Juli Clover, MacRumors: Apple has removed more desktop Macs from its online store as the global memory shortage continues. Mac mini models with 32GB and 64GB of RAM are no longer available for purchase, nor is the M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 256GB RAM. The M3 Ultra Mac Studio is now available only in a 96GB RAM configuration, with higher-tier options eliminated. Both M3 Mac Studio and M4 Max Mac Studio models have delivery estimates of 9 to 10 weeks.  ★

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: Last March, Apple was hit with a class action lawsuit after delaying the launch of the “more personalized Siri” that was first announced at WWDC 2024. Apple agreed to settle the case in December, and the full settlement terms are now available. Apple is set to pay $250 million to settle the lawsuit, equating to an estimated $25 per device. That number could reach up to $95 per device, depending on how many users submit claims. [...] As part of the settlement, Apple is not [more]

A year ago, officials all but sneered at the idea of AI safety. A new frontier model has them reconsidering

Taegan Goddard, quoting the Financial Times last week: The Pentagon said President Trump’s Iran war has cost the United States at least $25 billion, driven primarily by the military’s use of munitions, the Financial Times reports. The New York Times had an interesting piece trying to put that number in context (gift link): $25 billion is similar to: The annual budget of NASA. Spending on military aid to Israel after Oct. 7. Spending by U.S.A.I.D. before it was disbanded. The cost to expand Obama [more]

Back in 2009, Merlin Mann and I jointly gave a talk at SxSW titled “Obsession Times Voice”. Regarding how it turned out, I wrote: My muse for the session was this quote from Walt Disney: “We don’t make movies to make money; we make money to make more movies.” To me, that’s it. That’s the thing. Merlin and I were talking about independent writers and podcasters, because that’s what we were (and remain), but the concept applies just as perfectly to independent developers. This came to my mind afte [more]

This is nuts: Fred Again has uploaded a video of every single show he did during his USB002 tour (except Mexico City) — it’s four and a half days long. “im told this is the longest video on YouTube ever?”

Some nice work here from Swedish designer Eric Rohman, who designed thousands of movie posters in the early-to-mid 20th century. (via meanwhile) Tags: design · Eric Rohman · movie posters · movies

The official trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was just released. Really looking forward to this.

What now-familiar domain names looked like before they were bought by big-time companies, e.g. openai.com was “the personal homepage of a guy named glenn”, doordash.com was a porn site, threads.com sold spools of thread.

David Smith, “Six Years Perfecting Maps on watchOS”: I love going on wilderness adventures. I am rarely happier than when I am far off into the mountains without a soul in sight. As a result, I have spent a lot of time learning how to safely explore and navigate when I’m away from civilization. The most important habit I’ve found for not getting lost is to be very regular in checking your location as you go, and the best way I’ve found to do that is to have a map on my wrist. For more than six y [more]

Pocket forests. “The Miyawaki method of reforestation inserts small, densely packed wild acreage into urban environs. It’s proving wildly successful.” The key is densely planting diverse & native species…this isn’t just planting some trees.

Could This Fish Be a Notebook? “David Byrne learns how fisheries from Iceland to the Great Lakes are using 100% of their catch — and shares his tips for making fish head soup.”

Huh. A24 is coming out with an Anthony Bourdain biopic that focuses on the time period around the chef/writer’s college years, when he first started working in kitchens. Directed by Matt Johnson, who co-created Nirvana the Band the Show and directed BlackBerry. Could be good. (via rex) Tags: Anthony Bourdain · movies · Tony · trailers · video

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace in black & white with the Japanese audio track “becomes the best ‘Space Kurosawa’ movie ever made”.

Microshifting. “From a creativity standpoint, it’s good to take breaks. When you stop thinking about a task is when your best ideas come to you.” This is how I’ve worked for the past decade+…bursts of work throughout the day & week.

If you’re building B2B SaaS, especially AI, you quickly need enterprise features like SSO, SCIM, and audit logs. Your developers shouldn’t waste cycles rebuilding that infrastructure. Free them to focus on what sets you apart. WorkOS gives you production-ready APIs for auth and access control that integrate directly into your product. Trusted by over 2,000 companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel. Build faster with WorkOS →  ★

Chess Peace — a new iOS game by Sam Shepherd — is my kind of logic puzzle. Each puzzle is a board with a few unplaced chess pieces. To solve you need to place all the pieces so that none of them attack each other. There’s a timer if you care, but I don’t. (And you can hide the clock.) Clever name too: the pieces need to be ... at peace with each other. You can download Chess Peace and try it out free of charge, and it’s just a one-time payment of $7 to unlock everything. Great simple premise, re [more]

