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Finished reading: The Dark Bible: Cultures of Interpretation in Early Modern England by Alison Knight. A fascinating book, about which I hope to write when life is less crazy. 📚

Gil Durán, posting on Bluesky:

It’s official! I’m permanently banned from X for tweeting “TLDR: Fascism.” (appeal denied)

“TLDR: Fascism” was Durán’s two-word response to this 1,000-word essay from Palantir describing their vision for a “Technological Republic”. (Alternative link to essay if you don’t want to visit x.com.)

Getting perma-banned from Twitter/X by Elon Musk gives Durán a nice Streisand-effect boost to promote his upcoming new book, The Nerd Reich. If the book is even half as good as its title it should be a bestseller.

I don’t want to spoil any of this story from David Gelphman, which he wrote back in 2013, but which I only came across this week had read so long ago I’d forgotten it. Go read it. But before you do, one bit of context you should keep in mind is that the original iPad was unveiled at a special Apple event on 27 January 2010, but it didn’t ship until early April. Gelphman’s story takes place in that interregnum.

There is no point getting any more outraged or disgusted at Meta for firing the Kenyan contractors who exposed the privacy fiasco of AI Glasses than you already were in the first place. They had to fire them.

Apple calls this OS version Tahoe because Lake Tahoe is on the Nevada border and you’re basically gambling with your computing life when you use this OS.

I have a single page site with all the WordPress news. Bookmark it. Here's the OPML subscription list, import it into your feed reader, get the news as you like it. WordPress is an amazing platform with a blogging community that we just can't see. And once we're listening, more will appear. It's a great idea exchange platform. So -- are there any great WordPress news feeds we're missing? Please share here.

First, a short apology. I was unable to send the newsletter last weekend. Life and sniffles got in the way — OM As has been the case lately, I have been writing a bit too much about AI, and its two most visible examples, Anthropic and OpenAI, either on their own, or as a counterpoint …

Just got my new Mac Mini, and, since it has Tahoe installed, I had to “upgrade” my MacBook to Tahoe in order to use Migration Assistant. I now have two shockingly buggy Macs. I’m on the newest version, and can’t quite believe how little Apple has done to fix bugs that have been reported since Tahoe came out.

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Everyone is working on something with Claude.

Heard on the internets ad nauseum. "I know how to do what you do much better than you do."

I was just marveling with Claude about how well all the pieces are fitting together, two databases, connected by an RSS 2.0 feed and a websocket pipe had to agree on how to communicate the same object. Worked the first time. Small pieces loosely joined.

Apple (transcript, MacRumors, Hacker News): The Company posted quarterly revenue of $111.2 billion, up 17 percent year over year. Diluted earnings per share was $2.01, up 22 percent year over year. “Today Apple is proud to report our best March quarter ever, with revenue of $111.2 billion and double-digit growth across every geographic segment,” said […]

Ryan Christoffel (Reddit): Apple recently announced an AI partnership with Google. But reporting indicates the company initially pursued deals with other companies, including Anthropic. Based on new comments from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, it’s easy to see why. Gurman, speaking on TBPN, said the following: Apple runs on Anthropic at this point. Anthropic is powering a […]

Jess Weatherbed (Hacker News): All empires eventually fall, and it seems the creative software industry has collectively decided that Adobe’s time has come. […] Pricing in particular has given competitors an opening to attack. Some of the best alternatives aren’t just undercutting Adobe’s price — they’re available for free. People love free. […] Perhaps coincidently, […]

Scoble asks on Twitter if there are successful companies that have an open source product. There are lots of them. There are markets where users and developers won't even consider your product or service if it isn't open source. It's a trust issue. I offered an example, WordPress, which probably wouldn't have launched well if it wasn't open source.

Knicks will play the Sixers in round 2 of the playoffs starting Monday.

I've been teaching Claude why we favor Markdown. "We add support for Markdown editing wherever we can, because people like Markdown and they should. It makes things simple and guarantees a certain level of flexibility for their writing far beyond the standards of twitter-like systems with tiny little text boxes. If you don't really support Markdown people figure it out right away. But the character limits and stuff like that seem more technical to users. Markdown support says clearly -- you're really on the web."

Something weird happens as you get older, you walk into a room and see a friend but at first you don't get that this is your friend. Instead you see an old man or lady. Your attention goes away because like everyone you are programmed not to look at old people. Then you instantly realize this is your friend. You put on the virtual colored glasses that let you see them as you remember them, instead of what's there today.

On Bluesky: I asked ChatGPT when weblogs.com peaked.