Since my bookmarking app now features links to Bluesky, I’ve observed that my Bluesky timeline is heavily political, which I dislike. I’m unsure how to unfollow people or lists. I wish there was a way to simply reset the timeline and start fresh for a better experience.

I saw people mention FreshRSS on my timeline today and I was curious about it. Why? Because self-hosting an RSS reader service might mean that I could drop Inoreader… so, I started reading the documentation. If there was a single-click install droplet on DigitalOcean, that would be enticing, provided that FreshRSS offers a great set of APIs. The UI is meh, though, but using the engine with a nice client like NNW might be a possibility. I didn’t go further in my exploration so far… but now I want to look at other self-hosting solutions, too. Suggestions?

Apple’s iCloud File Sharing Left Ex-Employees With Access to Secret Documents:

The former employees said many Apple files they had been shared on over their careers at the company—including planning documents for product launch events—continued to sync to their personal devices through the iCloud storage service after they left Apple. In some cases, they even received notifications about fresh updates to the documents. Some former employees said they were petrified to delete the files for fear that doing so would attract Apple’s attention.

Wow! I work in the banking system and such document life cycle management would be considered lousy at best. I think it’s time for Apple to make iCloud a little bit more business-friendly. The story on the iPhone is better as corporate-controlled apps are using their own partition which can be wiped independantly from the personal partition. But on iCloud? It doesn’t seem to be the case.

Today, while preparing the next edition of my newsletter, I wondered whether managing numerous product lines, with a multitude of variants and configurations, might be harming Apple, especially in the current context of supply chain difficulties. I feel that Apple’s strategy is no longer in tune with the times.

In “The War That Could Swallow the World”, David French writes:

“I’ve often wondered what it was like to be alive in the summer of 1914, much less in 1938 and 1939. When did people start to realize that the world was on the brink of catastrophe? Speak up too soon or too frequently, and you look ridiculous — like the Chicken Little of World War. Speak up too late, and you live (if you live) with bitter regret.”

I often ask myself similar questions. When does it feel like it? Are we calling a world war after-the-fact? Does it matter in the end? This blog used to have a blog post category named “UkraineWar”. It will be renamed “Conflicts” which I think feels closer to what I perceive from today’s world.

In the TV series “Silo” there is a woman who seems to be responsible for retrieving and refurbishing old computer equipment or various devices. It makes me think that with the current situation, where electronic device prices are soaring, the periods of price drops for a computer or smartphone are over. One day, society might see the latest-generation devices become inaccessible to the general public, who will then have to settle for rebuilt or refurbished devices.

If my non-scientific calculations are to be believed, this week marks the weekly release of Apple’s OS 27 betas. In my case, Beta 4 was a bit of a step back compared to Beta 2 and Beta 3.

I’m not sure what is going on at Anthropic these days, but updates to Claude Desktop have stopped. Normally, I would get an update every few days; the last update was July 24th. Something might be going on. I wouldn’t mind if AI companies took a pause and started thinking about the consequences of putting their products in the hands of millions, you know, being conscious about what you do? Alas, that’s not going to happen.

This morning, I received a renewal notice for a domain I registered during my transition from my previous job to my current one. At the time, I wasn’t sure if I would start my own consulting firm, so I registered the domain but then changed jobs. Despite that, I decided to renew the domain just in case. I like to think that one day I’ll be my own boss. It cost me about ten bucks a year, which is really cheap for dreaming.

Should You Use AI for a Task? Here’s a Simple Way to Decide - Schneier on Security

But it’s precisely because I have spent years developing my own writing skills that I’m able to identify prose that sounds great but doesn’t actually make sense. My students don’t have that skill; they mistakenly view a confident, well-written essay as evidence of the quality of their ideas. They see the AI as cleaning those ideas up, getting them through that uncomfortable stretch of having to turn those ideas into prose. What the students miss is that their initial discomfort is a normal and healthy stage of writing, and not something to quickly get beyond. The very act of struggling with how to express what they think is an important part of the process. It’s how they test out their ideas, examine their hypotheses, and actually figure out what they think. Homework is not work; it’s the gym.

Learning can be hard, for many people at least. I like the feeling of being outside my comfort zone when working on something because I know that at some point, the journey is going to be the reward. We forget that in the age of AI.

