Finished reading: The Fires of December by Brandon Sanderson. Starts strong, ends strong. Might be a little too much Hoid if that is possible, but overall I enjoyed it. 📚

Good point from John Voorhees about potential Full Disk Access restrictions:

On the one hand, it seems to suggest that users will simply have to jump through additional explicit hoops to grant Full Disk Access to their agents and other apps. On the other hand, claiming that Full Disk Access was designed solely for backup apps raises red flags that could signal that the company intends to restrict the kinds of apps that can use Full Disk Access.

Apple says they’re planning to lock down Full Disk Access even further:

Going forward, we will introduce additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action.

Sounds complicated / annoying.

Amazon has a long blog post about data centers that no one is going to read in full. Here’s one part:

…this build out is so important geopolitically that there are widespread reports of various countries intentionally seeding misinformation in the U.S. about data centers to trick us into slowing down.

It wouldn’t surprise me if this was true. But Amazon’s blog post isn’t going to convince anyone who is on the fence. AI, data centers, and humanoid robots are very polarizing and will continue to be. We get stuck talking about what we’re against and the divide widens.

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.