The incomparable Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg: Apple Inc.’s upcoming push into smart home devices will include a doorbell, thermostat and other accessories developed through an unusual partnership with LG Electronics Inc. The products will be part of an ecosystem of devices that work with Apple’s new smart home hub, as well as an upgraded HomePod mini and fresh TV set-top box, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The new Apple devices are set to be introduced on Oct. 13. The [more]

Where in the world are typefaces being designed? The US, Germany, and France…but also the UK, Netherlands, and Indonesia.

Laika is the stop-motion animation studio that made Coraline & Kubo and the Two Strings. Their newest film, Wildwood, looks pretty incredible; have a look at the trailer. Creative Boom recently highlighted some of the process behind the film, which is heavily dependent on physical sets and puppets. The man tasked with putting the show together was art director Matthew Maldonado, having spent five years designing and building Wildwood’s sets. So I asked him the million dollar question: how much [more]

Read to the end for 500 hours of YouTube train footage

AI-generated images don’t have to look like AI-generated images…they can be any style you want. (It’s just going to get more and more difficult to tell…)

In 2005, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory calculated that the water stored by China’s huge Three Gorges Dam is enough to increase the length of a day by 0.06 microseconds and move the North pole by 0.8 inches. (A 9.1 earthquake had a bigger impact.)

To go along with my recent post about control rooms, here’s the Control Panels group on Flickr, containing almost 3000 photos of control interfaces for all kinds of things. You’ll see some of the same photos as in the Control Rooms group, but when you get past the first couple of pages, there’s more variety: fiddly knobs, entire walls of nearly identical switches, dials, inscrutable gauges, soda machine interfaces, bump it and you might die buttons, computers with switches, Swinging Fingers (!!) [more]

The Job Trail, a web game about making it through 52 weeks as a laid-off creative worker. Based on The Oregon Trail. My first try: “You have died of burnout. Week 13. 51 applications, 1 ghosting.”

BBC Earth is returning to the ocean. 25 years after the first installment, the legendary naturalist, presenter, and centenarian David Attenborough narrates Blue Planet III. This first look video, backed by a song Hans Zimmer & Jade Thirwall, is teeming with stunning footage of sea life of all sorts. Ed Yong called BPIII’s predecessor the best nature series ever: Blue Planet II is the greatest nature series that the BBC has ever produced. It is almost transcendentally good—the product of a team t [more]

118 Things to Do Instead of Doomscrolling. Including “put together a puzzle”, “go for a bike ride”, “hold a plank for as long as you can — even if it’s only a second”, and “make your own limoncello”.

Calls for a new kind of slowdown were the talk of The Curve. PLUS: Slinking back to X

From a tongue-in-cheek Google Japan, a conveyor belt keyboard, where the keys move and your hand stays still while typing. One of several unusual keyboards released by the company. You can even build your own.

Preorder your copy to get the full story on the AI-fueled data center buildout

Silent Friend is a historical drama written and directed by Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi. Here’s the description: In the botanical garden of a medieval German university, a ginkgo tree hundreds of years old watches its human neighbors through the slip-stream of time. Among them, a young woman in 1908 attempts to break through the botany department’s masculine academic culture; an idealistic couple in 1972 performs experiments on plant communication under its branches; and a neurologist on l [more]

Things That Are Good to Do. Including “admit what you don’t know”, “put the cart away”, “rest before you’re exhausted” (I often get this one wrong), and “walk home if you can”.

The Ku Klux Klan is rebranding itself as The Knights Party, centered on “family and faith” along with proud & open white supremacy. 💩🖕

Scharon Harding, Ars Technica: Unlike with previous versions of macOS, macOS 27 Golden Gate doesn’t have a toggle for turning off Apple Intelligence. That makes disabling AI features that you may not want more difficult. It also means that the AI models necessary for running Apple Intelligence will take up space on your disk, even if you don’t use them or if you go through your settings to individually find and disable AI capabilities. In response, a developer known as Om Lahore on GitHub last w [more]