The real AI risk is inside the labs -

I believe we should not consider AI safe. A critical event that may result in the extinction of Homo sapiens is possible, but the danger is not in open models, or China making faster progress than the US. The danger is that a few CEOs (everywhere in the world) without the required background and legitimacy are in the position of making hard choices for humanity at large. They were not selected to do so; it was just the randomness of events that created this setup. They can’t speak for everybody, given the stakes, just because they have GPUs and money. This is the first thing that should be fixed.

In light of recent security-related events, both at OpenAI and Anthropic, I also believe these companies must be held accountable for what they put out there. I believe we are entering dangerous times with AI, maybe we are even on the verge of being out of control with this. Add this to the AI bubble speculation. Scary.

For the past two or three years, I’ve been contemplating the idea of creating a comprehensive training course for Craft. There’s nothing comparable to what you find for Notion or Obsidian. I think it’s a great opportunity, very niche, but still an opportunity. Craft has evolved considerably in recent years, making it difficult to produce content that doesn’t become outdated quickly. Now that Craft’s evolution seems to be slowing down, the idea of creating this training keeps resurfacing. But there’s a problem: a lack of motivation and time with no guarantee of results.

I tested creating a training plan using Claude AI, and while I’m impressed by the level of detail and completeness of the proposed content, I would need to record more than 75 video capsules lasting 2 to 4 minutes each. Preparing those recordings requires between 15 to 45 minutes of preparation, without considering the post-processing requirements. That’s quite a commitment!

I’m afraid the idea won’t materialize. Life is short and I’m not here on a humanitarian mission. I think I’ll move on to something else. 😌

I’m unsure who Substack writers aim to reach. In my view, Substack might be the most anti-reader platform I’ve ever seen, even more so than Medium, which is in itself very telling. Today, I wanted to read an article on Substack after following a link in an email from my inbox, but my app wasn’t installed on my iPhone. After reinstalling it, I tried to open the link again, but it didn’t work. I had to log back in, apparently, which I did. The next step? Reading the article? Not quite—now it asks for topics of interest, then requests access to my Contacts. I stopped there, killed and removed the app from my phone and never read that article. Instead, I’m here to vent my frustration.

Links to Claude Chats Were Indexed by Google and ‘Bing’, Whatever That Is — Pixel Envy

Search engines do not automatically discover new URLs as they are created. They are typically indexed by taking one of two actions: either the site owner submits URLs to search engines — by using a site map, for example, or by manually submitting the page for indexing — or by someone linking to the URL from a different already-indexed page. The critical thing left unreported in Varner’s article is whether these Claude links were being indexed thanks to Anthropic’s actions or those of users.

Following up on my previous blog post, I’m now confident my private chat sessions are “safe”.

Claude chats exposed in Google searches – another endorsement of Apple’s privacy approach — 9to5Mac

This is not at all what users would expect when they share a conversation, since Anthropic implicitly assures users that nobody can see the chat without knowing the URL.

WTF, Anthropic! Does this problem affect chat with a private link (instead of a public one)?

I follow technological news every day, and I’m starting to get nervous about the situation surrounding investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure. This video is particularly revealing and convincing. There’s increasing talk of a tech bubble, much bigger than the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s. What worries me, actually, is the impact of this crisis on my finances. I’ll be retiring in less than 7 years. A financial crisis of the magnitude being predicted would take years to recover from. I wonder if it’s time to reevaluate some of my investment strategies. 🤨

I don’t want to link my WhatsApp account with my Facebook account. I don’t use Facebook. Inuse WhatsApp mostly while abroad during vacation. I know I would make a favour to Meta if I did link both in the name of convenience. I’m probably being naive here, though. Postponed indefinitely.

I played a little bit with Glaze today. In less than half an hour, I was able to build a “native” macOS app, a front end to my web-based task manager. It’s far from north stars like Things 3, but it is quite capable for the efforts I put into this experiment. Glaze offers a Glaze Store where app builders can share their work with others. A brand new account comes with 120 free credits. I’m currently at a bit less than a hundred credits left now after building this little Mac app. It’s currently in read-only mode and looks very dry but I plan to tweak it and see what I can come up with the remaining credits.