Nick Heer: If you do a little poking around in Adobe’s application bundles, a key reason for the jankiness of these user interfaces becomes apparent: it is because they are little webpages. These dialog boxes are HTML files that reference a chunky CSS file and oodles of JavaScript, and appear to be built with React. [...] I was going to write about how this stuff should have been tried with people who actually use Adobe’s apps in a high-pressure environment, but I am sure it was and, also, it do [more]

Paul Thurrott: I may or may not write and publish a short e-book about Markdown sometime this year, most likely as part of a monthly focus. But l’ve written small parts of it already, as I do, and I figured it might be interesting for at least some readers. And so here’s an early draft of an introductory chapter that may or may not be called “On writing.” We’ll see. It’s odd how things turn out in life. Thurrott’s and my careers are almost uniquely parallel, but have seldom intersected. This boo [more]

Speaking of companies with valuable minority stakes in AI companies, there’s one thing that stuck in my craw about the blockbuster Ronan Farrow / Andrew Marantz investigative piece on Sam Altman and OpenAI last month for The New Yorker. It didn’t come up during Nilay Patel’s excellent interview with Farrow on Decoder, either. Sam Altman was the president of Y Combinator for several years, and left to become the full-time CEO of OpenAI. The New Yorker quotes Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham mu [more]

The Booksellers is a 2019 feature-length documentary film about antiquarian and rare book dealers; you can watch the whole movie for free on YouTube.

The New York Times, back in March last year (gift link): To win the artificial intelligence race, Google not only has developed its own technologies, but has also pumped money into prominent A.I. start-ups. And to preserve its competitive edge, Google has kept its ownership stakes in those start-ups a secret. Court documents recently obtained by The New York Times reveal Google’s stake in one of those start-ups, Anthropic, as well as how its investment in the young company is set to change. Goog [more]

Jeremy Provost, on the blog for Think Tap Work, his mobile app development company: iOS App Store search is no longer about relevance. It’s about ad inventory. With Apple’s introduction of a second search ad, for any query where we weren’t #1, we’ve effectively moved down one position. [...] If you’re counting at home, roughly 70% of the interface is covered in ads. A casino ad, to boot. That was a month ago. Two weeks later, he posted a follow-up, showing the effect on Think Tap Work’s apps in [more]

The artist Banksy has installed (without a permit, one assumes) a new statue in London that depicts a man in a suit marching off off a ledge, blinded by a flag. The artwork has been dubbed Blind Patriotism, although Banksy, enigmatic as always, doesn’t explain the meaning of his latest work. However, many have interpreted it as satirising the rise of nationalistic fervour in the UK, typified by the populist politician Nigel Farage and other forces on the far right. Another bullseye for Banksy [more]

Jake Adelstein (author of Tokyo Vice) on his blog Tokyo Paladin: For decades, Japan’s Oreos weren’t made by Nabisco at all. They were produced domestically by Yamazaki Biscuits, under a licensing arrangement with what eventually became Mondelez International. This was, by most accounts, a reasonable arrangement. The cookies were local. The quality was consistent. Nobody was complaining. Then Mondelez did what corporations do when things are working fine. The license expired, and Mondelez moved p [more]

Designer Jenny Volvovski’s collection of unsolicited book cover designs. “I really wanted to design book covers but didn’t have any book cover work. So I hired myself to redesign my personal library.”

Marcin Wichary at Unsung: I’m angry. (Clearly.) We should all be angry in face of stuff like this. This is how people get fed up with software — because it feels unstable and deteriorates on its own without needing to. I know I brought up that an existing power user base can be a huge pain in the ass, and I am a decades-old Photoshop power user. But this is different than other examples where the product needs or at least wants to evolve past its core audience or toward a different market. For P [more]

I’m not a fan of the first part of this music video (reminds me too much of dipshits I had to endure at school), but the single-take choreography from ~4:18 is great.

According to this peer-reviewed paper, the “screeching sound of peeling tape” is caused by tiny sonic booms. The speeds at work here are in the range of Mach 0.7–1.8. Supersonic crafts!

Sam Sabin, writing for Axios one year ago: Anthropic expects AI-powered virtual employees to begin roaming corporate networks in the next year, the company’s top security leader told Axios in an interview this week. [...] Virtual employees could be the next AI innovation hotbed, Jason Clinton, the company’s chief information security officer, told Axios. Agents typically focus on a specific, programmable task. In security, that’s meant having autonomous agents respond to phishing alerts and othe [more]

Read to the end for the quickpilled brown fox vibemogs lazy chud dogcel by jumpmaxxing

NASA has released some 12,000 unseen photos from the recent Artemis II mission; here are some of the best shots.

Nowhere on XKCD’s map of The Contiguous 41 States does it say that you need to find the missing seven states, but that’s immediately where my mind went. And it was a little more challenging than I anticipated — all of New England is present & accounted for somehow? The answer key is here, along with this tidbit: The United States did have exactly 41 states for a few days in 1889, from the admission of Montana, the 41st state, on November 8, to the admission of Washington (the state, not DC), the [more]

A 55-minute mix of Boards of Canada B-sides and rarities.

