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Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie, on Patreon being required by Apple to offer in-app subscriptions through their iOS app: But we also don’t think that Apple should be wholly blamed. This unfortunate situation, in which creators ultimately bear the biggest costs, is a s...

The new rule for journalists on Threads is big.

How big is it?

So big I got my first Fediverse reply, ever.

I had another morning of driving around so I listened to a bunch of podcasts about how the campaign is going, all good news for Democrats which of course makes me happy. The last podcast I listened to was Ezra Klein's interview with Nate Silver. I only listened to the first ...

The new rule for journalists is sweeping Threads and Mastodon. People have power we don’t use but could. We could turn off the interview after the first egregious lie, even if the reporters don't.

Nick Heer, writing at Pixel Envy: The 30% fee is also notable. As far as I can tell, only a handful of Patreon users would exceed the million-dollar annual threshold for Apple’s Small Business Program. That is, everyone who earns less than a million dollars per year thro...

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:

Despite Apple’s rules and policies, Patreon had existed in an odd sort of gray area, as some of its subscription-based offerings could be consumed in its app while others could not. Another possible reason for the Patreon exception was due to the fact that many users didn’t come to Patreon itself to discover creators and content, Patreon CEO Jack Conte told tech news site The Verge in 2021. Instead, the discovery took place through other channels. Though the company admitted it didn’t have any sort of special contract with Apple to avoid the App Store fees, the app had been able to skirt Apple’s in-app billing requirements for some time.

It wasn’t good that Patreon existed in an unofficial gray zone. But it’s hard to see how this is better for anyone, including Apple.

Patreon: As we first announced last year, Apple is requiring that Patreon use their in-app purchasing system and remove all other billing systems from the Patreon iOS app by November 2024. This has two major consequences for creators: Apple will be applying their 30% ...

The new rule is getting a great response on Threads, Mastodon.

New from the Steve Jobs Archive: an hourlong video of young Steve Jobs delivering a talk on design in 1983. Jony Ive wrote a splendid introduction:

The revolution Steve described over 40 years ago did of course happen, partly because of his profound commitment to a kind of civic responsibility. He cared, way beyond any sort of functional imperative. His was a victory for beauty, for purity and, as he would say, for giving a damn. He truly believed that by making something useful, empowering and beautiful, we express our love for humanity.

When the NYT makes Trump sound like a reasonable candidate that a sane person might vote for, remember this day.

Speaking of which, I must've converted DocServer some time ago and didn't test it well enough. It didn't even load. Oy. It works now.

I listened to a bunch of podcasts this morning about how freaked out Trump is. I wonder if they realize that if a president freaks out over something like this, how would he handle a Cuban Missile Crisis? He'll panic. Remember the phone call that comes at 3AM? We saw what he did with COVID, he froze, like he's freezing now.

A new rule for journalists. End the interview on the first egregious lie. Turn the lights out, switch off the recorder, get up and leave. And your report should state clearly that this is why the interview was terminated. It never should have been tolerated in the first place.

When Google tells you it's easy to convert a site to HTTPS they're wrong. It's an insurmountable job for scripting.com. 30 years of writing is on that domain, lots of different runtimes on lots of different domains which would also have to be converted. Images in all the pages. All that breaks when you flip the switch, which would be easy. I can't walk away from a big part of my life's work. Sorry, not for Google. Every time someone assumes I'm to blame for this situation, that's how Google has tricked you. I followed the rules. They broke them.

A lot of people are thinking that Threads is the new "nice" version of The Original Twitter, but folks, that's pure bullshit -- remember who owns Threads and ask yourself if you want that dude to be in charge of our political organizing network. We need something better.

Idea for a neat product from Automattic or really anyone: Configure WordPress for writing a book, hook it up to an AI service that can always turn that site into prose, reorganized into chapters, however you'd like, on demand, in an instant. You could use an outliner to arrange the table of contents and it could automatically generate a back of the book index. Technologically I think today's AI is ready to do this, just needs to be packaged. Charge a fair price for the service, esp at the beginning it would totally be worth it. Who knows where it would lead. I bet a lot of writers would use it, I certainly would.

I carry two phones, an iPhone 13 Pro and a Pixel 6 Pro. The latter is my main phone, and I prefer it to the Apple phone, not sure why, it's what I use for most things. I need the iPhone because I use an Apple Watch. Lately there's been some trouble with the screen on the Pix...

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. Start selling to enterprise customers with just a few lines of code. Ship complex features like SSO and SCIM (pronounced skim) provisioning in minutes instead of months.

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For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.

From now on, until further notice, when I feel like watching some mind-numbing "news" program, I'm going to have a look at the Kamala Harris channel on YouTube. I don't mind doing hard work, I just don't want to hear what the NYT-centered media has to say because it's all bullshit. If I have to listen to nonstop bullshit, I'd rather hear from people who tell me we can have a bright future, than the usual NYT-spawned bullshit. It's just bullshit. I'm tired of bullshit. That's all I have to say about bullshit for now at least. Have a nice day.