2026-01-16 10:00:00
Joint statement from Google and Apple
Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year.
My only question is whether this will be more like the Maps or Search deals. Is this a forever thing where Apple is never incentivized to build their own, or is it a temporary thing while Apple figures out their own solution to replace this? My money's on the former, but time will tell.
2026-01-16 09:00:54
Jez Corden: Jeff Bezos once said the quiet part out loud
Bezos thinks that local PC hardware is antiquated, and that the future will revolve around cloud computing scenarios, where you rent your compute from companies like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.
Corden links to an interview with Bezos where he talks about going to an old brewery and finding it fascinating that the brewery used to do its own power generation since there wasn't a a power grid yet. Here's more of his direct quote from the interview:
I went to a brewery in Luxembourg many years ago now. In fact, this trip was one of the little tiny catalysts for the founding of AWS. And the brewery was 300 years old. This company making beer for 300 years. A lot of the oldest companies in the world are breweries, by the way. I don't know why this is. And they were very proud of their history and they had a museum.
And in that museum, was an electric power generator, 100 years old. Because when they wanted to improve the efficiency of their brewery with electricity, there was no power grid, so they had to build their own power station. So they made their own electricity. And at that time, that's what everybody did. If a hotel wanted electricity, they had their own electric generator.
And I looked at this, and I thought, this is what computation is like today, everybody has their own data center. And that's not gonna last. It makes no sense. You're gonna buy compute off the grid. That's AWS.
Put another way in a trending post on mastodon.social:
Jeff Bezos is saying the quiet part out loud. They want to kill local computing.
You will own nothing and be happy. You will rent your computing power from the cloud. You pay a subscription for the privilege of using a computer.
So, I almost published a completely different version of this post. I was all set to go, scheduled to publish, but at the last second, I thought I should probably watch a bit more of the interview myself, just to get the full context of what Bezos actually said. After all, the original article claimed he was "saying the quiet part out loud" and the Mastodon post said he wanted "to kill local computing". I figured I should probably double-check, just in case.
Honestly, my takeaway from the interview is completely different.
The core of Bezos's argument, as I understood it, was creating a parallel between electricity distribution and data center distribution, specifically in the context of AWS and why he thought that worked for data centers. At no point did he mention personal computers, and he certainly didn't express any desire to move all customer data to his cloud. The explicit text of his words was that AWS solved the problem of every business needing its own physical server farm. AWS offered a different solution, one that has been quite successful and convenient on the whole.
I suspect the counter argument is that, "well, he implied he wanted to kill local computing!" Maybe that's what he meant, but to me, that's like hearing someone say they like dogs and replying, "oh, so you hate cats?" It feels like an unwarranted extrapolation of the point to get him to have said what you want to be angry about.
Anyway, I encourage you to watch the interview yourself and see what you think. The portion we're discussing starts around the 51-minute mark.
2026-01-16 07:59:07
Here's a post on Digg, which relaunched in beta today to everyone. I've been using it since July in their private beta, and it's pretty nice! Christian Selig, maker of the dearly missed Apollo, advised on the app design, so I guess that's not a big surprise.
But anyway, back to the post:
This feels like reddit from 10 years ago!!
Great work guys!!! Feels way more organic and less hate filled. Thank you folks!!!
Add this onto my extended list I made a couple years ago about how Threads/Bluesky/Mastodon all "feel like early Twitter". It just seems like all social platforms need a reset every 10 years or so. People get too good at the old platforms, and content becomes predictable and stale. Then something new comes along, those who are frustrated flock to it, and it feels like the good old days again. With luck, the new thing will get traction, more people will join, it will have a vibrant community, and eventually it will turn into a trashy content farm that makes people yearn for something more. Or, you know, it fails before it gets a chance to be hated.
Oh my god, did I just walk into a genuine, "you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain" quote? Harvey Dent ain't wrong.
