Miriam Pawel, in an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that University of California should not bring back the SAT requirement for admission: What has made the University of California exceptional is its commitment to increase access without sacrificing excellence. [...] Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates. A success story would be increasing the number of people with solid math skills. Printing degrees for students [more]

New novel from Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven): Exit Party. “Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted.”

Will Oremus, writing for The Atlantic last week, “Okay, Sure, a Folding iPhone” (gift link): Apple’s next big invention, the company revealed at a launch event in Cupertino, is a $2,000 iPhone that sports — get ready — a “remarkable hinge.” Is it not possible for a hinge to be remarkable? This is the iPhone Duo, a foldable gadget that opens like a book to reveal a capacious 7.6-inch screen. Billed as the most versatile iPhone, it can be used in folded or unfolded form, and in split-screen or ful [more]

In addition to the Duo-specific 27.1 SDK, which allows third-party developers to get start adapting apps to the Duo’s new screen sizes and layouts, Apple’s developer site also has Figma and Sketch design kits.  ★

Wes Anderson steps into the mobile Criterion Closet to select some films that he enjoys. One unsurprising thing about this video: Anderson says he has his own Criterion closet at home with all of the Criterion films. That’s maybe a $40-50K investment? (He probably gets them free from Criterion tho.) I wonder how many films he watches a day? Two? Three? If Soderbergh’s yearly watch/read lists are any indication, it’s probably in that ballpark. One surprising thing about this video: I was expectin [more]

Warren Buffett, in a letter to Berkshire shareholders: Recently, I celebrated my 96th birthday with family and friends, including one of my great-grandchildren, who had just turned one. He’s moving a bit faster than I am these days. [...] So the timing is right to complete the transition. I will become Chairman Emeritus and remain a Director. My son, Howard, will succeed me as Chairman. Howard has been a Berkshire Director for 33 years. That is a longer apprenticeship than I served before taking [more]

Let’s check in on the president of the United States, having a normal one on his blog: I am proud to announce that, effective immediately, I am banning Fake News CNN, MSNOW (who recently changed their name from MSNBC due to lack of viewership and credibility!), and Politico (The recipients of an illegal and ridiculous $8 Million Dollar subscription, an All Time Record, directly from the United States Government, under Crooked Joe Biden, in order to keep them “alive.” Seems like corruption to me! [more]

“The clan of predators currently in charge of the U.S. federal government” are striving to make the world safe for grift, corruption, and theft, with their mob boss president leading the way.

Read to the end for your granddad Cyclops

Artist Maya Barkai assembled a collection of pedestrian traffic signals from around the world: Walking Men Worldwide. I love all of these little people. The Warsaw one reminds me somewhat of Rocky from Project Hail Mary. Some of the ones from smaller places have more personality, but I feel like the New York and Boston ones are my favorites aesthetically. Weirdly, the iconic German Ampelmännchen isn’t among the crowd here. A screenprint of the collected pedestrian people is available on the [more]

Page Six Hollywood: Ternus attended an intimate Apple party the night before the Emmys, filled with stars and powerbrokers, where some talent brazenly hit him up for the phone. “The new phone is big news,” said one top Hollywood exec, who added that they heard of at least one star, “asking [Ternus] to get him on the list” for a phone. Joked the source about who gets the phones: “It’s like CEOs. That’s like the ‘Eddy Cue list of illuminati.’” (Cue is Apple’s senior vice president of services and [more]

Instant click for me: how NYC street signs are made. “The sign shop…has a staff of 46 workers, including seven letterers who lay out signs by hand and a blacksmith who makes custom brackets to securely attach signs to traffic poles.”

Max Roberts, after looking at the list of MKBHD’s all-time most popular videos, and noting that his Duo first-look is #3, and a Duo follow-up is already at #36: Apple enters the category and in a week it blows past every other folding video. Now, this doesn’t translate to sales and folding phones taking over the entire smartphone market, but it does highlight a few things to me about tech and the viewers of Marques’ channel. Apple is the most popular brand Marques talks about. New products and f [more]

Cleaning up my notes this morning, I realized I forgot to write about the new under-display Face ID sensor in the iPhones 18 Pro, and the corresponding change to the Dynamic Island. I just added it to my review. For those of you who’ve already read the review, here’s the new section in its entirety: A Smaller — or Is It Bigger? — Dynamic Island Apple moved the Face ID infrared camera under the display. It’s up in the top left, underneath the area where iOS displays the time in the status bar. Th [more]

YouTube Help: Last year, we updated how we count public views for Shorts to better capture how viewers watch on YouTube. Now, we’re aligning all other video formats to this same standard for consistency across the platform. Beginning on 8/24/2026, a view will be counted the moment a video begins to play — from the very first frame. This standard will now apply globally across all formats. Historically, we’ve used multiple view counting systems across different formats. However, we’ve heard that [more]

The History of Concrete, a new documentary film by John Wilson, who one review called “the Werner Herzog of the mundane”. This looks great!

