John Calhoun:
It was frankly a thing I liked about working for Apple in those days. The engineers were the one’s driving the ship. As I said, I wrote an HSV picker
because it was, I thought, a more intuitive color space for artists. I wrote the HTML color picker because of the advent of the web. And I wrote the
crayon picker because it seemed to me to be the kind of thing Apple was all about: HSL, RGB — these were kind of nerdy color spaces — a box of crayons
is how the rest of us picked colors.
[…]
And it turned out, to my surprise, Apple shipped all the color pickers. No marketing or design person ever asked for them. But we, engineers,
were not only programmers, we were also users and often had an intuitive sense of what other Macintosh users wanted. We knew what
we wanted anyway. I was creating the things I would have wanted.
[…]
It seemed like a humble and discreet Easter egg. I mistakenly assumed the poem was in the public domain but, regardless, a single stanza would seem to me to be “fair use”. Still, it should have been obvious to me that Apple Computer Inc. was going to be very much copyright-violation averse.
[…]
A few other Easter eggs that had nothing to do with intellectual property rights were in the color pickers as well. In time, the crayons in the crayon color picker would appear worn down or broken. This had no effect on the functionality of the color picker but was kind of … cute? I believe the crayons were all restored though on Christmas Day (a new box of crayons!).
Apple Color Copyright Easter Eggs Firing History Mac System 7
John Voorhees:
I never expected my game controller obsession to pay automation dividends, but it did last week in the form of the tiny 16-button 8BitDo Micro. For the past week, I’ve used the Micro to dictate on my Mac, interact with AI chatbots, and record and edit podcasts. While the setup won’t replace a Stream Deck or Logitech Creative Console for every use case, it excels in areas where those devices don’t because it fits comfortably in the palm of your hand and costs a fraction of those other devices.
[…]
As I suspected, the 8BitDo Micro works just as well with any app that supports keyboard shortcuts as it does with Anki. What’s curious, though, is that even though medical students have been using the Micro and Zero 2 with Anki for several years and 8BitDo’s website includes a marketing image of someone using the Micro with Clip Studio Paint on an iPad, word of the Micro’s automation capabilities hasn’t spread much. That’s something I’d like to help change.
[…]
The buttons on 8BitDo’s controllers can be remapped, like on many others. 8BitDo’s free Ultimate Controller app, which is available on the App Store for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, can remap every button on the Micro. The Micro doesn’t have thumbsticks, but it does have a D-pad; A, B, X, and Y buttons; four other face buttons; and L, R, L2, and R2 buttons. That makes for a total of 16 programmable buttons, an impressive number for such a tiny device.
Update (2025-07-11): Matt Sephton:
An obvious choice for a device with multiple buttons is a game controller. In modern macOS it’s easy to pair Nintendo Switch controllers, and the JoyCon (left or right) is an ideal candidate for a hand-held shortcut device. Xbox and PlayStation controllers can also be paired but they are much larger. Wired or wireless controllers will work.
You can even use a Wii remote using an adapter like the Mayflash MAGIC-NS Lite. Or you might use more esoteric controllers with an adapter from Robert Dale Smith’s Controller Adapter store. In fact, I use one of his adapters to get an old Sony Jog Controller to act like a GameCube controller, which I then map to keyboard shortcuts using the methods below. The sky’s the limit!
Bluetooth Hardware Karabiner-Elements Keyboard Shortcuts Mac macOS 15 Sequoia
Samantha Subin and Kif Leswing (via Hacker News):
Nvidia stock rose on Wednesday lifting the company’s market cap briefly past $4 trillion for the first time as investors scooped up shares of the tech giant that’s building the bulk of the hardware for the generative artificial intelligence boom.
[…]
Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company, surpassing Microsoft and Apple, both of which hit the $3 trillion mark before Nvidia.
These numbers are hard to comprehend. Nvidia is now worth about the same as Apple plus half of Meta—or, alternatively, Alphabet plus Meta—and it’s doubled in the last year.
Mike Rogoway:
New CEO Lip-Bu Tan told employees this week that he doesn’t consider Intel among the leading chip companies, a bracing message as the chipmaker began expansive layoffs in the face of severe technical and financial challenges.
[…]
Customers are giving Intel failing grades, Tan said, and the company is too far behind to catch up with industry leader Nvidia in developing technology to train artificial intelligence.
Previously:
Update (2025-07-11): See also: Kirk McElhearn, Trung Phan, and Dare Obasanjo.
Artificial Intelligence Business Intel NVIDIA
Carlo Zottmann:
Google offers an OpenAI-compatible API for Gemini, and while working, it is not what Xcode expects in terms of URL layout. In Xcode’s LLM provider config, the custom “URL” parameter is the API’s base URL up to but not including the v1/ path segment, e.g. https://api.openai.com/ instead of the full https://api.openai.com/v1/. When making calls to the provider later on, Xcode will automatically append the endpoint path (e.g. v1/models etc.) to that URL.
Now, the Gemini URL structure breaks with the v1/ convention: its URL is https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/openai/ instead of https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1/. You can see why this might be a problem.
So here’s how to set up both Xcode and a proxy app to use Google’s offerings.
Previously:
Artificial Intelligence Google Gemini/Bard Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Programming Proxyman Xcode
