How NIL, realignment and the expanding playoff have ruined college football for casual fans.

Immersive sports feels like one of the killer use cases Vision Pro has been waiting for, and I'm rooting for it to actually go somewhere. Cosm is already proving the appetite exists, just with a domed screen instead of a headset strapped to your face. Superfans will pay real money to feel closer to the game. None of that gets me closer to buying a Vision Pro, though.

I realize I haven’t posted in about 6 weeks. Summer has been pretty busy, but I assure you, like Mitch McConnell, I am alive and well. We’ll get back to normally scheduled programming soon.

Earlier this year, we built a rudimentary fact gathering bot for managers to pull in all evidence of our team operating at their given skill level without making any judgments, but instead just finding all of the examples of times where they do a certain thing and provide the link to that data. For each area of the skill map, it would build out a list of all evidence it could ind with a link to that PR, conversation, document, etc.

Thank goodness - I felt like I was going blind looking at Tahoe icons on the Mac. The glassy, blurry nature of the style seems to be on the way out.

It's nice to see the "Snow Leopard" year has extended beyond just the OS platforms and over to WebKit as well. Jeremy Keith gives a brief rundown of some of the features he's most excited about and catalogs a number of the 500+ bugfixes coming our way as well.

We already know about the pervasive spread of Flock Safety and other Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) cameras. But Motorola's Vigilant Solutions is actively pitching a handy upgrade for any budding authoritarians: adding Bluetooth and RFID sensors to these street cameras. This means they aren't just logging your car anymore. They want to sniff out the unique MAC addresses of your phone, your smartwatch, and your AirPods as you pass by, tying your digital footprint directly to your vehicle's location.

I always enjoy Michael Tsai’s roundups of WWDC wishlists as well as the reaction posts afterwards as well. I’ve found a handful of new voices to follow as a result.

There’s a version of the engineering manager who shows up to every 1:1 slightly out of (figurative) breath. You open the calendar invite, scan the last few notes you half-wrote three weeks ago, and spend the first five minutes of the conversation just trying to remember where you left off. Meanwhile your report is sitting across from you, or staring at a video call thumbnail, wondering if you actually know what’s going on with them.

I'm a big fan of Last.fm, and less of a fan of their slimy parent company that bought them 15 or so years ago. Glad to see they are breaking free, and hopeful they can stay up and running. The thing I struggle with a bit is that the $4.99/month plan is a bit more than I need, but I do want to support. Maybe they'll introduce more tiers now that they're independent.

Headlines are shortcuts support, search improvements, more AI integration, better git support, and tons of quality of life improvements. I tend to bounce between BBEdit and VS Code these days, but I'll always have a soft spot for BBEdit as it's been a mainstay since I started using Macs many eons ago. Full release notes can be found here.

This is great to see - little things like this start to chip away at the "default" choice people have let themselves get sucked into with the Kindle and it's ecosystem. I have a Kindle paperwhite from a few years back so I'm not going to rush out to replace it but I've mostly stopped purchasing books from their store and intend on buying a non-Amazon device whenever I replace it. If you're on StoryGraph, add me!

I was going to write something like this after watching the 4-2 debacle vs Aston Villa on Friday. This article sums it up for me. This team is somehow in significantly worse shape after a massive overhaul and injection of high priced talent last summer, and with the likes of Salah, Gomez, Jones, Konate, Robbo and others on the way out, it's hard to see how things get turned around in one window.

Indigo looks great - it's beautiful, does multi-account in a really elegant way, and it's from the guys who built Croissant a few years back. I've installed it on all of my devices to give it a whirl before deciding if I want to pay for a 3rd party social media app given I just let Ivory's subscription lapse and overall I'm very impressed.

I think the companies who come out of this AI transformation on top will be the ones that don't just slash huge swaths of their workforce in the name of efficiency. Instead, it will likely be the ones that invest in education & optimization and raise the bar on their team's expected output over time. This retains the pipeline of talent and ensures companies are structured to take the most advantage of AI coding tools. I think companies that are cutting 20% or more of their staff will regret the short term win they think they're getting.

On one hand, I do strongly believe that the AI industry needs more oversight and regulation. The sense of unease with what the advancements in AI mean for our society and economy is very real, and I'm happy to hear the administration is taking is more seriously. On the other hand, I don't trust anything that the Trump administration does. Instead of pushing for legislation or a set of clear rules, they'll likely just use mafia-style tactics to demand concessions from these companies before allowing them to do certain things down the road.

