Took a little time to go through most of my podcasts in Overcast, unsubscribing from a bunch of shows that I no longer listen to regularly. I have a “Favorites” playlist that shows recent episodes from select shows. Also: most podcasts are just too long now.

Ben Thompson goes philosophical about the Claude watermarking:

What the E.U. is doing is stealing the last thing humans have — creation — and demanding it be bundled with substantiation, effectively giving AI the credit. That the human gave AI the text to proofread — or even the prompt to generate writing — doesn’t matter to the bureaucrats.

Apologies to blog readers who are sick of all the AI-related posts! New Micro.blog stuff coming later today.

Is anyone else surprised that Gemini has 1 billion users? I’ve only met one person who uses it instead of ChatGPT or Claude. But maybe I don’t know enough Android users. People go along with whatever defaults they’re given… Browser, maps, AI.

One day I’m going to work up the courage to ask AI to rewrite every old jQuery call to use simple DOM manipulation and fetch instead. But not today.

After some bug fix juggling that wasn’t going anywhere, decided to throw a problem at GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra, which I had never used before because it churns through tokens quickly. It spun up a few subagents to handle different facets of the problem. Fascinating.

John Gruber isn’t buying the Claude watermarking either:

What happens if you copy my text and quote it in something you write, by hand? Now you’ve got a watermark in your prose, invisible characters or something, that implicates that your prose is AI-generated? Even though you didn’t use AI and just copy and pasted text from me? Madness.

Maybe the watermark won’t work on short sections of text, like a blockquote, because there aren’t enough words to detect a pattern (unless every word is shifted with the algorithm, which seems insane). But who knows, because how it really works is a secret.

Following up on my comment yesterday, I now have Codex → OpenClaw working, so I can chat with my bot in the same place I have other AI chats. Codex wrote a plugin for itself to handle the connection, plus some setup on the OpenClaw server. 🤖

I don’t like the Claude watermark announcement. For images, yes, watermarks are important. “A picture is worth a thousand words” and there’s too much of a chance for misinformation. For text, it’s more complicated, as essays will often be 95% human, with AI-assisted edits.

Great episode of Dithering this morning. I’ve been wondering about the Apple / Google partnership too, with Google falling behind. I think Siri AI will be a good release, but it’s not really in the same ballpark as the frontier models. Try GPT-Live sometime.