Ben Chapman, reporting for The Independent in 2019: After 40 years of advertising its lager as “Probably the best beer in the world”, Danish brewer Carlsberg has confessed that the famous slogan may not be true. Reacting to falling sales and increasingly harsh comments from drinkers about the taste of its beer, Carlsberg has launched a new recipe along with a more honest approach to marketing. The campaign declares: “Probably not the best beer in the world. So we’ve changed it. Somewhere along t [more]

Early adoption of new technology is generally considered a young-person thing, but maybe Snap Specs will turn that notion on its head. Direct sales in retirement homes?  ★

NBC News: The Trump Mobile T1 phone, originally marketed as “Made in the USA,” is nearly identical to the two-year-old HTC U24 Pro, a phone made by the Taiwanese company HTC using Chinese parts, according to a technical analysis the repair-guide and parts company iFixit conducted in partnership with NBC News. That report is paywalled, but NBC News’s five-minute video is on YouTube, and iFixit has a full teardown report of their own. The only thing that’s surprising is that the Trump T1 doesn’t c [more]

The Wall Street Journal on Monday: Fox Corp. said it is acquiring Roku in a deal valued at around $25 billion, making a major bet on the future of ad-supported streaming. The deal — Fox’s largest to date — brings together a media company known for its live news and sports programming with the biggest provider of streaming platforms for connected TVs. It will add scale to Fox’s streaming business, currently home to free, ad-supported streaming service Tubi, which the company bought for $400 milli [more]

“They’re about power, aren’t they, and the bloody powerful blokes who wear them.” Maybe I’m all wet and these things are stylish, no matter what they do to your ears.  ★

“Hey buddy, nice frames.” Seinfeld’s father tried them out too.  ★

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

Re: my post on Verizon flat-out admitting their business practices have resembled a scheme from Dr. Evil, Domino’s did something similar regarding their pizza a while back. This 2021 story for Inc. by Jeff Haden describes the turnaround.  ★

Verizon has sprung for a new ad campaign set in the Austin Powers world, with four stars from the cast — Mike Myers, of course, as Dr. Evil; Rob Lowe as Number Two (Robert Wagner is alive but is 96); Seth Green as Evil’s son Scott, and Mindy Sterling as Frau Farbissina — and director Jay Roach. The premise of the two-minute spot is that Dr. Evil is proposing “Menace Mobile”, a wireless carrier with confusing pricing and plans. Scott pooh-poohs the idea on the grounds that “This isn’t evil. This [more]

The Side That Won the Civil War is Now Banning Books About Why the Civil War Was Fought. “It is a well-known feature of civil society that nervous middle managers often act far more radically than top executives out of a sense of self-preservation.”

Record winter temperatures in Antarctic raise fears over speed of climate breakdown. “This is absolutely crazy. It is also about 20C above normal for this time of the year. That is a huge anomaly.”

As the World Cup gets underway here in the Americas, here’s a look back at a football battle for the ages: Germany vs. Greece in The Philosophers’ Football Match. Germany’s lineup included Nietzsche , Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Marx while the likes of Plato, Socrates, Sophocles, and Archimedes took the field for Greece. Hegel is arguing that reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant — via the categorical imperative — is holding that ontologically, it exists only [more]

Usually when I link to a new app, it’s something that I find useful personally. Cotypist is something else. It’s an AI-powered autocomplete utility for the Mac, using on-device models and processing, by developer Daniel Gräfe of Accelerated Thought. It is very well-designed, and remarkably Mac-assed (right down to where it stores its local data and AI models). It respects your privacy and all the best conventions of MacOS. Cotypist suggests a few words ahead of your insertion point at a time, an [more]

“The prevailing emotions among scientists right now are rage and shock.” U.S. Science Is in Chaos. “This compact that has existed since World War II, that made the U.S. the successful, prosperous nation that it is, is being dismantled.”

The Founding Story Behind Japan’s Oldest Whisky Maker. “Success in the Japanese market required a lighter, more delicate flavor profile than Western spirits typically offered.” And so Suntory was born.