Back in ~2008, right on the cusp of stardom, Lady Gaga did a crate-digging video in a London record shop and named Radiohead’s set at Bonnaroo 2006 as her favorite show she’s ever been to. A post-fame Gaga reaffirmed her choice in this 2018 Vogue interview. Many share her opinion. Here’s the official concert video of that Bonnaroo show so you can judge for yourself. The setlist for the show: There There 2+2=5 15 Step Weird Fishes/Arpeggi Exit Music (For a Film) Kid A Dollars & Cents Videotape N [more]

An interesting long profile of Mark Zuckerberg. “Mark is the fucking Terminator. He’s actually not an asshole, which is interesting. He’s not a miserable fuck. But his source of advantage is he’s never happy. He just doesn’t fucking stop.”

YouTuber Rob Martinez travelled to Columbus, Ohio to tell the story of what he calls the best sandwich shop in America, Wario’s Beef and Pork. Here’s part of the transcript of owner Stephan Madias talking about the restaurant: For the longest time, especially the first two years, I was very protective of how the bread was sliced and I would not let anybody cut bread. It’s about the experience. I think about me eating the sandwich. Think about the things that happen when you get a big sandwich. Y [more]

Richard Linklater is directing a film adaptation of the Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along. Shooting started in 2019 and will continue until 2040 to match the musical’s 20-year period. (Linklater’s Boyhood was shot over 12 years.)

Mapsnap is a program designed to take old Sanborn insurance maps (block-by-block maps of every US city from 1870-1960) and aligning them with modern maps.

JumpStar is the world’s strongest Chinese Checkers AI engine. Designed to emulate AlphaGo and Stockfish but for Chinese Checkers. The model was trained entirely on a M4 MacBook. You can play it online or on iOS.

What an apt photo, today of all days. What a gift Make Something Wonderful is.  ★

How can B2B software be so friggin’ delicious? Early access drops 10/19. Spread the love.  ★

OpenAI, today: The EU AI Act requires generative AI providers to make generated text identifiable in a machine-readable way. Text watermarking and detection remain early technologies with significant limitations, and views about their benefits and responsible uses are still developing. Our phased approach reflects both the EU AI Act requirements as well as the technology’s limitations, with an emphasis on transparency about what a text watermark can and cannot tell people: Starting today, API cu [more]

Random TV Time: watch old TV pulled from the Internet Archive. 17 channels to surf, including cartoons, 1960s TV, and one that’s only old commercials.

Read to the end for a really good storefront

Designer Giorgia Lupi: In Defense of the Detour. “I fear that A.I. is undermining what makes us most human — the ability to translate lived experience and nuanced thoughts into a unique point of view…”

John Ternus, posting on X: The way Steve taught us to care about every detail, every experience, every person, still guides our work today. Forever grateful. Tim Cook, also on X (with a photo I don’t recall seeing before): There are people who leave a mark on the world, and then there are people who change it entirely. Steve changed the world and so many lives in the process. He certainly changed my life forever. His spirit lives on in everything he created and everyone he inspired.  ★

Stalin Boys is a short documentary about a Joseph Stalin-obsessed middle-schooler from a tiny Texas town who writes a play about the Soviet dictator and enlists his three friends to stage it for the Texas State History Fair. Free to watch online.

Nappy is a site offering free stock photos of Black and brown people. (The site says they’re going offline in a few months due to a falloff in demand bc of AI. Maybe Internet Archive can do their thing here?)

O Superman by artist Laurie Anderson from 1981. Some of the lyrics: ‘Cause when love is gone There’s always justice And when justice is gone There’s always force And when force is gone There’s always Mom Hi, Mom So hold me, Mom In your long arms So hold me, Mom In your long arms In your automatic arms Your electronic arms In your arms So hold me, Mom In your long arms Your petrochemical arms Your military arms In your electronic arms Ah, ah, ah, ah 60 Minutes did a profile of Anderson a few y [more]

Mapping Tariffs explores “the potential impacts of tariffs on jobs and businesses across Canadian cities and communities at the neighbourhood and city level”.

After working hard taking away the civil rights of people and granting more powers to our Mob Boss President, Chief Justice John Roberts retreats to a Maine island for the summer. But lately, neighbors are protesting his presence there. Good! No peace!

