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Marcin Wichary, writing at Unsung (which is just an incredibly good and fun weblog): Half of my education in URLs as user interface came from Flickr in the late 2000s. Its URLs looked like this: flickr.com/photos/mwichary/favorites flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets flickr...

Also in this new edition of Hedgehog, another, shorter piece by me on how not to save the planet. Sample:

This marks for me my problem in reading [Jonathan] Schell and [Bill] McKibben: My “slow, unreckoning heart” is unable to keep up with the abstractions of “the Earth” or “Nature.” It needs something smaller to capture its power of affection. Schell himself wrote at the outset of The Fate of the Earth that “in spite of the immeasurable importance of nuclear weapons, the world has declined, on the whole, to think about them very much. We have thus far failed to fashion, or to discover within ourselves, an emotional or intellectual or political response to them.” Precisely.

I wrote last month about the announcement economy, where bombast and news releases are meant to dominate news cycles. Being right or wrong doesn’t matter. Whether the money actually arrives is a different question entirely. OpenAI’s $110 billion funding round is the purest example yet. We (including me) are talking about the headline number, regardless …

During the most recent episode of The Talk Show, Jason Snell brought up a weird issue that I started running into last year. On my Mac, sometimes I’d drag an image out of a web page in Safari, and I’d get an image in WebP format. Sometimes I wouldn’t care. But usually when I...

Jesper, writing at Take:

My hope is that Macintosh is not just one of these empires that was at the height of its power and then disintegrated because of warring factions, satiated and uncurious rulers, and droughts for which no one was prepared, ruining crops no one realized were essential for survival.

My hope is that there remains a primordial spark, a glimpse of genius, to rediscover, to reconnect to — to serve not annual trends or constant phonification, but the needs of the user to use the computer as a tool to get something done.

New issue of The Hedgehog Review out today, with an essay by me trying to outline the conditions under which a new understanding of humanism might be forged and sustained. I’ve been thinking and writing on this topic for several years now, and this essay is my best attempt to map the territory.

Julien Khaleghy, CEO of SerpApi: Google thinks it owns the internet. That’s the subtext of its lawsuit against SerpApi, the quiet part that it’s suddenly decided to shout out loud. The problem is, no one owns the internet. And the law makes that clear. In January, we pr...

The title is a little over the top, but barely — we have two fantastic talks this Thursday (March 5) that you should go to. (I’ll be there!) Laura Savino will present “Learn Out Loud”: As devs today, we’re supposed to demonstrate immediate skills in tools whose confi...

Ben Thompson, writing at Stratechery: In fact, Amodei already answered the question: if nuclear weapons were developed by a private company, and that private company sought to dictate terms to the U.S. military, the U.S. would absolutely be incentivized to destroy that c...

Amrith Ramkumar, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Trump’s announcement came shortly before the Pentagon’s Friday afternoon deadline for Anthropic to agree to let the military use its models in all lawful-use cases, a concession the company had refused t...

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

A seasonal color refresh arrived today for a variety of Apple accessories, including iPhone cases, Apple Watch bands, and the Crossbody Strap. All of the accessories in the latest colors are available to order on Apple.com starting today.

Apple Newsroom: Apple today announced the new iPad Air featuring M4 and more memory, giving users a big jump in performance at the same starting price. With a faster CPU and GPU, iPad Air boosts tasks like editing and gaming, and is a powerful device for AI with a faster...

11:35AM I wrote some stuff in the comment section thinking I'd paste them in here, but that didn't work. But if you've been reading my blog you've heard it all before. 11:14AM They have a new format which includes "tables" for up to six different participants. It's a go...

Apple Newsroom: Apple today announced iPhone 17e, a powerful and more affordable addition to the iPhone 17 lineup. At the heart of iPhone 17e is the latest-generation A19, which delivers exceptional performance for everything users do. iPhone 17e also features C1X, the l...

Very happy to welcome my old friend, John Palfrey, back to the web. I added his feed to my blogroll on scripting.com. His first new piece is about his experience at the AI Action Summit in February, in Delhi. He was executive director at Berkman when I was there in the early 00s. It feels like the old band is getting back together. ;-)

A few years ago Reclaim Hosting (which hosts my big blog) decided to increase protections against hacking, so if I try to refresh the blog in MarsEdit it shuts everything down for an hour, making the blog inaccessible to readers as well as to me as editor. I like using MarsEdit to back up my blog to my computer, but I can no longer to that. Similarly, we’re about to change banks because our current bank repeatedly declines to honor obviously legitimate charges, like purchases at our local grocery store. I understand the need to protect against fraud, but not to the point at which a service regularly becomes completely unusable.

Where does my first name (Anton) come from? This weekend I explored the public archives a bit. Thanks to open data efforts, these days a lot of public archives are online and made fully searchable. The trigger was a conversation with Y about first names and being named after someone else (Y’s second name is […]

Watched: The Awful Truth. Not only the movie in which Cary Grant became CARY GRANT, it’s the very best of the Hollywood screwball comedies. I watch it almost every year. 🍿

Dylan McDonald: The Charge Limit feature, which lets you set a maximum charge to help extend battery health, was previously only available on iPhone and iPad. […] Additionally, the new iOS 26.4 and macOS 26.4 betas bring Charge Limit to the Shortcuts app. I like the current feature to automatically restore the charge limit the […]

Glenn Fleishman: And yet. And yet. When you desperately want the digital jingle bell to sound off on a particular device, my goodness, what a fuss that might be. Quick: Without picking up your iPhone, tell me how you configure an alarm in the Clock app to trigger on your Apple Watch when you’re wearing […]