2026-01-16 03:00:29
I recently wrote about how LLMs have made simple software trivial to create, but additionally, it's made features incredibly simple to test with very little effort.
As an example, just today, I was using my own Mastodon app, Best-o-Masto, and was thinking about what I could do next. One idea I had was to create an alternative feed layout which presented each post in full screen and let you swipe right and left to move between posts. All the post actions would be at the bottom of the screen so you could easily interact and browse your feed one-handed. It sounded like an interesting idea in my head, but I wasn't sure how it would feel in practice.
But of course, we live in a world with coding agents. Over my morning coffee, I simply requested the feature in Claude Code, giving it quite a few details to make sure it understood what I was trying to do, and had it go build out the feature. It took a few additional prompts to lock in an experience that I thought was solid, but I was able to do this while I was preparing for the day and making my wife's lunch. Because I try to be a good developer, I also monitored what sorts of changes it was making to ensure that it wasn't introducing any new bugs or complexities, but that was about it.
After playing around with the feature for a few minutes on my own device and feeling pretty happy with it, I shared a build to the public beta where I can get feedback. It's really the velocity that excites me about this. I was able to go from an idea for something that might work to having it in the hands of users in what is effectively zero time in the world of traditional development.
If the feature works, then great; I can refine it further to make sure it is as good as it can be and then release it to everybody. If it turns out people don't particularly like it, then I can just revert the change and not ship it to production. There's no real sunk cost I'm worried about in the way I would feel if I had spent several days of focused time implementing this.
Not all features are this simple, and obviously, larger ones will take more time to implement. But what I am saying is that there are a bunch of small changes to software that simply don't happen because our velocity is low enough that we need to prioritize things in a way where it doesn't make sense for a lot of features to even get made. I really like that in the current world, these sorts of changes can be made with little risk in time and effort.
If you'd like to try this out, you can join the public TestFlight for Best-o-Masto and try it today.
2026-01-16 02:30:52
Are they real? Are they not? Are they actually sneakily good? How do you even begin to break free?
2026-01-15 21:00:00
I built a micro-app for the folks over at MacStories, who as you know, produce a lot of podcasts. My aim was to streamline some of the data entry we do every week.
Whenever a new podcast episode comes out, there's a form we have to fill out that requires links to the episode on all the major podcast platforms. We need the Apple Podcasts embed code, the show notes, the episode title, all that stuff. It's all perfectly doable, but it's a manual process that involves jumping around to a bunch of different apps, often across several devices.
I wanted to make it easier, so I created a little app called Podcast Dashboard, specifically designed for this task. You can add as many podcasts as you like, though most users will probably only need one or two. You start by entering the Apple Podcasts URL. You can also add the Spotify and YouTube URLs. Unfortunately, there's no way to grab those programmatically, so they're part of the initial setup, but you can always add them later.
Once you've entered the podcast URL, the app loads the show info, giving you access to everything you need. Need to copy the episode title? Just hit the copy button. Done. You'll also find the Apple Podcasts URL and the embed code right there. The show notes are available for download in both HTML and Markdown formats. You can even download the MP3 file directly from here if you need it.
Getting the exact podcast episode links for apps like Overcast and Pocket Casts is a bit trickier. I haven't found a way to automatically determine those yet. However, both Overcast and Pocket Casts create public websites for each show based on the Apple Podcast ID. So, when you enter your Apple Podcast link, it allows me to generate links to the Overcast and Pocket Casts pages for that show on the web. The latest episode will always be at the top, making it easy to grab and share the link.
Spotify and YouTube are static links that take you directly to the show page, where you can easily find the most recent episode and share those links. The one app that's currently missing is Castro. While Castro does have episode-specific web links, it doesn't seem to offer show links. This means I don't currently have a way to easily direct you to Castro to grab the link; you'll still need to open it on your phone.
That's essentially it: basic information about your show, readily accessible, all in one place. It was built specifically for the MacStories crew to make their data entry a little less painful.