The Comedy Wildlife Awards have announced the finalists for the 2026 competition and, well, these awards never miss. You can almost hear the background music for some of these… Tags: best of · best of 2026 · photography

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring this last week, once again, at DF. 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 their developer’s guide to learn more — everything from how SSO works to [more]

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple said: We have identified an issue affecting a small number of iPhone 18 Pro Max users on the AT&T network that may cause a device to lose service and be unable to make calls. We released iOS 27.0.1 earlier this week and strongly encourage all iPhone 18 Pro Max users to update now, and are also issuing a carrier settings update today. These updates together are meant to help prevent this issue from occurring. The carrier settings update for [more]

Is American Culture Simply Bad Now? I’ve been hanging with my friend Matt while he’s here in Tokyo for a trip, which he refers to as his “America is Cooked Tour” as he keeps running across things that are much better here.

Back in 2005, a group of restorers established a hidden workshop in Paris’s Panthéon and snuck into the building for a whole year to repair an antique clock. “The group managed to connect the hideaway to the electricity grid and install a computer…” Wild!

Apple Developer News, in a post titled “Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS”: We give developers powerful APIs to build incredible capabilities into their apps for Apple products, backed by a set of controls designed to protect users’ private data. Full Disk Access largely sidesteps these controls in order to allow backup apps to function properly on the Mac. Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems — including files, [more]

OrySnack: The Bar Where Bartenders Work From Home. Small robot servers in this Japanese bar are controlled by people who can only work from home because of disability or illness.

Last week, the NY Times dropped a list of The 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century, as picked by a panel of “more than 500 influential stars, showrunners and other notable names in the world of TV”. The rankings have already been dissected online six ways from Sunday, but the link got lost in my forest of browser tabs and so here it is, a bit late but still interesting. Here are some of my personal favorites from the list and arrowed opinions on whether some should be higher or lower on the lis [more]

Here's your Garbage Intelligence for September 2026

Don’t Cook That: a collection of real recipes that you shouldn’t make. Cholera remedy recipe calls for “equal parts laudanum, rhubarb, double-strength capsicum, camphor and spirits of nitre”.

From the Control Rooms group on Flickr. 🤩 So many little details in all of these photos to pore over. See also Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green, The User Experience Design of Lego Interface Panels, Inside NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center (c. 1966), and Lots and Lots of Control Panels. Tags: photography

The Bayeux Tapestry of Fascism. “What’s this middle bit?” “Why, that’s the Battle of Legitimate Concerns!”

“Influencers are the private equity of culture: draining whatever’s ‘cool’ until higher prices and worse experiences push out the original fan base. Then they move on to the next thing, leaving the original to die…” 🎯

In this video, Patrick Hicks tells the story of the development of the classic educational video game The Oregon Trail and how Prince (you know, the genius musical artist) was one of the first people in the world to play the very first version of the game. The basic story is that a college history major (Don Rawitsch) teamed up with two friends (Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger), both of whom were math majors and had some programming experience, to make a computer game to liven up the histor [more]

A “Kelvin wave” powered by El Niño will soon raise sea levels in California “by half a foot or more”. “It’s ‘highly probable’ that California will soon witness its highest sea levels ever recorded.”

The Student Journalists Who Never Let the Cornell Assault Case Go. “Why be financially independent, [editor in chief Sophia Dasser] wondered, if not to publish sharp-edged views of the biggest campus issues?”

In the 6th inning last night the Yankees were only ahead 2-0, and Red Sox first baseman and all-around jackass Willson Contreras hit a home run, closing it to 2-1. Contreras decided to walk around the bases. The baseball gods do not look kindly upon that sort of ostentatiously belligerent showboatery. (Especially when your team is still losing.) Contreras circled the bags after his dinger like a rooster letting you know he just banged a few hens — but at a slower pace. In the next inning, Contr [more]

The best multi day hikes in the world. “As an avid hiker, who spends most of her time hiking, I have done more than 100 multi day hikes all over the world. This list includes 25 of my favorite ones.”

