Director Rian Johnson (Knives Out, Poker Face) wrote the review of the Thursday crossword puzzle for the NY Times today. “I love a good Thursday. The baffling special graphics, the wait-that-can’t-be-right puzzlement and that glorious ah-ha moment…”

A protest at OpenAI headquarters suggests the backlash to military AI is growing — even if its politics are still half-formed. PLUS: The Pentagon declares Anthropic a supply chain risk

Earth’s gravity is lumpy. “The gravity in East Antarctica is measurably weaker than anywhere else on the planet.”

Oh wow, I love these photographs of “big tusker” elephants by Johan Siggesson. I didn’t even know big tuskers were a thing — and they may not be for much longer: The term “Big Tusker” refers to an elephant with tusks so large they scrape the floor. Unfortunately, the opportunities for witnessing a big tusker in its natural habitat are slim. As of today, there are approximately 25 individuals left in the world, most of which reside in the Tsavo Conservation Area. It is vital that we make every [more]

This is kind of amazing: World Monitor is a real-time global intelligence dashboard. Includes military activity, climate anomalies, live webcam feeds in warzones, internet outages, active fires, and even the Pentagon Pizza Index.

In August 2007, Apple held a Mac event in the Infinite Loop Town Hall auditorium. New iMacs, iLife ’08 (major updates to iPhoto and iMovie), and iWork ’08 (including the debut of Numbers 1.0). Back then, believe it or not, at the end of these Town Hall events, Apple executives would sit on stools and take questions from the media. For this one, Steve Jobs was flanked by Tim Cook and Phil Schiller. Molly Wood, then at CNet, asked, “And so, I guess once and for all, is it your goal to overtake the [more]

Yes, let’s retire the restaurant monologue. “The urge to direct diners through every bite of a meal runs counter to what I love about dining out, one of just a few cornerstones of American life that have not yet been optimized into oblivion.”

From ProPublica, a database of financial disclosures from the Trump regime’s political appointees. “Use this database to explore potential conflicts of interest for President Donald Trump and his team.”

After posting the video on the history of HyperCard the other day, I went down a bit of a HyperCard rabbit hole on the Internet Archive. There are a ton of HyperCard programs, manual & packaging scans, and other resources available on IA; among them: The Manhole, from the developers of Myst A bird identification quiz The 1991 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference Presentation (“Contains session info, presentations, and attendee list”) The “expanded book” version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the G [more]

Here's who's talking about us!

Web game: list as many animals as you can in 1 minute (but you get more time with correct guesses).

In 2017, city planner Jeff Speck gave a talk on the four ways to make a city more walkable: In the typical American city, in which most people own cars and the temptation is to drive them all the time, if you’re going to get them to walk, then you have to offer a walk that’s as good as a drive or better. What does that mean? It means you need to offer four things simultaneously: there needs to be a proper reason to walk, the walk has to be safe and feel safe, the walk has to be comfortable, and [more]

Legendary computer scientist Donald Knuth: “Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6.”

“The entire Sun oscillates in a globally coherent way, and the oscillations are formed by sound waves trapped inside the Sun that make it resonate just like a musical instrument.”

Greetings from Read Max HQ!

From late January, a 40-minute talk by Rick Steves on “how lessons learned on the road can help Americans better understand and meet the challenges facing Democracy in the USA.”

$599. Not a piece of junk. That’s not a marketing slogan from Apple for the new MacBook Neo. But it could be. And it is the underlying message of the product. For a few years now, Apple has quietly dabbled with the sub-$1,000 laptop market, by selling the base configuration of the M1 MacBook Air — a machine that debuted in November 2020 — at retailers like Walmart for under $700. But dabbling is the right word. Apple has never ventured under the magic $999 price point for a MacBook available in [more]

Timothy Snyder on strongmen. “Once you accept that Trump is strong, you are accepting that you are weaker than Trump. And once you accept the strongman form of politics, you no longer have recourse to laws, or norms, or even basic ideas of decency.”

