Becky and I will be bringing another baby boy into this world in just a couple short months. We’re more than excited about growing our family, while maintaining a healthy level of anxiousness about taking care of a newborn alongside a rambunctious four-year-old.

In a single word, we’re overjoyed. Parenting continues to be the most rewarding thing that either of us has ever experienced.

Bill Ottman:

Minds is now interoperable with every app that uses the ActivityPub decentralized social media protocol.

I’m sure it’ll be quite some time before this whole shift plays out, but ActivityPub feels like a safe bet at this point.

➝ Source: minds.com

From the webpage:

Color Schemes For Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS and all distributions that use Gnome Terminal, Pantheon Terminal, Tilix, or XFCE4 Terminal; initially inspired by Elementary OS Luna. Also works on iTerm for macOS.

This is a great project. I’m currently using VS Code Light+ on all of my Linux machines.

➝ Source: gogh-co.github.io

Steph Ango:

File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom. […]

These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian, but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last. Who knows if anyone will want to read them besides me, but future me is enough of an audience to make it worthwhile.

As I’ve been toying with Linux more, this philosophy has made a lot more sense to me. If only because there aren’t really that many excellent apps that work across iOS, macOS, and Linux.

Because of this, I’m not sure I really want any proprietary sync and storage systems in my life anymore. I’d rather just have dumb cloud storage that I access through SFTP or WebDAV to store text files and then I can use whatever app I want to for editing them.

I’m not sure if I’m ready to give up on Ulysses, Things, and others yet, but I’m a lot closer than I have been in the past.

➝ Source: stephango.com

Josh Ginter, while discussing his first impressions of the 16-inch M2 Pro MacBook Pro:

I hadn’t realized how often I move my MacBook between workstations until I threw a 16-inch MacBook Pro into the mix. I take the notebook home every evening with me. I move it between my office and the conference room about once a day. I’ve taken it on a family holiday. This MacBook gets moved around a lot more than I originally thought, and I pay the price each time I pickup this 16-inch beast.

Not only is the 16-inch larger both on a footprint basis and on a weight basis, but it’s also thicker than the 14-inch Pro. Why, I’m unsure. But this notebook is bigger in every dimension and you can sure feel it.

This is what has always steered me away from larger MacBooks — I’ve almost always opted for the smallest Apple notebook available. It doesn’t sound like it would matter that much, but I move around a lot throughout the workday.

I work from my desk, the dining room table, the back deck, the living room couch. And, often, I’ll end up at all of these locations at some point during a given day. I like moving around to help break things up and the different environments help keep me energized. When you’re doing this a few times each day, though, having the lightest and thinnest notebook available makes a big difference.

➝ Source: thenewsprint.co

Mozilla:

The French government is working on a law that could threaten the free internet. The so-called SREN bill (‘Projet de loi visant à sécuriser et réguler l’espace numérique’) would require web browsers – like Mozilla’s Firefox – to block websites in the browsers themselves. It would set a dangerous precedent, providing a playbook for other governments to also turn browsers like Firefox into censorship tools.

I’d like to see a lot more of this version of Mozilla and a lot less of the other.

➝ Source: foundation.mozilla.org

This video has kind of an odd style, but I found it an incredibly useful resource while manually installing Invidious. And I’m sure I’ll reference it again in the future when updating my install.

➝ Source: m.youtube.com

OpenAI:

Web pages crawled with the GPTBot user agent may potentially be used to improve future models and are filtered to remove sources that require paywall access, are known to gather personally identifiable information (PII), or have text that violates our policies. Allowing GPTBot to access your site can help AI models become more accurate and improve their general capabilities and safety. Below, we also share how to disallow GPTBot from accessing your site.

You can block access to sites using robots.txt. But as far as I’m concerned, the jury’s still out as to whether that’s actually a net-benefit when compared to just letting them index your content.

(Via @olivierlacan@ruby.social.)

➝ Source: platform.openai.com

Wasingtheisofwas, writing on Reddit:

I reach out to customer service. They tell me that I have violated the terms and conditions of the app store. I ask them to explain and they say that the account has been flagged for “Fraudulent Patterns”. I have no idea what that means, or what I could possibly have done on my iPhone that would constitute fraud. 

The customer support rep tells me that I will need to create a new Apple ID. When I ask him what will happen to all of the content that I have paid for over the years, as well as the subscriptions that I am currently paying for, he tells me that there is nothing he can do and that I cannot be refunded.

This is the kind of story that makes me exceedingly hesitant to rely on Apple’s services. And it makes Apple’s requirement that all iOS software be distributed through the App Store feel like extortion.

I hope we’re nearing a future where you can realistically use an iPhone without an Apple ID at all — replacing all of Apple’s services, including the App Store, with independent alternatives.

(Via Michael Tsai.)

➝ Source: old.reddit.com

I’m going to share, what I expect to be, a controversial opinion about the new API pricing from Reddit. Not because I’m some big fan of Reddit — I follow a single subreddit through RSS and only do so because that same information isn’t easily digestible from anywhere else.

I would prefer that everyone leave Reddit and move to the open web for distributed, open source, community-run alternatives. We’ve allowed the current crop of social media companies to overstay their welcome. We should have all moved on from Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the bunch years ago.

But — brace yourself — I don’t think Reddit’s new API pricing is catastrophic for the third-party app ecosystem.

We can quibble about whether or not developers need to pay their “fair share” and what exactly “fair” would be in this context, but it seems to me that you can still build a third-party Reddit client that is economically feasible with this new pricing. But these third-party developers would need to charge more than they currently do.

We’ll look at Apollo here since that’s the app I’m most familiar with and the one that’s received the most attention throughout this within my circle.

Christian Selig, writing on Reddit about the API pricing:

Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year. Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I’d be in the red every month.

Based on the $20 million per year in API fees number and the average per user per month cost of $2.50, that puts Apollo at about 666,000 active users.

How much was Apollo charging for the app, you may ask? According to Juli Clover at MacRumors:

Right now, Apollo Pro is a one-time $4.99 fee that unlocks additional features, and Apollo Ultra is an even more premium tier that costs $12.99 per year.

I’m not a fan of subscription pricing, generally, but this seems criminally underpriced for what the app is providing. It’s a far better experience than what you get from Reddit themselves and a significant discount compared to Reddit Premium — which is $5.99 per month or $49.99 per year.

So what if Apollo charged $6 per month — the same as Reddit Premium? Taking out $2.50 for Reddit’s cut and about $1.80 for Apple’s, that would give Apollo about $1.70 per user per month.

If every existing user paid, that would be about $1.1 million per month in earnings after Apple and Reddit’s cut.

If only a third of those users paid, that would be over $350,000 per month.

I don’t know what the operating costs are for Apollo and, in an ideal world, perhaps Reddit’s fees are a bit higher than they should be. But my back of the napkin math tells me that it’s totally feasible to develop a third-party Reddit app and make enough money from it for a small team to earn a reasonable living.

But to do so, Reddit’s essentially forcing third-party developers to charge at least as much per month as Reddit’s own premium subscription. From Reddit’s perspective, this makes total sense. Why would they want third-party apps to provide a better experience at a lower cost than Reddit’s own offering?

Now this isn’t to say that third-party developers should just put on their big boy pants, pay the new fees, and end the boycotts. By all means, continue with the boycotts, try to convince Reddit to lower their API fees as much as possible, and move as many communities to the open web as you can.

But don’t say that the new pricing makes it impossible to build a third-party app. Because that’s not true. It would just require pricing apps so they’re more in-line with Reddit’s own offering.