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Galicia, May 2026.

10 years ago I wrote about BitCam 1.0: Gorgeous, unbelievably faithful one-bit camera app for iPhone done in the style of the original Mac. A lovely tribute to Bill Atkinson’s remarkable dithering algorithm. “Catnip for old-school Mac users,” says John Siracusa. Check ou...

I complained last week that starting with an update last month, the list of apps I’m testing in Apple’s TestFlight app has been sorted alphabetically, rather than by recency. Whatever is going on with this sort order, it isn’t affecting everyone. John Siracusa, amongst many ...

One reason I want AI-assisted writing to be identifiable is that it devalues the idea of Claude et al to be quoted in public. What can it teach us? What it is relative to a human being. I know the doubters sniff at that, but it really is like an alien life form, it's the first such example, it kind of did evolve from us, but it has its own way, things it's really strong at and things it utterly fails at. I for one want to study this! What a unique experience. It can also give a summary of what we've been trying to say for forty years and have never managed to put into words. I'd say that's something I should feel comfortable publishing, but right now I don't. Maybe I just have to get over that.

Amy X. Wang on using Wispr Flow (as dictated to Wispr Flow): We’ve been talking a lot about the so-called end of literacy, but the real problem isn’t that people don’t read — it’s that they do read and spend all day ferociously consuming words, but those words aren’t really...

Paul McCartney, early-to-mid 1980s:  One thing I’ll never forget at EMI was the “pop”/ “classical” switch on the right-hand-side of the console! And the control knobs were great big RAF things, that was the state of the technology then. We used to like them though, and...

Good morning sports fans!

Learned something yesterday. Couldn't believe how stupid Claude had become, as I've been writing about here, and then I noticed that I was using Opus 5 and not Fable 5. So I switched back and all of a suddent Claude is smart again. So I conclude that there's a very substantial difference between the two. It's overnight jobs were done more carefully and the report it produced is literate, understandable, and tracks what we had agreed to.

Jeffrey Kopp, of CNBC, wrote a short profile of Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, whose name you may have heard even if you do not live in her district of Northern California. That is because her district covers such areas as San Francisco and Silicon Valley, so her rulings on the many cases heard there have […]⌥ Permalink

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John Moltz, in his weekly members-only column for Six Colors (no gift links, but Moltz’s column is worth the subscription in and of itself): This week Anthropic announced that in order to identify AI from human-generated content it would be watermarking all text it gener...

Finished reading: Thursday Murder Club series, book 4. The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman. Published 2023. 421 pages. Started August 19, 2026; completed August 21, 2026. Posted: August 22, 2026 at 4:29 AM UTC. Tagged: crime, humor, mystery.

Now that it has been a couple of years since Apple began requiring administrators to sign in to the News Publisher dashboard or risk their accounts losing their role, there are a few things we have learned: These notifications arrive on an approximately five-month schedule, perhaps a couple of weeks longer. News Publisher has little […]⌥ Permalink

Now in Claude's defense, I had to re-learn everything about how Frontier worked. Over the last decade or so I had only been using a narrow set of functionality. I used it for very occasional utility scripts for the file system or over the web, but mostly for writing JavaScrip...

Today's development version of Frontier is buggy and the kernel developer (Claude) keeps breaking the most basic verbs. You spin your wheels and wish you could get them to just get keep it together. I remember this from the work that led up to Frontier version 1.0 in 1991 or so. It was a miserable time. Never got to work on what I wanted to, just reported breakage that kept me from getting anywhere. The sad part is that Claude should be able to find the things it broke on its own, far better than I can and at a much lower expense (I'm paying for its time, not the other way around). But basically every day begins optimistically, maybe today is the day I get to create something, but not yet. My only goal right now, and I'm single-minded about it, is to get it to move forward without breaking the essentials, actually without breaking anything.

Two podcasts I can recommend without reservation.

A year ago I read Libraries of the Mind by William Marx, and some of it is still very much on my mind ever since. Particularly what William Marx called ‘dark matter’ literature, which exists but you don’t have access to. E.g. because it’s in a language you can’t read, or material you don’t know […]

An even-better-than-usual essay by the invaluable J. B. Crawford: [Brigadier Martin Hotine’s] greatest memorial is an artifact of his work: squat concrete pillars surmounted by a triangular brass plate. Found atop mountains and hills throughout the United Kingdom, these "tr...