John’s Blog

It was a big week for us at Air Mail. We officially opened our new newsstand in New York, at 546 Hudson St in the West Village. Almost all of the work I’ve done in my career has been online or in digital form so it’s a rare occurrence for me to have a physical manifestation of an idea or work product. This was a lot of fun and I’m so excited to see the store open to the public.

Lovely coverage of the opening and Graydon’s vision in The New York Times from Friday. Ruth La Ferla writes:

The shop arrived in Manhattan after Air Mail opened others in London and Milan. Its merchandise, like the newsletter it is named after, is meant to appeal to an urbane crowd.

A rigorously edited selection of books and high-end glossies like “The World of Interiors,” “Kinfolk” and “Beauty Papers” is supplemented by various novelties with a statusy, you-can-only-find-it-here appeal. Say, a curly brass shoehorn ($145); a palm-tree-patterned Chez Dede lampshade ($345); old-fashioned typewriter paper ($15); or an Air Mail logo baseball cap ($30) like the one Larry David wears in recent episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

Is Mr. Carter, Vanity Fair’s former editor in chief, adopting a new identity as a shopkeeper? Not quite. But “there is a merchant inside everybody,” he said unflappably.

Love that quote. If you’re in New York, come visit us.

Happy Saturday. It’s a rainy one over here in Texas. A few notes and thoughts from the week that was…

Limitless

The newly announced Limitless Pendant looks really nice. Limitless dubs the device “a personalized AI powered by what you’ve seen, said, or heard”. I’m also going to give the Limitless Meetings feature a spin as well. Overall this launch seems very well done. Considering pre-ordering one of these to try it out. It’s the first AI-device that I’m seeing actually utility for myself with.

Soulver 3 for iPhone

I am an avid daily user of Soulver on the Mac. It’s nice to see the app coming to the iPhone as well. Soulver is such a better way to do quick calculations and formulas than having Excel open all day.

Delta Game Emulator (App Store Link)

Now that Apple allows “retro game emulators” in the App Store, a few have started to appear. The best and most notable example seems to be Delta, by Riley Testut. The app used to require side-loading with AltStore, but now it’s in the App Store proper.

Oh the Humanity

Ben Sandofsky has a great piece on “Why You Can’t Build Apple with Venture Capital” and the Humane launch.

MKBHD’s Review of the Humane Pin

Speaking of Humane, MKBHD’s review seems to put the nail in the coffin of this device. Brownlee faced some odd criticism of this review, which seemed very honest to me. Ben Thompson, as usual, has a great take which I 100% agree with regarding content creators and integrity.

Meta.ai

A new “AI Assistant” launch by Meta, based on the Lllama 3 LLM. Meta has a solid approach to rolling out these AI features. Yes, they’re publishing cool tech and AI ideas, but they’re also actually making products out of them and enhancing existing products. Microsoft and Google are doing the same. Apple needs to show work in this space soon to keep up.

A Glimpse Into Modern News Consumption

The Trump hush-money trial begins, and M.G. Siegler has a very interesting breakdown of where the jurors claim they get their news. Sure, it’s a New York jury pool, but interesting to see how many of the jurors get their news primarily from The New York Times.

Have a great weekend. ⛈️

Excellent post on iteration by Justin Jackson:

Your ability to launch a successful business depends on the accumulation of experiences, connections, skills, resources, experiments you’ve run, and insights you’ve gathered.

Today, ConvertKit’s mission is to “help creators earn a living online.” [Nathan Barry] and his team design and build the product with intuitions about what creators want and need. How did they develop those intuitions? Nathan developed his intuitions through his time being a creator. His experience writing and launching multiple apps, books, and courses from 2011-2013 informs his work today.

As an indie entrepreneur, you want to maximize every advantage you have. Most good markets are competitive, so you can’t just show up with a “good product;” you need an edge. Your competitive advantage should be that you understand the customer (and what they want) better than anyone else.

Happy Friday. It’s been a few busy weeks of work for me, so I’m catching up on some interesting links..

Microsoft researcher discovers backdoor in xz Utils library

This entire story is crazy, like out of a movie. It’s incredible how much of the computing world is dependent on small libraries like this run by volunteers.

Open Source Quality Institutes

Tim Bray suggests a new government organization to maintain, support, and protect our most crucial open source infrastructure. Open source maintenance is a thankless and mostly zero-revenue job, but so important to modern tech life. This is a really thoughtful and nice idea, that’ll likely never happen.

Yahoo acquires Artifact

It’s only been a few months since Artifact announced it would wind down, but apparently Yahoo still wants in.

Threads API is coming soon

Very nice looking API docs and specs for the new Threads API. It’s in testing with a few partners now, and rolling out later this year. I’ll be interested to see how this takes off.

