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Apple is very excited about all its software updates, naturally, but I am particularly appreciative of MacOS 27. While it does not hit the thoughtful design highs of the pre-Yosemite era, Apple has corrected a bunch of problems it introduced in last year’s Tahoe release and, as a matter of fact, from the past decade […]⌥ Permalink

Karl Bode: Earlier this month a 27-year-old who had been employed at Anthropic for all of four months declared he was quitting the software company because he believed that software automation poses an existential risk to humankind. […] The problem is – and shockingly the ad-based clickbait press didn’t do a very good job explaining […]⌥ Permalink

Currently listening: Mingus Ah Um. Never gets old. 🎵

A note flagged “Important” atop the Xcode 27.2 release notes:

The iOS SDK and simulator support for iPhone Duo will be available later this month in an upcoming release of Xcode 27.1.

Adapting apps for the Duo is not just a simple “recompile with the new SDK”. It’s different. For just about all apps it’s going to be a significant amount of work, and for some apps it’s going to be a lot of work. But without Xcode 27.1, developers cannot get started. Developers wanted this SDK a week ago. And when day one preorder buyers start using their Duos on October 23, they’re going to wish Apple had shipped this SDK last week too.

WordPress has a product that could be shaped into a Substack competitor. With a beautiful user interface for writing. WordPress is its OS, but most users never see it, the same way most web users never see the command line. But technical users can get under the hood and tweak things. And unlike Substack, it lets their users write with different editors, thus forming a coral reef for a new platform. Wordpress could be the OS the web never had. I still believe this as I see Automattic and WordPress flail. If we were starting a new future for the web, no one would have time for corporate intrigue. Look at how far from the idea of blogging we've strayed. How far should this go before I comment? Well, I decided it's time.

BTW, this blog is one of those periods where there are a few mind bombs every freaking day. What's a Mind Bomb? An idea that's so strange or powerful that it explodes in your mind. And that's a good thing!

Note the reaction from the Deadline reporter.

Steve Wozniak:

I’ve decided it’s time to have a little more fun on X this year! 😄⚡

I get to speak at some amazing events, meet fascinating people, hear great stories, and occasionally find myself in places I never expected to be. So I figured… why not share some of those moments here?

He announced this on X, you will note, not “social media”.

Galicia, June 2026.

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: Apple just seeded the first beta of iOS 27.2 to developers for testing. Yes, you read that correctly: iOS 27.2, not iOS 27.1. Why no iOS 27.1 beta? The answer likely relates to the iPhone Duo. This unusual version numbering is entirely about ...

Wednesday waves. 🌊👋 Clear dawn with a perfect violet to gold gradient.

To Daniel Moran's question about the reasons for the decline of The Simpsons, I have an answer: There are only so many stories you can tell and jokes you can make about characters who are forbidden to change. 

The AI companies shouldn't only be listening the politicians and journalists, even the base developers, they should be tuning into their users, and what kinds of apps they can do under the current security setup. Claude Code, even though it had blocks preventing it to do this, overwrote files on an S3 bucket that took one of my major apps off the air. I always think of things it could do to make my mess of an archive more useful, but I can't give it access to any of that stuff, I would never know if any of it was deleted or replaced, there are no critical apps that would make it known to me. Every customer of theirs must be grappling with the same thing. How do I get the benefit without having to trust this app with things it is unwise to trust it with.

Google replaced the library card catalog. Imagining that, Claude and ChatGPT et al are as much of a leap. I think libarians must be ecstatic. It moves their job up one level. They now have about 100 librarian-power tool that works for them. Librarians and programmers worked together a lot in the early days of the web. Maybe we'll do that again.

The flaw in how journalism covers US politics. We wait for proof, then it comes, and go back to waiting for proof. We think we want proof, but what we really want is to not have proof. That is if you judge us by our actual behavior. We'll deal with the truth when we have the proof. (That would be a good bumper sticker.)

Marcus Werner, of the Breach, put together a video illustrating the persuasion tactics Canadian politicians are using as they argue for greater A.I. data centre development. It is what referred me to the fracking discussion I referenced in the article I published last night, so I wanted to shout it out for that reason. But […]⌥ Permalink

In my long take yesterday on Apple’s event last week, I wrote that when you pay $20 extra to get the $150 AirPods 5 With Wireless Charging Case, that the case is compatible for inductive charging with “MagSafe, Qi, or Apple Watch pucks”. But the compatibility section of Appl...

FeedLand and WordPress have a new hookup. With Scott Hanson's new River Embed for FeedLand plugin you can use feedland.com or feedland.org, or host your own FeedLand, to create a timeline, and when you're ready show the river to readers of your WordPress site, using the new plugin. For a news orgs like CNN and TechCrunch, both use WordPress, they could have a stream of news from related pubs. For a product site, or a political leader site, news from pubs that cover the area. It's a way of bringing the feed world into the world of news. Here's a thread where you can ask questions.

I keep hoping for the barrage of AI-generated author-scamming emails to slow down, but instead they keep coming — and are getting worse. This morning I find in my inbox fulsome praise of me for having written a book I only wrote a foreword for and an invitation from the (imaginary) host of an (imaginary) podcast focused on “stories of Texas” who wants to talk with me about Dorothy L. Sayers, because, really, who’s more Texan than Dorothy L. Sayers? It seems that the worse these phishing expeditions are the more likely they are to get past the spam filters.

Last month, within a day of each other, two writers published contrasting takes regarding the backlash to artificial intelligence and its infrastructure. I do not think they were knowingly writing in opposition to each other — the second does not reference the first — but they set up the titular question I find intriguing: will […]