In followers rot, Matt forgot to cover followers that are trying to get your attention and hoping that you will visit their profile and get hooked to them by starting to follow you and like everything you post online. They are active but don’t really care about the content. I have a few of those on Bluesky and Mastodon (and a lot on Twitter, too).
Yesterday I had a long and tricky discussion with some of my colleagues about the war in Ukraine. It was tricky because one of my colleagues suggested to consider Russian side before judging that it is not ok to invade Ukraine. While he wasn’t fully up-to-date with what is going on in this war as I am, he kept pressuring me to think that Ukraine might have done bad things in the past to justify Russian invasion. I find this point of view morally hard to hold and justify. Even if it is about joining NATO or not and the effects on Russian political posture and geopolitical posture, I cannot accept any justification.
Gruber, in his most recent article about Anthropic’s strategy for encoding fingerprints in generated text:
“English Is the Finest Language, and Thus, Perhaps, More Fingerprintable”
Give me a break. The finest language is French, the language of diplomacy. Period.
The new traffic light controls in macOS 27 beta 6 are 👌🏻 To me, Apple is slowly but surely correcting course here.
My sister, who discovered water painting late in life, is part of a group of artists who share the same passion for art and painting in general. She is really good. She has taken many art courses since COVID. Now, she’s part of a Facebook Group, and when she mentioned it, I suggested creating a website for her to showcase her work, separate from platforms like Meta. She inquired about discoverability. What can I say to her? Is discoverability always tied to rewards? Are likes part of a validation process? Can we be on the web without seeking discoverability or rewards (likes, reblogs, etc.)?
Vibe coding, Glaze, Lovable, etc. are these the consequence of a disconnect with traditional developers as well as with traditional digital distribution conduits? 🤔
For the second time in as many days, I’ve seen paid promotion from Incogni (one in a YouTube video and on the 9to5Mac website). According to the Incogni website:
Incogni is a personal data removal service that automatically removes your information from data broker websites, significantly reducing your digital footprint. Anyone can get instant access to personal data online—Incogni makes sure it stays private.
I was curious and headed to their website, where you can enter your email address to test the service. The problem is that, according to their ToS and privacy policy, they collect email addresses this way so they can bug you with promotions and all that. I find this against their value proposition and it weakens their credibility. People willing to pay for such a service are probably protective of their email address, and yet, this is the first thing Incogni collects. If they offered a way to test the service, albeit in a limited way, while saying they don’t collect email addresses to perform these tests, it would be quite another matter, and I would be more willing to test and maybe even subscribe! But no. Bummer. I’ll pass.
This morning, I spent some time revisiting my RSS feeds and blogroll, and I was sad to delete the RSS feed pointing to Om Malik’s website. Such a loss. 😔
My bookmarking web app is now mature, but one thing was missing: an MCP endpoint. I wasn’t sure whether I could add that feature while running on Vercel. Well, after less than an hour, Claude Code helped me get my MCP endpoint running smoothly and responding to all sorts of prompts! I was expecting a much more challenging journey. 😅
It’s fun to go back in time and look at content I’ve previously published. Here’s an example: a Create Summary newsletter issue published two years ago. I still have a newsletter; the name is different, the content format is similar but more mature, and the motivation to put it together regularly is the same.