Twice in the Earth’s history, massive ranges of supermountains have formed on ancient continents. Studies like these point to something we do know for sure: from the highest peaks to the smallest cells, geology and biology are deeply intertwined. And while it’s often said that we are stardust — built from elements forged in the hearts of dying stars — in a sense, we also might be supermountain dust. They were perhaps as tall or taller than Everest but their distinguishing feature was their ma [more]

Due to FIFA’s poor security practices, this person stumbled into their wide-open broadcast portal w/ full access. “An attacker could have rickrolled the entire FIFA World Cup. Or played Subway Surfers gameplay. Live. On every TV network worldwide.”

Apple Developer: Later this summer, Apple will unify the email domains used by Sign in with Apple and iCloud+ Hide My Email under a single, shared domain: private.icloud.com. New addresses generated for both features will be issued on the new domain. For example: Sign in with Apple addresses, previously issued on privaterelay.appleid.com, will be issued on private.icloud.com. iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses, previously issued on icloud.com, will be issued on private.icloud.com. Existing add [more]

Brent Simmons, writing at Inessential: My hope for retirement was to get a lot of work done on NetNewsWire. A year ago it was in sore need of modernization, tech debt pay-off, and bug fixes. People were asking for features, but the foundation needed a ton of work before I could get on to adding new rooms. Here are some highlights of what we’ve done with 2,188 commits in the past year. NetNewsWire was already one of my favorite, most-used, most indispensable apps. Now it’s much better and improvi [more]

CNBC, two days ago: In November, Cursor said it crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue, according to a release at the time. Cursor was also ranked at No. 37 on the annual CNBC Disruptor 50 list in 2026. The $60 billion in class A common stock that SpaceX has agreed to pay to acquire Cursor represented a 3.4% dilution at the aerospace and tech conglomerate’s IPO valuation. Shares of SpaceX gained roughly 16% on Tuesday, topping Amazon and Microsoft by market cap and making it the fourth most va [more]

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has given away half a billion dollars against a backdrop “where a growing number of billionaires are lashing out against philanthropy”.

Inspired by Ukraine, and Worried by China: Taiwan Teaches Its Citizens How to Fly Drones. “I may not be a soldier, but if [a China invasion] ever happened here, as a citizen, I’d like to have the ability to help in some way.”

Rolfe Winkler, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Apple plans to raise prices on its products to offset the surging costs of memory and storage chips, Chief Executive Tim Cook said in an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal. “Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainab [more]

Assume You Will Be Hacked. “As AI tools have become extremely good at writing code, they’ve also become extremely good at pulling off cyberattacks. The result has been a change in the scale, speed, and sophistication of hacks…”

Why Lionel Messi is a genius on the football pitch.

Jay Peters, The Verge (gift link): Snap is finally launching augmented glasses for the public. Specs, which Snap describes as “a wearable computer built into see-through augmented reality glasses,” will cost $2,195. You can preorder a pair of Specs now at specs.com with a $200 refundable deposit, and Snap says they’re expected to ship “this fall” in the US, UK, and France. [...] The company says that Specs are “fully standalone, with no puck and no tether.” (Which is perhaps a jab at Apple’s Vis [more]

Thomas Ricker, writing for The Verge: I’ll just work from the car, I thought. But after a few minutes of staring at my screen on quick mountain switchbacks I could feel the first signs of cold, coagulated nausea bubbling up from that sweaty place in my gut. I looked to the horizon for relief, but nothing helped... until I remembered Apple’s magic dots. Introduced in 2024, Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues promise to tap into your device’s accelerometer and gyroscope to reduce or, in my case, even elim [more]

This is kind of fantastic: Ribbie lets you watch actual MLB baseball games “rendered pitch by pitch in a cozy 8-bit view while they happen”. Ribbie is a simple way to keep a live baseball game nearby. It shows the score, the bases, the count, and a tiny pixel field that moves with the real game. I built it because I wanted something between a stats tab and a full broadcast. Something you can leave open while you work, cook, or do whatever else, then glance over and know what is happening. The [more]

Full set of Underworld playing live at EDC Las Vegas back in May.

A digital clock where the numbers are made from dozens of analog clock hands. Hard to describe…just go take a look.

