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.

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.

Gruber’s reaction to Hacker News Discussion on Shubham Bose’s ‘The 49MB Web Page’:

One of the most controversial opinions I’ve long espoused, and believe today more than ever, is that it was a terrible mistake for web browsers to support JavaScript. Not that they should have picked a different language, but that they supported scripting at all. That decision turned web pages — which were originally intended as documents — into embedded computer programs.

It’s hard to imagine the web without JavaScript, only as a collection of static, linked documents served by essentially passive file servers.

Just as streaming services helped lower the cost of music, AI is reducing the price of software even more than the subscription model does. The downside is that AI is driving hardware prices up, and it’s uncertain whether we will ever see the return of the always-cheaper hardware trend.

‘The Window Chrome of Our Discontent’:

This entire idea that application window chrome should disappear is madness. Some people — at Apple, quite obviously — think it looks better, in the abstract, but I can’t see how it makes actually using these apps more productive. Artists don’t want to use invisible tools.

Well, if window chrome is absent, what’s left for Apple to differentiate itself from others than UI elements inside a window? Buttons!

A UI should step back and let user content come forward. But Apple often treats the UI itself as a key part of its identity and differentiation. That creates a tension: the more the UI disappears, the harder it becomes for Apple to stand apart from Microsoft or Google.

Claude hits #1 on the App Store as users rally behind Anthropic’s government standoff — 9to5Mac

While the long-term consequences of this disagreement are unclear, Anthropic appears to be winning in mindshare, at least for now, in terms of app downloads among iPhone users.

If Anthropic was a publicly traded company ten times their current valuation, would they still stand out against the US government? Asking for a fictional friend at Apple.