I installed iOS 27 on my phone, but holding off on the Mac. I don’t want to interfere with my Xcode workflow and shipping apps. Still on the waitlist for Siri AI.

A wonderful post from Federico Viticci about WWDC this year.

Amy Klobuchar and Chuck Grassley introduced an updated version of their bill today that attempts to control the anti-competitive behavior of large platforms. I asked Codex to download previous versions of the bill so I could understand the changes in the latest version. Here...

Floyd Norman will receive an honorary Oscar. From Cartoon Brew:

Norman, 90, became the first Black artist hired on a long-term basis at Walt Disney Studios in 1956. During his initial run at the studio, he worked on features including Sleeping Beauty, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Sword in the Stone, and The Jungle Book, where he was part of Walt Disney’s story team.

I’ve blogged about Floyd a couple of times over the years. I just noticed that his blog is now showing up as “expired” on Squarespace. This is why on Micro.blog when you stop paying, we keep hosting your blog indefinitely.

More negative reaction from Salvatore Sanfilippo on X to Fable blocking certain questions:

I believe what Anthropic is doing, gating the ability to do certain harmless things like LLM research, and with incredibly sensitive filters that even medical questions are often blocked, is deeply wrong. They got open research, the Transformer, GPT2, …

Anthropic has walked back the part of this where they secretly rerouted LLM-related requests to avoid detection.

Micro.blog 4.0 is out today, our latest app for macOS. For day to day blogging, I think this is the best experience for Mac users. Here’s another screenshot of the new Categories pane.

I think I’ve gotten enough feedback about the Micro.blog beta for Mac. Going to just release it to everyone. The local AI has high requirements so won’t be widely used, maybe until macOS 27 ships, but there are lots of other good improvements.

Quoted on Simon Willison’s blog, part of an X thread from Jeremy Howard about Fable:

Anthropic has chosen the opposite of the safe path: they are allowing themselves, the current top lab, to use their top model for frontier AI research. They’ve said they’ll sabotage others who try.

The morning after a Spurs lose, my mood is low and my cynicism is high.

Aaron Sorkin is great so I’m of course looking forward to The Social Reckoning. Great job capturing Mark Zuckerberg’s voice too. Only nitpick with the trailer is the music makes it feel overly dramatized, which shouldn’t be necessary because the truth is already pretty bad.

Stunned. Seriously cannot believe it. I’m torn between wondering if maybe this just isn’t the Spurs’ year to also believing they can win the next three games. 🏀

Spurs usually start strong but this first quarter is especially good. Opening a 20-point lead early gets the crowd out of the game. Let’s go! Gotta hold on to it. 🏀

Michael Tsai blogs about the EU not accepting Apple’s proposal for a Trusted Agent System that might take 18 months develop:

It’s not surprising that the EU would reject that proposal. The App Store doesn’t approve apps that flout the guidelines but promise to comply later. It doesn’t even entertain proposals of the form, “If I built this would it be approved?”

After WWDC is always a good time to reflect on priorities. This year’s event for me was about refinements and focus.

On the technical side, I’m hoping to use Apple Foundation Models as a fallback when bigger models can’t be used. But since my Mac app is outside the App Store, I’ll be limited too, apparently without private cloud compute.

Congrats to Apple on a good week. The reaction I heard from folks seemed overwhelmingly positive. Onward! There’s a lot to work on.

Thinking about a point raised by Joanna Stern and Nilay Patel at The Talk Show last night, that regular people may not totally get the privacy of Apple’s private cloud compute. Will they trust it more than giving personal context to ChatGPT? All these years of Apple ads about privacy should help.

Excellent Stratechery update this morning about Fable and more broadly how Anthropic’s “only we can be trusted” messaging also helps their business:

It’s fascinating to observe: me, the rational business analyst, sees a hard-nosed but understandable business decision to cut off would-be competitors; Anthropic employees and advocates, the true believers, see a regrettable but understandable safety decision that ensures that responsible and thoughtful people — themselves, of course — will be the ones guiding our AGI future.

Bustling downtown San Jose.

OpenAI published an article about the company’s high-level plan for AI, written by Sam Altman and Jakub Pachocki. There are themes in it that will be familiar for anyone following OpenAI closely this year. This passage feels a little new:

Entirely automating everything is not the future we want. It would be unfulfilling, and it would be dangerous. AI should help people pursue their goals, not become untethered from them.

The Talk Show Live is tonight. I’ll be there. Not too late for tickets if you’re in the area. John Gruber blogs:

If you can make it in person, you should come. The California Theater is a beautiful big theater and tickets are still available.

Catching up on more of Apple’s new AI architecture. Finally have some clarity that the sort of default Apple Foundation Models will run on Apple servers. The most capable “Pro” model will run on Nvidia chips in Google Cloud. Seems like a reasonable way to split things up.

Myke Hurley blogged a very optimistic take about Siri AI:

I fully understand I may be in that WWDC Glow right now when it comes to Siri AI. I want to preface this before I say what I am about to say, which is that I imagine that after Siri AI ships later in the year, I will not have much need for any of the general-purpose chatbots like Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, or others.

I don’t see this at all. But everyone is different, and Siri AI should be fairly popular.

I’ve posted an update to the Micro.blog 4.0 beta for Mac. You can download the new version here. There’s no “Check for Updates” for the beta. It improves bookmarking and also adds collecting anonymous machine stats for the first time, so we can have a better sense of what Macs people are using.

Haiku, Sonnet, Opus, Mythos, Fable. I’m not a fan of Anthropic’s business but I’m a fan of their names. So nice.

Instead of thinking about on-device models and cloud models, a better framing for Apple vs. everyone else is on-device context and cloud context. Apple is focused on apps, privacy, and security, at the expense of speed and universal access anywhere. There can’t really be a w...

Congrats to the Iconfactory on 30 years! 🎉

I’m impressed with what Apple has come up with their most advanced on-device model. From the Machine Learning blog:

Built on cutting-edge Apple research, this 20-billion-parameter model uses a sparse architecture, activating just 1 to 4 billion parameters at a time depending on the request.

Long day but really good day. Felt like it had a little bit of everything. Still coming down after that Spurs game, really good. Tomorrow need to unpack a little more of what I glossed over during the WWDC announcements.

Go Spurs Go! Big game in NY. Found a sports bar to watch a little while in San Jose. Mostly Knicks fans here but a few Spurs fans here. 🏀

OpenAI announces draft S-1 in an oddly direct, brief blog post:

We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it. We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company.

Catching up from yesterday’s post from John Gruber about SwiftUI:

There’s something really wrong with SwiftUI. Amongst the apps I use, the best example is Apple Journal. Basic stuff that’s worked reliably for decades — some things that heretofore had worked forever — are dangerously broken.

Apple should’ve unified AppKit and UIKit years ago. SwiftUI could be purely a wrapper for the core framework, plus support for watchOS. Maybe too late to correct this now.

Seeing this screenshot on Mastodon from Finn Voorhees, sounds like Apple doesn’t want big companies to use private cloud compute. Which means it probably won’t even work with Mac apps like mine that are distributed outside the App Store. Apple’s going to lock this down.