On his YouTube channel, Thomas Whichello reads interesting literature aloud, often in the original languages, dialects, or accents, with the goal of making “classic works intelligible and enjoyable to everybody”. One of his most popular videos is his recitation of book 1 of the Iliad in Ancient Greek. In the translation for this video, I have attempted to follow the emphasis, division of thought, and order of ideas of the original, as well as its turn of phrase, as closely as the English idiom w [more]

Read to the end for some really good Backrooms fan art

The Black Jeopardy Misses YouTube channel catalogs just how little Jeopardy contestants know about Black history, culture, and celebrities. (See also, of course, Black Jeopardy, which drives home a similar point in a different way.)

For the first time in hundreds of years, two collections of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks have been brought together online at the Leonardotheka. In some cases, pages that were cut apart centuries ago have been digitally joined so we can see the full pages again, as Leonardo drew and wrote them. From the press release: Marking the culmination of a 10-year project in collaboration with Royal Collection Trust, Windsor, the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, and the Biblioteca Leonardiana in V [more]

MacBreak Weekly: John Gruber of Daring Fireball joins the MacBreak Weekly panel this week! A deep dive into Apple’s new Siri following WWDC. Why Apple Intelligence & the new Siri are not coming to the EU initially later this year. And could the iPhone Ultra’s launch be delayed this year? It’s fun to be the guest, not the host, of a podcast. I took Jason Snell’s usual panelist spot this week, alongside Leo Laporte, Andy Ihnatko, and Christina Warren. Lots to cover, including a week of real-life e [more]

David Pierce, host of The Vergecast: So where did Markdown come from? It came from John Gruber. John joins the show, along with Anil Dash, to tell the story of where Markdown came from and how it took over the world. Markdown has been growing steadily for years, but it’s seen a step change in popularity now that it’s been embraced as the lingua franca of LLM agentic systems. I had an interesting all-too-brief chat last week in Cupertino with some people from Apple’s developer tools team about ho [more]

A searchable archive of the almost 5000 TV episodes that naturalist David Attenborough has worked on in his career (1954-present). “Search by animal, habitat, location, natural phenomenon, or theme to find exactly the episode you’re looking for.”

Before making his revolutionary documentary film The Thin Blue Line, filmmaker Errol Morris worked as a private detective. His detective skills came in handy not only in making the film but in actually solving the crime at the heart of the story and freeing an innocent man from a prison life sentence. The Thin Blue Line (1988) not only exposed a miscarriage of justice and freed an innocent man from prison, but created a new genre of movies and forever changed the way Americans view their own jus [more]

Andrea Pitzer writes about the forced labor happening in Trump’s immigrant concentration camps and its roots in chattel slavery in the US and in Nazi & Soviet work camps.

Proposed UI rule of thumb: “If I take a screenshot of your app at any moment, it must make sense.”

Yours truly, in September 2024, expressing skepticism that “European iPhones are more fun now”: Meanwhile no one in the EU will get Apple Intelligence or iPhone Mirroring, both of which features are very useful, and, dare I say, quite fun. Should we judge how much fun each side of the continental divide is having by how much fun they theoretically could be having, or by how much fun they are having? As it stands, the fun side is not the EU. But hope springs eternal. Here we are two years later a [more]

And yes, AI is a factor. Replika and Wabi founder Eugenia Kuyda on how advances in coding changed her hiring calculus

Is this the sloppiest AI slop video of all time? The AI-generated voiceover (at ~6:45) gets tripped up saying “what WWE” and basically sings Daisy Bell for more than 10 minutes until someone kicks the server.

If I lived in LA, I would go to this concert at the Hollywood Bowl: Music From the Films of Wes Anderson. “Over three nights, musicians including Beck, Jenny Lewis, Jackson Browne, and Mothersbaugh himself perform favorite songs, scores…”

Disclosure Day surely sets a world record for the number of Spielberg Faces.

