Simon Willison's Weblog: john-gruber

Quoting Daniel Jalkut

2026-05-30T17:29:55+00:00

My take on AI is, essentially, everybody who’s against it is too against it and everybody who’s for it is too for it.

Quoting John Gruber

2026-05-05T00:46:29+00:00

So it’s well known that Y Combinator owns some stake in OpenAI. But how big is that stake? This seems like devilishly difficult information to obtain. I asked around and a little birdie who knows several OpenAI investors came back with an answer: Y Combinator owns about 0.6 percent of OpenAI. At OpenAI’s current $852 billion valuation, that’s worth over $5 billion.

— John Gruber, Y Combinator’s Stake in OpenAI

Tags: john-gruber, y-combinator, ai, openai

Quoting John Gruber

2026-04-15T17:13:57+00:00

The real goldmine isn’t that Apple gets a cut of every App Store transaction. It’s that Apple’s platforms have the best apps, and users who are drawn to the best apps are thus drawn to the iPhone, Mac, and iPad. That edge is waning. Not because software on other platforms is getting better, but because third-party software on iPhone, Mac, and iPad is regressing to the mean, to some extent, because fewer developers feel motivated — artistically, financially, or both — to create well-crafted idiomatic native apps exclusively for Apple’s platforms.

— John Gruber

Tags: apple, john-gruber

Quoting Guilherme Rambo

2026-03-16T20:34:13+00:00

Tidbit: the software-based camera indicator light in the MacBook Neo runs in the secure exclave¹ part of the chip, so it is almost as secure as the hardware indicator light. What that means in practice is that even a kernel-level exploit would not be able to turn on the camera without the light appearing on screen. It runs in a privileged environment separate from the kernel and blits the light directly onto the screen hardware.

— Guilherme Rambo, in a text message to John Gruber

Tags: apple, hardware, john-gruber, privacy

Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino

2025-03-14T20:15:54+00:00

Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino

John Gruber's blazing takedown of Apple's failure to ship many of the key Apple Intelligence features they've been actively promoting for the past twelve months.

The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI. It's also not that they had to announce an embarrassing delay on promised features last week. Those are problems, not fiascos, and problems happen. They're inevitable. [...] The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn't true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn't true, and they set a course based on that.

John divides the Apple Intelligence features into the ones that were demonstrated to members of the press (including himself) at various events over the past year compared to things like "personalized Siri" that were only ever shown as concept videos. The ones that were demonstrated have all shipped. The concept video features are indeterminably delayed.

Tags: apple, john-gruber, ai, apple-intelligence

Apple Is Delaying the ‘More Personalized Siri’ Apple Intelligence Features

2025-03-08T05:39:25+00:00

Apple Is Delaying the ‘More Personalized Siri’ Apple Intelligence Features

Apple told John Gruber (and other Apple press) this about the new "personalized" Siri:

It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.

I have a hunch that this delay might relate to security.

These new Apple Intelligence features involve Siri responding to requests to access information in applications and then performing actions on the user's behalf.

This is the worst possible combination for prompt injection attacks! Any time an LLM-based system has access to private data, tools it can call, and exposure to potentially malicious instructions (like emails and text messages from untrusted strangers) there's a significant risk that an attacker might subvert those tools and use them to damage or exfiltrating a user's data.

I published this piece about the risk of prompt injection to personal digital assistants back in November 2023, and nothing has changed since then to make me think this is any less of an open problem.

Tags: apple, john-gruber, security, ai, prompt-injection, generative-ai, llms, apple-intelligence

Quoting John Gruber

2025-01-22T23:59:05+00:00

When I give money to a charitable cause, I always look for the checkboxes to opt out of being contacted by them in the future. When it happens anyway, I get annoyed, and I become reluctant to give to that charity again. [...]

When you donate to the Red Cross via Apple, that concern is off the table. Apple won’t emphasize that aspect of this, because they don’t want to throw the Red Cross under the proverbial bus, but I will. An underrated aspect of privacy is the desire simply not to be annoyed.

— John Gruber

Tags: apple, john-gruber, privacy

Quoting John Gruber

2024-12-30T05:29:07+00:00

There is no technical moat in this field, and so OpenAI is the epicenter of an investment bubble.

Thus, effectively, OpenAI is to this decade’s generative-AI revolution what Netscape was to the 1990s’ internet revolution. The revolution is real, but it’s ultimately going to be a commodity technology layer, not the foundation of a defensible proprietary moat. In 1995 investors mistakenly thought investing in Netscape was a good way to bet on the future of the open internet and the World Wide Web in particular. Investing in OpenAI today is a bit like that — generative AI technology has a bright future and is transforming the world, but it’s wishful thinking that the breakthrough client implementation is going to form the basis of a lasting industry titan.