MacRumors’s article “Anthropic’s New Claude Opus 5 Nearly Matches Flagship Fable 5 at Half the Cost”:

Anthropic has released Claude Opus 5, an upgraded AI model that delivers near-Fable 5 performance at half the cost and is optimized for everyday use. The new model shows significant improvements over its predecessor (Opus 4.8) across multiple benchmarks including coding, problem-solving, and visual outputs, while maintaining the same pricing structure. Opus 5 is now available as the default model on Claude Max and the strongest option on Claude Pro, with an optional faster mode available at double the cost.

It’s fascinating to watch AI companies release their new offerings. It’s all over the place if you compare that to the way Apple releases their flagship products like the iPhone. “Ship it as soon as it’s ready” seems to be the way to go.

Here’s a very compelling argument that Apple will win the AI race… or, more specifically, the personal AI race. Cue this video for all the details. Spoiler if you are lazy: Apple owns the device and the context, they don’t need the most powerful LLM to succeed in the personal AI space.

A blogger shouldn’t need to defend their selection of topics, writing style, approach, writing tools or writing workflows. Sometimes, my writing is moody.

Another tech journalist has passed away: John C. Dvorak at age 80. I recall reading his column in MacUser magazine during the challenging early days of Apple. Although I wasn’t a fan, I occasionally kept reading his work. I always saw him as a perennial Apple skeptic, perhaps more for the sake of it, but personally, he might have felt more warmly about Apple’s future than he let on. He was often wrong on tech trends and about Apple.

Always liked working outside on my terrasse during summer. Such a nice and comfortable temperature.

I’ve been a weather enthusiast since I was a teenager. At that time, I wanted a weather station (which I got) and manually recorded weather conditions on paper, one page per day with three observations per page (early morning, noon, and before going to bed). It was fun, and I learned a lot in those days. I even met a real meteorologist who was also doing the public radio weather forecast. I was lucky. I still have an interest in weather and climate, but it takes a different form these days.

This morning, I wondered if Claude AI could read a surface conditions map. It can. 🤯 I wonder if today’s meteorologists are using AI to summarize weather conditions.

Canada Weather Snapshot — Friday, July 18, 2026

Valid morning of July 18 (08:00 EDT / 12:00 UTC). A single-moment snapshot, not a forecast.

The big picture

A tale of two countries this morning. A deep summer storm system is spinning over northern Quebec and the Hudson Strait, keeping the Far North unsettled and breezy, while most of southern Canada sits under warm, humid, and comparatively quiet air. The sharpest weather is well to the north; the population belt along the U.S. border is having a mild, muggy summer day.

Region by region

Northern Quebec, Nunavik & Labrador

This is the active zone. A strong low is churning over the region, so expect gusty winds, unsettled skies, and periods of cloud and showers, especially around Ungava Bay and the Hudson Strait. Conditions ease the further south you go.

Southern Quebec & the St. Lawrence Valley

Warm and humid, with a gentle flow of muggy air moving up from the south. Comfortable-to-sticky temperatures and a fair amount of moisture in the air — a typical mid-July feel. Nothing severe on the map here.

Atlantic Canada

Sitting under the influence of a broad ridge of high pressure anchored over the Atlantic and Greenland. That generally means more settled conditions in the east, with the ridge acting as a bit of a wall that keeps systems moving off the continent from barrelling straight through.

The Prairies & Western Interior

A few weak, shallow low-pressure areas are scattered across the Prairies and interior west. These are minor and disorganized — think passing clouds and the odd shower rather than any organized storm. Broadly unremarkable.

British Columbia & the Pacific Coast

Under a mix of weak systems along the coast, with generally mild conditions. No dominant storm feature — a quiet Pacific setup for the day.

The North (Arctic & territories)

Cold air remains locked over the high Arctic, as you’d expect, with the northern Quebec storm being the standout feature. The rest of the territories are relatively calm.

Bottom line

If you’re in southern Canada, it’s a warm, humid, low-drama summer day. If you’re in northern Quebec, Nunavik, or Labrador, keep an eye on the wind and showers from that storm parked overhead. The east is settled thanks to Atlantic high pressure, and the west and Prairies are quiet with only minor disturbances.

Today, I implemented a card view in my RSS flow web app. I don’t recall seeing this style of RSS feed display in the numerous RSS readers I’ve tried and used. It’s quite fun.