In this modified scene from Breaking Bad, Walter White’s hat grows in proportion to his ego. YT commenter: “He was just brimming with confidence.” Could be time for a BB rewatch. (via @ernie.tedium.co) Tags: Breaking Bad · remix · TV · video

“Film posters inadvertently photographed by [British] postwar town planners.” Includes posters for Help!, Shaft, Dr. No, Planet of the Apes, and many more.

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch: This week, Apple announced a series of discovery features that will personalize app recommendations based on users’ interests and behavior, providing a new way for developers to have their app discovered. At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), the iPhone maker introduced Personalized Collections in the App Store, which will showcase recommendations tailored to the individual. These will also include new “App Notes” that explain why the specific ap [more]

“If Platner’s past rhetoric about and treatment of women are the natural price of running a working class candidate, isn’t the implication that working class men by nature mistreat the women in their lives?”

A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky — for everyone on Earth. They already have 10K satellites in orbit and they want to add a million more. 🥴

Marconi Union, which you might remember for creating the most relaxing song in the world, has released a new album: Multiforms: Ambient Transmissions, Vol. 3. You can watch the visual album on YouTube or stream it from a variety of sources. This went straight into my Underscore collection. Tags: Marconi Union

The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech. Like: “4. Please, please stop asking me to verify my humanity by clicking on tiny motorcycles.” and “35. To Mark Zuckerberg, specifically: Shut up about the Roman Empire.”

Commodore (you know, the 64 folks) is releasing a flip phone. “No social media, no browser. Runs 99% of Android apps (without Android). T9-style texting adds mindful friction. Audiophile grade HD Audio.”

Video is a boatload of data. Every video file in your product contains audio, objects, and scenes that most stacks can’t read or access. Mux Robots turns that data into video intelligence. Configure your video workflows once, and they run automatically on every new upload: ask questions, summarize, find key moments, and more. No asset webhooks or self-hosted glue code needed. Mux is video infrastructure for developers, trusted by Synthesia, Shopify, and the U.S. Soccer Federation. Start building [more]

The Washington Post editorial board yesterday (News+ link), “Why Europe Won’t Have the New Siri”: Brussels insists the decision is “Apple’s and Apple’s only” and that nothing in its flagship Digital Markets Act forbids the launch. That’s technically true and wholly beside the point. The law requires that the moment Siri AI ships in Europe, any rival AI agent must get the same sweeping access to a user’s messages, files and chat history. Apple proposed putting in a software security layer to make [more]

How The Heck Do Solar Panels Work? “Every hour, the Earth receives enough sunlight to power all of human civilization for a year. It arrives silently, from all directions, at no cost.”

Mad Max creator George Miller wants to make one more Mad Max movie and a TV series before calling it quits.

Randomly thought of Brendan Dassey today. He’s still serving out his life sentence for, IMO, having absolutely nothing to do with the murder at the center of Netflix’s Making a Murderer.

The SpaceX IPO Is A Giant Unworkable Con Orchestrated By An Overt White Supremacist Huckster. “He’s endlessly mythologized by a shitty corporate press, eager to ignore his virulent racism & financial fraud bc he’s accumulated obscene amounts of money.”

Read to the end for a really good World Cup fan

Rockwood, Texas is home to a unique business, Starfront Observatories. Owner/operator Bray Falls hosts hundreds of other people’s telescopes in perfect conditions — ultra-dark skies (Class 1 on the Bortle scale), clear weather, and fast internet — so astrophotographers from around the world can run their scopes and make observations completely from their computers. Out in the middle of nowhere Texas, a young astrophotographer is running one of the largest telescope ranches on Earth. Stargazers [more]

Ryan Whitham, writing for Ars Technica back in April: European regulators are proposing several broad changes to the way AI tools operate on Android phones. Some of this is straightforward, like allowing third-party AI tools to be invoked system-wide via hot words or button presses. This might also include allowing AI tools to view screen context when the user opens them. Context also extends to allowing alternative AI systems to access local data to generate proactive suggestions and summaries. [more]

How to get out of bed. “There is no 28 point shot in basketball. The only way to come back from a 27 point deficit is one shot at a time. Two points here. Two points there. A few three pointers sprinkled in.”