Beeper is joining Automattic

Beeper, mostly known for its battles with Apple over iMessage for Android, has been acquired by Automattic. This seems like a strange partnership on the surface, but I didn’t realize Beeper has a messaging app for multiple services. And apparently so does Automattic, in the form of recently acquired Texts.com. I’m not in the market for an app like this myself, but I’m glad it exists and will continue to get support.

Have a great weekend. ⚾️

Today’s eclipse was incredible. Here in Texas, we were in the line of totality so were able to see the full eclipse in all of its glory. At first it just seemed like it was about to storm: getting slightly darker every few minutes. The moon slowly rotated in front of the sun until everything was dark. The birds were acting strange and dogs were barking in the neighborhood. And for a few minutes it was nighttime again. Then it was all over. Incredible. So cool.

The series finale for Curb Your Enthusiasm last night was perfection. It’s so rare that a finale for a series this popular gets it right. Loved all of the cameos and flashbacks to the idiotic moments throughout this great show. Curb has been my favorite show on TV for years, and it’ll be missed.

Happy Opening Day for the MLB. I’ve missed baseball so much this winter, and I’m very much looking forward to this season.

My beloved Orioles kick off the season with a series against the Angels today at Camden Yards. The Orioles’ new ownership group and David Rubenstein sure have given us more reasons to cheer this year. It’s going to be tough to follow up last year’s amazing season, but things are looking up for this club.

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Let’s go ⚾️

I’ve been thinking a lot about the DOJ suit against Apple this week. It’s still the talk of the community, for good reason.

Kontra (aka @counternotions) on Twitter sums up my current thoughts very well:

DOJ’s antitrust suit against Apple may read infuriatingly ignorant, inaccurate and ahistorical, but, above all, it’s an ideological frontal attack on the notion of integrated product/platform design…a death march to commodification and interchangeability. The rest is much noise.

A ton of the suit seems to focus on the negatives of Apple being a deeply integrated product company. Integrations between hardware and software. Integrations between its services. Integrations between devices (such as your phone and watch).

I reject the notion that this is a bad thing! The entire reason many of us strongly prefer Apple products is because of these integrations.

Yes, Apple sometimes does use these integrations in a way that prevents competition, especially related to the App Store. But the focus in the suit isn’t on those policies. Instead, the suit focuses on non-issues like third-party watch integrations.

I continue to believe that this suit is misguided and a waste of the government’s time. What’s the end game here? To enable third-party watches that have better notifications? Is that something the general tax-paying public is interested in? I think not.

I will continue to preach that there are plenty of issues with Apple’s dominance in the smartphone market and app economy. But this suit has yet to show me how it will fix any of that. Instead the DOJ is just wasting resources and taking time away from more important issues to litigate something that, I would guess, most of Apple’s customers think is a good thing.

Hayes Gardner and Christine Condon, writing in The Baltimore Sun:

A massive container ship adrift at 9 mph issued a “mayday” early Tuesday as it headed toward the iconic Francis Scott Key Bridge, losing power before colliding with one of the vital support columns. As the 984-foot vessel struck the bridge in the middle of an otherwise calm night, it caused a din that woke people ashore and immediately toppled an essential mid-Atlantic thoroughfare into the frigid waters.

[…]

Hours after the overnight collision, sunrise illuminated the chaos. A massive ship sat in the middle of the Patapsco River and strewn about were pieces of what used to be the 1.6-mile bridge that carried 12.4 million commercial and passenger vehicles in 2023.

A terrible story from my home town yesterday. My heart goes out for the people injured and still missing.

The big tech news last week was the US Department of Justice suing Apple in an antitrust case. The New York Times has the full PDF of the complaint here. It’s not terribly long and worth a read through to understand what’s going on here, or at least what the DOJ are claiming.

It’s my understanding that the DOJ does not typically bring cases like this that they do not believe they can win. They’re certainly going to have an uphill battle in this one and it will be very interesting to see this play out.

The biggest challenge is going to be proving that a company with, at most, around 60% market share in the U.S. is a true monopoly and is using that status to abuse the market.

Lauren Feiner at The Verge has a great summary of the ways the DOJ is claiming that Apple is illegally maintaining its monopoly:

• Disrupting “super apps” that encompass many different programs and could degrade “iOS stickiness” by making it easier for iPhone users to switch to competing devices
• Blocking cloud-streaming apps for things like video games that would lower the need for more expensive hardware
• Suppressing the quality of messaging between the iPhone and competing platforms like Android
• Limiting the functionality of third-party smartwatches with its iPhones and making it harder for Apple Watch users to switch from the iPhone due to compatibility issues
• Blocking third-party developers from creating competing digital wallets with tap-to-pay functionality for the iPhone

I sure hope these are examples to understand the spirit of the complaint, rather than an exhaustive list of actual issues to fix. I think there are much bigger concerns with Apple’s treatment of third-party developers and how the App Store economy works, but of course I’m biased.