“They Would Never Use the Death Star on Us”: Alderaan Residents Reflect on Their Support for the Empire as a Large Imperial Installation Enters the System. “The Senate was ineffective, and the liberal Jedi were out of touch…”

Two months ago, revisiting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s year-prior prediction that AI would soon be writing 90+ percent of all programming code, I wrote: But where I think Amodei’s remarks, quoted above, are facile is that it hasn’t played out as simply that lines of code that would have been written by human programmers are now generated by AI models. That’s part of it, for sure. But what’s revolutionary — a topic I’ve been posting about twice already today — is that AI code generation tools ar [more]

Press release last week: SightMD, a leading ophthalmology practice in the greater New England area, today announced a historic milestone in surgical innovation. Dr. Eric Rosenberg, DO, MSE, has become the first surgeon in the world to successfully perform cataract surgery using the Apple Vision Pro, powered by ScopeXR, a groundbreaking mixed reality surgical platform co-developed by Dr. Rosenberg. The initial procedure was successfully completed in October 2025, and since that time, Dr. Rosenber [more]

I’m gonna call it: Every Frame a Painting, my all-time favorite YouTube channel, is back. Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos stopped producing their fantastic video essays back in 2017 and while they have popped up here and there since then, they’ve mostly stuck to their retirement. But for the past few months, the duo have been releasing video essays produced in partnership with Criterion: Night of the Living Dead: Limitations into Virtues, The Blade (1995): The Edges of Wuxia, and just yesterday, The [more]

Bryan Hoch, reporting for MLB.com: A colorful personality who engaged and entertained fans with a distinct conversational style, Sterling called 5,426 regular-season Yankees games and 225 more in the postseason from 1989 until his retirement in 2024. After initially stepping away from the microphone in April of that year, Sterling returned to call selected games late in the ’24 season, including each contest of the World Series. At the time of his initial retirement, Sterling said that he consid [more]

How Sylvester Stallone Rescued the First Rambo Film With a Radical Recut, Cutting It From 3½ Hours to 93 Minutes. “The solution that ended up saving the movie wasn’t much less drastic, producing a 93-minute cut that excised most of Rambo’s dialogue.”

Gil Durán, posting on Bluesky: It’s official! I’m permanently banned from X for tweeting “TLDR: Fascism.” (appeal denied) “TLDR: Fascism” was Durán’s two-word response to this 1,000-word essay from Palantir describing their vision for a “Technological Republic”. (Alternative link to essay if you don’t want to visit x.com.) Getting perma-banned from Twitter/X by Elon Musk gives Durán a nice Streisand-effect boost to promote his upcoming new book, The Nerd Reich. If the book is even half as good a [more]

I don’t want to spoil any of this story from David Gelphman, which he wrote back in 2013, but which I only came across this week had read so long ago I’d forgotten it. Go read it. But before you do, one bit of context you should keep in mind is that the original iPad was unveiled at a special Apple event on 27 January 2010, but it didn’t ship until early April. Gelphman’s story takes place in that interregnum.  ★

A follow-up point to Friday’s post about Meta unceremoniously shitcanning its entire contract with Sama, the Kenyan contractor that employed over 1,100 contractors to serve as Mechanical Turks for Meta’s AI efforts, after a few of the contractors told investigative reporters about the incredibly private things they witnessed from footage captured by users of Meta’s AI Glasses. There is no point getting any more outraged or disgusted at Meta for firing these contractors than you already were in t [more]

Roundup 05/03/2026

Regarding my earlier post about the cleverness of Tim Cook’s solution to Apple’s dilemma regarding how to apply for, and accept, a potential tariff refund check without drawing the ire of Donald “Tariff Is My Favorite Word” Trump, at least one reader asked why Tim Cook committing to spending the refund check on “U.S. innovation and advanced manufacturing” doesn’t mean that Apple would — if they get a tariff refund — be spending more than they had previously committed to. Cook even said yesterda [more]

Ohhhhh dear, Richard Dawkins: Is AI the Next Phase of Evolution? Claude Appears to Be Conscious. “My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism.” 😬

Unruly Play: “A collection of 169 works of play in unlikely places. Games about unusual things. Unexpected encounters.”

Remember the appalling but utterly-unsurprising story two months ago where a team of investigative reporters in Sweden uncovered a company in Kenya contracted by Meta to review video content captured by Meta’s “smart” glasses? They spoke to some of the workers, who told tales of reviewing footage of Meta glasses users getting undressed, having sex, and taking dumps. This is a rather seedy job, and a big surprise to most of the people wearing Meta’s AI glasses, who are under the impression that “ [more]

A Read Max re-run

Ada Palmer & Bruce Schneier: AI Learns Language From Skewed Sources. That Could Change How We Humans Speak – and Think. “Our sense of the world may become distorted in ways we have barely begun to comprehend.”