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week to promote Auth.md, their new open protocol for AI agent registration. Sign-up forms were built for humans in browsers, so how do AI agents programmatically register with services? That’s the question Auth.md aims to answer. By exposing a single, machine-readable Markdown file at your service root, AI agents can dynamically discover your OAuth Protected Resource Metadata, parse required scopes, and authenticate seamlessly. Markdown, baby. Who’d hav [more]

DJ Shadow and the BBC Symphony Orchestra will be performing a “collaborative reimagination for orchestra” of his seminal album Endtroducing… in December. Tickets are already sold out, but there will be a recording!

Ben Thompson, in his weekly free column at Stratechery: On one hand, I actually don’t begrudge Anthropic not wanting to help its competitors; on the other hand, what should be blisteringly clear is that Anthropic does not think that anyone else other than them should even be making frontier LLMs. What makes this policy all the more remarkable is the fact that it was enacted only two months after Anthropic had that dispute with the Department of War: the latter wanted to use Claude for any legal [more]

Matthew Butterick is a lawyer, programmer, writer, and designer. He’s written a long, interesting piece about the inherent risks of AI called Extinction-Level Capitalism. It is well-worth a read; I’ve excerpted several passages here but urge you read the whole thing. In prac­tice, certain people in a capi­talist liberal democ­racy tend to get increas­ingly rich. Absent coun­ter­mea­sures, the wealthy gain control of the polit­ical appa­ratus, thwarting liberal-demo­c­ratic norms. This tension be [more]

Paul McCartney on Song Exploder. I think he was with The Beatles at some point?

Artist Claire Salvo has painted the starting five of the world champion NY Knicks on a set of US one dollar bills. If you’re in NYC, you may have seen these cheekily pasted up around the city. She’s selling a print of all five bills but is also auctioning off the hand-painted originals. The auction ends in a bit more than 4 days and the top bid currently stands at $3200. See also: The Harriet Tubman $20 Stamp and a discussion of whether such modification of US currency is legal or not. [more]

Sports but make it wealth inequality: “Brunson…didn’t take an extra $113M so the Knicks could sign KAT, Mikal Bridges and keep OG long term… It’s almost as if sharing wealth leads to better outcomes for all…”

Jonathan Edwards reporting for The Washington Post: President Donald Trump’s name is off the Kennedy Center. Crews at the performing arts venue started removing it from the front of the building around 3 a.m., several hours after the center missed a federal judge’s two-week deadline to do so. The judge had ruled that the decision by the center’s board of trustees to rename it was illegal. A perfect metaphor for the work ahead of us.  ★

From Apple’s Developer site: To ensure getting started with a large cloud model is as accessible as possible, developers in the App Store Small Business Program with fewer than two million first time App Store downloads will be able to use Apple Foundation Models running on Private Cloud Compute (PCC) with no cloud API cost. The model provides access to frontier level intelligence with unparalleled privacy protections. This makes it easy for small developers to get started building intelligent a [more]

Anthropic: The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected. We received the directive from the governme [more]

Recorded in front of a live audience at The California Theatre in San Jose on Tuesday 9 June 2026, special guests Joanna Stern and Nilay Patel join John Gruber to discuss Apple’s announcements at WWDC 2026. Immersive 3D video with spatial audio: Coming soon, exclusively in Sandwich Vision’s Theater on Vision Pro, available on the App Store. The bandwidth-constrained immersive livestream Tuesday night looked cool; the on-demand version coming in a few days will look amazing. Audio-only version: [more]

The world’s first trillionaire is a killer. “A year ago, Musk’s actions directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He did it knowingly. And, worse — gleefully.”

Two competing (?) thoughts kept going through my head while reading this: “Not even a celeb like Emily Ratajkowski can find a decent man to date” and “A celeb like Emily Ratajkowski especially can’t find a decent man to date”.

Read to the end for a good song

Apple’s Developer app lets you download local copies of every session, including the State of the Union, except the keynote. Why this is I don’t know. But if you want a local copy, you can grab it from YouTube. Speaking of the State of the Union, the full version runs just over an hour, but Apple cut together a 4.5-minute recap. If you haven’t watched the full thing you should at least watch that recap.  ★

Joe “Handyman” Negri, a Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood fixture, has died at age 99. “He really was like the friendly fellow you might find walking around a neighborhood. He was just incredibly gentle as a person, but also as a musician.”