Review of a new book on Stephen Hawking. “The uncomfortable truth is that Hawking’s overweening ambition and self-promotion, his repeated failure to acknowledge the work of others, his sexism and controlling behaviour were largely ignored…”

Uruguayan birder Juan Pablo Culasso, who was born blind, has been recording and collecting bird songs for more than two decades. I think that because I’m blind, I enjoy birds differently. Bird songs are my way of appreciating and understanding this world. Culasso is aided in his quest by his incredible sense of of hearing: Culasso is blind, but his hearing is so acute (he has absolute pitch) he can identify over 3,000 components of birdsong and differentiate among more than 700 species in his [more]

From our own Edith Zimmerman for the New Yorker, some Updated Jane Austen Titles like Dead-Ass Karen and Red-Flag Baddie and Brain-Rot Third Space.

Every year since 2007, Apple has debuted a new flagship iPhone. Other than the just plain “iPhone” original, they all have numbers of some sort in their name. If you make a list of them in order, it’s a bit of a marketing curiosity that the only one of the bunch whose number in its name corresponds to its generation number is the iPhone 4, which was in fact the fourth iPhone. (The “ten” in iPhone X marked 10 years, but it was the 11th flagship model.) The iPhone 18 Pro, in fact, heralds Apple’s [more]

Saying goodbye to some old friends — and hello to Machine Gods

“Szilveszter Makó’s surreal portraits have become nearly as recognisable as the celebrities he photographs.” But: “Artists who become successful for a signature style are then accused of monotony for being hired to reproduce it.”

New book from Ed Yong! Life Beyond Measure: Nature’s Hidden Wonders at Every Scale. “A bristlecone pine rounds the corner of its fifth millennium; shorebirds fly without stopping across the world’s largest ocean…” Out in April, pre-order now.

Yes, this summer really was as hot as you think it was. This summer “was the hottest on record for the contiguous U.S., beating the previous champions of 1936 and 2021 by 0.4°F. Compared to the average over the 20th century, this summer was 3° hotter.”

By taking a camera, pointing it out the window of a train, and keeping track of how fast the train is moving, you can create very wide panoramic scans of the scenery. It’s a little more complicated than that — all the details are here — but you’re essentially using the train (or ferry) as a massive flatbed scanner. I knew from the start that I’d need to measure the speed somehow, but I was naïvely hoping that I wouldn’t need to measure it that well and could simply fudge it. This image, however [more]

Japanese architect Tadao Ando designed a floating children’s library and donated it to Kagawa prefecture. “We created reading spaces throughout the ship. A large circular bench was placed on the rear deck, and children can even lie under the sun.”

The Rumpus Book Club event for this month is a conversation between Debbie Millman, Roxane Gay, and Emily Wilson about Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. Sept 25th at 7pm ET on Zoom, free for all.

Joe Rossignol at MacRumors over the weekend: Apple now says the iPhone 18 Pro has a C2 modem worldwide, while the iPhone 18 Pro Max uses the chip in every country except for the U.S. [...] Apple has yet to provide an explanation for this modem difference, so we can only speculate for now. In 2023, Qualcomm announced that it would supply Apple with smartphone modems through 2026, so perhaps Apple is equipping the U.S. version of the iPhone 18 Pro Max with a Qualcomm modem in order to honor this a [more]

The Star Wars Archives. 1977-1983. From Taschen. Looks fantastic.

With Adapted Sailing, the Sea Is for Everyone. “The program and others like it across the world are opening up a new frontier for people with reduced mobility, out on the open sea, free from the limitations of buildings and streets.”

This is fun: Red Bull took over one of the karting tracks at Silverstone (home of the British Grand Prix), put 100 regular folks in karts, positioned four-time F1 champ Max Verstappen at the back of the pack, and gave him 75 minutes (or 30 laps) to pass everyone. Spoiler alert: he only needed 35 minutes. (And yes, his kart was the same speed as everyone else’s…you can see it in the straights later in the race.) Update: the video got taken down. You can find shorter highlight videos on YouTube. T [more]

A note flagged “Important” atop the Xcode 27.2 release notes: The iOS SDK and simulator support for iPhone Duo will be available later this month in an upcoming release of Xcode 27.1. Adapting apps for the Duo is not just a simple “recompile with the new SDK”. It’s different. For just about all apps it’s going to be a significant amount of work, and for some apps it’s going to be a lot of work. But without Xcode 27.1, developers cannot get started. Developers wanted this SDK a week ago. And when [more]

