Numeric Citizen Blog

Just finished verifying my options for backing up my Synology NAS to the cloud and Synology C2 is still offers the cheapest option. Yet, it’s not cheap.

Between 2009 and 2013, in my spare time, I was an independent developer and had three applications in the App Store. I learned on the job, as they say, and it was an adventure that required a great deal of personal investment. I learned a lot, but it was arduous. Learning a new programming language (Objective-C), APIs, and a development lifecycle to make applications available for sale in a store like the App Store was a major challenge. At the time, to deal with problems, there was no artificial intelligence. Everything relied on Google searches and countless visits to Stack Overflow to find solutions.

Today, I have another project focused on automation with n8n, hosting an instance in the cloud, and consuming APIs and artificial intelligence services to build highly customized workflows. There are many things I don’t know, but knowing that I will be able to rely on artificial intelligence to help solve my learning challenges is very reassuring. Without these possibilities, I probably would not move forward with this project.

Seriously thinking of moving out of IFTTT to a self-hosted n8n instance on Digital Ocean. My IFTTT use case is simple: archiving RSS feed articles into Dayone. This seems quite possible to move this workflow into n8n automation.

This morning I discovered that I could add RAM to my Synology DS720+, increasing it from 2 GB to 6 GB. This upgrade would make it possible to install an instance of n8n as a container and explore the creation of automations connected to Craft. But, memory prices aren’t cheap these days. 🤯 Trying to find alternatives source for memory purchase and Crucial is no longer selling memory that fit, than to AI data centers demand.

Tonight I’ve been testing something really cool: using Claude, Craft MCP connections, and Craft Agents to write a blog post to Scribbles. The blog post was written by Claude under my instructions but I could tweak the workflow to get the text of the blog post from a Craft Collection instead. Something to experiment during the upcoming Christmas holidays.

Realmac Software shared their latest dev talk video. The video title mentions conversations about future plans for Elements. I was curious because I want to know where they are going with the CMS and RSS. I headed to YouTube and asked AI the following question: did they mention CMS? In a few seconds, I got my answer: yes, and they also talked about better support for RSS, which is something I’ve been waiting for. I didn’t watch the video; I already had the information I wanted. I saved 50 minutes of my time.

Now, one question: how is this good for Google? We’re so accustomed to being manipulated by platforms designed to increase our engagement with them; with this AI feature, it’s the opposite—I’m less engaged. Is this another subversive move by Google, part of a master plan that escapes my awareness?

ChatGPT recently launched version 5.2, shortly after version 5.1. The update frequency remains consistent. Why hasn’t Apple upgraded the Apple Foundation Model behind Apple Intelligence? Shouldn’t they be able to push out updates to their models as well? Will this change in next year’s Siri?

I’m happy (and quite surprised) to have made it to third place in today’s Craft Winter Challenge — a.k.a. the hackathon — for my submission of the Year-in-Review Writing Assistant. It’s a 500 US$ prize! 😅

What a night & day difference between Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.5 models. The latter is much more effective at working through my MCP connection to Craft. But boy this baby consumes a lof of credits. 😅

I’m trying something new this year for my year-in-review blog post. Using all my monthly post digests stored in Craft¹, I’m using ChatGPT to look at those digests, take into account last year’s year-in-review article, plus this year’s document personal milestones to suggest ideas. This is now possible because Craft now supports MCP. Using the best ChatGPT models, I get a lot of material to consider but somehow I feel this is really overwhelming. I should be more directive like limiting the number of possible scenarios, their length, etc. I’m still exploring this workflow.

Anyone from my dear followers reading my newsletter (the ephemeral scrapbook)? Thoughts? 🙏🏻

I added a new page to my “Where Apple’s Liquid Glass Crashes the User Experience” mini website called “Expectations might be too high”. You might take a look if you care about Apple.

I forced my wife to update her iPhone 16 Pro to iOS 26.1. She will probably kill me today. It was nice to meet you guys. 🫢

Time to renew Kagi Search. I’m on the starter tier. Upon examination, I’m doing about 45 searches per month. The trend is decreasing. I use their Article Summarizer on the iPad and iPhone much more often. I want to support them because I believe we need diversity when it comes to searching the web. But it’s not cheap, and my search requests trend is going downward, thanks to AI. Decisions, decisions, decisions. Any Kagi users in the room?

