Listening to the Vergecast podcast’s wrap-up of DevDay… I think it’s a big deal that Dots is powered by Astra. It’s just not going to make the same kind of mistakes as Muse has so far.
I guess not shocking that a product that’s $100/month is better than one that’s $0/month.
(Yes, we're still learning to tango. Slowly.)
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Meta is refuting a journalist’s claim that its AI agent Muse read the user’s private messages without permission. Following an earlier report from Inc. columnist Jason Aten that detailed the issue, Meta VP of Communications Andy Stone pushed back, making it clear that the company does not believe its product did this without the user’s consent.
I was curious about this too, so I added a bit of test code to Micro.blog for Mac (which like Muse is not sandboxed) to try to read Messages.app's SQLite database on my own machine. It can't do it. macOS blocks access at the system level unless Full Disk Access has been granted. No amount of mischief from Meta will be able to override this.
The other idea I had was that maybe Muse got clever and tried to script another app with Full Disk Access, like Terminal.app, to read the database. I prototyped this too. It triggers another modal system prompt to confirm access to control Terminal.app. Jason Aten would've noticed this.
Making everything murkier, Muse did clearly hallucinate the initial explanation of reading Jason's notifications. But just because it made that up doesn't mean that Meta is wrong that technically what happened shouldn't be possible unless Jason allowed access. Unfortunately it's really hard to go back in time and figure out exactly what went wrong.
Bottom line is that most people don't trust Meta. Many people still think Instagram listens to your microphone to serve you targeted ads. There's nothing to support that. I'm also pretty confident that Muse doesn't read your Messages.app database without permission. But no amount of technical evidence from Meta is going to assuage people's concerns, because Meta has a long history of other privacy violations. That trust will take a long time to rebuild, if it ever can.
Reddit announced they are winding down RSS feeds:
Because RSS is now a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse, we'll stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026 while preserving moderation workflows that depend on it through supported alternatives.
Just another silo.
I loved it.
He talks about how YouTube is going to start shipping this new feature where makers can essentially publish different “variants” of their videos and see which performs best (an A/B test).
Which immediately begs a lot of questions. Brownlee voices his:
It’s pretty wild when you think about it. I mean, imagine sending someone a link, “Check out this cool video!” And at that point you’re basically crossing your fingers, “I hope they see the same thing I did…”
Marques says he spoke to some YouTube engineers about these questions and they didn’t really have answers. They were kind of just like, “We don’t know — yolo! This’ll ship soon.”
So his video is a kind of plea to YouTube creators everywhere: Don’t use this feature!
There’s this sort of unspoken rule of community on YouTube, that like we’re all having this same experience together — we’re all watching the same video. That is what makes it a cultural phenomenon is that we all saw the same thing […] so letting people put up two or three different videos of the same thing at the same time kind of fundamentally breaks that, which doesn't feel right.
I agree, 100%.
Brownlee goes on to make a lot of great points in the video that, I think, can be applicable to making software as well. A few that stood out:
I find it interesting how Brownlee shares his opinion that YouTube spends way too much time chasing their competitors and not enough time being YouTube.
Which, when you think about it, is exactly the kind of place a feature like this would stem from: an insecurity in your own creative choices. How YouTube approaches its own insecurities is now trickling down as a feature to its users.
“Let’s let people make lots of variations on things, try all of them, and see what performs best” is exactly the kind of thinking you get in a platform that doesn’t know what it wants to be. So it’s left spending its time 1) doing what others are doing, and 2) following the fickle whims of whatever it can measure.
It’s like this adolescent attitude of, “I don’t know what I want to be, so I’m gonna imitate my peers and let others tell me what they think I should be.”
Anyway, that’s a long way of saying I liked the video. You might too. Hopefully you see the same thing I did, lol.
A pilot on a Dubai-to-Tel Aviv flight has been arrested after he stabbed the other pilot and appears to have tried to crash the plane, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. A passenger described how he put the alleged assailant in a chokehold before grabbing the plane’s controls to stabilize the flight.
I’d love to see the technology decoupled from the current depressing narrative. I’d love to see a thousand homemade software flowers bloom from open local language models.
Me too.
At work, we use some of the subsidized models Jeremy talks about. We well know that the current token cost is likely to change. I think it is going to continue to march to near zero. Jeremy thinks we’ll get priced out of paradise. We’ll see which happens.
But, ever since I was a young man helping a local doctor to care for a local chicken coop with a few hundred chickens in it, I don’t think it is a good idea to keep all of your eggs in a single basket.
To that end, we’ve got a fallback agent/LLM set up that we can hot swap out when we need to (at least, I’m working pretty diligently on being able to do just that). Because of that work I’ve had the chance to really put the screws to many open local models. Kick the tires. Turn them upside down and see what falls out of their pockets. They are getting rather capable, rather quickly, which means you can have as many tokens as you need.
I genuinely hope the future is a world of many, many models.
There's lots of new stuff in Wavelength 2.1. My favorite is an easier way to add audio narration to existing blog posts. In the Posts tab, you can tap to show the post text while you record reading it. Gives a little extra human touch to your blog posts.
I wrote more about audio narration in Micro.blog two years ago.
