 billion users? I’ve only met one person who uses it instead of ChatGPT or Claude. But maybe I don’t know enough Android users. People go along with whatever defaults they’re given… Browser, maps, AI.
One day I’m going to work up the courage to ask AI to rewrite every old jQuery call to use simple DOM manipulation and fetch instead. But not today.
After some bug fix juggling that wasn’t going anywhere, decided to throw a problem at GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra, which I had never used before because it churns through tokens quickly. It spun up a few subagents to handle different facets of the problem. Fascinating.
John Gruber isn’t buying the Claude watermarking either:
What happens if you copy my text and quote it in something you write, by hand? Now you’ve got a watermark in your prose, invisible characters or something, that implicates that your prose is AI-generated? Even though you didn’t use AI and just copy and pasted text from me? Madness.
Maybe the watermark won’t work on short sections of text, like a blockquote, because there aren’t enough words to detect a pattern (unless every word is shifted with the algorithm, which seems insane). But who knows, because how it really works is a secret.
Following up on my comment yesterday, I now have Codex → OpenClaw working, so I can chat with my bot in the same place I have other AI chats. Codex wrote a plugin for itself to handle the connection, plus some setup on the OpenClaw server. 🤖
I don’t like the Claude watermark announcement. For images, yes, watermarks are important. “A picture is worth a thousand words” and there’s too much of a chance for misinformation. For text, it’s more complicated, as essays will often be 95% human, with AI-assisted edits.
Great episode of Dithering this morning. I’ve been wondering about the Apple / Google partnership too, with Google falling behind. I think Siri AI will be a good release, but it’s not really in the same ballpark as the frontier models. Try GPT-Live sometime.
I’ve now read more of OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the Apple lawsuit. This part sums it up:
Instead of pleading facts showing misappropriation, Apple recasts the benign, lawful conduct of former employees—who in many of the cited instances were in fact trying to help Apple, at Apple’s request, by making sure their former colleagues’ work could continue without them—as theft of so-called trade secrets. The proffered “trade secrets” are not specific, protectable information at all; they are generic categories of the product-development process…
It supports my original hot take.
People worry about AI bots overloading servers, but in my experience the dumb requests for potential security holes are much worse. Bots trying to get into non-existent files like htpasswd, wp-admin.php, etc. Servers getting hammered today.
Another section from Mark Zuckerberg’s essay:
For example, in Richland Parish, Louisiana, where Meta is building a large data center, teachers received a $50,000 bonus this year because of the increased tax revenue from our investment. The superintendent told us that teachers are now moving there from across the country and he believes it will become one of the nation’s best school districts.
This sounds like Ben Thompson’s argument to just give people money. If you think of data centers as intelligence factories, paying teachers more is actually perfect.
Mark Zuckerberg has a long essay today, basically an expansion of the op-ed he wrote recently. On personal agents:
It will have strong privacy and security options so you can trust it to handle all of your personal content knowing that no one else can access your information, similar to how encryption works on WhatsApp. You’ll be able to interact with your agent through any device, including your glasses to keep you present in the moment with the people you care about.
Practically in the same breath: privacy and AI glasses! People just don’t trust Meta with this.
I would use OpenClaw more if the chat interface was built directly into Codex. My little bot mostly goes unused because it’s so disconnected from other workflows. I’ve thought about hacking around this… No elegant solutions.