Thomas Regnier, spokesperson for the European Commission, in a statement posted to LinkedIn (with edited video, if you’d like to watch him read parts aloud): What is the true story behind Apple’s decision not to roll out “Siri AI” in the EU? This decision is Apple’s and Apple’s only. Because absolutely nothing in the DMA prohibits Apple from rolling out new features in the EU. Yes, the European Commission and Apple had a few contacts on “Siri AI”. But instead of offering a compliant solution, Ap [more]

US Authorities Investigate Huge Etching of ‘8647’ on National Mall Grounds. Bwahaha. Make it a new US National Treasure. An Interior Dept. spokeperson hyperbolically called it a “threat against the president”. 🙄

David Hockney, iconic British artist known for his colorful landscapes and pool scenes, dies at 88. “His work is admired — loved is not too strong a word — by the millions who, worldwide, flock to see it because it presupposes an expectation of pleasure.”

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

Highlights from Hard Fork Live, including Figma CEO Dylan Field on why design isn’t dead

Apple Newsroom, in an Apple Newsroom post Monday: According to EU regulators, the DMA requires Apple to give any AI system nearly unlimited access to a user’s device, as well as the ability to act on that access autonomously without a user’s ongoing visibility and control. That includes the ability to read and send messages, make purchases, access files, and execute actions across any app. Security researchers have already shown that AI systems can be hijacked to steal personal data — like passw [more]

Ian’s Shoelace Site Is Still The Best Site For Tying Your Shoes. However: “What is the point of adding value to the internet if it is only going to rob you? Why do research, make diagrams, and develop new knots?”

Steven Spielberg, on The Rest Is Entertainment on YouTube: I approached Cubby Broccoli after Jaws was a big hit. I’d always wanted to make a James Bond film from the day I saw Dr. No, so I called Cubby after Jaws and volunteered. I said, “If you need a director, I would love to direct one.” And he said no. And he moved on. And then Cubby called me again after Close Encounters came out. And that was a big hit. And Cubby called me a few years after Close Encounters and said, “We’d like to use the [more]

“This song has no instruments in it.” This is cool: a song made only from pink noise and an equalizer.

This is clever & depressing: the Apocalypse Early Warning System tracks private jet activity. “In the event of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies…”

For his great visual field guide to the chili peppers of the world, Erik Gauger hand-drew 176 peppers from India, South America, Korea, Thailand, Africa, and seemingly every other place on the Earth. Capsaicin, the compound that makes chili peppers hot is an evolutionary filter designed to punish mammals and reward birds. Mammals feel it as pain because mammal digestion destroys seeds. Birds don’t have the receptor that detects it, so they eat the fruit, fly off, and deposit the seeds far from t [more]

John Thomson’s photos of China (1860s-70s). “Unlike many other early photographers he didn’t spend all his time photographing palaces and ruins. He also captured a lot of daily life including peasants, merchants, and criminals.”

A close-up look at some of Spain’s oldest & most compelling cave paintings. “We lost the connection they had to this world. They led the way quite nicely and successfully, and we got…distracted.”

For the first time on record, solar overtook coal in the US electricity mix in May 2026. “Solar supplied a record 12.8% of US electricity, while coal fell to 12.2%, its fourth-lowest monthly share ever.”

Released a few days ago, this is the official video for Max Cooper’s Becoming, directed by Brandon Eversole. It’s mesmerizing, trippy, and a little bit glitchy. The video is also notable for being so wide that it breaks YouTube’s desktop layout — anything less than stretching my browser window to the edges of my screen and I can’t read the left-most text under the video. Tags: Brandon Eversole · Max Cooper · mesmerizing · music · video

“It’s so dumb!” I quote this line from Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion like 10 times a day now. Feel free to add it to your repetoire.

Billionaires’ Billions Are Increasing Faster Than Ever. 15 years ago, billionaires had $4.5 trillion. “Now, their combined wealth totals $20.1 trillion — an amount that is equivalent to nearly a fifth of the entire world’s total yearly output.”

