I skimmed through Don Lemon’s interview with Elon Musk. The segment on the new Tesla Roadster was entertaining. Other parts, sort of painful and awkward. You can tell Elon gets increasingly frustrated. Probably an impulsive and strategic mistake to scrap the deal, though.
I’ve been thinking about this blog post I wrote 13 years ago more and more. A few years after I wrote it, I remember backpedaling a little, questioning my premise about free apps. But now with the EU’s DMA and CTF, it seems relevant again, and the closing line has proven correct many times over.
On the latest Core Intuition, we talk again about Apple and the EU, with the news of sideloading and steady progress to the rules. From the show notes:
They talk about whether Manton would open an EU subsidiary if given the chance, and whether simply plunging in and doing something is the best way to find out what it’s worth.
No joke, $700 for an M1 MacBook Air (via Daring Fireball) might be the best deal for any Mac in the history of the company. They’re going to sell a bunch of these at Walmart.
It’s a cheap shot to complain about developer tools — and Xcode overall is great! — but something is seriously wrong in Xcode debugging in recent years. Feels like I can reload an entire React Native app’s JavaScript faster than I can view simple variables when stepping through Swift or Objective-C.
To underscore how important sideloading or marketplaces are to me, I would be willing to set up a subsidiary in the EU, pay EU taxes, and have custom app code that runs just in the EU in order to get it. It’s not only about the 30%. It’s independence.
Ben Werdmuller on a first-class fediverse platform:
I’m not bullish on squeezing long-form content into a microblogging platform, whether on Mastodon or X. Long-form content isn’t best consumed as part of a fast-moving stream of short updates.
It’s a good post. In some ways, Micro.blog best fits Ben’s vision. But not exactly. A theoretical fediverse-powered Medium might be a better match.
More updates from Dave Winer: he has a blogroll on his home page again, and a new site blogroll.social. One interesting twist is that his blogroll sidebar is sorted by most recently updated blog. We’re going with manually ordered in Micro.blog, but I can see the value in automatic sorting too.
I can’t blame spam for my failure to reply timely to support emails, but it doesn’t help feeling overloaded with junk messages. Today I took a first step: a new workflow that automatically marks anything with “guest post” as spam. No real customers ever ask for that.
The TikTok bill has passed. I like Ben Thompson’s thoughts on this… We can support a sale (because there’s risk with China’s influence) while at the same time being concerned that forcing apps to be removed from stores is its own dangerous can of worms (and not something to make a habit of).
Dave Winer has a new page about blogrolls. Micro.blog’s new recommendations feature supports this link
tag too. I love seeing how an older idea can be dusted off and given new life for the modern social web! Lots of potential for the future too, linking blogrolls together.
“…a book is different—it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind…” — The Diamond Age
Excited to see Apple continue to improve the EU rules. The latest big change is web distribution, so we’ll have something more like true sideloading. Seems like a reasonable approach:
To install apps from a developer’s website, users will first need to approve the developer to install apps in Settings on their iPhone. When installing an app, a system sheet will display information that developers have submitted to Apple for review, like the app name, developer name, app description, screenshots, and system age rating.
Getting great feedback about the new recommendations feature in Micro.blog. I’ve made a couple more improvements this morning. Blogrolls were a sort of early social graph, and they’re still useful today! There’s a joy in discovering new blogs that goes beyond the blandness of large platforms.