As someone who (until a few days ago) owned the lobsters.social domain and has long been into the gag of digitized lobsters evolving into self-aware AI (yes, Accelerando is one of my favorite books of all time), I have been following the madness around this for a bit, although i did not commit to the insanity of devoting hardware to it and was not (still am not) impressed by the code quality or utter lack or any substantial guardrails (security or otherwise).

It’s bad enough to use insecure public IM to talk to one of these things, but giving it root on a machine is madness (never mind the influencer gags around buying a Mac mini for it), so after running it on a VM for a couple of days and seeing how it was “designed”, I punted and kept doing my own (sandboxed) thing.

I’ll let other people go for the AI Darwin awards.

But what sets it apart from most other personal agents for me is the huge (if uneven and creaky) skill library it’s generating–people are using it for completely off the wall stuff, and going through the list feels like Reddit on crack.

My own agent is much more contained (I made it a point of not letting anything permanently loose or with access to any of my personal data), so I’m just making popcorn until one of these things causes real damage, financial ruin, or both.

Still, the idea is worth a look because it’s aiming at the right interface: chat is where people already are, and turning that into a command line for personal admin is a sensible direction (when it’s done with guardrails).

And it makes you wonder if Apple will ever do this properly with Siri/Gemini in any useful way that matters–but I’m not holding my breath here.

A+. No notes… Oh well, OK, I’ll say my piece.

“Total time wasted by humanity because Apple won’t fix these” is a wonderfully blunt premise, and the math is… lovely: Base Impact is Users Affected × Frequency × Time Per Incident was enough of a zinger, but the Power User Tax (Σ (Workaround Time × Participation Rate)) and the Shame Multiplier (Years Unfixed × Pressure Factor) just pile it on.

Clearly nobody at Apple is measured by these OKRs, or we wouldn’t be constantly finding new UX disasters like breaking the Finder column view (which now stupidly lets the scroll bar overlap the resizing handles).

Hey Craig, why don’t you adopt the Shame Multiplier for your directs, or at the very least start having some sort of AI-driven Apple Feedback pipeline that actually tries to fix the code instead of acting as a black hole?

I actually considered doing something like this during my holiday break, but ended up fixing drawterm instead and never got around to it.

But I don’t think I could have done a better job than Jasmin did in this writeup, and the agent itself is pretty neat. If I wasn’t behind schedule on pretty much everything right now, I’d be hacking on it myself, and it’s just depressing to ponder when I’ll be on vacation again…

Scott Adams passed away this week, and regardless of the controversies that surrounded him of late, anyone who’s been reading this site since the beginning knows I have a soft spot for Dilbert.

As a telco person, it resonated with me so much (and had so many touch points with my daily life) that I was even accused of tipping Adams off about some of the absurdities I witnessed in the field.

And it stayed eerly accurate for decades, which is why I’m linking to this post, which I think pretty much captures the essence of Dilbert and its creator, with all its ups and downs, controversies, and humor.

And, of course, I’d like to share one of my favorite Dilbert strips, which I think completely nailed our future:

Apple is bundling Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage into a new subscription suite (with the obligatory vague promise of AI features) and revamping Pages, Numbers, and Keynote with more content, which I find interesting in many respects…

First off, I’ll state the obvious: this is a jab at Adobe’s Creative Cloud, which has dominated the professional creative software market for years, with the side effect that it pretty much dried up the low-end prosumer space.

By offering a comprehensive suite of “professional-grade” applications under one subscription, Apple is positioning itself as a viable alternative not just for creatives who may have been hesitant to invest in Adobe’s ecosystem, but also for those looking for more affordable options.

But… how viable is it, really? I have my doubts, especially given that I recently tried Final Cut Pro and found it lacking in several areas compared to freemium competitors like DaVinci Resolve. And I have been using Logic Pro for years. It’s a solid DAW, but it faces stiff competition from Ableton Live and an increasing number of free or low-cost alternatives. But that’s my personal experience; I wonder how this will play out for the broader market, where there’s stuff like Affinity Suite, which has recently surfaced after the Canva acquisition as a free alternative to Pixelmator Pro (with paid add-ons).

Apple’s move is interesting because of its breadth and ambition–it’s great value for money for consumers, and does offer a lot of tools that can be used professionally. However, I think it also confirms one of my hunches, i.e., that (statistically) nobody was paying for the iPad app subscriptions.

And I do have to wonder how many people they have developing and maintaining all these apps–there have been many glitches and issues with Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro over the years that make me think they are not exactly top priority for Apple.

Update: Gruber’s round-up of reactions to the hideous new icons is well worth reading. I just took the whole thing in stride since it’s pretty obvious thwt Apple just doesn’t care about good UI design anymore, but this amazing zinger from Heliographe Studio made me laugh out loud:

There’s a special kind of UI regression that doesn’t look like a regression until you try to use it, and the Liquid Glass Tsunami just keeps on giving.

The huge rounded corners are turning a basic motor skill into a hand-eye coordination puzzle, and this piece goes into exquisite detail on that, and demonstrates how Apple completely botched window resizing.

