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.

Taking the Apple Agents Concept Even Further with Shortcuts, a Store, and Access Anywhere — Parker Ortolani

The reception to my Apple Agents concept the other day was tremendously positive and I had to expand on it. Imagine being able to build agents with Shortcuts and natural language, browsing an Agent Store for more advanced automation tools, and even the ability to chat with your agents from anywhere on your iPhone from the Dynamic Island.

Will Apple dare to use the “Little Finder Guy” to give Siri a face? That would be really cool. I could call that “courage”.

This morning, I realized that having a self-hosted version of n8n comes with some notable limitations. For example, with the SaaS version, you can link your n8n instance to a GitHub repo so you can use version control right in GitHub and manage issues and all that. More details from Claude AI:

n8n has a native Source Control feature (available in Enterprise / Self-hosted Pro plans) that connects your n8n instance directly to a Git repo: Push/pull workflows, credentials stubs, and variables to/from a branch Supports environment promotion (e.g. dev → staging → prod branches)