Lobster is Lobster: a language guessing game. “Lobster is lobster in English. Langosta is lobster in ___”

Ooh, Mestra is a new short story from Madeline Miller (Circe, Song of Achilles). “Mestra, daughter of the King of Thessaly, is granted a unique gift by Poseidon: The ability to transform herself into any being she can imagine.”

From mapped.earth, a map of every lighthouse on the planet, along with other charted lights like lighted buoys and such. The screenshots above are static but the lights on the real map move: each lighthouse sweeps out its actual arc and the reach of the beams is true to scale. I recorded a short video of how it looks on the site: Each lighthouse has a unique light characteristic so that ships can tell them apart: In any of these designs an observer, rather than seeing a continuous weak light, s [more]

Looks like Every Frame a Painting is ramping up again! “Over the last 10 years, Taylor and I have amassed a series of ideas — some of them originally designed to be on Youtube, some designed to be other things. All of this is currently in progress”

Amazon is releasing some new Kindle models, including a thinner Paperwhite (my fave) with an aluminum back, more storage, and faster interactions. If I didn’t just get a new last-gen Paperwhite to replace one I lost, I’d be tempted to pre-order.

A raw, revealing interview with an 80-year-old Sylvester Stallone on the occasion of his new memoir, The Steps. I listened to about half of this and had to stop…it’s incredibly candid but what he went through as a kid & young adult, oof.

A 15-minute tour of former NFL coach Mike Tomlin’s Minecraft city. As previously mentioned, he started playing the game to connect with his kids and never stopped. (This is only part 1 of ???)

You can destroy kottke.org if you want. Or any other site!

This is a three-hour, high-quality recording of thunderstorms in the distance in the Slovakian countryside. The rest of the channel is loaded of similar (and similarly long) atmospheric videos: thunderstorms, blizzards, rain, wind & fog, winter storms, etc. The most recent videos are prominently labeled “No AI” because there are so many AI-generated videos like these on YT that are just kinda lifeless and juiced with keywords to show up as related videos. Tags: video

Eternal Family is a media service that shows “a hand-picked collection of unique & rare films across Vintage Animation, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror, Action, Documentaries, Found Tapes & Much More”. KDO readers might like the Early Technology section.

Blackbird Spyplane’s Jonah Weiner on his past career as a profile writer. “If you’re doing the job well, you find yourself asking them profoundly intimate questions, and they find themselves answering them.” Really interesting.

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 →  ★

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg (gift link): Apple Inc. plans to make its long-delayed push into the smart-home market on Oct. 13, marking a critical product expansion for the company under new Chief Executive Officer John Ternus. At the center of the strategy is a smart-home hub code-named J490, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple also plans to announce the first update to the HomePod mini since that device’s 2020 debut and its first new TV set-top box since 2022. [...] The [more]

“There are more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than there are Starbucks, McDonald’s, Walmart, Home Depot, Domino’s, Dunkin’, and Costco locations combined.”

Read to the end for Matt Portner's Pro Skimboarder

Echo Wang, reporting for Reuters yesterday: Anthropic is making a massive bet that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than ​industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters. This is a strong clear lede, but even so it falls short of expressing the true magnitude of what Anthropic represents. To wit, not that “AI” as a field will prove more profoundly transformational than industrialization, electricity, and the Internet, but that [more]

I love 2005’s Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightly & Matthew Macfadyen and directed by Joe Wright. So I really enjoyed Danny Boyd’s video essay about the great cinematography in the film. Pride & Prejudice isn’t a movie I’ve exactly seen a 100 times in my life. And believe me, I like a good romcom. But when I finally sat myself down, put on the 4K disc, and paid attention, I could not believe the level of craft on display here. The cinematography of this movie is insane. Some of the clos [more]

The Tell, a very long read about Thomas Goldstein (SCOTUSblog founder, high-powered lawyer, poker player) who once played a legendary game at the Bellagio where he bet wildly, didn’t even look at his cards for long stretches of time, and won big.

“Sky burial is a funeral practice in which a corpse is placed on a mountaintop to decompose while exposed to the elements, or to be eaten by scavenging animals.” (CW: there are some potentially upsetting photos on that page.)