— John Gruber

Tags: john-gruber, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms

My approach to running a link blog

2024-12-22T18:37:16+00:00

I started running a basic link blog on this domain back in November 2003 - publishing links (which I called "blogmarks") with a title, URL, short snippet of commentary and a "via" link where appropriate.

So far I've published 7,607 link blog posts and counting.

In April of this year I finally upgraded my link blog to support Markdown, allowing me to expand my link blog into something with a lot more room.

The way I use my link blog has evolved substantially in the eight months since then. I'm going to describe the informal set of guidelines I've set myself for how I link blog, in the hope that it might encourage other people to give this a try themselves.

Writing about things I've found

Back in November 2022 I wrote What to blog about, which started with this:

You should start a blog. Having your own little corner of the internet is good for the soul!

The point of that article was to emphasize that blogging doesn't have to be about unique insights. The value is in writing frequently and having something to show for it over time - worthwhile even if you don't attract much of an audience (or any audience at all).

In that article I proposed two categories of content that are low stakes and high value: things I learned and descriptions of my projects.

I realize now that link blogging deserves to be included a third category of low stakes, high value writing. We could think of that category as things I've found.

That's the purpose of my link blog: it's an ongoing log of things I've found - effectively a combination of public bookmarks and my own thoughts and commentary on why those things are interesting.

Trying to add something extra

When I first started link blogging I would often post a link with a one sentence summary of the linked content, and maybe a tiny piece of opinionated commentary.

After I upgraded my link blog to support additional markup (links, images, quotations) I decided to be more ambitious. Here are some of the things I try to do:

I always include the names of the people who created the content I am linking to, if I can figure that out. Credit is really important, and it's also useful for myself because I can later search for someone's name and find other interesting things they have created that I linked to in the past. If I've linked to someone's work three or more times I also try to notice and upgrade them to a dedicated tag.
I try to add something extra. My goal with any link blog post is that if you read both my post and the source material you'll have an enhanced experience over if you read just the source material itself.
- Ideally I'd like you to take something useful away even if you don't follow the link itself. This can be a slightly tricky balance: I don't want to steal attention from the authors and plagiarize their message. Generally I'll try to find some key idea that's worth emphasizing. Slightly cynically, I may try to capture that idea as backup against the original source vanishing from the internet. Link rot is real!
- My most basic version of this is trying to provide context as to why I think this particular thing is worth reading - especially important for longer content. A good recent example is my post about Anthropic's Building effective agents essay the other day.
- I might tie it together to other similar concepts, including things I've written about in the past, for example linking Prompt caching with Claude to my coverage of Context caching for Google Gemini.
- If part of the material is a video, I might quote a snippet of the transcript (often extracted using MacWhisper) like I did in this post about Anthropic's Clio.
- A lot of stuff I link to involves programming. I'll often include a direct link to relevant code, using the GitHub feature where I can link to a snippet as-of a particular commit. One example is the fetch-rss.py link in this post.
I'm liberal with quotations. Finding and quoting a paragraph that captures the key theme of a post is a very quick and effective way to summarize it and help people decide if it's worth reading the whole thing. My post on François Chollet's o3 ARC-AGI analysis is an example of that.
If the original author reads my post, I want them to feel good about it. I know from my own experience that often when you publish something online the silence can be deafening. Knowing that someone else read, appreciated, understood and then shared your work can be very pleasant.
A slightly self-involved concern I have is that I like to prove that I've read it. This is more for me than for anyone else: I don't like to recommend something if I've not read that thing myself, and sticking in a detail that shows I read past the first paragraph helps keep me honest about that.
I've started leaning more into screenshots and even short video or audio clips. A screenshot can be considered a visual quotation - I'll sometimes snap these from interesting frames in a YouTube video or live demo associated with the content I'm linking to. I used a screenshot of the Clay debugger in my post about Clay.

There are a lot of great link blogs out there, but the one that has influenced me the most in how I approach my own is John Gruber's Daring Fireball. I really like the way he mixes commentary, quotations and value-added relevant information.

The technology

The technology behind my link blog is probably the least interesting thing about it. It's part of my simonwillisonblog Django application - the main model is called Blogmark and it inherits from a BaseModel defining things like tags and draft modes that are shared across my other types of content (entries and quotations).

I use the Django Admin to create and edit entries, configured here.

The most cumbersome part of link blogging for me right now is images. I convert these into smaller JPEGs using a tiny custom tool I built (with Claude), then upload them to my static.simonwillison.net S3 bucket using Transmit and drop them into my posts using a Markdown image reference. I generate a first draft of the alt text using a Claude Project with these custom instructions, then usually make a few changes before including that in the markup. At some point I'll wire together a UI that makes this process a little smoother.