Note the reaction from the Deadline reporter.  ★

Steve Wozniak: I’ve decided it’s time to have a little more fun on X this year! 😄⚡ I get to speak at some amazing events, meet fascinating people, hear great stories, and occasionally find myself in places I never expected to be. So I figured… why not share some of those moments here? He announced this on X, you will note, not “social media”.  ★

The gang from Craighill explains the origins and uses of three seemingly small design details that show up everywhere: pips, nubs, and the very useful union of pips and nubs. You’ve seen pips on dice and dominos, nubs are used for Braille text, and the pips/nubs combo is used for locks or stops that can be released under pressure. Craighill even has a pips + nubs category in their online store. (thx, rion) Tags: Craighill · design · video

Usenet-Rewind: search over 1 billion Usenet text posts from 1981 to the present.

Read to the end for a really good video about garlic bread

“Figures show Japan is now home to 107,677 centenarians, the highest number in the world, of whom 88% are women. The oldest woman is Kishimoto Fuyo, a 114-year-old from Kyoto City and the oldest man is Kato Hikaru, a 112-year-old from Kumamoto.”

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: Apple just seeded the first beta of iOS 27.2 to developers for testing. Yes, you read that correctly: iOS 27.2, not iOS 27.1. Why no iOS 27.1 beta? The answer likely relates to the iPhone Duo. This unusual version numbering is entirely about the Duo. The Duo is on its own branch of iOS — heretofore to keep details about its software secret / internal to Apple. When it launches October 23, Apple has already announced it will ship with iOS 27.1. Apple is thus using 27.2 a [more]

Scottish trials rider and mountain biker Danny MacAskill, who I first featured on the site more than 17 years ago, recently took his Santa Cruz eMTB north of the Arctic Circle to Narvik, Norway. He rode three different mountains and the result is this incredibly beautiful video, backed by a Max Cooper soundtrack. As one of the commenters notes, MacAskill makes a relatively heavy eMTB seem extraordinarily playful. As a mountain biker myself, some of that looks insanely fun but the narrow steep st [more]

Hidden in Pieces: Live at the Royal Albert Hall. A live album from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs? Hell yes yes yes! 13 songs are available now plus 9 more tracks when the full album drops in October.

Paul Ford: Aided by LLMs, people & companies are producing lots of software. But where are the AI-coded killer apps? “[AI is] very good at reproducing things that look and feel like what came before.”

The All of the Above Trail Fest is “deconstructing the very definition of a trail race, refiguring it into something more expansive and inclusive”. There are no gender divisions and winners are decided by who gets closest to their predicted finish time.

In my long take yesterday on Apple’s event last week, I wrote that when you pay $20 extra to get the $150 AirPods 5 With Wireless Charging Case, that the case is compatible for inductive charging with “MagSafe, Qi, or Apple Watch pucks”. But the compatibility section of Apple’s tech specs page for AirPods 5 doesn’t list MagSafe: Works with USB‑C connector, Apple Watch charger, or Qi‑certified chargers That’s because for Apple, true MagSafe compatibility means magnetic attachment. The AirPods 5 c [more]

One thing I didn’t get a chance to work into my post about the unexpected memory bomb triggered by my spice drawer was the tight, deep connection between smell and memory. I first learned about this relationship in college when I read A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman for a class. It’s still one of my favorite books. Here’s some of what she has to say about smell: Smell is the most direct of all our senses. When I hold a violet to my nose and inhale, odor molecules float back int [more]

We Must Create the Shit Machine. “I asked everyone I know at the BIG TECH HUMAN CENTIPEDE ROUNDTABLE, and we all agreed that UNCONTROLLABLE SHIT-RAIN IS USEFUL AND GREAT, and that EVERYONE WANTS IT.”

The frontier Anthropic & OpenAI models are only ~4 months ahead of open models — at 5x the price. “Most organizations should ideally be using open models as the default for the majority of their work, according to [a report] from Mozilla…”

Apple Security Research has released a concise, cogent paper describing how Apple Reference Image works, and why they made it. A terrific read. Here’s just one fascinating bit regarding privacy: Other industry solutions require a photographer or institution to vouch for an image using their own credentials. We are concerned this puts some photographers, such as those operating in conflict zones, in a difficult position; it should not be necessary to forgo anonymity in order to prove image authen [more]

Last year in Ireland, a bouncy castle infested with a “hypervirulent, multidrug-resistant pathogen” infected almost 50 children. Reality: always weirder than the weirdest sci-fi.