One more from Jason Snell, from his analysis of Apple’s quarterly results: During a complicated question from J.P. Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee about product margins, Parekh unusually half-answered the question and then stopped and “turned it over to Tim” so that Cook could read an obviously prepared statement about tariffs, which included this bit: In terms of applying for a refund of tariffs paid, we’re following the established processes, and we plan to reinvest any amount we receive back [more]

Using the NY Times Archive API, journalist Ted Alcorn built Below the Fold, a dashboard through which you can explore the last 25 years of Times coverage: 2.2 million articles containing 1.5 billion words. You can slice and dice this data in a bunch of different ways — it’s a fantastic resource. One of the site’s sections is about obituaries. From that data, Alcorn produced this infographic of whose obits contained the highest word count: As you can see, it’s a lot of world leaders, religious l [more]

Am…am I “alternatively influential”? Defined roughly as “public thinkers and tastemakers who have real clout in their own demesnes despite only modest internet followings”.

A little state of the union

This is excellent: Jamelle Bouie explains why he thinks the Supreme Court is corrupt and what we (through Congress) can do about it. Not all video transcripts work as text, but this one does, so I’m including his full remarks here: The Supreme Court is corrupt. You might hear that and think, “Well, Jamelle, you just disagree with the rulings. They’re not corrupt. They’re doing their jobs.” But I want to posit to you that they’re not doing their jobs. They’re in fact doing something very differe [more]

For his latest video essay, Evan Puschak tells us about Un Chien Andalou, the pioneering surrealist short film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. The film is particularly notable for a shocking shot in the opening scene, which, if you’ve seen it, you’ve likely never forgotten. Said Buñuel of the film: This film has no intention of attracting nor pleasing the spectator; indeed, on the contrary, it attacks him, to the degree that he belongs to a society with which surrealism is at war. You can w [more]

I fixed a few bugs on the Rolodex yesterday — some of the feeds weren’t updating and modifying sites wasn’t working properly. (Members get the mini-feedreader view!)

“Since 1900, scientists have observed more than 20 phases of ice, many of them shaped under extreme conditions. The growing list includes hot ice and even ice that conducts electricity.”

On the futility of border walls. “The Ozymandian ruins of many such walls litter our ancient and modern landscapes, because for as long as humanity has built hard borders, people have inevitably found ways to cross, topple or simply bypass them.”

The Secret to Success Is ‘Monotasking’. “We find that in ­real‑world work, the more switches in attention a person makes, the lower is their end‑­of‑day assessed productivity.”

MG Siegler returns to the show to discuss Apple’s announcement that Tim Cook is stepping aside (into the role of executive chairman) and John Ternus will become CEO. Sponsored by: Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code TALKSHOW. Drafts: The Swiss Army knife for text on all your Apple devices. Act now to get your first year of Drafts Pro for 50% off. Finalist: A daily planner for iPhone, iPad and Mac, built on proven paper-based planning methods. Use this [more]

Uwa Ede-Osifo, reporting for The Guardian: On any given day, Los Angeles’s Hollywood Boulevard teems with tourists and street performers clustered near the area’s many landmarks. But in recent months, the strip has been set abuzz for a new reason. Throngs of mostly adolescent boys and young men have been rushing the Church of Scientology’s international headquarters on the famed street. The so-called “speed runs” appear to be bids for social media valor — clips of the raids have amassed millions [more]

Apple Newsroom: “Today Apple is proud to report our best March quarter ever, with revenue of $111.2 billion and double-digit growth across every geographic segment,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “iPhone achieved a March quarter revenue record, fueled by such extraordinary demand for the iPhone 17 lineup. During the quarter, Services achieved yet another all-time record, and we were excited to introduce remarkable new products to our strongest lineup ever. That included the addition of the iPhone [more]

Juli Clover, writing at MacRumors under the rather incendiary headline “Apple Has Given Up on the Vision Pro After M5 Refresh Flop”: Apple has all but given up on the Vision Pro after the M5 model failed to revitalize interest in the device, MacRumors has learned. Apple updated the Vision Pro with a faster M5 chip and a more comfortable band in October 2025, but there were no other hardware changes, and consumers still weren’t interested. [...] The Vision Pro has been unpopular since it first la [more]

Think railroads, not crypto. PLUS: The government can't decide what to do about Mythos, and week one of the OpenAI-Elon Musk trial

Adam Serwer writing about the yesterday’s Supreme Court decision that guts much of whatever remains of the Voting Rights Act: In states with large Black populations that remain under Republican control — half of the Black American population resides in the South — lawmakers will now be able to draw districts that dilute Black residents’ voting power. In his opinion for the right-wing majority, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “in considering the constitutionality of a districting scheme, courts m [more]

Come on everyone, we’re going to Cursor Camp!