Spoiler: the resize hotspot is still a 19×19px target, but with the new corner radius “about 75%” of that target ends up outside the visible window. So you do what any reasonable person does and aim inside the corner (where the window actually is), and nothing happens.

The best part (in a dry, slightly tragic way) is the conclusion: the “most reliable way” to resize is to grab outside the corner, which is exactly the kind of invisible affordance that makes people feel like they’re going slightly mad.

It’s also a neat reminder that Fitts’s Law doesn’t care about your design language, and that hit-testing should follow what users perceive as the object boundary, not whatever geometry is easiest to keep from the previous release.

Oh, and that whoever did Tahoe’s UX design is borderline incompetent.

Worth reading because it’s not just a rant, it’s a small, well-illustrated teardown of how a cosmetic change can quietly break muscle memory and cause endless attrition and frustration.

The annotated images (green “expected” area, blue dot, and the “accepted target area” sitting in empty space) make the point better than any amount of hand-waving, and we need more of this to make it obvious that Apple needs to reverse course on the whole thing.

Anil Dash’s essay on how Markdown conquered everything is a good reminder that most “standards” don’t win because they’re perfect — they win because they’re good enough, easy to use, and easy to remember.

What I liked most is the through-line from early blogging (by which time I was also doing a PHP site generator that handled raw HTML posts) to today’s world, where LLMs are running stupefyingly complex workflows atop a pile of Markdown files.

It’s both empowering and a little unsettling that the same affordances that made writing on the web easier also make it easy to formalize instructions for systems that can do real damage.

I took a long detour through Textile before accepting Markdown had won (and am still paying the price for that, with thousands of Textile posts still to be converted), but the one thing I’ve found amusing over the years is that John Gruber created Markdown as a way to make writing HTML easier for humans.

One person can make a difference, and I’m willing to bet that when (ok, if) we ever become a Kardashev type 3 civilization we’ll still be using Markdown to write our interstellar missives.

Intricuit is pitching the Magic Screen as a snap-on touchscreen for MacBook Air and Pro that “comes ready with its own stylus that supports pressure sensitivity and stylus hover”, and as “the affordable alternative to bulky drawing tablets and iPads.” Which is a neat way of saying “we’re adding touch to macOS from the outside” (because Apple still won’t).

And yet, the first thing that came to my mind as I watched their videos was… How long is it going to take for Apple to “Sherlock” them?

As someone who regularly uses touchsceen laptops and very seldom use the touchscreen (the trackpad’s speed and precision is very much to blame, as well as the fiddliness of taking my hands off the keyboard to reach “up”), I have mixed feelings about this being something that I would use extensively–but I do miss the ability to dismiss dialogs and move windows like I do on Linux and Windows, and wish Apple just got on with it.

And I have a feeling they will, “soon”. In their own timescale.

This is a very well written, exquisitely detailed teardown of Apple’s decision to sprinkle tiny SF Symbols through menus in macOS Tahoe, and why it makes everything harder to scan, less consistent, and (sometimes) actively misleading.

Bruce Tognazzini (whose book I still pull out once in a while to remind myself of good UI design principles) would be proud.

Somehow I sort of tuned them out during last year’s rant about Liquid Glass, but they really do make a difference. I started actively noticing them in menus when my own little apps started sprouting some of them (apparently automatically) and thinking “why is that there?” or “what does that even mean?” and 90% of the time the icon is just not helping me at all, even in Apple’s own apps.

As a very heavy former Blackberry user, I have to say that this is pushing all the right buttons (pun intended), and I might just have to get one.

And of course there’s the obligatory high-standards Michael Fisher video announcing it in style, almost as an afterthought to their new (also pretty clever) Clicks Power Keyboard feature phone.

Their pitch is pretty direct–use the Clicks Communicator as a purpose-built device for taking action and communicating in a noisy world, etc., but what I think they are really getting right is the compact design, the audio recorder and the fingerprint reader. Oh, and it has a headphone jack.

This would make a killer corporate device for anyone who needs to be in touch but doesn’t want the distractions of a full smartphone, and I hope someone cottons on to that fact and places a huge bulk order so they get the funding to keep going.

Ryan Whitwam’s piece on switching to eSIM is a good reminder that a lot of “modernization” is really just moving failure modes around, and seems like a great way to kick off 2026 since it mirrors my own past experiences: my Truphone/iPad “side quest”, and my broader worries about eSIM-only iPhones.

A physical SIM is dumb and boring, but that’s exactly why it works: when you need to swap devices, it’s a 30‑second hardware shuffle that doesn’t depend on carrier apps, backend state, or a support queue.

With eSIM, the swap becomes a workflow—and if it fails at the wrong time you can end up locked out of your own number (and everything that still treats SMS as a magic identity token), with the delightful resolution of “go to a store and wait”.

If eSIM-only phones are the future, carriers really need an account recovery story that does not default to “we’ll text the number you currently can’t receive texts on”…