Naomi Klein: “Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. It turns you into a supremacist.” Klein’s new book, End Times Fascism, written with Astra Taylor, is out today.

Father Country I Do Love You sounds like a doozy of a new exhibition from photographer Taryn Simon. The project focuses on the life and work of an unnamed, retired FBI agent. From the NY Times: She Spent Years on a Giant Project About One Man. The Result Is Monumental. As it turned out, his work had touched many catastrophes of American life — the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800, for example, which the agent helped to inspect, or the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11, when the agent was in charge of s [more]

Joe Miller, reporting for the Financial Times (via Political Wire): Veteran socialist Bernie Sanders and rightwing activist Steve Bannon are joining forces to call for greater guardrails on AI, even as Donald Trump insists concerns about the technology are a hoax that will help China overtake the US. In a sign of how the outcry over AI safety is reshaping the US political landscape, speakers from the far right and left of the political spectrum will join an event billed as the “Pro-Human Assembl [more]

The Tube Computer was recently constructed from hundreds of 1950s vacuum tubes sourced from Eastern Europe. “The Tube Computer has a pleasant homely aroma from the hundreds of double triodes, all quietly burning off their dust.” It heats the room too.

The Keynote I loved the keynote’s “You want a great opening scene?” opening, which ran through a series of genre-inspired hook-you-from-the-first-shot pretend movie openings. Apple started with a title card that said “The following was shot on iPhone”, but the whole keynote — including the fun fake-movie openings — was shot on iPhone 18 Pros. Apple started shooting its keynote movies using iPhone Pros in October 2023, with the “Scary Fast” Mac event. That first one was shot on the then-just-rele [more]

For the 93rd year in a row or something like that I didn’t check the math, Tycho has released his sunrise set from Burning Man. I am not a Burning Man person but I always enjoy this set. See also a playlist of every 2026 Burning Man set on Soundcloud, currently 147 tracks and some 252 hours of music. (via @mikeakers.bsky.social) Tags: music · tycho

SSO is table stakes for enterprise deals, but building it into your app yourself means writing SAML controllers, parsing XML assertions, and handling IdP-specific quirks for each provider. Learn how SAML flows work, the tradeoffs between building or buying, and best practices for security, routing, and UX. Or skip the hassle and add SSO with WorkOS. Read the guide →  ★

Alex Gibney’s documentary reveals that Elon Musk has always been a racist, sexist fraud. “Musk’s ex-wife Justine, whom he married in 2000 and divorced in 2008, says the man the world began to see in 2020 was the one she’d always known.”

With a new installment every seven years since 1964, the Seven Up series has followed a group of 14 British schoolchildren from adolescence to adulthood. The final installment, 70 Up, directed by Asif Kapadia (Senna, Amy), is out this week.

Over the past six months (leisurely) and in the past three weeks (intensely), I’ve cleaned out and packed up my entire house where I’ve been living for the past 10 years. I went through every bit and bob of what I owned and either: gave it away (fiddle leaf fig, grill, chairs, stuffed animals,1 blender, rugs) sold it (car, coffee table, lamp, iPad) put it into storage (art, mementos, chairs) took it with me (very little, mostly clothes & computing things) Parting with my possessions was surprisi [more]

A declaration signed by 25 Fields medalists: “The goals of the AI companies and the goals of the mathematical community are severely misaligned.”

The leaders of AI labs agree that the United States to act, and soon. But the president and the speaker of the House aren't interested

From a curator at the Getty, ratings of every “framed picture” emoji. “A total rejection of nature and reality. Why is the horizon rounded? Has this artist seen planet earth before?”

Armin Briegel at Scripting OS X has compiled links for all the release notes for all of today’s OS updates (features, developer, security). In addition to the 27.0 updates, Apple also released 26.7 updates and MacOS 15.8 Sequoia. Big day.  ★

The 2026 winners of the Ig Nobel Prize include papers on “a more precise definition of kissing”, “An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing”, and the discovery “that milk proteins from cockroaches pack 3X as much energy as milk proteins from cows”.

Read to the end for Braden’s Infinite Tour Of Italy

Project Hail Mary is already on my list of movies that I can just throw on in the backround while I do a bit of work or puttering around. (Not sure whether that’s an endorsement or not…I like the movie!) Anyhoo, if you get tired of the movie, you can watch Rocky sleep for 2+ hours with the PHM soundtrack playing in the background. Tags: movies · music · Project Hail Mary · video

Now open for business in Nyack, NY: Busman’s Holiday, a stationary store run by (former?) graphic designer Sam Potts, who announced the shop back in March in a KDO open thread. Lots of nice touches here, including a used pencil exchanger.