600 words from Hartley Charlton at MacRumors expounding upon a wacko post on Weibo suggesting that Apple is debating dropping MagSafe from all iPhones (which post, translated to English, is only 70-some words). Given that last year’s 16e didn’t have MagSafe and this year’s 17e does, you don’t need a pseudonymous Chinese weatherman to know which way the MagSafe wind is blowing in Cupertino.  ★

Brilliant statue, hilarious intro video. The greatest artist of our age.  ★

Max Harrison-Caldwell, reporting for The San Francisco Standard: In 2024, the port — which manages the Oakland airport — changed the name from Oakland International Airport to San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport, hoping to entice travelers by emphasizing the hub’s proximity to SF. At the time, the number of people flying into Oakland was declining after a brief post-pandemic rebound, and the airport was losing routes. The effort largely failed, while having the secondary impact of an [more]

Winners of the GDT Nature Photographer of the Year 2026.

The Angine de Poitrine Argument for UBI. “If universal basic income enables even one more Einstein to become Einstein over the course of the next century, it will have paid for itself a thousand times over.”

Who Are the Unexpected Friends in Your Life? “Little did I know that I would find this kind of friendship with my 70-something neighbor, Jesse.”

Read to the end for an 108-hour Fred Again mix

“There is a feeling I search for: being in good hands. It is the feeling I look to give and the feeling I look to receive. I know I am in good hands when I sense a cohesive point of view expressed with attention to detail.”

“Trump did not cause the attempts on his life. But it would be dishonest to deny that he is responsible for shaping the environment in which we live — for creating an atmosphere in which these kinds of events are more likely.”

On May 22, Boards of Canada is doing a handful of listening parties around the world (NYC, Tokyo, London, etc.) for their new album. “Tickets live Friday 1 May. Sign up for access by Thursday 30 April, 15:00 BST.”

Holy moly, DJ Shadow is doing a 30th anniversary tour for Endtroducing… Starts Sept 24 in San Diego. Endtroducing… is one of my all-time favorite albums.

I Bought Friendster for $30k — Here’s What I’m Doing With It. “I created an iOS app for Friendster, and I made it so that in order to connect with someone as a friend, you have to actually tap phones together in real life.”

Elizabeth Lopatto, reporting on Musk v. Altman from the courtroom in Oakland (gift link): Today the first witness was sworn in in Musk v. Altman: Elon Musk. I was surprised by how flat he seemed. This is not the first time I’ve seen Musk in court. During his defamation suit, he turned on the charm and the jury responded by finding him not guilty. Today he looked adrift and unprepared. The only times he showed real animation were when he was bragging about how much he’d done for OpenAI. [...] Wha [more]

Matteo Wong, covering Musk v. Altman for The Atlantic (gift link): Musk is asking that Altman be removed from OpenAI’s board, that the company convert back to a nonprofit, and for the return of allegedly “ill-gotten gains” — some $150 billion — which Musk says would go to OpenAI’s charitable trust. Outside legal experts say that Musk is unlikely to win all or even much of this. His argument is confusing: OpenAI has certainly evolved from a nonprofit lab to a revenue-chasing, consumer behemoth, a [more]

A Georgia teen diagnosed with a rare cancer used his Make-A-Wish gift to help the homeless in his community. “I got out of my version of heck, and I want to help others who are in a similar situation, their own version.”

Cade Metz and Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times from the Ronald V. Dellums U.S. Courthouse in Oakland (gift link): On the first day of testimony in a landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, two notably different tales were offered of how OpenAI evolved from a nonprofit artificial intelligence lab into one of the most influential tech companies in the world. In Mr. Musk’s telling, OpenAI’s shift was one of the greatest heists in history — a nonprofit ripped from its p [more]

The intelligence of LLMs is “a function of the social complexity of the civilization whose language it digested”, and their widespread use will lead to a thinning of that complexity, “undermining the conditions for its own advancement”. (And ours.)

Jer Crane, in an article earlier this week posted on Twitter/X: I’m Jer Crane, founder of PocketOS. We build software that rental businesses — primarily car rental operators — use to run their entire operations: reservations, payments, customer management, vehicle tracking, the works. Some of our customers are five-year subscribers who literally cannot operate their businesses without us. Yesterday afternoon, an AI coding agent — Cursor running Anthropic’s flagship Claude Opus 4.6 — deleted our [more]

Teaser trailer for season four of Ted Lasso. Looks like he & Coach Beard are back in the UK to coach AFC Richmond’s women’s team. Premieres Aug 5 on Apple TV.

