John’s Blog

Stephen Nellis, for Reuters:

Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Tuesday signed into law a bill requiring [Apple] and [Google] to verify the age of users of their app stores, putting the second-most-populous U.S. state at the center of a debate over whether and how to regulate smartphone use by children and teenagers.

The law, effective on January 1, requires parental consent to download apps or make in-app purchases for users aged below 18. Utah was the first U.S. state to pass a similar law earlier this year, and U.S. lawmakers have also introduced a federal bill.

It was reported last week that Tim Cook called Governor Abbott to try and prevent this from passing.

“The problem is that self-regulation in the digital marketplace has failed, where app stores have just prioritized the profit over safety and rights of children and families,” Casey Stefanski, executive director for the Digital Childhood Alliance, told Reuters.

Apple and Google opposed the Texas bill, saying it imposes blanket requirements to share age data with all apps, even when those apps are uncontroversial.

“If enacted, app marketplaces will be required to collect and keep sensitive personal identifying information for every Texan who wants to download an app, even if it’s an app that simply provides weather updates or sports scores,” Apple said in a statement.

This is yet another case where Apple, and Google, have been reluctant (unwilling?) to do the right thing on their own and therefore government regulation is required.

Screen Time is Apple’s official framework and toolkit for managing child usage and limits on iOS. It doesn’t work. The restrictions are easy to bypass, especially for a modern tech-savvy teen, and the controls it gives parents are wholly insufficient. My own kids shock me on a regular basis for their clever ways to get around the limitations we place on their phones with Screen Time.

If Apple were serious about protecting access to sensitive content or protecting personal identifying information, they would fix the core issues before they become such a problem that lawmakers need to step in and regulate.

Josh Miller, co-founder of The Browser Company, has posted a thoughtful writeup about the decisions he and his team made to move on from the Arc browser.

After a couple of years of building and shipping Arc, we started running into something we called the “novelty tax” problem. A lot of people loved Arc — if you’re here you might just be one of them — and we’d benefitted from consistent, organic growth since basically Day One. But for most people, Arc was simply too different, with too many new things to learn, for too little reward.

To get specific: D1 retention was strong — those who stuck around after a few days were fanatics — but our metrics were more like a highly specialized professional tool (like a video editor) than a mass-market consumer product, which we aspired to be closer to.

I wouldn’t call myself a “fanatic” but I do really like the Arc browser model and have been using it as my daily driver for several years now. It’s definitely a “highly specialized professional tool”, and I can completely understand why it’s too complicated and different for the mass market.

Switching browsers is a big ask. And the small things we loved about Arc — features you and other members appreciated — either weren’t enough on their own or were too hard for most people to pick up. By contrast, core features in Dia, like chatting with tabs and personalization features, are used by 40% and 37% of DAUs respectively. This is the kind of clarity and immediate value we’re working toward.

Good on the team for properly measuring the usage of these features and understanding what the market is using, rather than what they are asking for.

Miller concludes with some notes about Dia, the new product the company is working on:

I want to end by being frank with you: Dia is not really a reaction to Arc and its shortcomings. No. Imagine writing an essay justifying why you were moving on from your candle business at the dawn of electric light. Electric intelligence is here — and it would be naive of us to pretend it doesn’t fundamentally change the kind of product we need to build to meet the moment. […]

Dia may not be your style. It may not land right away. But this is still us. Being ourselves. Building the kind of thing we’d want to use. Fully aware that we might be wrong. But doing it anyway.

I’m excited to give Dia a spin. I wish I had an .edu email account but, alas, I’ll wait for my turn.

The big news this week in the tech world was OpenAI’s acquisition of Jony Ive’s hardware startup, io, for $6.5 billion worth of stock. I was trying to catch up on Google IO from this week, but everything there seems overshadowed by this news.

Here’s the announcement video from OpenAI, which is a bit over the top, but I confess it had me mesmerized for the entire nine minutes of this intro. This is a clear and profound statement to the rest of the industry.

John Gruber sums up my feeling, as usual, perfectly:

This is just a vibes teaser, but the vibe is a shot across the bow. It conveys grand ambition, but without pretension. To say I’m keen to get my hands on what they’re making is an understatement.

