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I wouldn’t grant a stranger access to my email. So why would I grant a robot?

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg Wednesday, after Meta’s 2026 Connect keynote (gift link): Meta Platforms Inc. unveiled a palm-sized, dedicated gadget for using Muse, the company’s popular new artificial intelligence assistant, pushing deeper into the AI devices mark...

Jason Aten, in a good follow-up to his previous column at Inc. (the one where he described how Muse, running on his Mac, read his Messages database): The entire reason Muse is interesting is that it isn’t just a chatbot, but can actually do things for you. But that promi...

Eli Tan, writing for The New York Times, “I Gave My Life Over to Meta’s A.I. Agent and Was Blown Away” (gift link): For one final task, I asked Wren for a good way to spend that $44.99 it had saved me. At this point, it knew my life pretty well. I thought it might sugges...

I decided a couple of weeks ago that I needed to write a biggish essay on what it means to me to be a Southerner. Since then I’ve struggled with it. Today I decided I needed to post it. Think of this not as a completed work but as one abandoned in public. 

Currently reading: Loren Eiseley : Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos by Loren Eiseley. I’ve written occasionally over the years — here for instance — about how much Eiseley has meant to me since I discovered him at age fifteen or thereabouts. But how did I discover him? I well remember: He was quoted occasionally in Intelligent Life in the Universe, a 1966 book by I. S. Shklovskiĭ and Carl Sagan, which I borrowed from the East Lake Public Library in Birmingham, Alabama. That’s the kind of person I was at age fifteen. 📚

I'm contemplating a couple of additions to Frontier in the Atlantis release. Two new formats, JSON and Markdown, have come along and become popular since I last worked on Frontier. Two fantastic open formats, in wide use on the web. From many years of working in JavaScript, I...

HTTPS is bugging me again. Now that my main desktop is finally a modern Mac, I can see how ugly Google is getting about my poor old blog that goes back to 1994. I think they should make exceptions for historic sites. Go ahead and have your AI do a scan and see that there are ...

Just a note on how I use micro.blog, in response to some emails: not as a social-media platform. Instead, I follow people in my RSS reader, and only open micro.blog to reply to someone I follow. Also, I write my posts in MarsEdit. So if you reply to me, I am very unlikely to see it. (And I guess I should add that one thing I learned from my years on Twitter is to be very wary of interacting online with people I don’t know IRL.) 

Really interesting comment by Ethan Iverson in his interview with Deborah Gordon, the owner of the Village Vanguard. She asked him who he wishes he had seen at the Vanguard:

Well, like you I would have seen Monk … Coltrane and Miles Davis, of course … But you know what? I like Bill Evans but only up to a point. However, those that saw Bill Evans live said the sound he got out the piano was really extraordinary and that the overall ambience was utterly seductive. I hear that extraordinary sound on the records, but I think I could have learned something by sitting close to Bill Evans at the Vanguard one night.

There are some curious subplots in the data centre boom happening now in Alberta that I think go a long way toward explaining why people hate these things. First, even though developers tout their clean electricity bonafides, the fact is the actual power will come from fossil fuels. That is in part because our province […]⌥ Permalink

I think Meta is a perversely interesting company which means this week I watched, as I do every year, its Connect presentation. It is once again a glimpse into what Meta aspires toward — Apple-quality hardware matched with Google-quality services — compared to what it actually does: track users’ digital and physical activities to sell […]⌥ Permalink

Always interesting when you’re reading a work of history, in this case Charles Norris Cochrane’s matchless Christianity and Classical Culture, and find something that shines a bright and direct light on your own moment.  To Eusebius the glorious and unexpected triumph ...

Inordinately pleased with my little hack of hanging the jacket of the album I’m listening to from a binder clip. This record, by the way, is a neglected masterpiece, with Miles as a sideman (if Miles ever actually is a sideman, which I doubt). Also: Blue Note’s design staff in this era! This jacket was designed by the great Reid Miles. 🎵

Victoria Song, in her Optimizer column/newsletter for The Verge: I’ve been aggressively avoiding Muse since it launched a few weeks ago. Sure, some of that is because I was busy testing other devices. But the number-one reason why is that I am horribly vulnerable when fa...

Great interview from Stern, as usual, seemingly conducted on the old set of Three’s Company. She opened by asking if AI is going to wipe out humanity, and I think Zuck whiffed by not simply laughing and saying no. She also directly asked his thoughts on people calling Meta G...

Meta’s annual keynote yesterday was a tight 55-minute live event held on their campus in Menlo Park. I watched the whole thing this morning, before recording tomorrow’s episode of Dithering. (Which you should subscribe to.) It was a good keynote. Consumer products announced...

I remain unhappy with Apple’s passkey backup story. There’s little documentation about this, but from what I can tell: There are no automatic versioned backups. (Syncing is not backup because it doesn’t protect you against human error, bugs, or attacks.) Even if you have a Time Machine backup, it’s not possible to restore it to […]

Tonight, I enjoyed the Zodiak while waiting for my soup to simmer. I love Karl Grandin’s doodles on the can. 👽