Craig Mod made a cool mini-site cataloging all of the long walks he’s taken since 2009, with maps and GPS tracks and links to essays/books/media that resulted from them.

A lovely contemplative short video featuring Toshiyuki Ueno of the Japanese fashion brand Visvim talking about craftsmanship. We want to make things that people will get attached to and will use for a long time. And that’s at the core of our creating process. It’s simple and not that complicated. He continues: I think about how people grow attached to things over time as they use them, and how those things add to its allure over time. “Those things” is a little ambiguous without the conte [more]

Manchester City guilty over Premier League charges after £900m of ‘sham’ contracts. The “financial doping” scheme allowed the club’s owners to pump large sums of money into the team without appearing to exceed the league’s spending limits.

With safety questions still swirling, the company introduces a more business-focused take on agents

Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. “There’s no point beating yourself up for failing to clear a backlog (of unread books, undone tasks, unrealized dreams) that was always inherently unfeasible to clear in the first place.”

From the early 1970s until his death in 2021, Korean artist Kim Tschang-Yeul painted water droplets. From one of the galleries representing his work: The waterdrop was the starting point for a singular and iconic body of work, which stands at the confluence of lyrical abstraction, Pop art and Chinese calligraphy. This simple and limpid œuvre subtly fuses Taoist wisdom, modern conceptual irony and the tragedy of war. You can view more of Kim’s work at Colossal and InspirationGrid. [more]

Regarding my post yesterday speculating on how Apple’s October — seemingly set to be a big one — might play out, a friend asked if any or all of the new stuff might be released through Apple Newsroom announcements only. Good question. Let’s run through the rumored new hardware products: Apple TV hardware: I’d love to say no, but the answer is yes. I could see this coming out as a simple announcement with new specs. I really want to see Apple double-down in this space, reinvigorate it. I think wa [more]

Desktop only, and you definitely want sound on. (Update: Now works great on mobile devices, too!) With things like this I always start with Kottke.org. No idea why, because it’s quite possibly the last site on the entire web I’d want to see actually destroyed. (Well, second-to-last.)  ★

“A foundry for bastard web fonts.” The default is a version of Times New Roman but every 7th glyph is replaced with one from Arial, but you can dial up whatever bastardization you want. This is why I’m not at all worried about AI destroying the world. Look at the horrible things human beings have made.  ★

Sancho Panza: I recently had an experience while doing a simple Google search that was so profoundly weird that it stopped me in my tracks. Kagi, the search engine I’ve been using for a few years now, gave me the exact sort of results to Panza’s query that he was looking for.  ★

If anyone could devise a funny way to measure battery life, it’s her.  ★

Apple executives seemingly did very few interviews after the iPhone event three weeks ago. The best, perhaps by far, is this 11-minute video with Craig Federighi by “Donald Decodes”, a Chinese language creator. His YouTube account only has 1,100 followers (and only had 500 at the time of the video) and only one other video — presumably he’s got a big following in China. Very insightful questions about the Duo user interface — and Federighi gives very thoughtful answers. The question (and answer) [more]

Glenn Fleishman: Leaving Stolen Device Protection enabled does mean that you may have to wait an hour in some scenarios to manage aspects of your Apple Account, make changes to Face ID or Touch ID, change your device passcode, and a few other actions. But this minor inconvenience might assuage the kinds of concerns that Scott wrote in about, and make you more comfortable that your big basket of secret eggs won’t scramble. I put off enabling Stolen Device Protection for a while after it came out, [more]

On the eve of the company's developer conference, it cancels a new model over safety fears

Jeremy Stern, in a massive and massively good profile of Mark Zuckerberg for Colossus: Unsure of my own ability to evaluate such things, I leave Meta HQ and spend another few days in Palo Alto and San Francisco ahead of my interview with Zuckerberg, seeking out a number of MSL’s competitors and investors who agree to speak to me on background. Many of them take pleasure in what they describe as the organizational “mess” of MSL, in the people there allegedly being motivated more by money than by [more]