Ok wait, the NES Tetris world record is now 40.26 million??! It took 2 hours and 20 minutes and the previous record was 29 million. At level 255, you hit “rebirth” and the pieces slow down to level 0 speeds again. Totally bonkers.

From Deep Down History, an entertaining hour-long explainer video on the Bayeux Tapestry. This video tells the Tapestry’s story in full, using Charles Stothard’s early colour reproduction, presented here as a seamless scroll for the first time. We follow Harold Godwinson’s fateful journey from Edward the Confessor’s court to Normandy, his later seizure of the Crown, and William the Conqueror’s invasion. Beyond its political messaging, the Tapestry is also bursting with medieval history, includin [more]

I’ve linked to Summoning Salt’s videos before (they make some of the best video game explainer videos out there — hell, some of the best YT videos period) and here’s their newest one: The Tournament That Changed Tetris Forever.

Miles Abbott: Open x.com links in a popup so you can read the one post and leave. Port of the Litterbox Safari extension. Litterbox is a cleverer name, but Dumpster Fire is funnier.  ★

In 1992, Canada declared a moratorium on Northern cod fishing due to overfishing. It was devastating for Newfoundlanders. This year, for the first time since then, the govt has “upgraded the cod stock’s status from ‘critical’ to ‘healthy’”.

From NTS, this is a two-hour mix of jazz music featured in the books of Haruki Murakami. ‘Somewhere along the line Coltrane’s soprano sax runs out of steam. Now it’s McCoy Tyner’s piano solo I hear, the left hand carving out a repetitious rhythm and the right layering on thick, forbidding chords. Like some mythic scene, the music portrays somebody’s — a nameless, faceless somebody’s — dim past, all the details laid out as clearly as entrails being dragged out of the darkness. Or at least that’s [more]

XCancel: Unfortunately, due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings, we are required to suspend this service again until further notice. We can’t share more details. Not surprised, and not sure what to make of the “can’t share more details” part. Again, if you want to avoid visiting X but want to see the content posted there linked from other sites (and, let’s admit it at this point: there’s not just a lot posted on X, it is outright resurgent in popularity), install a browser exte [more]

We Are Living in the Fantasy World of 13-Year-Old Boys. Today’s tech titans took all the wrong lessons from the science fiction of their youths and now they’re each building their version of the Torment Nexus.

The Way We Live Now: 11-11-01; Lost and Found, a piece written by Colson Whitehead just a month after 9/11. “The New York City you live in is not my New York City; how could it be? This place multiplies when you’re not looking.”

My thanks to Glyphs for sponsoring this last week at DF. Glyphs 4 is a truly native Mac app for creating fonts, lettering, icons, and pictograms. Glyphs lets you draw with flexible strokes and efficiently reuse shapes across huge sets of glyphs, and explore variable vector designs with complex higher-order interpolation. Glyphs lets you build and manage massive font family and icon sets with ease, and it exports all modern font formats, as well as SVG, PNG, and PDF. Earlier this year Glyph co-cr [more]

John Brayton: Unread 5.0 is available now from the App Store. This update adds these improvements and more: Improvements around hero images, article list thumbnails, and widget thumbnails Syncing with FreshRSS and Miniflux The ability to quickly mark old articles read I’m a NetNewsWire man personally, but I’ve long admired Unread as a different, very good take on a feed reader. Just a gorgeous app. One of the very best things about RSS is that feed readers take such different shapes and approach [more]

Tim VanBenschoten: Post Peek is an independent, open-source project inspired by Litterbox, the Safari extension by Zhenyi Tan (And a Dinosaur).  ★

Paul Ford, writing for The New York Times (gift link): For a while, I must admit, it looked as if software developer roles like mine were done for. How could we fight against tireless robots? But our industry is slowly realizing that making truly cutting-edge software still requires humans to think and work together, to maximize their skill sets and to practice their respective crafts. A.I. can write very good software, but it also makes it easy to do someone else’s job badly, which is part of w [more]

My old friend Jim Ray now runs developer relations at Bluesky, and part of that gig is hosting a podcast, Off Protocol (“a show about building a better Internet”). I was delighted to appear as his latest guest. I generally don’t like talking about my career, but I did enjoy talking about it with Jim. He has that effect on people.  ★

T-Mobile, in their iPhone 18 Pro / iPhone Duo press release: Plus, T‑Mobile is one of the first to support Apple’s new iPhone Handoff feature, where customers with two compatible iPhone models can use their T‑Mobile number across both devices and choose which phone is active at any given time. The secondary iPhone works seamlessly, including essential T‑Mobile services like calls, texts, data, mobile hotspot, Scam Shield and T-Satellite on eligible plans, allowing customers to get the most from [more]

