XCancel:

XCancel is an instance of Nitter.

Nitter is a free and open source alternative Twitter front-end focused on privacy and performance. The source is available on GitHub at https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [...]

Using an instance of Nitter (hosted on a VPS for example), you can browse Twitter without JavaScript while retaining your privacy. In addition to respecting your privacy, Nitter is on average around 15 times lighter than Twitter, and in most cases serves pages faster (eg. timelines load 2-4× faster).

I personally don’t care for Elon Musk’s X-rebranded Twitter. I also realize that some of you outright despise it, and, worse, that under Musk, they make it difficult to view content if you’re not signed into an account or if you have JavaScript disabled. So, sometimes, when I link to posts or threads on Twitter/X, I include a link to the same content at XCancel.

XCancel isn’t perfect, alas. Just this week I linked to a tweet from Google Design that contained an animation of an Android app that they were inexplicably proud to show off. The XCancel cache of that tweet only showed it as animated to some people. Others just saw a static image. I don’t know why. That’s XCancel’s problem, not mine.

Also, it’s tiresome and repetitive to include an extra link to XCancel every time I link to a tweet on Twitter/X. If you would prefer to view x.com links on xcancel.com, you should automate the redirection. If you use Safari, XCancel Redirect is a free extension that claims to do just what you think it does. (I haven’t tried it.) Or you can use a general-purpose redirect extension. RedirectWeb is a good one that I can recommend. Also, Jeff Johnson’s excellent StopTheMadness — an extension I rely on for multiple purposes and frequently recommend. With StopTheMadness, you can redirect all x.com URLs to xcancel.com with the following rules (you need the leading and trailing slashes in the pattern to tell STM that it’s a regex pattern, not a plain text string):

Pattern: /https?://(www.)?x[.]com/
Replacement: https://xcancel.com
Enabled on platforms: All

I understand not wanting to visit Twitter/X. But if you feel that way, I do sympathize, but that’s your decision, and you should use tools to redirect Twitter/X links automatically. And if you’re wondering why I don’t just refuse to link to anything on Twitter/X, that just isn’t practical. I wish it weren’t so, but many people, including senior Apple executives, and many organizations post interesting content exclusively to Twitter/X. If something posted to Twitter/X is also available elsewhere, I link to the elsewhere version. But if it’s exclusively available on Twitter/X and interesting, I link to the original.

My linking to original content on Twitter/X does not perpetuate Twitter/X’s relative popularity. Original content appearing exclusively on Twitter/X does.

Link: xcancel.com/about

The third developer betas of Apple’s 27 OSes dropped today, and this new page in Apple’s developer documentation drew my attention — a built-in Uniform Type Identifier for Markdown data:

UTI: net.daringfireball.markdown

Conforms to: public.utf8-plain-text

I had previously recommended conforming to public.plain-text but stated that the text encoding should be UTF-8. I’ve updated my own recommendation to public.utf8-plain-text to enshrine the UTF-8 encoding. (Back in 2004 UTF-8 support was far from universal. Today it is.)

Link: developer.apple.com/documentation/uniformtypeidentifiers…

Anthropic:

On Friday, June 12, the US government applied export controls to our newest models, Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5. This required us to restrict access to foreign nationals, whether inside or outside the United States. Because the order took effect immediately and we had no reliable way to verify nationality in real-time, we suspended access to both models for all users.

As of today, June 30, the export controls on Fable 5 and Mythos 5 have been lifted.

That’s a link to this tweet on Twitter/X from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick:

Over the past two weeks, we have worked closely with Anthropic to analyze and approve Fable 5 to ensure alignment across the US Government and strengthen America’s leadership in AI.

I don’t think a goddamn thing happened in the last two weeks, and if anything did happen, it sure as shit wasn’t anything that Lutnick understood. There should be real government oversight regulating frontier AI, but this is just pantomime performative nonsense.

The entire Trump 2.0 term (and much of the 1.0 term before it) can be summarized with a single word: kayfabe, “the tacit agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events, stories, characters, etc., are genuine”. Trumpism and MAGA is entirely about the belief system that everything is bullshit. Everyone is crooked, every supposed fact is merely an opinion, and everything is ultimately subject to the whims of whoever has power. The fix is not just in, it’s always been in, and always will be in. What Trump says is true is true because he’s the fucking president. Trump himself asserts that “evidence” is what he claims to see — not what he can actually show for others to see. If Trump says we won the war he needlessly started with Iran, then we won it. If Trump says there’s a peace deal 38 times, then there have been 38 peace deals. The FIFA “peace prize” Trump was awarded last year was no more legitimate or earned or meaningful than a WWE championship belt. It’s pro wrestling not just writ large, but (alas for the entire world) writ very large.

