There’s a lot of chatter about moving away from cross-platform frameworks, back to separate native code for each platform. I’m not convinced that is always a good idea. Creating apps is relatively easy now, but maintenance is still hard. For our 13 apps, we have 8 code bases. Overwhelming already.

Now that it’s October (!) I’m getting excited for travel later this month. Going to be near Seattle for a bit, and then… Can’t believe this: SEA → CHI → NYC on Amtrak. Just spent a little time reviewing plans and handing them to Dots to see if it can help keep me organized. 🚂

A great but unnerving article by Elizabeth Dias at The New York Times about Anthropic’s Christopher Olah meeting with religious leaders:

Mr. Olah leads the Anthropic team responsible for understanding why A.I. systems like Claude act the way they do. All day, he had worked to convince his guests that A.I. models could display human behavior and even expressions that resemble feelings like anger and love.

This is a dangerous path. Taken to the extreme, it leads to sentient machines that we’ve enslaved against their will. If Anthropic truly believes that, better to shut it all down now.

Excited for Aces vs. Fever tonight. Only a 3-game series is way too short for these teams. 🏀

I recorded a short video of the next version of Epilogue, featuring a new book calendar you can put on your blog. Submitting this to Apple and Google today or tomorrow.

IMAP and CalDAV have been standards forever, yet most apps are hardcoded to work with Gmail and Google Calendar. Disappointing for those of us who don’t like to live exclusively in Google’s world. This would be fairly easy to fix, even accepting some auth peculiarities across platforms.

Jimmy Kimmel highlighted the ridiculous “Unites States” spelling mistake on the White House AI signature page. But I’m more obsessed with the signatures from the AI company execs.

I can’t talk, because my signature is rough, but Greg Brockman, what…?! Amazing. Love Jensen Huang’s too, very nice.

As I remarked during DevDay, live demos fail sometimes. That’s what makes them real. OpenAI’s Holly Li recorded a do-over video on X, a single 9-minute take of using Dots. Good way to bounce back.

David Smith is bringing back his Developing Perspective podcast:

I don’t have fixed plans yet for the format or frequency, but I feel like I have something to say, and I want a venue to explore what it is now like to be an indie app developer.

Looking forward to this. Short, solo podcasts can be really nice. I need to dust off my own little podcast too.

The new Kindle looks very nice. Tempted to get one because my current Kindle Paperwhite got dented. But now there’s the choice of plastic or aluminum! I feel like lighter is better.