Tristan Buckmaster, professor of mathematics at NYU, in his own statement, regarding his and Levent Alpöge’s interactions with employees at OpenAI regarding this week’s math-proof controversy: I asked when the first prompt had been sent by them. This question was not answered directly by OpenAI for some time. Eventually it was agreed that it had been sent in the past few days, after information about our work had reached OpenAI. I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, ou [more]

I have been busy with new-iPhone-week stuff, so I haven’t been able to follow either of these stories closely, but Marcus summarizes them both well. First: the drama regarding OpenAI claiming a solution to the Navier–Stokes math problem. In short, OpenAI continues to prove itself to be a company full of cheaters. In this case, they seemingly were willing to tank the company’s reputation to first claim the solution to one of mathematics’ top unsolved problems. Apparently they spent $23 million in [more]

David Smith, developer of the widely-used Widgetsmith, on Mastodon: The eve of iPhone 18 Pro pre-orders seems a good time to look back at the iPhone 17 family’s adoption. Here’s the 17 family data as a percentage of overall usage for Widgetsmith. Generally they followed the usual adoption pattern, and overall did very well ending at around 20% of total usage. With the exception of the Air really struggling to find market share. For comparison the 16 Plus ended its first year at around 1.4% (vs t [more]

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac: Many have complained that Apple design has been sapped of some of its trademark whimsy in recent years. Well, here’s the latest example of how the tides seem to be changing. Buried in the Settings app on iOS 27, Apple has hidden an easter egg that hails back from classic Mac OS; Clarus the Dogcow. Here’s how to trigger it … Very fun. Alas, this easter egg isn’t present in MacOS 27, only iOS 27. But the MacOS 27 version of the Liquid Glass settings panel does have a drawin [more]

XCancel: Following the legal progress as announced in the Nitter GitHub project. The XCancel service is resumed. More details will be shared on the Nitter GitHub project page. Glad to hear it and I wish them well, but I think Zhenyi Tan’s Litterbox Safari extension is a much better solution for viewing tweets on X without going to X.  ★

Neat little prototype demo of a Bluesky reader that uses the UI of the long-retired Paper app. I loved the design of Paper.

Juli Clover, MacRumors: It’s likely the iPhone Duo doesn’t support the Apple Pencil Pro because there’s no magnetic surface for charging the pencil. The Apple Pencil Pro charges magnetically when connected to a compatible iPad, while the Apple Pencil with USB-C charges with a USB-C port hidden behind a sliding cap. Charging is the least of the problems. Because the Duo doesn’t have the magnetic attachment for Pencil Pro, there’s no way to even pair a Pencil Pro. The easiest way to think about it [more]

A late 90s guide to Super Metroid was written in monospaced type, fully justified with no double spaces or hyphens. “I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up on the right hand side.”

Back when I went on sabbatical in 2022, I told the story of the fiddle leaf fig tree I bought shortly after my ex-wife and I separated and I’d moved into my own apartment. I’d recently moved into my own apartment after separating from my wife and figured a large plant in my new place would add some liveliness to a new beginning that was feeling overwhelming, lonely, and sad. For the first couple of months, I didn’t know if my tree and I were going to make it. I’d never really had a plant before [more]

“In almost every [US] county, extreme heat is at least as bad as it was 30 years ago. In most counties, it’s much worse.” It’s Not Just You. America Has Gotten Much Hotter. (Not a fan of articles like this being in the “opinion” section…)

VC Isn’t VC Anymore — Understanding the Rise of Cancer Capital. “We must understand that it is no longer a financial machine that is used to fund startups, but a political and social machine focused on dismantling democracy and civil society.”

At the beginning of a clip from this podcast episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend with Matt Groening, Conan talks about one of his favorite things they did on The Simpsons: It’s a phenomenon that the Simpsons did so beautifully, which is — and we did this with Homer a lot — but Homer is not the smartest guy in the world, but if it’s funny for him to have a certain knowledge of something or turn a phrase, suddenly he has it. And one of my favorites of that is he’s sitting around the table and [more]

Once a fringe obsession of Bay Area rationalists, existential risk is suddenly all anyone is talking about

“Gimme is a dazzling ever-growing type family of multi-chromatic and variable display typefaces…” This is bonkers…letters made from Battleship pieces, Connect Four boards, playing cards, wooden railroad tracks, etc.

Bring Blockbuster Video back to your town/city by setting up a little free library of VHS tapes & DVDs. “Take a movie, leave a movie.” Love this.

Gloria Steinem’s final essay, posthumously published by the New Yorker. “When you’re lucky enough to have lived a long life, as I have done, your role as an older person is to remind us how far we have come.”