When you view Trump and his administration through the prism of kayfabe, it doesn’t make actual sense, but you can see how they think it makes sense.

I’m not accusing Anthropic of being in cahoots, per se, with the Trump administration on this whole “Fable is so good that it’s too dangerous ... wait two weeks ... OK now everyone can have it” back and forth. But they played along. “The AI model the Trump administration didn’t want you to have” is advertising no money could buy.

Link: anthropic.com/news/redeploying-fable-5

Steven Spielberg, on The Rest Is Entertainment on YouTube:

I approached Cubby Broccoli after Jaws was a big hit. I’d always wanted to make a James Bond film from the day I saw Dr. No, so I called Cubby after Jaws and volunteered. I said, “If you need a director, I would love to direct one.” And he said no. And he moved on.

And then Cubby called me again after Close Encounters came out. And that was a big hit. And Cubby called me a few years after Close Encounters and said, “We’d like to use the five notes in Moonraker.” And I said, “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll give you permission to use the five notes if you let me direct a Bond film.” And he said “Nope.” But I gave him the five notes anyway.

In Moonraker, the iconic Close Encounters notes are the passcode to the locked door of a secret lab that Bond (Roger Moore) needs to enter. Probably not so secure to play the passcode digits audible, but it’s a fun Easter egg. I always presumed that EON used it as fair-use homage, without bothering to ask Spielberg or Columbia Pictures for permission.

Spielberg, in his interview with The Rest Is Entertainment, goes on to explain the oft-repeated story that his disappointment over his rejection by Broccoli led to his collaboration with George Lucas to make Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I put on my short list for best movie ever made. The whole opening sequence of Temple of Doom — where Indiana Jones is wearing a dinner jacket and chaos erupts at a nightclub while Jones chases a vial of poison antidote while the other characters chase a diamond being kicked around the floor — is more Bond-like than most Bond films. (Oh, and that Shanghai nightclub’s name: Club Obi Wan. No need to ask permission for those five syllables.)

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=iEho3brGB64

Merriam-Webster:

The 1820s and 1830s shared another linguistic fad with today: an appreciation for deliberate misspellings. (Kewl, rite?) This trend, which had humorists adopting now-cringey bumpkin personas with ignorance manifested in uneducated spellings, turned no go into know go and no use into know yuse (lol). Abbreviations were not immune, and no go became K.G.. So too all right became O.W. , as an abbreviation for oll wright. And all correct became o.k. , as an abbreviation for oll korrect.

Although OK became one of the more commonly used initialisms, it might have passed into oblivion when the linguistic fad had passed if not for the presidential election of 1840, when Martin Van Buren was given the nickname of “Old Kinderhook” because of his hometown of Kinderhook, NY. The Van Buren stans who joined “OK Clubs” nationwide were themselves, they proclaimed, “OK.” Their campaign was memorable enough to have both popularized the word and to have hijacked the story of its origin: there are today still those who believe that “Old Kinderhook” is the original meaning of OK.

I have a strong preference for OK (perhaps infused by the classic Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines’s adamance on the spelling). Okay is OK in prose, but never as a UI button label. Ok and ok are not OK.

Link: merriam-webster.com/wordplay/the-hilarious-history-of-ok…

Berber Jin, reporting last week for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

OpenAI is planning to unify its ChatGPT app, coding platform Codex and browser into a desktop “superapp,” a step to simplify the user experience and continue with efforts to focus on engineering and business customers.

Chief of Applications Fidji Simo will oversee the change and focus on helping the company’s sales team market the new product. OpenAI President Greg Brockman, who currently leads the company’s computing efforts, will help Simo oversee the product revamp and related organization changes, an OpenAI spokeswoman said.

The strategy change marks a major shift from last year, when OpenAI launched a series of stand-alone products that didn’t always resonate with users and sometimes created a lack of focus within the company. OpenAI executives are hoping that unifying its products under one app will allow it to streamline resources as it seeks to beat back the success of its rival Anthropic.

This sounds like an utter disaster in the making. Would it make any sense for Apple to merge Safari, Messages, and Xcode into one “superapp”? No, it would not. It makes no more sense for OpenAI to merge ChatGPT, Codex, and especially Atlas together. I use and very much enjoy ChatGPT because its Mac client is such a good Mac app.

Simo came to OpenAI by way of Shopify and Instacart, so it doesn’t surprise me that she sees OpenAI’s existing product-first culture of creating well-crafted native apps as a problem, not a strength to build on. If this “superapp” plan is true, it’s going to tank everything that heretofore has been good about ChatGPT and Codex.

Link: wsj.com/tech/openai-plans-launch-of-desktop-superapp-to…