I definitely see more of this type of sentiment these days, and I'd be lying if I said it isn't on my mind at times as well. I feel extremely lucky to come up at the exact moment I did - building tech literacy in the 80s/90s, breaking into the web design/dev world in the early 2000s, and working at a number of consultancies and startups over the past 2 decades during the growth of the early consumer web and mobile's explosion.

Here's a rundown of some Mac apps I've discovered in the past year or so and have really enjoyed.

In 2010, John Gruber wrote a piece for Macworld called "This is how Apple rolls." It is worth reading if you haven't. In short: Apple ships something small and considered, cuts ruthlessly to a solid core, polishes that core to a high shine, and then goes back to Cupertino and iterates. Slow, steady, iterative improvement until something genuinely great emerges.

We didn't hand over our digital lives all at once. It happened one convenient feature at a time, one ecosystem lock-in after another, until we looked up and realized we'd built our lives around companies that had fundamentally changed what they stood for. Two books I've read recently, Apple in China and Cory Doctorow's Enshittification, helped crystallize something I'd been feeling for a while.

It's been really nice to just have good news at all, but specifically within the realm of NASA. We've outsourced so much of our programs to other nations and private companies, so the past few weeks of buildup and prep coverage have been genuinely exciting.

It's easy to dismiss the No Kings protests as performative, and honestly, they are. That's the point. Democracy is performative by design. The alternative to showing up in the streets isn't some purer, more effective form of resistance ... it's staying home. And staying home is exactly what an administration comfortable governing by fiat is counting on. We need to win, and win bigly, if we want any real shot at fixing the deeper rot. That starts with people showing up, making connections, and realizing how big this movement could be.

A few days ago I finally did the thing I’d been putting off for years: pulled back all the posts I lost when I migrated to WordPress in 2013. Before that I was on Tumblr, and before that, a couple of other domains. Posts going back to the early 2000s, just sort of… evaporated. I used Claude Cowork to scrape the Wayback Machine across all the old domains. Archive.org had a fair number of IP and browser restrictions in place. Cowork found approximately ten ways around them. No complaints. It eventually produced about 1,000 individual text files, which I then asked Claude to dedupe, tag with existing tags from my site, cross-referenced against what already existed, and quietly imported without triggering a massive RSS blast to everyone’s feed readers. (If you’ve ever done a bulk import wrong, you know.) What I didn’t expect: some of this stuff I had genuinely forgotten I’d written. Most of it is pretty rough. I was in my early 20s, it was the early 2000s, and the bar for what constituted a blog post was different. But reading through them brought back what I was thinking about, what I was using, who I was talking to. Little time capsules from a person who is technically me. I also definitely exercised an editorial muscle and deleted a number of posts that were not import-worth. Done by hand, this would have been a weekend of grinding work I didn’t have the appetite for, and those posts would have stayed lost. The thing that changed isn’t the what, it’s the activation energy. I did have one moment, staring at 1,000 recovered text files, thinking: congratulations, you’ve built a content pipeline for AI training. But that’s a problem for another post.

Not a surprise, but still it's sad to see a lot of the bits of the 00's era Apple fade away. If I recall correctly, my Mac ownership history was: iMac G4 Titanium Powerbook PowerMac G4 12" Powerbook PowerMac G5 iMac G5 iMac 27" (Intel) 13" Macbook Pro 13" Macbook Air So, I've had a few PowerMacs in my day. But like most folks, we moved on to iMacs or laptops to fill our needs over time.

This is great - I wish this were a norm across the industry. I tend to make my physical vs digital decisions based on a flowchart that is basically: Do I think this game is evergreen, or do I think I might want to sell it at some point? Is it a game my kids would want to play on their Switch Lite?

It's too early to have a super strong feeling about this. In a strange way, maybe advertising on Maps will improve the quality of the listings a bit more. Maybe not. Still, this just kind of feels gross.

This is one quote of many that are piecing together that Apple isn’t going to undo or retreat from their UI paradigm this year, or anytime soon. To me, it’s always been wishful thinking to assume there will be some great reset this year or next. Apple is going to continue to (hopefully) improve it over time but that’s about the best we can expect. It it sure sounds like it’s “damn the torpedoes” in Cupertino.

This is pretty gross. AI tools have tons of really amazing applications. Rewriting people's titles to ostensibly A/B test engagement ain't one of them. You really should be trying out Kagi, DuckDuckGo, or literally any other search provider.

The lonely specialist problem does not go away entirely. But when the whole team starts to share the language, the context, and a bit of curiosity, it gets a lot less lonely.

This is so cool. Reminds me of the old Geocities days. I was stoked to see that my site is listed in the rotation as well!