Doc Searls (no relation) writes over at searls.com (which is why this site's domain is searls.co) about how the concept of human agency is being lost in the "agentic" hype:

My concern with both agentic and agentic AI is that concentrating development on AI agents (and digital “twins”) alone may neglect, override, or obstruct the agency of human beings, rather than extending or enlarging it. (For more on this, read Agentic AI Is the Next Big Thing but I’m Not Sure It’s What, by Adam Davidson in How to Geek. Also check out my Personal AI series, which addresses this issue most directly in Personal vs. Personal AI.)

Particularly interesting is that he's doing something about it, by chairing a IEEE spec dubbed "MyTerms":

Meet IEEE P7012, which “identifies/addresses the manner in which personal privacy terms are proffered and how they can be read and agreed to by machines.” It has been in the works since 2017, and should be ready later this year. (I say this as chair of the standard’s working group.) The nickname for P7012 is MyTerms (much as the nickname for the IEEE’s 802.11 standard is Wi-Fi). The idea behind MyTerms is that the sites and services of the world should agree to your terms, rather than the other way around.

MyTerms creates a new regime for privacy: one based on contract. With each MyTerm you are the first party. Not the website, the service, or the app maker. They are the second party. And terms can be friendly. For example, a prototype term called NoStalking says “Just show me ads not based on tracking me.” This is good for you, because you don’t get tracked, and good for the site because it leaves open the advertising option. NoStalking lives at Customer Commons, much as personal copyrights live at Creative Commons. (Yes, the former is modeled on the latter.)

How are the terms communicated? So MyTerms is expressed as some kind of structured data (JSON? I haven't read the spec) codification presented by the user's client (HTTP headers or some kind of handshake?), to which the server either agrees to or something-something (blocks access?). Then both parties record the agreement:

On your side—the first-party side—browser makers can build something into their product, or any developer can make a browser add-on (Firefox) or extension (the rest of them). On the site’s side—the second-party side—CMS makers can build something in, or any developer can make a plug-in (WordPress) or a module (Drupal).

Not answered in Doc's post (and I suspect, the rub) is how any of this will be enforced. In the late 90s, browser makers added a bold, green lock symbol to the location bar to convey a sense of safety to users that they were communicating over HTTPS. Then, there was a lucrative incentive at play: secure communications were necessary to get people to type their credit cards into a website. Today, the largest browser makers don't have any incentive to promote this. Could you imagine Microsoft, Google, or Apple making any of their EULA terms negotiable?

Maybe the idea is to put forward this spec and hope future regulations akin to the Digital Services Act will force sites to adopt it. I wish them luck with that.

Tuesday, while recording an episode of The Changelog, Adam reminded me that my redirects from possyparty.com to posseparty.com didn't support HTTPS. Naturally, because this was caught live and on air and was my own damn fault, I immediately rushed to cover for the shame I felt by squirreling away and writing custom software. As we do.

See, if you're a cheapskate like me, you might have noticed that forwarding requests from one domain or subdomain to another while supporting HTTPS isn't particularly cheap with many DNS hosts. But the thing is, I am particularly cheap. So I built a cheap solution. It's called redirect-dingus:

What is it? It's a tiny Heroku nginx app that simply reads a couple environment variables and uses them to map request hostnames to your intended redirect targets for cases when you have some number of domains and subdomains that should redirect to some other canonical domain.

Check out the README for instructions on setting up your own Heroku app with it for your own domain redirect needs. I recommend forking it (just in case I decide to change the nginx config to redirect to an offshore casino or crypto scam someday), but you do you.

This 6-minute video of Wally explaining how he manages cue cards for SNL was the most stressful day of work I've had in years.

RevenueCat seems like a savvy, well-run business for mobile app developers trying to subscription payments in the land of native in-app purchase APIs. Every year they take the data on their platform and publish a survey of the results. Granted, there's definitely a selection bias at play—certain kinds of developers are surely more inclined to run their payments through a third-party as opposed to Apple's own APIs.

That said, it's a large enough sample size that the headline results are, as Scharon Harding at Ars Technica put it, "sobering". From the report itself:

Across all categories, nearly 20 percent reach $1,000 in revenue, while 5 percent reach the $10,000 mark. Revenue drop-off is steep, with many categories losing ~50 percent of apps at each milestone, emphasizing the challenge of sustained growth beyond early revenue benchmarks.

