On the most recent episode of The Talk Show, “A Good Duck Butt”, John Gruber and I discussed Apple Intelligence, Pixelmator, ChatGPT and Siri, the latest LLMs, and cursed faces.

Two developments since we recorded:

1. iOS 18.2 was released, which added image generation and web search to Siri’s ChatGPT integration.
2. Llama 3.3 70B was released, a new high-water mark for local models – if you have 64GB of memory.

After 82 episodes, the Fun Fact podcast has reached Final Fact – at least, for now. Good things don’t always get a satisfying ending, but this one turned out.

Fans of the show may enjoy It Shipped That Way, where I’ve been interviewing leaders from companies like Slack, Superhuman, and Shopify about how they’ve built great products and teams. More recently I’ve also been interviewing more founders, like this episode with Charity Majors, co-founder of Honeycomb.

Four years ago, I started the Fun Fact podcast with Arik Devens, and we’re still having a lot of fun every month sharing facts about schemes, history, science, and so on.

I’ve increasingly felt the itch, though, for a second show. I learn so much talking through product and engineering challenges with smart folks I keep in touch with, but those conversations aren’t captured anywhere – other than perhaps my hasty personal notes that occasionally yield a blog post.

So, this week our team at Steamclock and I launched It Shipped That Way.

Every three weeks I’m interviewing leaders in engineering, design, and product about how (and how not) to build great teams and software. I’ve already got 4 recorded and queued for release, and I’m really excited about how it’s coming together.

If you’re into podcasts and/or growing product companies, check out the first episode and let me know what you think!

In iOS 11, Apple made a variety of changes and improvements to the Apple Podcasts app and spec. Among other things, they added support for a new show format: serial podcasts. Finally, narrative-driven shows could request to be shown in strict chronological order. As part of this change, Apple added...

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Fun Fact is a new podcast where, every other Friday, Arik Devens and I discuss a variety of fun facts. They range from historical, to practical, to garburetor-related. It’s fun.

This year, in addition to my typical longer articles, I’ll also post some simple links from time to time. This is one of those.

A year ago I wrote about the modern era of podcasts. In that article, I made a forward-looking statement: With all this growth, what improvements are we seeing in the tools? As of this writing, a horde of developers are building podcast listening apps. Podcast recording apps, on the other...

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In November, my co-founder Nigel and I started planning an app to help record podcasts. Before we could do it right, we needed to do two things first: investigate the podcasting industry, and start a show of our own. Before we could start a show, we needed a format. Formatting…...

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In February 2005, Ev Williams and Noah Glass launched an exciting new podcasting business called Odeo. Podcasting, or “audioblogging”, was booming. The Great Startup Cynicism of the early 2000s was lifting, and podcasting was the Next Big Thing. The New York Times explained: Mr. Williams, who is 32, helped found...

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