Every B2B company hits the same inflection point — enterprise customers show up and they need SSO, directory sync, audit logs, and role-based access before they’ll move forward. Most teams lose months building that infrastructure. It doesn’t have to be that way. With WorkOS you get all of it. One platform for auth, identity, and security. Infrastructure for teams that ship fast and stay fast. OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Perplexity already chose WorkOS over building it themselves. Build faster [more]

This story by Kevin Guilfoile about his aging father (who worked for the Pirates and the Baseball Hall of Fame) and the mystery of what happened to the bat that Roberto Clemente got his 3,000th hit with is one of my favorite things that I’ve read over the past few months. [My father’s] personality is present, if his memories are a jumble. He is still funny, and surprisingly quick with one-liners to crack up the staff at the facility where he lives. He is exceedingly polite, same as he ever was. [more]

Five great book critics writing today (and where to find them).

This is interesting: Talkie is a vintage LLM, trained on “historical pre-1931 English text”. “The training data for the base model is entirely out of copyright (the USA copyright cutoff date is currently January 1, 1931).”

Listen, sometimes you just want to watch things blow up. But safely and without consequence (although Arnold Schwarzenegger did somehow become the governor of California). So, can I interest you in three minutes of movie explosions? The 80s and 90s were really a golden age for kick-ass movie explosions. (via @tvaziri.com) Tags: movies · video

“A half-century after it was published, The Soul of a New Machine does a better job challenging AI hype than most current criticism.” I thought something similarly (about the web) when I read Kidder’s book 25 years ago, during the aftermath of the dot com bust.

Do I Belong in Tech Anymore? “Why am I here? Does any of this work actually matter? And if I stop caring about the quality of my work… will anyone notice?”

“British energy major BP on Tuesday reported that first-quarter profits more than doubled from a year ago, following a surge in oil and gas prices driven by the Middle East conflict.” Oh, surprise surprise.

Boots Riley made his directorial debut with the totally weirdo (complimentary) movie Sorry to Bother You in 2018. He’s been quiet since then, but he’s back with a new comedy, I Love Boosters. This looks great. From a review on Letterboxd: Maximalist social commentary delivered with anime action and colourful high strangeness. Did it kind of fall off the rails towards the end? Absolutely. Was it fun as fuck and creative right to the end? You best believe it. God bless the shoplifters. I got major [more]

On the Propaganda of Early Nazism, and How We See it in America Today. “Unlike other political systems, fascism was not meant to be intellectualized or discussed; it was meant to be experienced.”

The Era of AI Malaise. “The AI has learned to code. The AI is building itself. Will I have a job tomorrow? Will the market crash? Why does OpenAI need a bunker? Do I need a bunker? Maybe I should have a bunker.”

It’s the Age of Electricity and America Isn’t Ready. “Our grid is too old and our supply of electricity too small. If we don’t meet this moment, we will face an impoverished future of more expensive, less reliable energy, and slower economic growth.”

Elizabeth Kolbert’s profile of EPA head Lee Zeldin. “In a little more than a year, Zeldin has transformed the E.P.A. from an agency devoted to protecting human health and the environment into one that, more or less openly, sides with polluters.”

My thanks to Rec League for sponsoring last week at DF. Rec League is a new app/social network for sharing what you’re into. (Get it? The “rec” in “Rec League” is for recommendations. It’s a damn clever name, and sometimes a clever name is half the battle.) It’s really well done, with a great simple brand aesthetic and obvious navigation and mechanics. You can easily use Rec League just to catalog your own collections: restaurants, books, movies, gadgets, whatever. The social aspects are totally [more]

On newsletters in the age of AI automation. PLUS: Musk and OpenAI in court, and China blocks Meta's Manus acquisition

Weekly “sponsor the whole week at DF” spots are sold out until August 24. That’s a great sign that sponsorships here work. But it’s not so great if you have a product or service that you’d like to promote now, or soon, to the DF audience — savvy listeners and readers obsessed with high quality and good design. The good news on that front is that the sponsorship schedule for The Talk Show has openings, including for the next few episodes, starting this week and into next month. The general rule o [more]

Greg Sargent writing for The New Republic: There’s no clean way to hive off terms like fascism or authoritarianism from Trump’s policies. Even if you disagree that the words apply, their use is backed up by a genuine attempt at intellectual justification for it. The use of these terms just is deeply linked to assessments of Trump’s actual policies, from the lawless renditions to foreign gulags to the unleashing of heavily armed militias in American cities to the naked intimidation of large swath [more]

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on magical thinking and elite impunity. “We are ruled by a class of people who seem either to believe or presume that war, disease, and apocalyptic destruction are things that will only ever happen to poorer and browner people.”