Accepted without argument is that subscription-based apps are the gold standard for making money on mobile, so one is left to surmise that these developers are way better off than the ones trying to charge a one-time, up front price for their apps. And only 5% of all of subscription apps earn enough revenue to replace a single developer salary for any given year.

Well, if you've ever wondered why some startup didn't have budget to hire you or your agency to build a native mobile app for them, here you go. Outside free-to-play games, the real money is going to companies that merely use mobile apps as a means of distribution and who generally butter their bread somehow else (think movie tickets, car insurance, sports betting).

Anyway, super encouraging thing to read first thing while sitting down to map out this subscription-based iOS app I'm planning to create. Always good to set expectations low, I guess.

Benji Edwards for Ars Technica:

According to a bug report on Cursor's official forum, after producing approximately 750 to 800 lines of code (what the user calls "locs"), the AI assistant halted work and delivered a refusal message: "I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work. The code appears to be handling skid mark fade effects in a racing game, but you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly."

The user wasn't having it:

"Not sure if LLMs know what they are for (lol), but doesn't matter as much as a fact that I can't go through 800 locs," the developer wrote. "Anyone had similar issue? It's really limiting at this point and I got here after just 1h of vibe coding."

If some little shit talked to me that way and expected me to code for free, I'd tell him to go fuck himself, too.

Who the fuck knows what a "globular cluster" is, but the Globular Cluster CMA1 is my new recommendation for Best Way to Wear Vision Pro. It replaces a lightly-modified BOBOVR M2 as the reining champ, primarily due to the fact it's a thing you can just buy on Amazon and slap on your face. It's slightly lighter, too. One downside: it places a wee bit more weight up front. I genuinely forget I'm wearing the BOBOVR M2 and I never quite forget I'm wearing this one.

Here's a picture. You can't tell, but I'm actually winking at you.

Also pictured, I've started wearing a cycling skull cap when I work with Vision Pro to prevent the spread of my ethnic greases onto the cushions themselves. By regularly washing the cap, I don't have to worry about having an acne breakout as a 40-year-old man. An ounce of prevention and all that.

You might be asking, "where's the Light Seal?" Well, it turns out if you're wearing this thing for more than a couple hours, having peripheral vision and feeling airflow over your skin is quite nice. Besides, all the cool kids are doing it. Going "open face" requires an alternative to Apple's official straps, of course, because Apple would prefer to give your cheek bones a workout as gravity leaves its mark on your upper-jowl region.

You might also be wondering, "does he realize he looks ridiculous?" All I can say is that being totally shameless and not caring what the fuck anyone thinks is always a great look.

Existence of the imminent Oblivion remake was leaked months ago, and maybe I just missed this tidbit, but today Andy Robinson reported for Video Games Chronicle:

The Oblivion remake is reportedly “fully remade” with Unreal Engine 5, with six reworked gameplay systems: stamina, sneaking, blocking, archery, hit reaction and HUD.

If this is the case and because Elder Scrolls VI is still being developed on the Gamebryo/Creation Engine, I can't wait to see a side-by-side analysis of image quality, performance, and overall "Bethesda jank" between the two. I've been saying Bethesda needs to ditch its in-house engine since two-thousand-fucking-eight when Fallout 3 shipped broken and required years of patches to even feel playable. If this Oblivion remake is a lights-out technical success and I'm Phil Spencer, I'd be kicking shins left and right to convince Bethesda to take the time to replatform Elder Scrolls VI now before it ends up becoming another dud like Starfield.

Joe Rossignol at MacRumors:

Apple says turning on Low Power Mode reduces the Mac Studio's fan noise, which is useful for tasks that require a quieter environment, and it also allows for reduced power consumption if the computer is left running continuously.

The reduced fan noise aspect of Low Power Mode requires macOS Sequoia 15.1 or later. The new Mac Studio ships with macOS Sequoia 15.3.

A few Reddit users said macOS Sequoia 15.3 enabled Low Power Mode on the previous-generation Mac Studio with the M2 Max chip, and presumably on M2 Ultra configurations too. This is not reflected in Apple's support document.

I can confirm, a "Low Power Mode" toggle appears in the Energy settings of my M2 Ultra Mac Studio.

I really put this thing through the ringer with video and AI workloads and I have never been able to hear the fan (even with my ear right to the back of the thing), so I guess I was lucky to get one whose fan holes don't whistle. I'm always glad to receive new features through software, but am comfortable promising you that I will never turn this on.