Ok, you know this is going to be a good one: De La Soul plays a Tiny Desk Concert. The humor of De La Soul has always been one of its calling cards. When DJ Maseo tells the Tiny Desk crowd, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a new group called De La Soul,” he means it as a joke. But, in so many ways, one of the most influential groups in hip-hop is new: the duties have been reassessed, the focus has shifted and the newness of The Plugs is laid plain here at the Tiny Desk. Here’s the setlist: YUHDON [more]

A new book by Rebecca Solnit came out yesterday; it’s called The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change (Amazon). The synopsis: Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century. In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. Despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock [more]

Read to the end for the Jigsaw agnostic

TIL about babysitting co-ops. “The premise is simple: Families in the co-op provide each other with free childcare. A point system…ensures that everyone contributes their fair share. Every half an hour is worth one point…”

Not sure if this page was there yesterday, but the main “Displays” page at Apple’s website is a spec-by-spec comparison between the regular and XDR models. Nice.  ★

Hello, good afternoon! As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I have a bunch of new stuff for KDO in the pipeline. I’ve been focused on backend infrastructure recently to make my life (hopefully) easier and have gotten that to a place of “useful enough to test out to find all the bugs & irritations”. So onto some things that you folks can actually use. When I launched the KDO Rolodex last July, it was a simple list of five recommended sites on the front page of the site. You could refresh to see more s [more]

Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Acquires Original Disney Adult. “There wouldn’t be a Disney as we know it without this guy, a grown man who has watched Tinker Bell And The Great Fairy Rescue more than 90 times.”

Juli Clover, at MacRumors, notes that neither the new Studio Display nor the Studio Display XDR are compatible with Intel-based Macs. (I’m curious why.) Also, in a separate report, she notes that Macs with any M1 chip, or the base M2 or M3, are only able to drive the Studio Display XDR at 60 Hz. You need a Pro or better M2/M3, or any M4 or M5 chip, to drive it at 120 Hz.  ★

TIL about burping your house, aka lüften (in Germany), aka opening up the windows in your house daily to air it out, even in winter.

The Library of Congress houses an online collection of 48 color photographs of Rome taken in the 1890s. The prints were created using the photochrom process: The prints look deceptively like color photographs. But when viewed with a magnifying glass the small dots that comprise the ink-based photomechanical image are visible. The photomechanical process permitted mass production of the vivid color prints. Each color in the final print required a separate asphalt-coated lithographic stone, usuall [more]

Steve Jobs famously said that computers are a bicycle for the mind. What does that make LLMs? An e-bike for the mind? A car for the mind? A jet plane for the mind?

Jason Snell, Six Colors: Here’s the backstory: With every new generation of Apple’s Mac-series processors, I’ve gotten the impression from Apple execs that they’ve been a little frustrated with the perception that their “lesser” efficiency cores were weak sauce. I’ve lost count of the number of briefings and conversations I’ve had where they’ve had to go out of their way to point out that, actually, the lesser cores on an M-series chip are quite fast on their own, in addition to being very good [more]

Shunned by the government, and newly appealing to consumers, the company is at a crossroads

LLMs are getting pretty good at unmasking pseudonymous users — their success rate is “far greater” than humans alone can manage.

Apple Newsroom: Apple today announced a new family of displays engineered to pair beautifully with Mac and meet the needs of everyone, from everyday users to the world’s top pros. The new Studio Display features a 12MP Center Stage camera, now with improved image quality and support for Desk View; a studio-quality three-microphone array; and an immersive six-speaker sound system with Spatial Audio. It also now includes powerful Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, providing more downstream connectivity f [more]

“Imagine what it was like for women in colonial North America. Life was different depending on where you lived, your background, and how much money you had.”

Apple Newsroom: MacBook Air now comes standard with double the starting storage at 512GB with faster SSD technology, and is configurable up to 4TB, so customers can keep their most important work on hand. Apple’s N1 wireless chip delivers Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 for seamless connectivity on the go. MacBook Air features a beautifully thin, light, and durable aluminum design, stunning Liquid Retina display, 12MP Center Stage camera, up to 18 hours of battery life, an immersive sound system with Sp [more]

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: A regulatory document for a “MacBook Neo” (Model A3404) has appeared on Apple’s website. Unfortunately, there are no further details or images available yet. While the PDF file does not contain the “MacBook Neo” name, it briefly appeared in a link on Apple’s regulatory website for EU compliance purposes. My money was on just plain “MacBook”, but I like “MacBook Neo”.  ★

This video traces the history of Apple’s HyperCard from Vannevar Bush’s idea of the Memex to the Mother of All Demos to the Xerox PARC Alto to Bill Atkinson, the inventor of HyperCard, who said: HyperCard is a software erector set. It lets people put things together without having to know how to solder. There’s a ton of information about HyperCard at hypercard.org, including this HyperCard simulator that runs in your browser. Tags: Apple · Bill Atkinson · computing · Hy [more]

Apple Newsroom: Apple today announced the latest 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro with the all-new M5 Pro and M5 Max, bringing game-changing performance and AI capabilities to the world’s best pro laptop. With M5 Pro and M5 Max, MacBook Pro features a new CPU with the world’s fastest CPU core, a next-generation GPU with a Neural Accelerator in each core, and higher unified memory bandwidth, altogether delivering up to 4× AI performance compared to the previous generation, and up to 8× AI performance [more]

Does Your Country Need Regime Change? A Quiz. “Is your country a notorious bad actor in the Middle East? Has your leader deployed the country’s military domestically against civilians who were protesting peacefully?”

