Really appreciated this article by Dan Moren on regulation and the App Store:

Let’s not root for Apple to win—let’s root for Apple to do better.

A good rule to remember with any corporation. See also: Dropout’s adventure with Ticketmaster’s Dynamic Pricing.

Messy space, messy brain. Time to clean the office!

Are there any good electric cars coming out in the USA that aren’t crossovers or straight-up SUVs?

(I know the Mini Electric exists, but I’m hoping for at least 200mi of range.)

Currently in Smolblog, I don’t like how much boilerplate there is around Content Types (and CRUD operations in general). I’ve gotten close to a good abstraction a few times. But something in my brain just isn’t clicking.

Maybe I just need to sleep on it. Again.

From Trevor Flowers:

I wish more people who are worried about FOSS supply side attacks would realize that universal basic income and free healthcare would result in an almost infinite stream of excellent software from people who care more about quality than profit.

I’m increasingly convinced we need this.

Interesting choice for ESPN to add commercial breaks (“we’ll pick up right where we left off”) to an F1 race that everyone’s going to be watching on DVR anyway (and thus skipping said commercials). What weird kind of contractual obligation is this? 🏎️

Just sent out the first set of private beta invites for Smolblog. 😬

I will have made the first public post about Smolblog five years ago this May.

Let’s see if I can’t get to Open Beta by then.

And it’s not even consistent? Like my logs are full of rejected inbox requests because the Delete messages are signed with public keys that don’t exist because they belong to the account ostensibly being deleted!

I’ve been “almost done” for a month now. 🫠

ActivityPub might not be complicated, but trying to figure out all the little nitpicks with Mastodon that if you don’t do just right means nothing works is almost enough to make me give up on the whole thing.

Count me in with people calling large-context machine learning models “spicy autocorrect” instead of “AI.” That being said…

It’s getting to the point where it doesn’t matter how good it actually is, just that it’ll be good enough for lots of people to be out of work. What are we doing about that?

Did beta work using smol.blog. Production server is Smolblog.com, but with handles on smol.blog…

Except mastodon.social cached the URLs and, even with the webfinger changes, only talks to smol.blog. With the old IDs.

sigh

TBT to when the internet went out and I worked from a Starbucks (because their internet wasn’t from the local cable company and therefore still worked).

…haven’t worked from a coffee shop since. 🙃

TIL a Time Machine backup can fail because the disk you’re backing up (not the disk you’re backing up to) is too full. 🫠

Thought I was going to send out some closed beta invites this weekend, but I ran into a snag with my last-pass testing. The good news is, I think this means custom domains and fediverse handles are coming sooner than expected…

I’m trying to customize the account registration page in WordPress. The hooks for adding fields work fine, but not the hooks for validating. I can only assume that, because it’s multisite, it works differently? Because reasons?

Am I actually going to launch manually creating user accounts?

Working on a color scheme… I don’t think I need any interface colors besides primary, secondary, error, and neutral, right? I know a lot of the off-the-shelf systems have “success” and “info” and “danger” (not to be confused with “error”), but I also feel like I never use those.

If you’ve been interested in Smolblog and you haven’t signed up for the mailing list, now’s a pretty good time.

Just saying… 😇

OK, let’s try this monorepo business…

• Setting up test coverage checks for the framework behind Smolblog.
• Tested lines: 100%
• Saw that there was an option for testing lines, branches, and paths.
• Tested paths: 38%
• Saw how many tests I would need for full path coverage.
• Decided to test branches instead.

File this one under “comically and colossally missing the point.”

I’m with John Gruber on this one:

Whatever revenue Apple would lose to non-commissioned web sales (for non-games) is not worth the hit they are taking to the company’s brand and reputation — this move reeks of greed and avarice — nor the increased ire and scrutiny of regulators and legislators on the “anti-Big-Tech” hunt.

I find it incredibly ironic that the flag allowing—allowing!—an app to have an external payment link is called an “entitlement."¹ Apple is a company with a valuation only matched by oil companies, and here they are reaching for 12-27% of app developers' revenue even if they use their own payment and purchase-tracking systems. And all this still requires apps to use in-app purchases; external payments can only be a second option.

I want to blame some of this on Wall Street. The stock market expects infinite growth, and while Apple’s profits are legendary, growth has slowed. This is why Apple has been so keen to start services like Apple TV+ and Fitness+. Why they keep pushing iCloud+ and Apple Music even at the expense of the user experience. Why they didn’t want the details of their search deal with Google getting out.

But the more I think about it, the more I worry that this is just in Apple’s character. This is still very much the company that got pantsed by Microsoft in the 1980s and refuses to forget. Now that they’re on top of the world, I worry that they don’t know how to stop. And they need to.

Apple is certainly entitled to reap the rewards of its hard work. As John Gruber (again) put it:

Apple’s 30/15 percent commissions from App Store purchases and subscriptions are not payment processing fees. They include payment processing fees, but most of those commissions are, in Apple’s view, their way of monetizing their intellectual property. And they see the entire iOS platform as their IP.

We all pay for the phones. Developers pay $100/year to get and stay on the store. We give a 15-30% commission to tie into the App Store’s payment infrastructure (which includes purchase management and verification, asset hosting, and a bunch of other stuff that makes it definitely worth it for my little app. But this demand for 12-27% of outside-app purchases just because? Grow up.

IT WORKS IT WORKS IT WORKS IT WORKS redacted because I don’t want you to follow my test account IT WORKS IT WORKS!!!

All these sports betting apps encouraging me to make sports “more exciting” and “mean more.”

No. I get my heart broken enough as it is.

Watching the NFL game, they’re showing the temperature difference between Kansas City and Miami. Mike Tirico narrates the temperature in Miami as “70 degrees.”

The on-screen graphic says 69°.