TIL that my iPhone has a tiny bit of water in it (for cooling).

9to5 Mac has the iOS 27 release notes too. I haven’t spent much time using Golden Gate, but I’ve been using iOS 27 full-time ever since WWDC. It’s in excellent shape for a .0 release. Now I need to think about how long I want to still hang onto MacOS 15 Sequoia on my main Mac. I’ll probably skip 27.0 and wait for 27.1, but maybe I’ll bite the bullet and upgrade when a 27.0.1 update comes out.  ★

12 months later, MAGA has never felt older and weaker and more out of touch

One thing I learned from this video is that I’m way, way too careful when playing with the hands-on area demo units. I handle them like museum pieces; Stern treats them like hot dog buns.  ★

Read to the end for one more good Dolly Parton post

Last year, an unplanned personal hiatus coincided with the time when I should have been reviewing the then-new iPhones 17 and iPhone Air. In my brief note explaining my absence, I wrote: I look forward to getting back to writing very soon. I can feel it: I will be back soon. I’m itching to go. I mean, jiminy, it’s new iPhones week. But it’ll be a few more days before I get those reviews out. 354 days is arguably more than a few, but given that I missed the window for reviewing them when they wer [more]

Frontier labs make for lousy messengers on AI safety — but it would be foolish to ignore them

There are good Elle Cordova videos, and there are great ones. (Last mentioned here for her “Fonts Hanging Out” trilogy.)  ★

I have mentioned and recommended Shirt Pocket’s Mac backup app SuperDuper quite a few times over the years, and for good reason: it performs very important functions very well. Version 4, which shipped just over a month ago, is an extraordinary update to an extraordinary app. Visually, the interface is all new. That took some getting used to, but not much. It didn’t take long for me to see how the new UI is better in every way. The style of presentation is new and modern, but the core idea remai [more]

Glyphs 4 is here: a Mac-native app for creating fonts, lettering, icons, and pictograms. Draw with flexible strokes and efficiently reuse shapes across huge glyph sets, explore variable vector designs with complex higher-order interpolation. Build and manage massive font families and icon sets with ease, export all modern font formats, SVG, PNG and PDF. Hundreds of refinements and native Tahoe support make designing, testing and shipping your vectors smoother than ever. Glyphs 4: Create. Love th [more]

Trackables: There are plenty of health tracking apps. Surprisingly, nearly all of them are bloated, subscription-gated, or blatantly harvesting our data; often all three. We wanted something simpler, less annoying and more fun, that’s where it started. Trackables turns the data your Apple Watch already collects — activity, sleep, steps, heart rate — into a clear, friendly, transparent interface. Totally free of charge, totally private, made by a small team of ex-Apple folks. (They might add a pa [more]

The Onion: The Onion: How did you get into the entertainment industry? Ellison: I remember going to the movies as a kid, and when the houselights went down and that hush fell over the crowd, I’d think to myself: I’d like to build a massive propaganda apparatus one day.  ★

Crackerjack new Mac app for creating and editing custom SF Symbols, from developer Amy Worrall: McKinley is an all-in-one studio for drawing and annotating SF Symbols. It bundles vector tools with knowledge of the SF Symbols structure, so you can edit one set of objects across multiple weights, sizes and colours. Import SVG or start from scratch, live preview your work using Apple’s own renderer, and export directly to Xcode, so you never need touch the SF Symbols app again! McKinley is Mac-asse [more]

Matt Birchler: So, yeah, I do think that, especially this year, unit sales will far lag behind the 18 Pro models, the normal iPhone 18, and probably the Air 2 and 18e. I think they will lag next year as well for similar reasons. I don’t know if this will ever become the most popular iPhone, but I do not think it will fail, and I think it will sell more units every year for its first few years on the market (especially if they can get the price down over that time as well). My evidence for this i [more]

Last week both Google and Apple updated their maps to accommodate Trump changing the United States Geological Survey’s recognized name for Lake Ontario to “Lake America”. Just as with Trump’s fiat renaming of the Gulf of Mexico back in the first days of his 2.0 administration, Google and Apple are showing the same names to the same people, by region. Here are the names you now see for Lake Ontario, based on what region your device is set to: United States: “Lake America” Canada: “Lake Ontario” E [more]

Plus, good reads you might have missed in August 2026

Zac Hall, writing for 9to5Mac on August 19: The new Meta AI desktop app is version 1.0 beta at launch and weighs just 16MB once installed. Based on initial inspection, it runs natively on Apple silicon Macs with macOS 15 or later, using an AppKit and SwiftUI shell with WebKit for richer chat content. In other words, this is not an Electron app or a repackaged iPad release. It includes Mac-specific hooks, making the desktop experience more robust than the Meta AI mobile app. Quick Invoke uses Opt [more]

