All bloggers eventually want to build their own blog software. All feed reader developers want their own sync platform. All blog hosts want a feed reader.

In 2026, I predict approximately thousands of niche open web apps, each with a small number of users who wouldn’t want to use anything else.

I can attest that, as a blogger, unsatisfied with the current RSS readers1 or bookmark managers’2 offerings, I had to build mine. I don’t plan to share any of it, though. I do see a trend among builders of putting together apps for their personal use, and I find this fantastic. Building software is hard, and seeing people able to put things together that fit their needs is really cool.

  1. I like Inoreader as a service, but less as an RSS reader. ↩︎

  2. I tried many of them, but settled on building mine, very focused on helping me to maintain a newsletter. ↩︎

Manton Reece writing about Software brain:

Maybe our belief in new technology has been warped by cynicism. We’ve been beaten down by ad platforms, manipulated by algorithms. We’ve grown weary of the relentless pace of Silicon Valley. We assume every CEO must be a liar and that even good intentions are corrupted by money.

Memory Is the Machine:

Apple did not win an AI race. Apple made a memory-architecture decision in 2020 that turned out to be the AI race, five years before there was an AI race.

Maybe we should stop focusing on Siri failures and, like Om Malik said, on the real story where Apple has a five year lead… which happens to make a big difference in an AI-distributed world.

Deleted a few dozens Shortcuts today. All sort of Shortcuts: simple ones, utility ones, more complex ones. Many of them aren’t needed anymore because of my AI usage. I’m curious to see how Apple will make the Shortcuts landscape evolve in the age of AI.

I will not go see the latest movie about Michael Jackson’s life1. I know I will be disappointed. Just knowing that the film ends with the Bad tour is a strong indicator of complacency. I do not want to repeat the mistake of seeing the Steve Jobs movie. I would take ten new songs from him from his private recording vault2 instead of a bad movie.

  1. Which life anyway? The public life? the private life? A combination of both? ↩︎

  2. I have always wondered why there are so few new songs from MJ since his death. ↩︎

Manuel Moreale, in his “Dealgorithmed” newsletter edition #007, commenting on a (very long) post from Anil Dash about the end of the web as we know it:

One thing I find entirely unconvincing about that post is what Anil has to offer in terms of action we can take. Support the Internet Archive and Wikipedia? Support the EFF? Donate to Mozilla? Think fondly about Stack Overflow?

Is that going to save the open web? If you want to do something to save the open web, leave social media behind and make yourself a website.

Of all the toxicities afflicting the (open) web these days, social media is probably the most toxic by a wide margin. In the name of discoverability and moneytization, we keep feeding the beast.

I was doing some cleaning tonight in my old documents on Craft, including those that were initially published as shared documents, then migrated to Micro.blog, on my metablog. The articles cover the period from 2020 to last year; the more recent documents are published directly on Micro.blog. While rereading some of these documents, I thought that their relevance was pretty much nil and that I should maybe delete them permanently. I didn’t do it, out of fear of erasing part of my memory.

Sometimes I test a local LLM on my M2 MacBook Air, which isn’t very powerful for this task. After a few prompts, it gets quite hot.🌡️ A MacBook Pro, with fans, would handle it better. Now, think about millions of people prompting LLMs in data centers worldwide, with much more powerful models responding and consuming huge amounts of energy. No wonder some parts of the world are experiencing an energy crisis because of AI.