Chance Miller, at 9to5Mac on Monday: Apple’s Siri team, led by Craig Federighi, held a post-WWDC keynote tech talk with members of the press this afternoon to talk through iOS 27 and the new Siri AI. During the talk, Federighi shared more details about Apple’s collaboration with Google. Federighi was joined by Amar Subramanya (vice president of AI), Mike Rockwell (Siri lead), and Sebastien Marineau-Mes (software VP). On the Google collaboration, Federighi explained: Of course, we don’t have the [more]

Perhaps the worst UI crime in MacOS 26 Tahoe was the inexplicable decision to add inscrutable, distracting icons next to every item in the menu bar. You will recall Jim Nielsen writing about it, rightly describing it as exactly the sort of thing that Mac users look down upon in platforms like Google Docs and Windows. You will also recall Nikita “Tonsky” Prokopov writing about it, illustrating that the bad idea wasn’t even implemented well, with different Apple apps using entirely different icons [more]

The White House’s Top Science Goal Is Ignorance. “The actions are seen as a deliberate attempt to stifle science and ignore the reality of climate change, in order to support the fossil-fuel industry and satisfy the climate denialism of Trump’s base.”

Oof, what a beauty. In the 1960s, four Porsche 912s were customized for use as police cars in Japan. This one, which was used in Kanagawa until 1973, is the only one left standing (and even it needed restoration). This Japanese police 912 served in Kanagawa Prefecture from 1968 to 1973, operating on the Daisan Keihin and Tomei Expressways. Over five years of service, it covered more than 155,000km and even played a role in stopping a speeder traveling at 178 km/h.⁠ ⁠Police vehicles are usually s [more]

Read to the end for AAA Mario with full voice acting

Brookings Institution researcher Molly Kinder on why she's leaving her job to create solution for AI's "messy middle." PLUS: Claude Fable arrives

Rishi Ó: My favorite Apple updates are not the flashy new features, but the quiet little touches: annoyances fixed, workflows made smoother, rough edges sanded down, and longstanding flaws thoughtfully reworked. To me, they’re the clearest sign of a company that cares about its craft. Here’s a collection from a WWDC26 screen-grab, organized for easier reading, on improvements coming later this year. That’s a lot of bullet points.  ★

If you can make it in person, you should come. The California Theater is a beautiful big theater and tickets are still available. You can also watch tonight’s show in live stereoscopic immersive in the Theater app from Sandwich Vision on Vision Pro. A purchase of the ticket to the live show, the Theater app for $12.99, is also good for replay forever — with surprise bonus features included. It’s a fun, truly immersive way to experience the show. Hope to see you there tonight, one way or the othe [more]

A brisk 76 minutes, including the post-credits Easter egg music video. The past few years ran about a half hour longer.  ★

Julie Bort, TechCrunch: But the most telling detail wasn’t what Apple announced. It was how it chose to show some things off. Many of the Apple Intelligence demoes featured someone standing, phone in hand, pressing buttons or using voice commands in real time, while another camera showed off the phone’s response. These weren’t live onstage, anything-could-go wrong demos; they were pre-taped. But they looked far more like proof of working features than what Apple showed at WWDC 2024, when the com [more]

Apple Newsroom yesterday: This new version of Siri is built on Apple Intelligence, allowing Siri to draw on personal context understanding and help users find what they need in the moment across messages, emails, photos, and more. For example, users can ask Siri to find a restaurant recommendation a friend messaged them about, surface a hotel confirmation number from an old email, or pull up photos with friends and family from a recent trip. And personal context understanding extends to third-pa [more]

Apple Newsroom: These new capabilities are powered by the next generation of Apple Foundation Models, custom-built in collaboration with Google and its Gemini models for deeply integrated Apple Intelligence experiences. These latest models run on device and on servers using Private Cloud Compute. Every facet of the new Apple Intelligence architecture is built privacy-first, from the latest Apple Foundation Models to the core operating system technologies that integrate these models deep into App [more]