As part of his show called Hark Back to Ukiyo-e: Tracing Superflat to Japonisme’s Genesis, currently on display in LA, Takashi Murakami painted his own version of Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son. The painting is paired with Murakami’s copies of woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) that influenced the work of Monet and other abstract & impressionist artists. Here Murakami pairs a copy of Monet’s portrait with twelve enlarged versions of ukiyo-e prints by Kikukawa Eizan and hi [more]

Remember the “scroll lock” key on your keyboard? What the heck was it for? And why is the same scrolling mechanic showing up in streaming service interfaces?

Apple Newsroom: Apple today announced M5 Pro and M5 Max, the world’s most advanced chips for pro laptops, powering the new MacBook Pro. The chips are built using a new Apple-designed Fusion Architecture. This innovative design combines two dies into a single system on a chip (SoC), which includes a powerful CPU, scalable GPU, Media Engine, unified memory controller, Neural Engine, and Thunderbolt 5 capabilities. M5 Pro and M5 Max feature a new 18-core CPU architecture. It includes six of the hig [more]

A painting from 1633 called Vision of Zacharias in the Temple has been newly identified by Rijksmuseum researchers as an authentic Rembrandt van Rijn. It had been decades since the painting was examined — art historians have access to all kinds of new techniques and information about Rembrandt’s methods and materials. Vision of Zacharias in the Temple was shown at the major Rembrandt exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1898. In 1960, however, it was excluded from Rembrandt’s oeuvre. [more]

Per Betteridge’s law of headlines and also the map above, my answer is clearly no. You can try it yourself here…you draw them one at a time and it adds them to the map automagically. I’m going to blame my trackpad use a little, but I’m not sure I would have done much better had I drawn with a pencil and looked a map beforehand. Update: Your periodic reminder that Senator Al Franken can draw all 50 US states from memory with astonishing accuracy. (thx, eric) [This is a vintage post [more]

Recent advances in science have revolutionized our understanding of the Maya, e.g. there’s evidence that “more people lived in the classic-era Maya lowlands than on the Italian peninsula during the peak of the Roman empire…”

“Boredom is the price we pay for a life rich with meaning. Recognizing this makes the feeling more endurable.”

Sam Altman’s deal with the Pentagon seems too good to be true. What happens when the public realizes that?

npx workos launches an AI agent, powered by Claude, that reads your project, detects your framework, and writes a complete auth integration directly into your existing codebase. It’s not a template generator. It reads your code, understands your stack, and writes an integration that fits. The WorkOS agent then typechecks and builds, feeding any errors back to itself to fix. See how it works →  ★

Back in December I linked to a sort-of stunt project from Tyler Hall called Alan.app — a simple Mac utility that draws a bold rectangle around the current active window. Alan.app lets you set the thickness and color of the frame. I used it for an hour or so before calling it quits. It really does solve the severe (and worsening) problem of being able to instantly identify the active window in recent versions of MacOS, but the crudeness of Alan.app’s implementation makes it one of those cases whe [more]

Marcin Wichary, writing at Unsung (which is just an incredibly good and fun weblog): Half of my education in URLs as user interface came from Flickr in the late 2000s. Its URLs looked like this: flickr.com/photos/mwichary/favorites flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904 flickr.com/photos/mwichary/54896695834 flickr.com/photos/mwichary/54896695834/in/set-72177720330077904 This was incredible and a breath of fresh air. No redundant www. in front or awkwa [more]

When lit up at night, this badminton academy in Bhubaneswar, India looks like a shuttlecock.

“Supercharged” solar activity and the equinox effect, which “doubles the chance of auroral activity around the spring and fall equinoxes”, could make March 2026 the best month for the northern lights until the mid-2030s.

