Michael Tsai blogging about Grok Bot and agents generally:

I don’t trust xAI (or Meta) with my data, but it doesn’t seem like Siri AI can do all that much. So far, I’ve been too busy to do much with agents, even on a test Mac. But I don’t think agents are going away, so there’s a tension here that will need to be resolved eventually.

In the latest Connected Places fediverse news, this improvement in Mastodon 4.7 stood out to me:

Mastodon 4.7.0 can now recognise a remote account that changes its handle by using its underlying ActivityPub identifier. This does not mean Mastodon’s own users can change their handles yet, but it means that Mastodon can better work with software where that is already possible.

Quite a big deal. In practice, might rarely pay off because an id URL is probably going to be tied to the domain name, but still a welcome step forward.

If the future is more agents and fewer traditional apps, it’s a threat to the App Store business, so Apple will resist it. The company that was willing to obsolete its own product (the iPod) to make a great phone… That company doesn’t exist anymore.

Ben Thompson writing about how the future will be on-demand UIs and agents that bypass needing an app at all:

…no one wants to use apps because they are apps, apps were just the vehicle for people to accomplish something or entertain themselves; once people realize they can get straight to the job to be done it will seem odd they did it any other way.

This is why Muse’s mission statement marks a pivotal moment. It might even be dangerous for the web, handing more centralized power to Meta.

The iPad update to Epilogue that I blogged about this weekend is now available. Apple review time: 22 hours. Not bad, except… Google review: 30 minutes.

Lex Friedman has a blog post about how broken the App Store review process is. He summarizes a few of the long-standing issues and a potential solution to at least whitelist trusted apps:

Apple’s “guilty until proven innocent” policy is offensive to the developers it claims to embrace.

John Gruber followed up about Alexandr Wang’s Muse post on X:

Wang wrote that Muse “Clears the way and solves all the problems it can until the human part, the wanting and the dreaming, is all that’s left.” That’s dystopic, not utopic. It’s the actual creation and doing of things that makes life worthwhile — not just wanting and dreaming about it.

I read Alexandr’s post as wanting to give people more time to do the work that matters, not the busywork. That vision for AI sounds good, but it doesn’t convince me to use Muse specifically. I’m worried about delegating so much power to Meta.

Crazy last few minutes of Ravens / Cowboys. 1 second! Sigh. 🏈

Dario Amodei will have a private dinner with Trump tonight, according to Axios:

Months ago, when Anthropic first started talking about having a one-on-one with Trump, some advised against it because “Dario’s a little too weird” for Trump, one senior official told Axios.

This is gonna be awkward.

Mark Gurman compares the Apple Vision Pro to the Meta VR Glasses, and adds some notes about new development:

Apple’s Vision team is now working on a completely revamped headset under the code name N224. Company engineers are exploring about four concepts for the device, including designs that offload internal components in the same way as Meta’s new product. But some senior Apple decision-makers view the external puck as a poor user experience and want the company to stick with something closer to an all-in-one design.