David Pierce, host of The Vergecast:

So where did Markdown come from? It came from John Gruber. John joins the show, along with Anil Dash, to tell the story of where Markdown came from and how it took over the world.

Markdown has been growing steadily for years, but it’s seen a step change in popularity now that it’s been embraced as the lingua franca of LLM agentic systems. I had an interesting all-too-brief chat last week in Cupertino with some people from Apple’s developer tools team about how it feels to see Markdown spread everywhere — including WWDC. In a word, gratifying.

But the biggest reason for Markdown’s continuing success isn’t Markdown itself. It’s the triumph of plain text files, both for system configuration and for the interchange of human-readable (and thus, LLM-readable) prose. Markdown isn’t really a “syntax”. It’s a set of conventions for formatting plain text. If everyone agrees to the same basic conventions, plain text can be significantly more expressive than a string of unformatted characters.

That’s it. So what I find gratifying isn’t that my “language” continues to thrive, because it’s not a language. It’s that the way I like to format plain text when I’m writing, and the way I like to see plain text formatted when I’m reading, has so thoroughly won the world’s mindshare battle. “Ha-ha”, I say, to people who want *this* to mean bold, not italic. (And to Slack and WhatsApp, I say “Fuck you.”)

Yours truly, in September 2024, expressing skepticism that “European iPhones are more fun now”:

Meanwhile no one in the EU will get Apple Intelligence or iPhone Mirroring, both of which features are very useful, and, dare I say, quite fun. Should we judge how much fun each side of the continental divide is having by how much fun they theoretically could be having, or by how much fun they are having?

As it stands, the fun side is not the EU. But hope springs eternal.

Here we are two years later and I think the answer is more clear than ever which side of the continental divide is more fun. It’s not the EU. EU users still don’t have iPhone Mirroring and until and unless the European Commission changes its interpretation of the DMA, they likely never will. It’s a great feature.

Apple Intelligence, as we knew it until last week, eventually came to the EU, about six months after it shipped for the rest of us. One can reasonably argue that EU iPhone and iPad users didn’t miss much during those six months. And that there hasn’t been that much to enjoy since Apple Intelligence debuted in the EU in iOS 18.4. That changed last week with the introduction of the first beta release of iOS 27. Siri AI is really good, truly useful, and genuinely fun. And it is not on pace to come to the EU six months after iOS 27 ships this fall. It is currently on pace to come to the EU never.

Elon Musk (February, Hacker News): SpaceX has acquired xAI to form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform. […] Current advances in AI are dependent on large terrestrial data centers, which require immense amounts […]

Apple (MacRumors): Apple today introduced the next generation of Apple Intelligence, powered by a bold new architecture that integrates the latest Apple Foundation Models deep into Apple’s platforms and is uniquely designed to protect users’ privacy. […] The next generation of Apple Intelligence also helps power Siri AI, an entirely new version of Siri. […] […]

Apple: At the heart of this architecture is our third generation of Apple Foundation Models (AFM), a family of five foundation models custom-built in collaboration with Google. These span from on-device models to server-based models running on Private Cloud Compute. Apple Foundation Models are built to unlock a wide range of helpful experiences for our […]