During the most recent episode of The Talk Show, Jason Snell brought up a weird issue that I started running into last year. On my Mac, sometimes I’d drag an image out of a web page in Safari, and I’d get an image in WebP format. Sometimes I wouldn’t care. But usually when I download an image like that, it’s because I want to publish (or merely host my own copy of) that image on Daring Fireball. And I don’t publish WebP images — I prefer PNG and JPEG for compatibility. What made it weird is when [more]

Jesper, writing at Take: My hope is that Macintosh is not just one of these empires that was at the height of its power and then disintegrated because of warring factions, satiated and uncurious rulers, and droughts for which no one was prepared, ruining crops no one realized were essential for survival. My hope is that there remains a primordial spark, a glimpse of genius, to rediscover, to reconnect to — to serve not annual trends or constant phonification, but the needs of the user to use the [more]

Last week, Nine Inch Nails released an album of remixes and unreleased session music from their Tron: Ares score called Tron Ares: Divergence. I’m listening to it now; pretty good so far. Tags: movies · music · Nine Inch Nails · Tron · video

Julien Khaleghy, CEO of SerpApi: Google thinks it owns the internet. That’s the subtext of its lawsuit against SerpApi, the quiet part that it’s suddenly decided to shout out loud. The problem is, no one owns the internet. And the law makes that clear. In January, we promised that we would fight this lawsuit to protect our business model and the researchers and innovators who depend on our technology. Today, Friday, February 20, 2026, we’re following through with a motion to dismiss Google’s com [more]

“A long dive into the features that make my ideal music app, and why nothing currently fulfills the brief.”

Read to the end for the wife emailer

This is the most 2026 thing I’ve ever heard: Sigmund Freud’s great-granddaughter Bella Freud has a video podcast on YouTube where she interviews people (Cate Blanchette, Lorde, Graydon Carter) while they lie on a psychiatrist’s couch.

Ben Thompson, writing at Stratechery: In fact, Amodei already answered the question: if nuclear weapons were developed by a private company, and that private company sought to dictate terms to the U.S. military, the U.S. would absolutely be incentivized to destroy that company. The reason goes back to the question of international law, North Korea, and the rest: International law is ultimately a function of power; might makes right. There are some categories of capabilities — like nuclear weapon [more]

A Boston man discovered a document passed down through his family: his ancestor’s freedom papers. “When he touched that paper he was touching the same place his relative touched in 1834.”

Amrith Ramkumar, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Trump’s announcement came shortly before the Pentagon’s Friday afternoon deadline for Anthropic to agree to let the military use its models in all lawful-use cases, a concession the company had refused to make. “We cannot in good conscience accede to their request,” Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said on Thursday. The company’s red lines had been domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, areas the Pentagon said [more]

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: A seasonal color refresh arrived today for a variety of Apple accessories, including iPhone cases, Apple Watch bands, and the Crossbody Strap. All of the accessories in the latest colors are available to order on Apple.com starting today.  ★

Apple Newsroom: Apple today announced the new iPad Air featuring M4 and more memory, giving users a big jump in performance at the same starting price. With a faster CPU and GPU, iPad Air boosts tasks like editing and gaming, and is a powerful device for AI with a faster Neural Engine, higher memory bandwidth, and 50 percent more unified system memory than the previous generation. With M4, iPad Air is up to 30 percent faster than iPad Air with M3, and up to 2.3× faster than iPad Air with M1. The [more]

Lumière, Le Cinema! is a new documentary film by Thierry Frémaux about Auguste & Louis Lumière and the early days of motion pictures — and includes 100+ newly restored films. It’s playing at MoMA at the end of this month; here’s their description: Witness the birth of cinema with Thierry Frémaux’s Lumière, Le Cinéma! (2025), about the pioneering achievements of the French entrepreneurs Auguste and Louis Lumière in the late 19th century. Journey back to the 1890s, when the Lumière Company, with t [more]

Roundup 03/02/2026

Astrophysicist Cosimo Bambi proposes sending a tiny spacecraft to study nearby black holes. “Earth-based lasers would blast the [light] sail with photons, accelerating the craft to a third of the speed of light.”

