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I didn't read the WSJ story about the deflation of expertise, quoting Vinod Khosla, Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who I know from my time in California. He says AI leads to a deflation of expertise. I agree with him, AI absolutely deflates the value of expertise. It ag...

Overall the iPhone 16 Pro Max is amazing. A couple minor gripes:

• Camera button is a little hard to get used to because it’s not raised. Too easy to accidentally change the zoom.
• Apps will randomly crash to a black screen and spinner. I’ve never seen this on iOS before. Maybe 18.1 beta eating RAM?

I don’t like captchas and will never force them on my customers. With AI, captchas will become increasingly useless anyway. See also, John Mulaney: “I’ve devised a question no robot could ever answer…Which of these pictures does not have a stop sign in it?”

I didn't like the code ChatGPT was writing for me, so I tried it in Claude, and the code is much closer to my style. I may try that again. I've heard it's better at supporting code than other chatbots.

Here’s what the new prompt for email newsletter subscriptions looks like for your blog. The extra step lets us generate some random values hidden from real users, inspired by this post from Jeremy Keith, to make it a tiny bit harder for bots. Could do more later now that this is in place.

Think I figured out my high bounce and complaint rate for email sending. Spammers are trying to (probably accidentally) sign up to customer’s newsletters with fake email addresses. Working on making it harder for bots to navigate this.

Israel’s series of military successes against its longtime adversary Hezbollah had raised the question of whether the militant group’s backer, Iran, would retaliate. On Tuesday, that question was answered, when Iran fired a barrage of missiles at Israel. Patrick Kingsley, th...

At the vice-presidential debate, the CBS News moderators fact-checked one of JD Vance’s lies—and that was all it took to trigger an epic attack on CBS from Donald Trump and his MAGA allies. Which highlights a larger story: The degree to which Trump’s campaign is built on an immense superstructure of endless, shameless lying. Bullying the media into not fact checking Trump and Vance is essential to that project. We talked to Jamison Foser, who writes about the media and the right on his Finding Gravity Substack, about the ways our institutions are capitulating to authoritarian attacks and threats—and what can be done in response. 
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SERIES 3 EPISODE 41: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: “Make them riot,” a man described by Jack Smith as a Trump campaign employee, agent, and co-conspirator, his identity redacted, replaced by the ID number “P-5,” informs a colleague on the gro...

And honestly, I can’t help but feel like it’s only gotten uglier and harder to defend. WordPress and its parent company, Automattic, are still fighting with WP Engine, and it hasn’t gotten any nicer.

TL;DR: Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, co-founder of WordPress, and single point of failure for WordPress.org is trying to bully me with legal threats over my commentary regarding his recent behavior.

We just shipped an update to Strata for iOS, our private notes app for Micro.blog, with Android to follow later in the week. This adds a QR code scanning option to get your secret key moved over from another platform. For Apple folks, it also syncs the key via iCloud, but nice to have options.

Counting down to 30.

IT WOULD BE AMAZING IF IN THE LAST WEEKS OF THE CAMPAIGN JOURNAILSTS DECIDED THEY CARE ABOUT OUR COUNTRY AND THE REST OF THE WORLD AND START REPORTING THE TRUTH ABOUT THIS ELECTION AND HOPE FOR THE BEST IF TRUMP IS ELECTED. OTHERWISE THE ONLY HONORABLE CHOICE IS TO QUIT.

 As our centennial series continues, Kenneth Wald, professor of political science at the University of Florida and the author of several books, including the forthcoming The Ghosts on the Wall: A Grandson's Memoir of the Holocaust (Amsterdam Publishers, November 9, 2024), talks about the past 100 years of history the Jewish vote in the United States.

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Meredith Lee Hill, food and agriculture policy reporter for Politico, offers analysis of the vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance.

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I have been looking for this picture of John Palfrey, and just found it via digging through the archive for September 2004.

Every week, Mayor Adams holds one off-topic press conference in which reporters are free to ask questions on any subject. Elizabeth Kim, Gothamist and WNYC reporter, recaps this week's news conference—the first since the mayor's indictment—with clips and analysis.

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Thinking about the difference between companies who use AI to make existing features better and companies who try to rethink everything. I’ve been using the iOS 18.1 beta for a while. I don’t think Apple really believes in AI the way OpenAI, Anthropic, or Microsoft do. See Microsoft’s memo from Mustafa Suleyman:

This is a new era of technology that doesn’t just “solve problems”, it’s there to support you, teach you, help you. In this sense, Copilots really are different to that last wave of the web and mobile. This is the beginning of a fundamental shift in what’s possible for all of us.

It has been pointed out that this blog will be 30 years old on October 7, not October 10, as I had previously reported. The clock at the bottom of story pages is correct. It currently reads: 29 years, 11 months, 25 days, 19 hours, 1 minute, 34 seconds.