Nicole Nikolich is a textile artist whose current focus is making crochet artworks that reference old school technology. You can explore her work on her website, at Paradigm Gallery and on Instagram. Some of her artworks are available for sale here. I’m a sucker for these types of projects because innovations in textile production led to the development of the first computers and the work of artists like Nikolich bring that relationship full circle. See also The Embroidered Computer. [more]

Livestream of the Big Bear bald eagle nest (perched 145 feet up in a pine tree) with two fuzzy bald eagle chicks that hatched 3 weeks ago.

David Pierce: On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay are joined by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber to talk about their reactions to the news, the (mostly) smooth transition Apple seems to have pulled off, and what we should really make of Tim Cook’s legacy as a product person. Really, the question is: Do we blame Cook for the Touch Bar, or do we blame him for not trying hard enough to make the Touch Bar great? I know that sounds like a joke but I really do think the biggest problem with [more]

Read to the end for a very interesting story about Hollywood

Roundup 04/27/2026

[Update: The store is now closed. Thanks to everyone who ordered — you should start getting shipping notices very soon.] It’s really just a coincidence, but it was 20 years ago this week that I went full-time writing Daring Fireball (after writing the site in my spare time for 4 years). That feels like a long time ago. But it feels like yesterday, too. In my announcement, I wrote: Daring Fireball is what I love to do. That remains as true today than it was then. Whether you’re a longtime reader [more]

The New York Times PR account, on Twitter/X a week ago: Sunday’s crossword puzzle in the print edition of The New York Times Magazine contains a grid that does not match the clues. The correct version of the puzzle can be found in the news section of Sunday’s print edition of The Times. The puzzle on our app is correct. Maggie Duffy, writing for Vulture: Some solvers who, like Wegener’s wife, complete the Sunday puzzle in the print magazine (often with pen) complained on crossword forums and soc [more]

Ben Schoon, 9to5Google: In March, a report revealed some of the internal cuts Samsung has been making for its mobile division, with the company initially concerned it could post an operating loss for the first time ever. It’s a big deal, as Samsung’s mobile (MX) division has historically always turned a profit. A new report out of Korea (via Jukan) makes this seem all but certain. Apparently, Samsung’s TM Roh, the head of the company’s mobile division, has expressed concerns of the “possibility [more]

In May 2024, Bloomberg ran a feature story by Mark Gurman under the headline, “Tim Cook Can’t Run Apple Forever. Who’s Next?” The subhead: “John Ternus, the head of hardware engineering, is emerging as a potential successor to the CEO.” The nut grafs from that piece: There’s no reason to assume that a change at the helm is imminent. Cook may be older than the CEOs of the other tech companies at the top of the S&P 500, but he’s hardly the oldest person running a major corporation. “If Trump or Bi [more]

A message to the Apple faithful

Andy McMillan and Andy Baio: Today, over 10 years later, and almost two full years after we retired the festival for good, we’re finally launching that website. Named after what we thought would be a throwaway title for a short-lived GitHub repo, allow us to introduce XOXO Explore. [...] And, for the first time ever (!) on an XOXO website, we now have an actual About page, where we’ve attempted to explain what XOXO actually was, documenting the 12-year history of the festival and its related pro [more]

Eva Corlett, reporting for The Guardian in 2023: New Zealand’s new government will scrap the country’s world-leading law to ban smoking for future generations to help pay for tax cuts — a move that public health officials believe will cost thousands of lives and be “catastrophic” for Māori communities. In 2022 the country passed pioneering legislation which introduced a steadily rising smoking age to stop those born after January 2009 from ever being able to legally buy cigarettes. The law was d [more]

Ephrat Livni, reporting for The New York Times (gift link): Britain aims to raise a “smoke-free generation” by permanently banning the sale or supply of tobacco to anyone born in 2009 or after, with a bill that was approved by Parliament on Tuesday. The bill applies to people currently 17 years old or younger and aims to keep them from ever picking up the habit in their lifetime. The proposal is expected to soon go into law after the final formality of approval by King Charles III. Lawmakers say [more]

Invasive monitoring and a fresh round of layoffs have workers I spoke to on edge. Is this the future of knowledge work?