Jeff Johnson: In other words, Muse AI is a blatant copy of Muse from Meta, the latter of which is currently the #1 iOS App Store download in the United States. I don’t know where Muse AI ranks in the iOS App Store, but I do know that it’s currently the #20 Mac App Store download in the US. It wasn’t languishing in obscurity — it had risen to #20 in the Mac App Store. A lot of Mac users are very confused when they’re told that Mac apps are available but they’re not in the Mac App Store, so it’s a [more]

Read to the end for FlubberLover01

On the new episode of The Talk Show that dropped over the weekend, Andru Edwards and I talked first about the September event Apple held three weeks ago at Apple Park, and then moved on to speculate about what they might do in October. The rumor mill says Apple has a bunch of as-yet-unannounced products coming: a new iPad Mini (8th generation), new Apple TV hardware (4th generation — maybe they’ll give it a better name than “Apple TV 4K”?), new HomePod Mini (2nd generation), and an altogether ne [more]

Vidit Bhargava (developer of LookUp and Movie Buzz): Duo-Man offers the complete walkman experience on the iPhone Duo. Open the Duo to pick and “insert” the cassette, Close the Duo to start listening. Yes, I actually recorded the button clicks and static noise from a real Walkman! More like this, please.  ★

My thanks to Mux for sponsoring last week at DF. Video isn’t just something to stream; it’s structured data you build with. Mux Robots — hosted AI workflows — turns video into context. Generate chapters, find key moments, translate audio, and more, through one API call, with no model hosting to maintain. Each workflow is evaluated against real video, not generic benchmarks. Configure the workflows once, and every new upload runs automatically. Mux is video infrastructure trusted by Patreon, Subs [more]

Katie Notopoulos, in a short tweet thread regarding Alexandr Wang’s “Why We’re Building Muse” essay: This makes me feel insane! This is faux-hallmark pap and if you believe for 1 sec that he cares about helping people “spending more time with family” or “opening a bakery” you don’t need to wait for AI to kill us; you’re stupid enough to drown from looking up at the rain. My take is much closer to Notopoulos’s than to Manton Reece’s. I think it’s fascinating that Wang’s essay doesn’t sound at all [more]

Back in 2011 I linked to Reelizer, a splendid archive of movie posters curated by Roger Erik Tinch. Reelizer went away for a few years, but Tinch has brought it back, seemingly better than ever. Huzzah.  ★

Alexandr Wang, blogging on X: Now imagine every person on earth with a second mind beyond their own. A general manager whose whole job is to find out what you want and make sure it happens. Someone that hears the half-sentence, “I feel like there’s something more I could be doing,” and helps fill in the blanks. This might not be a genie in a bottle, but it can be someone that says, “This is the thing you’ve been dreaming of your whole life. Let’s go get it. Here’s how.” And then builds a plan. S [more]

I keep mentioning Apple’s 1992 groundbreaking PowerBook Duo series as a precedent for the iPhone Duo’s name. But of course in 2020, Apple released the MagSafe Duo Charger, a wonderful Lightning peripheral for charging an iPhone and Apple Watch at the same time. It even folded. A brief note on the PowerBook Duo, while I’m at it. I got an email this month from Dave Rothschild, a now-retired former Apple employee who helped spearhead that project, and he emphasized that the internal motto was alway [more]

Markus Kuhn: In the ISO paper size system, the height-to-width ratio of all pages is the square root of two (1.4142 : 1). In other words, the width and the height of a page relate to each other like the side and the diagonal of a square. This aspect ratio is especially convenient for a paper size. If you put two such pages next to each other, or equivalently cut one parallel to its shorter side into two equal pieces, then the resulting page will have again the same width/height ratio. Same princ [more]

Zac Bowden, Windows Central: In 2024, Microsoft and Qualcomm kicked off a new category of Windows hardware it called “Copilot+ PCs” that set the baseline for a new wave of AI-first computers, and launched with exclusive features that would not be made available on PCs that didn’t meet a new set of system requirements. The launch didn’t go smoothly. [...] I’ve noticed that none of the Surface PCs launched in 2026 include the Copilot+ PC moniker in their product names, unlike the Surface PCs that [more]