My thanks to WorkOS for once again sponsoring Daring Fireball. Give an agent an access token and it spreads: into the context window, into tool call logs, into notes it keeps between steps. Each copy works from anywhere, long after the fact. Relay keeps the credential at WorkOS. Your agent names the user, WorkOS attaches that token, refreshes it, and releases it only to allowlisted hosts. A hijacked agent session is a live process you can kill. Learn how it works at WorkOS’s blog.  ★

Read to the end for all the bass

A third loss in antitrust court leads to ... very little. PLUS: GPT-6 Astra and 'the AGI era'

Read to the end for a good RFK roundup

The AI industry is begging for a slowdown. Maybe we should listen?

read to the end for New York Sora

Read to the end for a very good dog video

Clara Shih on how AI will soon displace the first few rungs on the career ladder — and why she left Big Tech to do something about it

Will significant changes to Facebook and Instagram be enough to beat back a global wave of bans?

Read to the end for Dolly Parton’s “Stairway To Heaven”

Read to the end for a pretty good TikTok

Read to the end for the Tumblrpillar

Every CEO Dan Shipper on doubling headcount while automating everything, building an agent out of 30,000 copyedits, and the “dirty secret” of writing with AI

And everything else I learned about productivity this year

Read to the end for the Discord barreled shotgun

Jean-Denis Greze on AI assistants, building a better corporate workspace, and avoiding "egg on face"

We were promised a transport revolution. Instead we got cars tracking us and serving us ads.

Read to the end for a good flight tracker

What Mark Zuckerberg misunderstands about powerful AI

Read to the end for 'Hereditary' The Musical

His criticisms are responding to industry hype, not the real harms of generative AI

Read to the end for a good cover

Amjad Masad on the "self-driving company," why a CEO is a glorified router, and what's left for humans when agents do the work

Six months after trying to automate myself, I gave Claude Fable 5 a bigger job: replacing Casey

Read to the end for someone who would appreciate some empathy right now

Plus, a recap of tech stories you missed in July 2026

Some platforms are turning against AI-generated content. Others are embracing it. What gives?

Read to the end for a good Instagram Reel

Read to the end for a good sociopolitical breakdown of various backyard animals

Read to the end for a good comic

Why does the media keep debasing itself for a man who despises them?

The imperial project of Silicon Valley and the US government is out in the open. Countries need to reclaim their sovereignty.

16 books for you to consider bringing on your vacation

How apps like Uber make taxis seem unappealing

Preorder my new book about the growing cost of data centers

Plus, a recap of top stories you missed in June 2026

The many problems with Mark Carney’s AI strategy for Canadians

Experiments with an imperfect policy are delivering more thoughtful social media rules

Is it time to pull back for the endless stream of content?

A trip to Zambia (temporarily) gone awry

In its bid to push AI, it’s destroying its products and trying to kill the web too

And you're getting a free month!

PLUS: A rich and evocative Iraq War (?) rom-com

PLUS: The "forklift model" of A.I. education

Roundup 05/03/2026

A Read Max re-run

Roundup 04/27/2026

With Quinn Slobodian, Ben Tarnoff, and John Ganz

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 […]

Roundup 04/20/2026

PLUS: Has Forum Brain crossed the gender divide?

Roundup 04/14/2026

Video of our conversation from Night of IDeas

Roundup 04/06/2026

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

Roundup 03/29/2026

A Read Max re-run

Roundup 03/23/2026

A recording of our livestream for paying subscribers

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

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Roundup 03/09/2025

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 […]

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, […]

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, […]

This is a video of Nirvana playing Smells Like Teen Spirit in a small club just two days after Nevermind came out in 1991. There’s a freight train bearing down on those boys and they don’t even know it. (via digg) See also The Notorious B.I.G. freestyling on a Brooklyn corner at 17 and LL Cool J plays to a mostly empty gymnasium in Maine…he was also just 17. Update: And here’s 40+ minutes from the same show at which they played Drain You, Polly, and Breed. (via @fimoculous) [This i [more]

E. Berry Wall was a dude. But not just any dude. In 1888, he was declared “King of the Dudes” in a competition against another gentleman, one Robert Hilliard. Wall became famous after meeting Blakely Hall, a reporter hungry for good copy. Thereafter, every week or so, Hall’s articles publicizing Wall’s adventures in clothing appeared in newspapers across the country. Then one of Hall’s competitors set up a rival, actor Robert “Bob” Hilliard, another flashy dresser. Thus began the Battle of the D [more]