Russ Choma, reporting for Mother Jones: Devin Nunes was not an obvious choice to run a fledgling social media network, but after $1.1 billion in losses, the former dairy farmer and congressman is out as the head of Truth Social. Donald Trump Jr., a board member at Trump Media + Technology, the parent company of Truth Social, said on Tuesday night that Nunes would be replaced by another executive who formerly worked at Hulu. Nunes confirmed the move in a Truth Social post of his own. The company, [more]

Nilay Patel, in a terrific essay (and Decoder one-sider) at The Verge: In fact, the polling on this is so strong, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people hate AI, and that Gen Z in particular seems to hate AI more and more as they encounter it. There’s that NBC News poll showing AI with worse favorability than ICE and only a little bit above the war in Iran and the Democrats generally. That’s with nearly two thirds of respondents saying they used ChatGPT or Copilot in the last month. Quinn [more]

With Quinn Slobodian, Ben Tarnoff, and John Ganz

Read to the end for a cool burger fact

PLUS: Everyone has feelings about Tim Cook

Let’s pretend it’s January, because I’m ready and excited to present to you the #new chips, cookies, cereals, and assorted garbage I found in the wild during 2025!! Last year, we started a new (temporary?) Panic tradition — at the very end of our Monday status meeting, I run through all the new snacks I’d found […]

How tech CEOs use the threat of job loss to distract from how AI is really used against workers

Tech companies hope a check in the mail will calm the AI backlash — but there are reasons for skepticism

Read to the end for a really good Instagram video

Roundup 04/20/2026

Read to the end for a good post about space travel

PLUS: Has Forum Brain crossed the gender divide?

New research confirms that LLMs often perform better when you encourage them. But why?

Read to the end for a great Bluesky post

Roundup 04/14/2026

OpenAI’s CEO is asking the public to lower the temperature on AI. But who turned it up in the first place?

Read to the end for a really good flowchart

Read to the end for a very good Facebook page

Nine months after an expensive overhaul, the company says it's back in the AI race — but the race keeps getting faster

Sam Altman wants intelligence to be a utility that you pay him for

Read to the end for a good Tumblr post

The company says it has built its most dangerous model yet. Can its coalition of internet companies fix the internet before others catch up?

Video of our conversation from Night of IDeas

11 books to get your brain moving through the spring

A strange purchase, executive reshuffling and a New Yorker investigation are raising questions ahead of an IPO

Read to the end for ghoulmaxxing

Roundup 04/06/2026

On a weird few weeks of A.I.-writing scandals

Read to the end for a good Tumblr post

Shifting priorities and budget pressures could bring an end to the company’s experiment in independent governance, sources say

Read to the end for a very good Aprils Fools’ Day post

The verdicts in last week’s social media trials have alarmed open-internet advocates. But it’s possible to regulate platform design while also protecting speech

Meta’s CEO said he didn't want to be the speech police. Then he texted Elon Musk

Read to the end for a really good dinosaur thread

Roundup 03/29/2026

Read to the end for a very motivational TikTok video

A Read Max re-run

Read to the end for a truly incredible TikTok video

The company is taking new steps to stop AI impersonation — but across the internet, the problem continues to grow. PLUS: Anthropic in court, and Meta loses in New Mexico

There aren’t any good arguments left to stay on Elon Musk’s platform

Read to the end for a predynastic Egyptian terracotta bowl with human feet

Roundup 03/23/2026

Read to the end for The Peg

A recording of our livestream for paying subscribers

Here's a good post about Daylight Saving Time

Roundup 03/17/2026 (Plus: a bonus book rec!)

This newsletter is brought to you by Squarespace.

Roundup 03/09/2025

Greetings from Read Max HQ!

Roundup 03/02/2026

Trying to make sense of the conjuncture

OpenAI CEO downgrades humanity in pursuit of goal to merge with computers

This post is about a found mural, a lost artist, and a conference talk. It’s the full story of Wes Cook and The McDonald’s Mural. Grab a beverage, sit back, relax, and thank you for joining me. Ten years after giving my first talk at XOXO, Andy (Baio) and Andy (McMillan) asked if I’d like […]

We need comprehensive rules on social media far more than age limits

Canada needs real digital sovereignty, not our own digital colonizers

When I was kid, on a road trip with my family, we stopped in Vacaville, California. And there, drawing us off the freeway with a wooden glow, was a brand new roadside attraction: Wooz. The pitch? It was a maze. A big maze. Wooz stood for “Wild Original Object with Zoom” (!), opened in 1988, […]

13 books to keep you thinking through the winter

Regulators need to stop cowering before the richest man in the world

Donald Trump’s “attack on sovereignty” in Venezuela has terrible consequences for the world

Getting off US tech led me to a wider questioning of digital convenience

It would be the next step in the degradation of culture to serve commercial ends

Maybe your grandma doesn’t need that Alexa smart speaker

Governments are deluding themselves into believing investment justifies allowing AI to upend society

Long ago, I was in the studio audience of a local PDX TV kids show called Ramblin’ Rod. “Local kids show” is a format that is completely lost to time, which is pretty wild, because it was such a thing. Think Krusty the Clown — kids sitting in a studio, a goofball host, time filled with […]

Welcome to 2025. The vibes are a little heavy, so, I’m trying very hard to focus on the things I can control — and yes, that includes remembering to share things that delight me like the latest #new snacks and cereals I find at the grocery store!! Yeah. It’s an age-old, very-odd Cabel tradition. This time, […]