“Novartis has settled a lawsuit by the estate of Henrietta Lacks that alleged the [company] unjustly profited off her cells, which were taken…without her knowledge in 1951 and reproduced in labs to enable major medical advancements…”

Apple Newsroom: Apple today announced iPhone 17e, a powerful and more affordable addition to the iPhone 17 lineup. At the heart of iPhone 17e is the latest-generation A19, which delivers exceptional performance for everything users do. iPhone 17e also features C1X, the latest-generation cellular modem designed by Apple, which is up to 2× faster than C1 in iPhone 16e. The 48MP Fusion camera captures stunning photos, including next-generation portraits, and 4K Dolby Vision video. It also enables a [more]

There are many possible and plausible answers to this simple question. Timothy Snyder offers a useful perspective in helping answer it: How do [we] understand the war with Iran? We must get away from the propaganda and ask why this might be happening, in light of the facts that we do know. These facts suggest two interpretive frameworks: a foreign war as a mechanism to destroy democracy at home; and a foreign war as an element of personal corruption by the president of the United States. From th [more]

My thanks to Sentry for sponsoring last week at DF. Sentry is running a hands-on workshop: “Crash Reporting, Tracing, and Logs for iOS in Sentry”. You can watch it on demand. You’ll learn how to connect the dots between slowdowns, crashes, and the user experience in your iOS app. It’ll show you how to: Set up Sentry to surface high-priority mobile issues without alert fatigue. Use Logs and Breadcrumbs to reconstruct what happened with a crash. Find what’s behind a performance bottleneck using Tr [more]

Jason Snell returns to the show to discuss the 2025 Six Colors Apple Report Card, MacOS 26 Tahoe, Apple Creator Studio, along with what we expect/hope for in next week’s Apple product announcements. Sponsored by: Notion: The AI workspace where teams and AI agents get more done together. Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow. Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Use code TALKSHOW for $80 in free credits.  ★

Tom Nichols, writing for The Atlantic: When the 2003 war with Iraq ended, U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine said that when American diplomats embarked on reconstruction, they ruefully joked that “there were 500 ways to do it wrong and two or three ways to do it right. And what we didn’t understand is that we were going to go through all 500.”  ★

Trying to make sense of the conjuncture

“For months, callers to the Washington state Department of Licensing who have requested automated service in Spanish have instead heard an AI voice speaking English in a strong Spanish accent.”

A 2-hour mix of music compiled by Thom Yorke that plays before Radiohead’s European shows.

Mike Masnick, writing for Techdirt: Read that again. If West Virginia wins — if an actual court orders Apple to start scanning iCloud for CSAM — then every image flagged by those mandated scans becomes evidence obtained through a warrantless government search conducted without probable cause. The Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary rule means defense attorneys get to walk into court and demand that evidence be thrown out. And they’ll win that motion. It’s not even a particularly hard case to make.   [more]

Read to the end for a pretty good video

Ann Ballentine bought an old candy factory building in Brooklyn in 1979. She filled it with working artists and became something of a fairy godmother to them all. It entails someone who’s not as money driven, because you’re not gouging people for huge rents, and it requires being determined to do that over a long stretch of time. This is a lovely little short film. Tags: Ann Ballentine · art · NYC · real estate · video

Rob Griffiths, writing at The Robservatory: So I have macOS Tahoe on my laptop, but I’m keeping my desktop Mac on macOS Sequoia for now. Which means I have the joy of seeing things like this wonderful notification on a regular basis. Or I did, until I found a way to block them, at least in 90 day chunks. [...] The secret? Using device management profiles, which let you enforce policies on Macs in your organization, even if that “organization” is one Mac on your desk. One of the available policie [more]

Back in December, Adam Engst wrote this interesting follow-up to his feature story at TidBITS a few weeks prior exploring the differences between the new Unified and old Classic interface modes for the Phone app in iOS 26. It’s also a good follow-up to my month-ago link to Engst’s original feature, as well as a continuation of my recent theme on the fundamentals of good UI design. The gist of Engst’s follow-up is that one of the big differences between Unified and Classic modes is what happens w [more]

Do people still worship the ancient Greek gods? “Hellenism – also called Hellenic ethnic religion, or Dodekatheism – which is the practice of worshipping ancient gods, has been growing in popularity since the 1990s.”

Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer. “Hendrix’s mission was to reshape both the electric guitar’s envelope and its tone until it could feel like a human voice.”

MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass: Of course, Netflix could have absorbed such a cost. It’s a $400B company (well, before this deal, anyway) — double Disney! Paramount Skydance? They’re worth $11B. Yes, they’re paying almost exactly $100B more than they’re worth for WBD. Yes, it’s looney. But really, it’s leverage. To be clear, Netflix was going to pay for the deal with debt too, but they have a clear path to repay such debts. They have a great, growing business. They don’t require the backstop of [more]

Marks found on 40,000-year-old artifacts might be a proto-language. “They found that these sign sequences displayed an information density very similar to the earliest examples of the cuneiform forerunner called proto-cuneiform.”

