FeedCity

The snails have returned! And I shared some recent snail mail in the newsletter.

Taegan Goddard, quoting the Financial Times last week: The Pentagon said President Trump’s Iran war has cost the United States at least $25 billion, driven primarily by the military’s use of munitions, the Financial Times reports. The New York Times had an interesting ...

You might think it counterintuitive that a movement obsessed with software would be spearheading a severe decline in the design quality of software, but in Patel’s definition, there’s no concept of software as art, as a practice, as a craft. Software brain is purely an obsession with software as a medium in and of itself. A means with no consideration for the end.

Adam Engst: What I didn’t know until recently is that Apple provides a hidden—but documented, amazingly!—way to export your replacement pairs to a property list file. All you have to do is select the items to export (Command-A selects all) and drag them to the desktop. You can then edit that file in a text […]

John Gruber: I know that sounds like a joke but I really do think the biggest problem with the Touch Bar wasn’t that the first crack at it wasn’t good enough, but that they never took a second crack at it. One could argue that the second crack was adding the physical Esc key. That […]

Goichi Hirakawa: Compatible with Mac with Apple Silicon [i.e. doesn’t require Rosetta]. Updated the app icon. Improved compatibility with macOS Tahoe. Previously: Ending macOS Intel Support GyazMail 1.7

Jason Snell (complete commentary): There weren’t too many radical changes in this year’s survey. Respondents are most positive about Apple’s hardware, with another strong score honoring its commitment to security and privacy. And optimism about the future of Apple in the enterprise skyrocketed, up half a point to tie for second-highest score in the survey. […]

Craig Mod (Hacker News): The iPad should be radically (though obviously) touch-only. No keyboards. No pointers. No mice. No trackpads. Just your disgusting fingers flopping over the screen and mooshing into icons. It should not have any window’d modes. Each app should fill the whole screen and only the whole screen. […] iPadOS shouldn’t be […]

David Smith, “Six Years Perfecting Maps on watchOS”: I love going on wilderness adventures. I am rarely happier than when I am far off into the mountains without a soul in sight. As a result, I have spent a lot of time learning how to safely explore and navigate when I’m...

It's interesting what Jeremy Herve and Matthias Pfefferle at Automattic have created with the WordPress feed reader, hooking it up to Activity Pub and AT Proto, the same way they hooked up those protocols to the standard WordPress blogging functionality (not sure how technically accurate this is). They're also supporting the Google Reader api for users of products like NetNewsWire.

Jeff Bezos is of course one of the biggest names in tech, but he doesn't have much of a public personality. I saw him speak in the early days of Amazon, and in that role, he came off as a great but controversial entrepreneur (he had no interest in profits). He spoke fast, had a weird laugh, but totally fit the part. Not sure about today as he pivots to being a personality, with his wife in every picture with him. Did the real Bezos get lost in there somewhere?

Ethan Ding:

the productivity gains from coding agents are not evenly distributed. they’re split along a k-shape: senior engineers are getting meaningfully more productive. junior engineers are, at best, treading water. at worst, they’re getting worse. 

This is exactly what we should expect. You have to be experienced (as a coder, as a researcher, as a thinker) to discern hallucinations and fakery. Only experience will make that alarm bell ring in your head. Younger and less experienced coders/scholars/writers will uncritically accept whatever their preferred chatbot offers them, and that will all too often lead them into more and more profound errors. 

If you’re building B2B SaaS, especially AI, you quickly need enterprise features like SSO, SCIM, and audit logs. Your developers shouldn’t waste cycles rebuilding that infrastructure. Free them to focus on what sets you apart.

WorkOS gives you production-ready APIs for auth and access control that integrate directly into your product. Trusted by over 2,000 companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel.

Build faster with WorkOS →

Nick Heer: If you do a little poking around in Adobe’s application bundles, a key reason for the jankiness of these user interfaces becomes apparent: it is because they are little webpages. These dialog boxes are HTML files that reference a chunky CSS file and oodles of ...

Chess Peace — a new iOS game by Sam Shepherd — is my kind of logic puzzle. Each puzzle is a board with a few unplaced chess pieces. To solve you need to place all the pieces so that none of them attack each other. There’s a timer if you care, but I don’t. (And you can hide the clock.) Clever name too: the pieces need to be ... at peace with each other. You can download Chess Peace and try it out free of charge, and it’s just a one-time payment of $7 to unlock everything. Great simple premise, really well implemented.

Paul Thurrott:

I may or may not write and publish a short e-book about Markdown sometime this year, most likely as part of a monthly focus. But l’ve written small parts of it already, as I do, and I figured it might be interesting for at least some readers. And so here’s an early draft of an introductory chapter that may or may not be called “On writing.” We’ll see.

It’s odd how things turn out in life. Thurrott’s and my careers are almost uniquely parallel, but have seldom intersected. This book would have been a very surprising outcome to me, if you’d told me about it 20 years ago. Sort of a fun outcome, though, and I must admit to being curious what comes of it.

The fact that Paul Graham personally has billions of dollars at stake with OpenAI doesn’t mean that his public opinion on Sam Altman’s trustworthiness and leadership is invalid. But it certainly seems like the sort of thing that ought to be disclosed when quoting Graham as an Altman character reference.

The New York Times, back in March last year (gift link): To win the artificial intelligence race, Google not only has developed its own technologies, but has also pumped money into prominent A.I. start-ups. And to preserve its competitive edge, Google has kept its owners...

I'll let you be the judge. We have a convention. I've asked it to keep a file named handoff.md. At the end of every session I tell it to update the file with where we left the project at the end of the session, it does, and then I take a break. When I come back, first thing ...

Jeremy Provost, on the blog for Think Tap Work, his mobile app development company: iOS App Store search is no longer about relevance. It’s about ad inventory. With Apple’s introduction of a second search ad, for any query where we weren’t #1, we’ve effectively moved dow...