John Voorhees has an initial look at ChatGPT’s Computer History feature. I enabled it this morning, but only for a few select apps like my web browser and text editors. It works well. I think I’ll keep it disabled for chat apps, since that’s a privacy can of worms that I’m not comfortable with yet.

I’ve made the first round of improvements to Micro.blog’s somewhat-complicated Sources page, now called Connections. A few things have been moved around and renamed. Should generally be a little simpler. Probably more to do later!

Craig Mod using AI to research his family history:

The article she saw, that led to that decision, that led to me having “Michael” as a middle name on my original birth certificate. A scan of the newspaper was in some obscure database and Claude ran it down like a pack of bloodhounds digging up a sack of livers in the backyard.

Congrats to Marco Arment on releasing his new app, Unforgetful! I love this part of the intro blog post:

Despite constantly being told that I’d never get a good job, computers provided a lucrative career path filled with even worse academic performers who couldn’t care less about my grades. What a stroke of luck! I’d be mediocre to terrible at most jobs, but I turned out to be very good at using computers to turn coffee and Phish into money.

Even for developers who’ve had some success, releasing a new app is no small thing. The app was hung up in app review for a while too.

Apple has proposed to the court a 15% link-out fee, 5% for small businesses. Still too high. The correct percentage for linking to a website is 0%.

Fun video with John Pomeroy talking to Andreas Deja and Aaron Blaise and Beauty and the Beast and Lion King. Some neat stories I hadn’t heard before.

We’ve rolled out a big update to listening to audio in the Micro.blog timeline. If you start listening to a podcast episode, it can now keep playing it in the corner as you scroll the timeline or browse other parts of Micro.blog. Thanks @vincent for all the work on this! It just looks way better.

ShieldFont is very clever, using a custom font to visually change what humans see vs. what bots see. But I strongly feel we shouldn’t make the web worse to combat AI. This font will break accessibility, search, and all sorts of other things.

Heads-up for Micro.blog folks: I’m been thinking about feedback on the poorly-named “Sources” section of Micro.blog. It used to be called “Sources & Cross-posting”, which was slightly better. Leaning toward a rename to “Connections” with sub-pages for inbound RSS and cross-posting.

Wavelength 2.0 was rejected for a second time. I don’t even know what to do with Apple anymore. Do I need to switch to Android and Linux? App review is so deflating.

Meanwhile the Epic case has dragged on nearly five years. Apple got another 24-hour delay today.