In general, I’m having a hard time agreeing that any of this is a good use of the DOJ’s time. I would much rather see Congress enact new laws that prevent the abuses of Apple and other companies rather than trying to apply monopoly laws from the 1890s. But these are the laws we have, and I don’t think Congress will be functionally able to pass anything cogent and reasonable any time soon. For now, we’re stuck with what we have.

Happy Friday. A few links from this week that caught my eye:

TikTok Bill Passes House

If the bill passes the Senate and is signed by President Biden, TikTok would either need to be sold to a non-Chinese entity or be banned completely. In modern US politics, this is a rare bill with bipartisan support.

Android Browser Choice Screen

Just like the iOS version revealed a few weeks ago, Android users in the EU will see a screen letting them choose a default browser.

The Most Populous Cities in the World

YouTube video of animated city size by population. By Ollie Bye. (via Kottke)

Dave Winer adds a Blogroll

I used to love these so much, and I wish it was more common. What are the people I’m following reading? Micro.blog leading the way, again.

Callsheet is on vision OS

Nice work by Casey to get Callsheet working on Vision Pro. A great companion to watching TV & Movies on the device.

Devin

The first “AI software engineer” is here? We’ll see.

🍀

I like Jason Fried’s idea of “doing something later” in a project in his latest post:

When you work on really long projects — say 3, 6, 9 month projects — or projects that don’t have any end in sight, “we can do that later” typically means you’ll get to it eventually, as part of the current project.

[…]

But, when you work in six week cycles, or relatively short time frames, later means something else entirely. There’s no time for later. It’s now or not. Later doesn’t mean we’ll get to it at the end of this cycle. It means we’ll drop it.

This is exactly how I treat my “later queue” as well in my various ventures. We often have a “Someday” list that is more of a punch list of ideas, but not a work queue. If something is important, it will come back up. If we don’t have time for an idea now, we skip it and wait for it to come up again. Keeping our task lists small and focused is the goal.

Lately I’ve started moving code projects away from CircleCI and just to use Github Actions natively within our repos. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with CircleCI! But, it’s still one more service to configure and pay for when we’re already paying for Github Actions along with our organizational account. So in an effort to tidy up a bit, we’ve switched over our CI pipelines to use Actions instead.

One of the issues I found while transitioning to Github Actions was with our Heroku Pipeline. With CircleCI, Heroku automatically had build status information on each commit. This way we could see exactly which builds passed or failed before we promoted the app to production.

I searched for solutions to this and couldn’t find anything that did what we needed, so I created my own little process.

If you’re using Heroku Pipelines and Github Actions, here’s how to get those little green checks back during your build phases.

Happy Friday. Back home from New York after visiting for Air Mail this week. A few links and thoughts from the week…

• Status Bar Builder is the missing status bar app for the Vision Pro.
• PixelSnap is a quick tool for measuring pixels on your screen.
• A 2024 redesign for Kottke.org. Not my favorite design ever, but certainly cool.
• Tumblr and WordPress to sell user data to AI companies. I don’t love this, but at least they’re providing users with some ways to opt-out. (It should be opt-in, not opt-out.)
• Apple reversed its stance and will allow home screen PWA apps in the EU. Some good news here for the web.
• Tailwind CSS’s progress towards 4.0, and a brand new compiler for the project. This is really cool stuff, excited to give it a spin.
• The Dynasty, a documentary about the New England Patriots, is very well done. Really enjoying this show.
• The final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm is also brilliant. I love this show so much, and will miss it. Love that cover art on episode 4 too.

Have a great weekend. 🌧️

Today is the start of the 2024 Formula 1 season. My football posting around here is going to quickly turn into racing discussion. (And, soon enough, baseball.) Like many Americans, I found a love for F1 during the early days of Covid through Drive to Survive. I never would have predicted this, but it’s surpassed the NFL as my favorite thing to watch.

F1 has no shortage of drama and story lines. The personalities are huge. The competition is fierce and often cut-throat. But there’s a class and charm to it that I  find missing in the American sports leagues.

Plus, I’m a nerd at heart and I absolutely love the engineering side of the sport. Unlike most other motorsports, F1 teams must design and build their own cars from scratch. There’s so much involved in designing a car from the floor to the wings to the engine itself. These are custom built rocket ships on wheels.

If you haven’t given Formula 1 a chance, it’s worth your time. Lights out, and away we go! 🏎️