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David Smith, last week: Been really interesting to watch the iOS 27 adoption curve over the first two weeks. Clearly on a different path than previous years. Still steadily growing, at a similar rate to the ‘steady growth’ phase of most years, but without the big surge a...

It’s almost like you can predict the timing of such things, if you pay attention to Apple’s consistent patterns.

Janine Liberty (Hacker News, NYT, WSJ): Margaret Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program, died on Sep. 30. She was 90. A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline. […] […]

Adam Engst: Apple has significantly improved dictation in iOS 27 by adding a few capabilities for editing text from the Voice Control system. In other words, Apple has finally done some of the things I requested in “How iOS and macOS Dictation Can Learn from Voice Control’s Dictation” (31 August 2020). Remember, dictation is what […]

Before long we’ll have Ukraine style drones raining down on American cities. Meanwhile we have built a military designed to fight WWII. We’d better hope Ukraine wins their war with Russia, and they’re still our friends. Journalism is letting us down bigtime here. The world is at war, it's going to get worse, and the US isn't preparing. We should be defending Ukraine with everything we have, we are still powerful enough to determine the outcome. But of course we are totally asleep at the wheel, gloating over Trump's approval rating, and how the Dems might win the Senate or whatever. Music to relax by. Bedtime stories.

The tech industry kicked the web out of the web. scripting.com is your canary in a coal mine. If you can read it then your browser is a real web browser. If it can’t it’s phony baloney. That's the big picture behind the Web of Markdown, an idea that has generated surprising...

The Firefox team just launched a website that allows users to rank the Interop 2027 proposals that they care about. And I care about things - for selfish reasons and for work. And that's a challenge. I want to rank things that only benefit me and my blog but I also want to r...

BTW, Mets fans do not root for the Yankees, while Yankees fans are happy to wear Mets caps when we're on top. They have no philosophy. And the Mets' philosophy is incomprehensible (I hear) to Yankees fans. Our philosophy is to have a philosophy. The Yankees philosophy is "We ...

I’m shocked and delighted that Anne Carson has won the Nobel Prize for literature. Back in 2003 I wrote about her translation of Sappho — in the context of her whole remarkable career to that point. And I compared the love poetry of Sappho and Carson alike to the Song of Songs. 

Discussies over verantwoorde toepassing van AI zijn vaak moeizaam omdat verschillende argumenten op heel verschillende beelden van wat AI is zijn gebaseerd, en dus wat geschikte interventies zijn. Het lijkt voor mij op hoe je het gedrag van licht als deeltjes en als golf kunt beschrijven. Die twee perspectieven komen niet bij elkaar. Ze zijn […]

Margaret Hamilton has passed away. She named my discipline, software engineering:

When I first came up with the term, no one had heard of it before, at least in our world. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. It was a memorable day when one of the most respected hardware gurus explained to everyone in a meeting that he agreed with me that the process of building software should also be considered an engineering discipline, just like with hardware.

For a few years, her LEGO build from Women of NASA kept me company at work.

Tower 18: But something has changed: thanks to AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex, even the most devoted GUI fans are now spending more and more time in the terminal. You kick off a task, the agent does its thing… and then you want to actually see what happened. That’s where Tower shines, […]

Alexis King (tweet): The type systems provided by mainstream languages have grown vastly more sophisticated, but how much value does that complexity actually provide programmers in practice? I would like to make the case that it is somewhat less than one might think. While at times convenient, invariants can be captured in the type system […]

Leon Wieseltier:  As Graham Greene reported in his review of [Make Way for Tomorrow] in Night and Day in the summer of 1937, “a sense of misery and inhumanity is left vibrating in the nerves.” The film is a withering criticism of a terrible wrong — and an eloquent vind...

Aparna Pappu of YouTube: This builds on the incredible success we’ve seen with other Studio tools like A/B testing, where creators have run more than 40 million experiments to find the perfect titles and thumbnails for their videos since the feature officially launched in 2024. Coming soon, you’ll also be able to test up to […]⌥ Permalink

This is a cool car. It doesn’t look like anything else and it looks like it’s been pulled a few years from the future. I don’t know about this whole trend where cars don’t have rear windows though. I get it that you just use the camera but my old habits says I want to see out the back sometimes.

But the only reason I wouldn’t buy this thing is that turd of a new logo Jaguar went with. I could not abide driving around in something with this typographic calamity.

Meta: Drive people directly to your website, shop or latest offer by adding a clickable link to your Instagram posts and reels. People can visit the website from your post or reel. If you subscribe to a Meta One plan, you can add links to a set number of posts and reels each month based […]⌥ Permalink

The incomparable Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg: Apple Inc.’s upcoming push into smart home devices will include a doorbell, thermostat and other accessories developed through an unusual partnership with LG Electronics Inc. The products will be part of an ecosyste...

32 is a lot of years. How much longer can this madness go on!