I always feel like I’m losing the time-saving benefits if I spend time improving an automation (an Apple Shortcut, for example). 🤦🏻‍♂️

Thinking out loud here: one way Apple could retain more talent could be to start innovating again, maybe? ¹

I spent the last few days putting together a workflow to help me write those year-in-review articles. As we get closer to the end of the year, it’s the right time to start working on this. I documented my workflow in this Craft document and submitted to the #winter_challenge on Slack. Hint: my first real use case for MCP.

Parker Ortolani on taking a chance of Tony Fadell to replace Tim Cook. At first, Tony Fadell seems like the obvious candidate, but I worry that we may be under the spell of a certain nostalgia in thinking he would be the perfect choice, as Parker points out. The world is no longer what it was in the days of Steve Jobs and his close collaborators. Apple is no longer what it once was either, and that is partly what many people criticize the company for. John Ternus is a product engineer, not a designer, and putting design back at the center of the process as it was in the Steve Jobs era may be a more restorative idea—and in that sense, yes, perhaps Fadell would be a good choice.

Rant on. I’m judging on facts and acts, not with what someone says. Some people might defend web openness et al, but sharing on x.com in 2025 because it’s the place most people go is not an act of openness. It’s an act of contribution toward fascism. Stop pretending, people, don’t be lazy, stop taking shortcuts and leave x.com once and for all. Rant off.

I don’t really believe in vibe coding, especially the scaling of it for complex systems, even more for maintaining code. But I certainly wish I could use vibe coding to write Apple Shortcuts. Apple must do something about its Shortcuts editor. It’s cumbersome, buggy as hell. Having a textual representation, a la Apple Script, would be so cool.

Louie Mantia on Steve Lemay:

I don’t have much to say about Steve Lemay. He was the hiring manager for my first interview at Apple fifteen years ago. It didn’t work out, and I went to work on iTunes and iLife instead. But he had already been at Apple for a long time, and I have lots of respect for him for his platform knowledge and expertise. I don’t expect any big changes because I don’t think he or Apple are looking at this as an opportunity to undo Jony and Alan’s influence on the company, but I do sincerely think this will all feel better with Lemay’s leadership. I wish him the best.

What we’re going to see from Apple in the next twelve months is probably set in stone (except Siri or Apple Intelligence, maybe). I don’t expect a revolution in that short time frame.

I understand the enthusiasm for AI among certain groups of workers, especially in the field of information technology and more specifically software development. However, I believe that caution is necessary for most other categories of employment. Enthusiasm cannot simply be transferred systematically and literally to every domain, whether technological or not. Contexts differ greatly, professions are highly diverse, and even small variations in requirements can reduce the applicability of AI to nearly zero. We should remain critical of this overflow of passion and the promised revolution; by doing so, we might help avoid the potential bubble that increasingly seems to be forming right under our noses.

Me to my wife: “Big news today, Apple is losing their designer lead. He’s joining Meta.” My wife: “WTF is there to design at Meta?”.

I love her. 😍

I believe in talents renewal and in new dynamics to favor new ideas, new ways at seeing problems and challenges. It’s a new opportunity even if the guy taking over has been at Apple for a long time. Bye bye Dye.

I don’t like the idea that a service like ChatGPT tries to present itself as a friend, an agent, or a human. With instructions, I can ask it to avoid this type of behavior. But I like the service’s appearance to be warm. Perhaps that’s why I prefer Anthropic’s Claude. Claude, even though it’s a proper name, presents itself better; its visual style seems friendlier to me. I feel like this is a contradiction.

I asked Claude about this possible contradiction. Here’s what he responded:

“I don’t think it’s actually a contradiction. You’re distinguishing between two different things: false intimacy (an AI pretending to be your friend or a person) versus pleasant design (a warm, welcoming aesthetic and tone). Wanting the latter without the former is perfectly coherent—it’s the difference between a tool that’s agreeable to use and a tool that’s trying to deceive you about its nature.”

Thanks, Claude.