FeedCity

In which I criticize Churchill and admire Dr George Augustus Auden.

Apple’s developer message used to be that it was not just easy to develop apps for their platforms, but that it was easy to develop good idiomatically native apps. That’s still true for AppKit and UIKit, but it’s never been true for SwiftUI, and SwiftUI is now seven years old.

Alberto Romero: AI is like religion. Either you believe it changes everything, or you don’t believe at all. There is no moderate position; nobody believes in AGI “more or less,” just like nobody is “casually religious.” If God exists, the only coherent response is to reo...

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For a while I have been wondering why Anthropic named its most powerful AI model Mythos. A safety company. A company whose entire justification for existing is that someone needs to tell the truth about what is being built. That company chose a name that, in the oldest sense of the word, means a story …

I wrote a blog post on Twitter this morning, sort of a version 0.4 of the talk I want to do at WCUS in August in Phoenix. I want to offer cross-posting to twitter in an upcoming product, but I think the user should pay for the service, not me, a one-person independent devel...

Het is DOEI! Dag, de eerste zondag van de maand om mezelf en anderen aan te moedigen weer een stapje te zetten weg van BigTech. Stap je mee? Blogpost:

All the news reports about AI tools repeat the same hallucination story they've been running for years. That's another huge bug in the news process. They only report on a small number of angles that might have been news a few years ago, and have no insights on what else is going on. They did this with the web too. They always pick an item that their narcissistic view of the world finds tasty. It's a huge bug in the system, and why "news" isn't valuable for news, it's mainly useful for a relaxing reassurance that nothing has changed, the world is fucked up in exactly the same way it was fucked last week, month, year, etc. It's a form of bedtime story.

Star City is very good. It's good enough that you have to watch each episode at least twice to get the idea of what's really going on. I stopped watching the show it is a sequel for, For All Mankind, because it got incredibly juvenile and sitcom-like. But Star City is serious, at least in the first three episodes.

Ben Sandofsky, writing on the Lux Camera blog: After decades of shooting digital, I returned to analog photography in 2023. I thought it would be challenging, given the limited selection of film stocks, only to be surprised by how freeing it felt. It felt so much better ...

Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim, in a memo to the 60 Minutes staff obtained by The New York Times (gift links): We have had a hard time deciding whether to stay at 60 Minutes. We’re still deeply upset by the firings of Tanya and Draggan, strong leaders who ...

Josh Marshall: In a hearing today about the president’s bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House and plans to build a vast ballroom, a judge asked if the president could also bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and be subject to no legal challenge. The DOJ lawyer, Yaako...

Walt Frazier: "The regular season is where you make your name, but the postseason is where you make your fame."

Freeman Dyson (1997): It often happens that a scientific revolution is accompanied by a change in style. I like to use the names of Napoleon and Tolstoy to symbolize two contrasting styles: rigid organization and discipline represented by Napoleon, creative chaos and freedo...

The Knicks won again last night. They're now up 2-0, both games on the road. This has blown my sense of reality. This Knicks team bears no resemblance to what I think of as the Knicks. Hard to concentrate. Will Trump try to put his name of Madison Square Garden.

Michael Landy: Future Ruins

Zac Hall: The third most popular free iPhone app in the U.S. App Store today is a mysterious productivity app that’s only available in Russian. That’s a pretty obvious red flag that something isn’t quite what it seems. […] The app icon looks similar to a star mapping app. The app itself isn’t available in […]

Jaanus Kase (Mastodon): We deployed direct silent CloudKit notifications in Tact in late 2024. They proved to be too unreliable to use in a messaging app like Tact: notifications arrived late or not at all. To be fair, this is within the bounds of the Apple SDK contract, which does say that the delivery of […]

Guilherme Rambo: When using the public database for content hosting or feature flags, you don’t want any random iCloud user to have the rights to publish or edit content on your behalf or to change the feature flags that control your app’s behavior for all of your users, that would be really bad.That’s where CloudKit’s […]