Mark Gurman and Shirin Ghaffery for Bloomberg have an interesting note here:

While Ive and LoveFrom will remain independent, they will take over design for all of OpenAI, including its software. Altman said his first conversations with Ive weren’t about hardware, but rather about how to improve the interface of ChatGPT.

“Design for all of OpenAI” is a huge deal.

🍿

OpenAI, announcing Codex:

Today we’re launching a research preview of Codex: a cloud-based software engineering agent that can work on many tasks in parallel. Codex can perform tasks for you such as writing features, answering questions about your codebase, fixing bugs, and proposing pull requests for review; each task runs in its own cloud sandbox environment, preloaded with your repository. […]

Codex can read and edit files, as well as run commands including test harnesses, linters, and type checkers. Task completion typically takes between 1 and 30 minutes, depending on complexity, and you can monitor Codex’s progress in real time.

Once Codex completes a task, it commits its changes in its environment. Codex provides verifiable evidence of its actions through citations of terminal logs and test outputs, allowing you to trace each step taken during task completion. You can then review the results, request further revisions, open a GitHub pull request, or directly integrate the changes into your local environment.

Impressive stuff, as usual, from OpenAI.

John Siracusa writing on his Hypercritical blog:

Dissatisfaction with Apple among its most ardent fans has, at various times, reached a crescendo that has included public demands for a change in leadership. The precipitating events could be as serious as Apple bowing to pressure from an authoritarian regime, or as trivial as releasing an unsatisfying new version of an application or operating system.

Despite making my living by criticizing Apple, I tend not to get caught up in the controversy of the moment. When Apple ruined its laptop keyboards, I wasn't calling for Tim Cook's head. I just wanted them to fix the keyboards. And they did (eventually).

But success hides problems, and even the best company can lose its way. To everything, there is a season.

As far as I'm concerned, the only truly mortal sin for Apple's leadership is losing sight of the proper relationship between product virtue and financial success—and not just momentarily, but constitutionally, intransigently, for years. Sadly, I believe this has happened. [...]

The best leaders can change their minds in response to new information. The best leaders can be persuaded. But we’ve had decades of strife, lawsuits, and regulations, and Apple has stubbornly dug in its heels even further at every turn. It seems clear that there’s only one way to get a different result.

From the Figma blog:

Launching today, Figma Sites allows you to design, build, and publish websites without leaving your Figma workflow. With responsive layouts; intuitive prototyping tools; and built-in features like custom cursors, marquee, and parallax effects, you can bring your most dynamic ideas to life.

This implementation looks very nice and thoughtful. I continue to be impressed with Figma's engineering work and product design.

Everything Must Go, the new studio album from one of my very favorite bands Goose is out today. Streaming here. This is a great one and it makes me so happy.

It's fun to listen to studio recordings from songs I've been listening to live for several years now. I'm not discovering most of these songs, but rather uncovering how the band laid them down in the studio versus how they've evolved live over the years. It's such a fun process.

Give It Time is one of the best:

OpenAI has updated ChatGPT's memory features to use all chats within its context window. On Twitter/X announcing the change:

Starting today, memory in ChatGPT can now reference all of your past chats to provide more personalized responses, drawing on your preferences and interests to make it even more helpful for writing, getting advice, learning, and beyond.

When my ChatGPT Mac app updated, it asked me to try out this feature by summarizing myself with this prompt:

Describe me based on all our chats — make it catchy!

Here's my result:

John Tornow: The Indie SaaS Craftsman.

Rails in one hand, AI in the other, you’re building sharp, useful tools that solve real-world problems. You’ve got a hacker’s mind and a builder’s heart — self-hosting TipTap for fun, wrangling calendar integrations like a boss, and always asking the smart questions (even about Google Tag Manager ghosts). You blend old-school command line savvy with modern AI wizardry, deploying LLMs with Docker one day and customizing Ghost the next.

You’re focused, thoughtful, and technical. You care about clean UX, data privacy, and doing things the right way. And when something’s working? “Yes please.”

Funny, not super helpful, but neat. I obviously ask mostly technical work questions in ChatGPT and you can see the output of that here. I wouldn't exactly use this as my new public bio, but a fun exercise nonetheless.