That static.simonwillison.net bucket is then served via Cloudflare's free tier, which means I effectively never have to think about the cost of serving up those image files.

I wrote up a TIL about Building a blog in Django a while ago which describes a similar setup to the one I'm using for my link blog, including how the RSS feed works (using Django's syndication framework).

The most technically interesting component is my search feature. I wrote about how that works in Implementing faceted search with Django and PostgreSQL - the most recent code for that can be found in blog/search.py on GitHub.

One of the most useful small enhancements I added was draft mode, which lets me assign a URL to an item and preview it in my browser without publishing it to the world. This really helps when I am editing posts on my mobile phone as it gives me a reliable preview so I can check for any markup mistakes.

I also send out an approximately weekly email newsletter version of my blog, for people who want to subscribe in their inbox. This is a straight copy of content from my blog - Substack doesn't have an API for this but their editor does accept copy and paste, so I have a delightful digital duct tape solution for assembling the newsletter which I described in Semi-automating a Substack newsletter with an Observable notebook.

More people should do this

I posted this on Bluesky last night:

I wish people would post more links to interesting things

I feel like Twitter and LinkedIn and Instagram and TikTok have pushed a lot of people out of the habit of doing that, by penalizing shared links in the various "algorithms"

Bluesky doesn't have that misfeature, thankfully!

(In my ideal world everyone would get their own link blog too, but sharing links on Bluesky and Mastodon is almost as good)

Sharing interesting links with commentary is a low effort, high value way to contribute to internet life at large.

Tags: blogging, django, django-admin, john-gruber

Quoting John Gruber

2024-10-20T22:17:54+00:00

I really dislike the practice of replacing passwords with email “magic links”. Autofilling a password from my keychain happens instantly; getting a magic link from email can take minutes sometimes, and even in the fastest case, it’s nowhere near instantaneous. Replacing something very fast — password autofill — with something slower is just a terrible idea.

— John Gruber

Tags: john-gruber, passwords, security

Quoting John Gruber

2024-09-30T18:56:18+00:00

I listened to the whole 15-minute podcast this morning. It was, indeed, surprisingly effective. It remains somewhere in the uncanny valley, but not at all in a creepy way. Just more in a “this is a bit vapid and phony” way. [...] But ultimately the conversation has all the flavor of a bowl of unseasoned white rice.

— John Gruber

Tags: john-gruber, podcasts, ai, generative-ai, llms, notebooklm

Quoting John Gruber

2024-08-27T15:57:26+00:00

Everyone alive today has grown up in a world where you can’t believe everything you read. Now we need to adapt to a world where that applies just as equally to photos and videos. Trusting the sources of what we believe is becoming more important than ever.

— John Gruber

Tags: ethics, john-gruber, ai, generative-ai, ai-ethics

Quoting John Gruber

2024-06-24T18:00:26+00:00

What Apple unveiled last week with Apple Intelligence wasn't so much new products, but new features—a slew of them—for existing products, powered by generative AI.

[...] These aren't new apps or new products. They're the most used, most important apps Apple makes, the core apps that define the Apple platforms ecosystem, and Apple is using generative AI to make them better and more useful—without, in any way, rendering them unfamiliar.

— John Gruber

Tags: apple, john-gruber, ai, generative-ai, llms

Some goofy results from ‘AI Overviews’ in Google Search

2024-05-24T05:33:41+00:00

Some goofy results from ‘AI Overviews’ in Google Search

John Gruber collects two of the best examples of Google’s new AI overviews going horribly wrong.

Gullibility is a fundamental trait of all LLMs, and Google’s new feature apparently doesn’t know not to parrot ideas it picked up from articles in the Onion, or jokes from Reddit.

I’ve heard that LLM providers internally talk about “screenshot attacks”—bugs where the biggest risk is that someone will take an embarrassing screenshot.

In Google search’s case this class of bug feels like a significant reputational threat.

Tags: ethics, google, john-gruber, search-engines, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-ethics, ai-assisted-search

Quoting John Gruber

2024-05-15T03:26:37+00:00

The MacBook Airs are Apple’s best-selling laptops; the iPad Pros are Apple’s least-selling iPads. I think it’s as simple as this: the current MacBook Airs have the M3, not the M4, because there isn’t yet sufficient supply of M4 chips to satisfy demand for MacBook Airs.

— John Gruber

Tags: apple, john-gruber

Quoting John Gruber

2023-08-24T06:16:18+00:00

And the notion that security updates, for every user in the world, would need the approval of the U.K. Home Office just to make sure the patches weren’t closing vulnerabilities that the government itself is exploiting — it boggles the mind. Even if the U.K. were the only country in the world to pass such a law, it would be madness, but what happens when other countries follow?

