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I’m happy (and quite surprised) to have made it to third place in today’s Craft Winter Challenge — a.k.a. the hackathon — for my submission of the Year-in-Review Writing Assistant. It’s a 500 US$ prize! 😅
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What a night & day difference between Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.5 models. The latter is much more effective at working through my MCP connection to Craft. But boy this baby consumes a lof of credits. 😅
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I’m trying something new this year for my year-in-review blog post. Using all my monthly post digests stored in Craft1, I’m using ChatGPT to look at those digests, take into account last year’s year-in-review article, plus this year’s document personal milestones to suggest ideas. This is now possible because Craft now supports MCP. Using the best ChatGPT models, I get a lot of material to consider but somehow I feel this is really overwhelming. I should be more directive like limiting the number of possible scenarios, their length, etc. I’m still exploring this workflow.
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I subscribe to my own blog post digest newsletter for archival purposed. ↩︎
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Anyone from my dear followers reading my newsletter (the ephemeral scrapbook)? Thoughts? 🙏🏻
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I added a new page to my “Where Apple’s Liquid Glass Crashes the User Experience” mini website called “Expectations might be too high”. You might take a look if you care about Apple.
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I forced my wife to update her iPhone 16 Pro to iOS 26.1. She will probably kill me today. It was nice to meet you guys. 🫢
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Time to renew Kagi Search. I’m on the starter tier. Upon examination, I’m doing about 45 searches per month. The trend is decreasing. I use their Article Summarizer on the iPad and iPhone much more often. I want to support them because I believe we need diversity when it comes to searching the web. But it’s not cheap, and my search requests trend is going downward, thanks to AI. Decisions, decisions, decisions. Any Kagi users in the room?
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I always feel like I’m losing the time-saving benefits if I spend time improving an automation (an Apple Shortcut, for example). 🤦🏻♂️
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I spent the last few days putting together a workflow to help me write those year-in-review articles. As we get closer to the end of the year, it’s the right time to start working on this. I documented my workflow in this Craft document and submitted to the #winter_challenge on Slack. Hint: my first real use case for MCP.
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On Tony Fadell For Apple's New CEO
Tony Fadell may seem like a nostalgic choice to replace Tim Cook at Apple, but the company’s current state suggests a focus on design, like during Steve Jobs’ era, could be more beneficial. Continue reading →
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Rant on. I’m judging on facts and acts, not with what someone says. Some people might defend web openness et al, but sharing on x.com in 2025 because it’s the place most people go is not an act of openness. It’s an act of contribution toward fascism. Stop pretending, people, don’t be lazy, stop taking shortcuts and leave x.com once and for all. Rant off.
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I don’t really believe in vibe coding, especially the scaling of it for complex systems, even more for maintaining code. But I certainly wish I could use vibe coding to write Apple Shortcuts. Apple must do something about its Shortcuts editor. It’s cumbersome, buggy as hell. Having a textual representation, a la Apple Script, would be so cool.
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Louie Mantia on Steve Lemay:
I don’t have much to say about Steve Lemay. He was the hiring manager for my first interview at Apple fifteen years ago. It didn’t work out, and I went to work on iTunes and iLife instead. But he had already been at Apple for a long time, and I have lots of respect for him for his platform knowledge and expertise. I don’t expect any big changes because I don’t think he or Apple are looking at this as an opportunity to undo Jony and Alan’s influence on the company, but I do sincerely think this will all feel better with Lemay’s leadership. I wish him the best.
What we’re going to see from Apple in the next twelve months is probably set in stone (except Siri or Apple Intelligence, maybe). I don’t expect a revolution in that short time frame.
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Think Different
I understand the enthusiasm for AI among certain groups of workers, especially in the field of information technology and more specifically software development. However, I believe that caution is necessary for most other categories of employment. Enthusiasm cannot simply be transferred systematically and literally to every domain, whether technological or not. Contexts differ greatly, professions are highly diverse, and even small variations in requirements can reduce the applicability of AI to nearly zero. Continue reading →
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Me to my wife: “Big news today, Apple is losing their designer lead. He’s joining Meta.” My wife: “WTF is there to design at Meta?”.
I love her. 😍
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I believe in talents renewal and in new dynamics to favor new ideas, new ways at seeing problems and challenges. It’s a new opportunity even if the guy taking over has been at Apple for a long time. Bye bye Dye.
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I don’t like the idea that a service like ChatGPT tries to present itself as a friend, an agent, or a human. With instructions, I can ask it to avoid this type of behavior. But I like the service’s appearance to be warm. Perhaps that’s why I prefer Anthropic’s Claude. Claude, even though it’s a proper name, presents itself better; its visual style seems friendlier to me. I feel like this is a contradiction.
I asked Claude about this possible contradiction. Here’s what he responded:
“I don’t think it’s actually a contradiction. You’re distinguishing between two different things: false intimacy (an AI pretending to be your friend or a person) versus pleasant design (a warm, welcoming aesthetic and tone). Wanting the latter without the former is perfectly coherent—it’s the difference between a tool that’s agreeable to use and a tool that’s trying to deceive you about its nature.”
Thanks, Claude.
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I’m experimenting with Claude for a month because I want to test MCP connections with Craft. ChatGPT does support MCP connections but the experience is not as mature as configuring an MCP connection with Claude. Claude is not cheap: pricing is similar to ChatGPT’s but plan usage limits are easy to reach.
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Algorithms, Platforms, and the Personal Web Space
The piece) from Disassociated about being “freed from personal websites” thanks to algorithms and timelines really resonated with me. I’ve long believed that platforms are killing the web; they are not the web. I recently asked my son if he had ever considered having his own personal website—a blog, having a place outside the usual platforms. His immediate response was, “But what about discoverability?” Why I think that everything comes down to that: It’s always about beating the algorithms (hello SEO) so that we are “discovered”. Continue reading →