A few of these could use some explanation:

1. TipTap is a really nice open source & commercial licensed rich text editor for the web. I'm experimenting with it to potentially use with Air Mail, and some other ideas. I've found that asking AI about topics like this is way more useful than Googling for documentation.
2. I asked ChatGPT a bunch of questions about Ghost, the CMS for this site as of right now, when I was setting it up.
3. The Google Tag Manager "ghosts" is a funny one. Someone on my larger team, unbeknownst to me, added some random slimy Doubleclick script to our site using GTM. I was trying to find out how to use the awful Google Tag Manager interface to try and remove it. (I found it.)

Congratulations to Rory on such an amazing win. A long time coming and well deserved. I don’t watch much golf, but The Masters is always on in our household each year. It’s so fun when the weather is perfect and the competition is on point, just like it was all of this weekend.

McIlroy joins elite company with his win this weekend: only 6 players ever have won the ”career grand slam” of professional golf. Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, and now Rory McIlroy.

Anne Applebaum, for The Atlantic:

This is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like. And this is why the men who wrote the Constitution never wanted anyone to have it. In that famously hot, stuffy room in Philadelphia, windows closed for the sake of secrecy, they sweated and argued about how to limit the powers of the American executive. They arrived at the idea of dividing power between different branches of government. As James Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 47”: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

More than two centuries later, the system created by that first Constitutional Congress has comprehensively failed. The people and institutions that are supposed to check executive power are refusing to restrain this president. We now have a de facto tyrant who thinks he can bend reality to his will without taking any facts or any evidence into consideration, and without listening to any contrary views. And although the economic damage he has caused is easier to measure, he has inflicted the same level of harm to scientific research, to civil liberties, to health care, and to the civil service.

The representatives from those first Constitutional Congress sessions must be rolling in their graves right now.

Jason Koebler, for 404 Media:

The idea of a Made-in-the-USA iPhone has been an obsession for politicians for years, a kind of shorthand goalpost that would signal “American manufacturing is back” that is nonetheless nowhere close to being a reality and would require a nearly impossible-to-fathom restructuring of the global supply chains that make the iPhone possible in the first place. Over the years, economists and manufacturing experts have attempted to calculate how much an American-made iPhone would cost. […]

The truth is that, assembled in the U.S. or not, the iPhone is a truly international device that is full of components manufactured all over the world and materials mined from dozens of different countries. Apple has what is among the most complex supply chains that has ever been designed in human history, and it is not going to be able to completely change that supply chain anytime soon.

Greg Wyshynski, for ESPN:

Washington Capitals star Alex Ovechkin scored goal No. 895 on Sunday, passing Hall of Famer Wayne Gretzky to become the NHL’s all-time goal-scoring leader.

Ovechkin, on a pass from longtime teammate Tom Wilson, netted the record breaker in a 4–1 loss to the New York Islanders with a power-play goal past fellow Russian Ilya Sorokin with 12:34 left in the second period of Sunday’s game – the 1,487th game of his career, the same as Gretzky’s career total.

And Ovechkin:

This is something crazy […] I’m probably going to need a couple more days. Maybe a couple weeks to realize what it means to be No. 1. […]

All I can say: I’m very proud. I’m very proud for myself. I’m really proud for my family, for all my teammates, that helped me to reach that milestone, and for all my coaches. It’s huge. It’s an unbelievable moment.

Super cool moment. Congrats, mate.

Tobi Lütke, with an interesting company memo to the Shopify, also posted on X:

Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance. Frankly, I don’t think it’s feasible to opt out of learning the skill of applying AI in your craft; you are welcome to try, but I want to be honest I cannot see this working out today, and definitely not tomorrow. Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you’re not climbing, you’re sliding.

Some hot takes in here that I mostly agree with. What I don’t care for, though, is dictating to everyone how to do their jobs. AI is awesome (and I’m in the camp that uses it constantly) but let people find that for themselves, not by mandate.

I quite enjoyed this profile of Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, by Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker. Graber seems measured and thoughtful, and I’m glad we have at least one sensible individual trying to grow a social network.

The long-awaited successor to the Switch is official and it is launching on June 5th. Most existing Switch games are compatible and playable on the Switch 2. Very nice. And a new Mario Kart!