CNBC: Block said Thursday it’s laying off more than 4,000 employees, or about half of its head count. The stock skyrocketed as much as 24% in extended trading. “Today we shared a difficult decision with our team,” Jack Dorsey, Block’s co-founder and CEO, wrote in a letter to shareholders. “We’re reducing Block by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000, which means that over 4,000 people are being asked to leave or entering into consultation.” [...] Other companies like Pinteres [more]

The aluminum soda can is a humble testament to the power and scope of human ingenuity. If that sounds like hyperbole, you should watch this video, which features eleven solid minutes of engineering explanation and is not boring for even a second. More science/engineering programming like this please…I feel like if this would have been on PBS or Discovery, it would have lasted twice as long and communicated half the information. For a chaser, you can watch a detailed making-of from an aluminum c [more]

Pope Leo XIV to his priests: stop using AI to write sermons. “‘To give a homily is to share faith,’ he said, and AI ‘will never be able to share faith.’”

Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees. “Composition II with Red, Blue, and Yellow is in the U.S. public domain. It has been since January 1, 2026. No amount of Spanish law or invented ‘dual copyright’ theories changes that.”

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors: Perhaps the most surprising announcement on Thursday was that Apple and Netflix, which have had a rather stand-offish relationship when it comes to video programming, have struck a deal to swap some Formula One-related content. Formula One’s growing popularity in the United States is due, perhaps in large part, to the high-profile success of the Netflix docuseries “Drive to Survive.” The latest season of that series, debuting Friday, will premiere simultaneous [more]

AI safety researchers have long worried that a government would seek to use AI for domestic surveillance and autonomous killing. The Pentagon’s fight with Anthropic threatens to make it a reality

“An interview from 2036 with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman.” This is what AI video generation was meant for.  ★

The New York Times: Netflix said on Thursday that it had backed away from its deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, a stunning development that paves the way for the storied Hollywood media giant to end up under the control of a rival bidder, the technology heir David Ellison. Netflix said that it would not raise its offer to counter a higher bid made earlier this week by Mr. Ellison’s company, Paramount Skydance, adding in a statement that “the deal is no longer financially attractive.” “This [more]

The NY Times has added another daily crossword to the line-up: the Midi. “The standard Times daily crossword, you see, is a 15×15 grid. The Mini is 5×5. The new Midi is 9×9, snug in between.”

During the recent annular solar eclipse on February 17, the ESA’s PROBA-2 satellite captured this great shot of the Moon passing in front of the Sun. Cue up the Johnny Cash. Tags: astronomy · Moon · photography · science · Sun

Apple Newsroom: Today, Apple announced iPhone and iPad are the first and only consumer devices in compliance with the information assurance requirements of NATO nations. This enables iPhone and iPad to be used with classified information up to the NATO restricted level without requiring special software or settings — a level of government certification no other consumer mobile device has met. That’s nice, but the iPhone is only the second phone to be approved for handling classified information [more]

“Eclipses have been connected with the fate of rulers since at least ancient Mesopotamia, around 4,000 years ago.” But more recently: “In 1581, Queen Elizabeth I of England made it a felony to use horoscopes to predict her death or her successor.”

Calculating the longest line of sight on Earth: 530km (329 miles) between “an unnamed Himalayan ridge near the Indian-Chinese border and Pik Dankova in Kyrgyzstan”.

“x86CSS is a working CSS-only x86 CPU/emulator/computer. Yes, the Cascading Style Sheets CSS. No JavaScript required. What you’re seeing above is a C program that was compiled using GCC into native 8086 machine code being executed fully within CSS.”

Ali Akbar, the last newspaper hawker in Paris, has been awarded a knighthood by French president Emmanuel Macron. “Macron went on to refer to Akbar as ‘the most French of the French — a Voltairean who arrived from Pakistan.’”

New book, shipping May 19, from author Geoffrey Cain: For twelve years, from 1985 to 1997, Jobs wandered the business wilderness with his new venture, NeXT. It was a period of spectacular failures, near-bankruptcy, and brutal humiliation. But out of this crucible of defeat emerged the visionary leader who would go on to create the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, transforming Apple into the most valuable company on earth. Drawing on previously unpublished materials and new interviews with the key players [more]

Still feels a bit ridiculous to me that Markdown is now an editing mode in Notepad.  ★

Bobby Allyn, reporting for NPR: An editor who works for YouTube’s biggest creator, MrBeast, has been suspended from the prediction market platform Kalshi and reported to federal regulators for insider trading, Kalshi officials said on Wednesday. It’s the first time the company has publicly revealed the results of an investigation into market manipulation on the popular app. The MrBeast employee, who Kalshi identified as Artem Kaptur in regulatory filings, traded around $4,000 on markets related [more]