Andru Edwards returns to the show to discuss Apple’s big September event and their new products: the iPhones 18 Pro and Duo, AirPods 5, and Apple Watch Series 12/Ultra 4. Sponsored by: Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off and one free breakfast item per box for one year, while supplies last, with code talkshow50off. Notion: The collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side, with a developer platform teams can build on.  ★

A reader asked if this Gary Choyka who hit two holes-in-one in the same round of golf back in 2020 is the same Gary Choyka who was my history teacher 30+ years ago. Indeed it is. He looks good. (He was a hell of a basketball player too.)  ★

“Thibault”, in post on Mastodon responding to Brent Simmons’s “stock Mac UI” post that I just linked to: It reminded me of my own explorations with the macOS design language, especially the modern title/toolbar which I believe is one of the most foundational design regression on the platform. I played with the idea of redesigning the Finder with the original hierarchy but keeping the current Liquid Glass styling. Though it’s still far from what I’d like to see on my Mac, I thought I’d share. Her [more]

Brent Simmons: To recap: the reasons for using stock Mac UI are 1) user familiarity, which we’ve known for a while just isn’t a thing, and 2) hoping to be able to expend less developer effort, which we’ve seen can work against you. But there’s another reason: the stock Mac UI is designed by Apple, the best designers in the world, and do you really think you can do better? Really? The app world is full of people who think they’re better and they’re really, really, really not. Well, I still think [more]

It’s Friday, and Muse is still the #1 app in the iOS App Store — that’s a full week in the top spot. Who knows if it’s a flash in the pan or not. (Remember Clubhouse? Sora?) But at the moment it’s clearly a hit. It certainly helps that Meta itself is promoting Muse heavily on its own channels like Instagram and Facebook. The Muse iOS app is sandboxed — because it has to be. So that’s the only version I’m personally tinkering with. But the Mac app is the more powerful one, because, well, it lets [more]

Generative AI is harming people today. We don’t need to waste time fantasizing about science fictional scenarios.

Read to the end for an introduction to puns

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg Wednesday, after Meta’s 2026 Connect keynote (gift link): Meta Platforms Inc. unveiled a palm-sized, dedicated gadget for using Muse, the company’s popular new artificial intelligence assistant, pushing deeper into the AI devices market with a surprise announcement. The product, unveiled on stage by Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, was born out of the company’s new design lab led by former Apple Inc. interface design chief Alan Dye and its Superi [more]

Jason Aten, in a good follow-up to his previous column at Inc. (the one where he described how Muse, running on his Mac, read his Messages database): The entire reason Muse is interesting is that it isn’t just a chatbot, but can actually do things for you. But that promise also comes with a pretty high bar of responsibility. If your goal is to put a powerful AI agent on millions of devices, you have to be incredibly clear about what’s happening, and what people are agreeing to. If your primary a [more]

Eli Tan, writing for The New York Times, “I Gave My Life Over to Meta’s A.I. Agent and Was Blown Away” (gift link): For one final task, I asked Wren for a good way to spend that $44.99 it had saved me. At this point, it knew my life pretty well. I thought it might suggest something altruistic, like donating the money to charity or buying flowers for my girlfriend, who was recovering from surgery. Instead, it suggested something even better — buying bowls from Heath Ceramics, a local ceramics mak [more]

Meta has a new vision to sell, but it may be getting ahead of itself. (The VR Glasses are amazing, though)

Victoria Song, in her Optimizer column/newsletter for The Verge: I’ve been aggressively avoiding Muse since it launched a few weeks ago. Sure, some of that is because I was busy testing other devices. But the number-one reason why is that I am horribly vulnerable when faced with extreme cuteness. Alas, at Meta Connect, I couldn’t escape this pink-cheeked fella with his plush ivory fur, and so I finally downloaded the app once I returned to my hotel room. He was plastered on every screen during t [more]

Great interview from Stern, as usual, seemingly conducted on the old set of Three’s Company. She opened by asking if AI is going to wipe out humanity, and I think Zuck whiffed by not simply laughing and saying no. She also directly asked his thoughts on people calling Meta Glasses “pervert glasses”. Regarding the shift from “the metaverse” to AI, Zuckerberg likened it to Apple having started work on touchscreen tablets and then pivoting to turn the technology into the iPhone first. His point bei [more]

