I use an old Pixel 4 for testing Android. I really like the buttons: only a power button and up/down volume. All the buttons are on one side. Not sure how I would redesign the iPhone buttons, but I don’t think they’re quite right.

There is always going to be some water spilling, might as well water the plant with it! Great idea at Lazarus on Airport. ☕️

Deployed some fixes and new settings for Mastodon this morning. Always feels good to make things just a little better. 🎉

Satya Nadella writes on his blog about what we potentially give to models for training. He focuses mostly on the enterprise, which I don’t care much about, but this part does describe a real tension of commercial models:

While the great innovation that comes from model providers having fair use rights to train models on public data is needed, I find it ironic that the status quo is to then turn around and impose restrictive terms on distillation, and to reserve the right to learn from customer usage and interaction data. If learning flows in only one direction, economic value converges toward the owners of the learning infrastructure rather than the creators of the knowledge itself.

I think this is something that both AI fans and skeptics could agree on.

Good article today from Ben Thompson about Apple vs. OpenAI:

AI is changing the world, and Apple’s contribution is to deliver two year-old technology differentiated by exclusive access to data it won’t share. It certainly has no interest in delivering on a new AI-driven paradigm that endangers its iPhone franchise in any way; any of its employees who wish to do exactly that, meanwhile, are being told loud and clear that Apple doesn’t just think it owns your laptop, but also your mind and knowledge.

Simon Willison blogs about how Anthropic keeps extending Fable access, presumably because too many people would cancel their subscriptions and use GPT-5.6 instead:

At this point I think Anthropic should change track and keep Fable permanently available on those plans. OpenAI are winning users simply due to the uncertainty that surrounds Fable access.

Anthropic should do this, but also if they do, it will make their original claim that they can’t support Fable in subscriptions look like a lie. Very interesting to watch. 🍿

TwoMillionKit is a clever solution from Guilherme Rambo (via Daring Fireball) to use private cloud compute by routing through the command-line fm tool. I was accepted into the Small Business Program a few days ago and had forgotten why I had applied until reading this.

Happy to get an Inkwell update out for macOS. From the news blog today:

Fixed several bugs in Inkwell for Mac. Grab the latest version with “Check for Updates” or directly from the help page.

Robin Sloan blogged about attending a Stop the AI Race march:

These things are growing and mutating faster than anybody can make sense of them. So … here’s a wild thought … let’s slow down, and make sense of them.

I really like Robin’s blog and his books. Great photos from the march too! I don’t think a pause can work, though, because coordinating with China labs and all open source seems nearly impossible. I’d rather see better plans for investing in renewable energy and some kind of UBI-like fund to help with the economy. No matter the speed of AI development, slow or fast, we’re going to need those things.