The details of Elizebeth Smith Friedman’s remarkable career sound a bit outlandish when you list them all together: cracked thousands of codes and ciphers during WWI did the same in WWII, helping to foil Nazi spy rings and protect Allied supply ships chief cryptanalyst for the US Navy and the US Coast Guard co-developed, with her husband, many of the principles of modern cryptology broke mobster codes used by rumrunners bringing illegal alcohol into the US during Prohibition testified in cour [more]

Edison Research: In 2015, AM/FM radio accounted for 75% of the time Americans spent with spoken-word audio sources. AM/FM radio was not only the most dominant spoken-word audio listening platform, but it was fully sixty-five percentage points higher than podcasts, which accounted for 10% of listening time back then. Quarter by quarter and year over year, time spent using AM/FM radio to listen to spoken-word audio has declined significantly and shifted to time spent with podcasts. As of Q4 2025, [more]

Reuters: New York’s attorney general sued Valve, a video game developer whose franchises include Counter-Strike, Team Fortress and Dota, accusing it of promoting illegal gambling and threatening to addict children through its use of “loot boxes.” In a complaint filed on Wednesday in a state court in Manhattan, Attorney General Letitia James said Valve’s loot boxes amounted to “quintessential gambling,” violating the state’s constitution and penal law, with valuable items often hard to win and ma [more]

How America Chose Not to Hold the Powerful to Account. “The answer to why powerful people in some other parts of the world face consequences, while in America they rarely do, is that elite impunity is now an American national project.”

Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers (free WSJ piece at MSN). “Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in.”

It's READER SURVEY time

Illustrator Zara Picken maintains an archive of commercial illustration from the mid-20th century. So much throwback inspiration here! Tags: illustration · Zara Picken

When re-hanging signage, “Mind your P’s and Q’s” ought to be “Mind your H’s and S’s”.  ★

Terry Godier, in a thoughtful essay on the design of RSS feed readers: There’s a particular kind of guilt that visits me when I open my feed reader after a few days away. It’s not the guilt of having done something wrong, exactly. It’s more like the feeling of walking into a room where people have been waiting for you, except when you look around, the room is empty. There’s no one there. There never was. I’ve been thinking about this feeling for a long time. Longer than I probably should, given [more]

Emily Glazer, reporting for The Wall Street Journal: The billionaire said he met with Epstein starting in 2011, years after Epstein had pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor for prostitution. Gates said he was aware of some “18-month thing” that had limited Epstein’s travel but said he didn’t properly check his background. Gates said he continued meeting with Epstein even after his then-wife Melinda French Gates expressed concerns in 2013. “Knowing what I know now makes it, you know, a hu [more]

Greg Knauss: People will argue that speaking English to LLMs is just another level of abstraction away from the physics of how the machine actually works. And while that’s technically true — the worst kind of true — it also misses the point. Industrialization fundamentally changes things, by quantum degrees. A Ding Dong from a factory is not the same thing as a gâteau au chocolat et crème chantilly from a baker which is not the same thing as cramming chunks of chocolate and scoops of whipped cre [more]

Adam Engst returns to the show to talk, in detail, about certain of the UI changes in iOS 26 and Apple’s version 26 OSes overall. In particular, the new Unified view in the Phone app, and the Filter pop-up menu in both the Phone and Messages apps. Also: a shoutout to Balloon Help. Sponsored by: Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Use code TALKSHOW for $80 in free credits. Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow. Factor: Hea [more]

Ben Schoon, writing for 9to5 Google: When activated, Privacy Display changes how the pixels in your display emit light, making it harder or near-impossible to view the display at an off-angle. At its default setting, it definitely works, but the contents of the display are visible at less-sharp angles. Samsung has a “maximum” setting that takes this up a notch, and that setting makes it even harder to see the contents and narrows the field-of-view even further. [...] A bigger deal, though, is th [more]

Read to the end for a very good video game

This week Jason Snell published his annual Six Colors Apple Report Card for 2025. As I’ve done in the past — for the report-card years 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 — I’m publishing my full remarks and grades here. On Snell’s report card, voters give per-category scores ranging from 5 to 1; I’ve translated these to letter grades, A to F, which is how I consider them. (See footnote 1 from last year’s report if you’re curious why it’s not A to E.) As I noted last year, “Siri/Apple Intel [more]

