Archive for January 22, 2026

Thursday, January 22, 2026

LosslessCut 1.13

Jason Snell:

There was a time when QuickTime was more than just a playback utility; I used it frequently to perform simple video edits, like removing commercials from an off-air recording or tacking the contents of one file on the end of another.

Since those days ended with the deprecation of classic QuickTime, I’ve never really had a go-to utility for these kinds of trims.

[…]

Apple [eventually] added editing features back to QuickTime Player. […] The issue is that the final file you save is a MOV container featuring those clips, which […] means that in the end you have to re-encode the video to get a seamless mp4 file for a video podcast.

[…]

This time, I decided to look for a visual utility (i.e., not something I have to drive from Terminal) that could solve this problem. And I found it: the open-source app LosslessCut, which provides a nice interface atop the powerful FFmpeg command-line app.

Previously:

Clawdbot

Clawdbot (Twitter, Showcase, Documentation, GitHub):

Clears your inbox, sends emails, manages your calendar, checks you in for flights. All from WhatsApp, Telegram, or any chat app you already use.

Federico Viticci:

To say that Clawdbot has fundamentally altered my perspective of what it means to have an intelligent, personal AI assistant in 2026 would be an understatement. I’ve been playing around with Clawdbot so much, I’ve burned through 180 million tokens on the Anthropic API (yikes), and I’ve had fewer and fewer conversations with the “regular” Claude and ChatGPT apps in the process. Don’t get me wrong: Clawdbot is a nerdy project, a tinkerer’s laboratory that is not poised to overtake the popularity of consumer LLMs any time soon. Still, Clawdbot points at a fascinating future for digital assistants, and it’s exactly the kind of bleeding-edge project that MacStories readers will appreciate.

Clawdbot can be overwhelming at first, so I’ll try my best to explain what it is and why it’s so exciting and fun to play around with. Clawdbot is, at a high level, two things:

  • An LLM-powered agent that runs on your computer and can use many of the popular models such as Claude, Gemini, etc.
  • A “gateway” that lets you talk to the agent using the messaging app of your choice, including iMessage, Telegram, WhatsApp and others.

[…]

Given the right permissions, Clawdbot can execute Terminal commands, write scripts on the fly and execute them, install skills to gain new capabilities, and set up MCP servers to give itself new external integrations. Combine all this with a vibrant community that is contributing skills and plugins for Clawdbot, plus Steinberger’s own collection of command-line utilities, and you have yourself a recipe for a self-improving, steerable, and open personal agent that knows you, can access the web, runs on your local machine, and can do just about anything you can think of.

Peter Steinberger:

Apps will melt away. The prompt is your new interface.

Jonah H.:

It’s the fact that clawd can just keep building upon itself just by talking to it in discord is crazy. The future is already here.

Subhrajyoti Sen:

I can understand why people love @clawdbot so much.

I wanted to automate some tasks from Todoist and clawd was able to create a skill for it on its own, all within a Telegram chat.

Max Reid:

Now it:

  • Logs my sleep/health/exercise data and tells me when I stay up too late
  • Writes code and deploys it
  • Writes Ralph loop markdown files that I deploy later
  • Updates Obsidian daily notes
  • Tracks who visits MenuCapture and where they came from
  • Monitors earthquakes in Tokyo
  • Researches stuff online and saves files to my desktop
  • Manage memory across sessions by remembering my projects, patterns and preferences
  • Reminds me of my schedule, including holidays/accommodation
  • Checks on me (on Telegram!) if I’m quiet too long

Conrad Sasheen:

I’m literally on my phone in a telegram chat and it’s communicating with codex cli on my computer creating detailed spec files while out on a walk with my dog.

Dave Morin:

At this point I don’t even know what to call @clawdbot. It is something new. After a few weeks in with it, this is the first time I have felt like I am living in the future since the launch of ChatGPT.

Previously:

Backseat Software

Mike Swanson (via Brent Simmons):

And yet, this is how a lot of modern software behaves. Not because it’s broken, but because we’ve normalized an interruption model that would be unacceptable almost anywhere else.

I’ve started to think of this as backseat software: the slow shift from software as a tool you operate to software as a channel that operates on you. Once a product learns it can talk back, it’s remarkably hard to keep it quiet.

[…]

And that’s when the vocabulary starts to creep in. DAU. MAU. Retention. Funnels. Stickiness. Cohorts. Conversion. Gamification. Oh my!

If you’ve worked inside a modern product organization, you’ve heard these words so often they start to feel unavoidable.

[…]

The analytics didn’t prove the feature was unwanted. The analytics proved that we buried it.

Previously:

Lessons From 14 Years at Google

Addy Osmani (via Hacker News):

User obsession means spending time in support tickets, talking to users, watching users struggle, asking “why” until you hit bedrock.

I wonder how much this happens at Google and Apple these days.

The quest for perfection is paralyzing. I’ve watched engineers spend weeks debating the ideal architecture for something they’ve never built. The perfect solution rarely emerges from thought alone - it emerges from contact with reality. AI can in many ways help here.

[…]

Your code is a strategy memo to strangers who will maintain it at 2am during an outage. Optimize for their comprehension, not your elegance.

[…]

With enough users, every observable behavior becomes a dependency - regardless of what you promised. Someone is scraping your API, automating your quirks, caching your bugs.

This creates a career-level insight: you can’t treat compatibility work as “maintenance” and new features as “real work.” Compatibility is product.

Previously:

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