— John Gruber

Tags: cryptography, john-gruber, law, uk, uklaw

First Impressions of Vision Pro and VisionOS

2023-06-08T06:16:53+00:00

First Impressions of Vision Pro and VisionOS

John Gruber’s description of his thirty minute Vision Pro demo includes a bunch of details I haven’t seen described anywhere else, including how calibration and corrective lenses work and how precise and stable the overlays of additional information are.

Tags: apple, john-gruber, vr

Quoting John Gruber

2020-06-20T05:48:35+00:00

Without touching upon the question of who’s right and who’s wrong in the specific case of Basecamp’s Hey app, or the broader questions of what, if anything, ought to change in Apple’s App Store policies, an undeniable and important undercurrent to this story is that the business model policies of the App Store have resulted in a tremendous amount of resentment. This spans the entire gamut from one-person indies all the way up to the handful of large corporations that can be considered Apple’s peers or near-peers.

— John Gruber

Tags: apple, appstore, basecamp, john-gruber

Quoting John Gruber

2018-01-25T13:43:42+00:00

I spent more time on my iPhone X review than anything I’ve written in years, and it went to paper twice. (Here’s a scan of my second printed draft, with handwritten revisions.) My thing is that I don’t use my favorite pen — which, of course, has black ink — but instead a pen with red ink. Editing is an angry, bloody act and therefore must be done in red.

— John Gruber

Tags: john-gruber, writing

Why didn't Apple release a gold (champagne) iPad?

2013-10-27T17:50:00+00:00

My answer to Why didn't Apple release a gold (champagne) iPad? on Quora

According to John Gruber: http://daringfireball.net/2013/1...

One other thing the 5S offers that the new iPads do not: a gold option. My understanding is that they tried it, and it just didn’t look good bigger. It works on the iPhone because the iPhone is so much smaller — more like jewelry.

Tags: apple, ipad, john-gruber, quora

Quoting John Gruber

2010-01-31T12:05:40+00:00

32.38 percent of visitors to DF last week did not have Flash.

— John Gruber

Tags: adobe, apple, flash, john-gruber

Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes?

2010-01-31T12:05:23+00:00

Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes?

John Gruber makes the case for the fading significance of Flash, brought about by Apple’s point-blank refusal to support it on the iPhone or iPad. “Flash is no longer ubiquitous. There’s a big difference between “everywhere” and “almost everywhere”.”

Tags: adobe, apple, flash, ipad, iphone, john-gruber

The Tablet

2010-01-01T03:49:10+00:00

The Tablet

John Gruber further demonstrates his mastery of long-form blogging. It’s reassuring to know that he started putting the notes for this entry together way back on the 24th of September.

Tags: apple, blogging, essays, john-gruber, macos, tablet

The OS Opportunity

2009-11-19T08:02:23+00:00

The OS Opportunity

John Gruber repeats his argument that PC makers should create their own OSes, and points out that compatibility concerns are less important than they’ve ever been because “the Web provides us with a core set of software and APIs that work everywhere”.

Tags: john-gruber, openweb

Quoting John Gruber

2009-10-06T07:33:28+00:00

This is very interesting technology. But that Adobe would go to this length suggests that they suspect that Apple will never allow the Flash runtime on the iPhone.

— John Gruber

Tags: adobe, apple, flash, iphone, john-gruber

Quoting John Gruber

2008-11-04T00:02:37+00:00

I'll put forth one central, overriding guideline for iPhone UI design: Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.

— John Gruber

Tags: design, iphone, john-gruber, usability

ExpanDrive

2008-03-04T19:32:34+00:00

ExpanDrive

Looks like this SFTP mounting application for OS X fixes the problems I’ve had with sshfs (which tends to freeze things up if you lose your network connection while using it).

Tags: expandrive, john-gruber, sftp, ssh, sshfs

Quoting Steve Jobs

2007-10-17T18:04:31+00:00

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers' hands in February.

— Steve Jobs

Tags: apple, developers, iphone, john-gruber, sdk, steve-jobs

Quoting John Gruber

2007-09-14T08:15:01+00:00

For any song you already own on CD, Apple is asking you to pay three times for it in order to use it as a ringtone on your iPhone: once for the CD you’ve already purchased, again to buy a needless duplicate of the track from the iTunes Store, and a third time to generate the ringtone.

— John Gruber

Tags: apple, iphone, john-gruber, music, ringtones, ripoff

Ways in Which iTunes's Just-Released Official Ringtone Support Is Weird, Rude, and/or Just Plain Buggy

2007-09-12T10:08:40+00:00

Ways in Which iTunes's Just-Released Official Ringtone Support Is Weird, Rude, and/or Just Plain Buggy

I’ve long been saying that the existence of a ringtone “industry” is a bug, not a feature.

Tags: apple, itunes, john-gruber, ringtones