PLUS: The Substack post that tanked the markets, continued

Learn how to connect the dots between slowdowns, crashes, and the user experience in your iOS app. This on-demand session covers how to: Set up Sentry to surface high-priority mobile issues without alert fatigue. Use Logs and Breadcrumbs to reconstruct what happened with a crash. Find what’s behind a performance bottleneck using Tracing. Monitor and reduce the size of your iOS app using Size Analysis. Watch it here.  ★

The US government still can’t think beyond “winning.” The rest of the world is still thinking too small

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

Read to the end for a good walking video

Roundup 02/23/2026

Testifying before a jury in LA, Mark Zuckerberg makes the case that platform design is about free expression. But the walls are closing in on Section 230

Talking A.I. and politics with John Ganz?

Read to the end for a magical sounding supermarket freezer aisle

Roundup 02/18/2025

Speaking of iOS 26, here’s Joe Rossignol reporting for MacRumors: Apple has shared updated iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 adoption figures, revealing how many iPhones and iPads are running those software versions. These adoption numbers are based on iPhones and iPads that transacted on the App Store on February 12, 2026, according to Apple. The statistics are as follows: 74% of all iPhones introduced in the last four years are running iOS 26. 66% of all iPhones are running iOS 26. 66% of all iPads introdu [more]

In the company’s latest policy reversal under Trump 2.0, the facial recognition system it blew up in 2021 may be poised for a return

Read to the end for a real bop

A new hype epicycle reaches its climax

Read to the end for a good post about aging

As OpenAI sunsets its most dangerous model, the tensions it exposed remain as tricky as ever. PLUS: Elon's space catapult, and OpenAI vs. Anthropic

Read to the end for a good focaccia recipe

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 […]

Joshua Achiam will become the company's chief futurist

A lawsuit that begins in LA this week, along with a new investigation into TikTok by the European Commission, could change social apps forever. PLUS: AI ads at the Super Bowl and in ChatGPT

Read to the end for a very talented octopus

Roundup 02/08/26

Read to the end for some Tumblr users casting a very powerful spell

Anxiety about AI replacing entry-level jobs is on the rise. Could a state-of-the-art chatbot do the job of a Platformer fellow? PLUS: Anthropic vs. OpenAI, and will AI kill SaaS?

Read to the end for a good post about DeviantArt

Plus: Epstein!

Spotify’s Molly Holder on the power of prompted playlists. PLUS: Meta is testing a standalone Vibes app

What a social network for AI agents tells us about the future. PLUS: Elon consolidates the X empire

His meeting with the founder of 4chan and his quest to profit off the end of democracy

Roundup 02/02/2025

Is it based or soy to kill yourself?

Maybe someday you’ll have a genie in your laptop working for you 24/7. Today is not that day

Abolish ICE is not just the mainstream position, it is the only moral one

Patrick McGee (author of last year’s bestseller, Apple in China, and guest on The Talk Show in May), commenting on Twitter/X re: Tim Cook’s company-wide memo regarding the “events in Minneapolis”: This literally says nothing, via intention and cowardice. It’s the kind of language Orwell attributed to politicians, when ready-made phrases assemble themselves and prevent any real thought from breaking through. I have previously linked to George Orwell’s seminal 1946 essay, “Politics and the English [more]

Read to the end for a good Bluesky post

Read to the end for a video with a very interesting timestamp

Roundup 01/26/2025

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

Read to the end for a real good vacation video

Which Trump administration official is a former Gawker commenter?

Read to the end for insider trading and money laundering

Read to the end for Dr. House In 2025

Roundup 01/18/2025

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, […]

Watch now | With special guest Vinson Cunningham

13 books to keep you thinking through the winter

Roundup 01/11/2025

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

X.com, c'est moi

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

Greetings from Read Max HQ, and welcome to the last column of 2025!

Over 30 lists and 15,000 words from Read Max friends, foes, and family

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

9 books to consider for the rest of the year

We need to stop falling for anti-regulation hysteria if we’re to get control of digital harms

The thin iPhone is teeing up a foldable phone likely to come next year

After 9 months on Substack, Disconnect is back on Ghost. Paris explains why the migration was necessary.

Conceding to Trump’s demands only guarantees new threats. It’s time to reject the US and its tech companies.

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 summer, a new video game came out that changed the way we think about comedy in games, becoming an instant smash hit in the process. That’s right, I’m talking about Thank Goodness You’re Here! from Coal Supper. Ok, yeah, sure, I work for Panic and we published the game, so I was contractually required […]