Meta’s annual keynote yesterday was a tight 55-minute live event held on their campus in Menlo Park. I watched the whole thing this morning, before recording tomorrow’s episode of Dithering. (Which you should subscribe to.) It was a good keynote. Consumer products announced: Third-generation Meta Glasses with cameras. A new glasses product: Ray-Ban Meta Audio. These are audio-only smart glasses, with microphones and speakers, but no camera. Zuckerberg pitched them as being less expensive, havi [more]

Apple Newsroom: Apple today announced the opening of Apple Music Hall, a brand-new state-of-the-art live music venue in London’s storied Battersea Power Station, designed to connect artists and fans through bespoke, intimate performances unlike anywhere else. Apple might be the most interesting architecture company in the world this century. They have a core look and feel they apply to their own facilities built from the ground up (e.g., Apple Park, certain flagship retail stores), but they also [more]

Dan Luu serves up some copiously documented claim chowder: After this point, most further predictions that I saw were either non-falsifiable or resolve in the future. Note that I didn’t attempt to catalogue statements that are nonsensical or were simply factually incorrect statements at the time, such as his December 2024 claim that “Generative AI’s products have effectively been trapped in amber for over a year.” January 2026 claim that “[models are] basically the same as they were a year ago. [more]

Michael Steil: Apple’s ill-fated Copland operating system is notoriously hard to run on real hardware, and has not previously been available in emulation. Here is the last build, D11E4 from June 1996, in an improved DingusPPC. Playing around with the GXSlidemaster app, I found a bug. The keyboard shortcut for File → Print One is ⌥⌘P, but the menu manager displays it as ⌘π (because Option-P is how you type a lowercase pi; add Shift to get an uppercase pi (∏)). I should file a Radar. Anyway, I don [more]

The most extraordinary Apple event in the company’s modern history was the emergency press conference on Friday, 16 July 2010 to address “antennagate” — the out-of-control media narrative that the iPhone 4 had a defective antenna design. The event was only scheduled one day in advance — I got invited around noon ET on July 15 and was on my way to the airport about an hour later. It remains one of the most interesting press events I’ve ever attended. The event was held in Apple’s Town Hall audito [more]

Read to the end for a machine we must create

Back in the mid-2000s there was a golden era of exuberantly designed Mac apps. Paul Kafasis coined it “The Delicious Generation”, a perfect name. The delicious was both a reference to Wil Shipley and Mike Matas’s Delicious Library — a personal media library management app that made something that sounds really boring look super fun — and a perfect description of the aesthetic. It clearly harks back to Steve Jobs’s description of the Aqua user interface in 2000: “One of the design goals was when [more]

Are consumer agents the future — or a mirage?

Read to the end for a good meme

Under the new CEO, products are more expensive and AI comes with more surveillance

Read to the end for your granddad Cyclops

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read to the end for one more good Dolly Parton post

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

Plus, good reads you might have missed in August 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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!)

This newsletter is brought to you by Squarespace.

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, […]

A few years ago, in a forest just outside of Oslo, 1000 trees were planted. In 2114, after a century of growth, the trees will be cut down and made into paper for an anthology of books. Meet the Future Library, an artwork by Katie Paterson. Between now and then, one writer every year will contribute a text, with the writings held in trust, unpublished, until the year 2114. Tending the forest and ensuring its preservation for the one hundred year duration of the artwork finds a conceptual counter [more]

I love watching Gordon Ramsay make scrambled eggs. I first saw this video years ago and, possibly because I am an idiot, have yet to attempt these eggs at home. You and me, eggs, next weekend. P.S. Jean-Georges Vongerichten makes scrambled eggs in a very similar way. Not quite soft-scrambled…Serious Eats calls them fancy French spoonable eggs. P.P.S. Anyone have a square Japanese omelette pan I can borrow? P.P.P.S. In Jiro Dreams of Sushi (now on Netflix!), an apprentice talks about making tamag [more]