Sign-up forms were built for humans in browsers, so how do AI agents programmatically register with services? Enter auth.md. By exposing a single, machine-readable Markdown file at your service root, AI agents can dynamically discover your OAuth Protected Resource Metadata, parse required scopes, and authenticate seamlessly. With native support in WorkOS AuthKit, you can now implement this protocol out of the box, giving AI tools a standardized, secure way to log into your application. Read the [more]

Mark Gurman, reporting (?) for Bloomberg two short months ago: Apple Inc. plans to open Siri to outside artificial intelligence assistants, a major move aimed at bolstering the iPhone as an AI platform. The company is preparing to make the change as part of a Siri overhaul in its upcoming iOS 27 operating system update, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The assistant can already tap into ChatGPT through a partnership with OpenAI, but Apple will now allow competing services to do [more]

Read to the end for an important update from the tunnel woman

My thanks to Mux for sponsoring last week at DF. Mux is what developers reach for when they need to do more with video. Video files are packed with data and context waiting to be unlocked. Mux Robots are AI workflows that unlock that data inside your video for summarization, caption translation, moderation, and more. Configure once and your workflows run automatically on new uploads. Mux is video infrastructure trusted by Patreon, Substack, and Synthesia. Start building for free. Use code FIREBA [more]

Paulo Andrade, last month, “Using SwiftUI to Build a Mac-Assed App in 2026”: I recently launched the macOS version of Shopie, an app I first released on the iOS App Store late last year. Shopie helps you keep track of products you’re interested in by letting you create wishlists and notifying you whenever a product’s price, availability, and other details change. Unlike my other apps, where I typically blend AppKit (or UIKit) with SwiftUI, Shopie is built entirely in SwiftUI. I wanted to keep it [more]

Alberto Romero: AI is like religion. Either you believe it changes everything, or you don’t believe at all. There is no moderate position; nobody believes in AGI “more or less,” just like nobody is “casually religious.” If God exists, the only coherent response is to reorganize your entire life around that fact, as priests do. If you pray sometimes, then you are just an atheist who’s also fearful. When tech companies spend hundreds of billions on capital expenditures to add sparkly AI features t [more]

Here's your Garbage Intelligence for May 2026

After hundreds of users submitted public comments, the board says it's clear the company has a problem

Read to the end for a good Bluesky post

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

Labor economist Kathryn Anne Edwards isn't worried AI will create a new class of permanently idle Americans — but argues it's still time for the government to fix the social safety net

Read to the end for some good journalism

Please enjoy this article on its own webpage. Trust me.

Read to the end for a good cat meme

After months of uncertainty, the company's oversight body has a new lifeline

A trip to Zambia (temporarily) gone awry

Read to the end for a good Drake song

Anthropic's Boris Cherny tells me major job loss due to automation really is coming — but job creation is, too. PLUS: the Pope's AI encyclical, and Trump abandons an AI executive order

Read to the end for succulent Chinese wheels

The 13 circuits of the U.S. federal courts of appeals operate with a fair amount of independence, including their typographic choices. I was reminded of this today while reading the aforelinked decision from the Ninth Circuit in Epic v. Apple, because the Ninth Circuit sets their decisions in Times New Roman — a font that came up back in December in the context of the Trump State Department. Long argument short, Times New Roman isn’t bad, but it isn’t good. It is the median choice. But most of t [more]

At Google I/O, new features bring AI agents into the inbox and YouTube in ways that further strain the relationship between publishers and platforms

Read to the end for a fascinating update from Reddit’s BDSM community

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

Tasks are getting easier to automate — jobs aren't. What now?

Musk vows to appeal; the judge vows to throw that case out, too

Read to the end for a good Drake song

Steven Levy, writing for Wired last month after Apple’s CEO transition was announced, under the provocative headline “Apple’s Next CEO Needs to Launch a Killer AI Product” (News+ link to get around Wired’s miserly paywall): Much more recently, I quizzed Ternus and global marketing head Greg Joswiak about Apple’s future, specifically its plans to get ahead of the AI transformation. Ternus acknowledged that AI is “an immense kind of inflection point,” but couched it as one of many leaps that Apple [more]

Read to the end for the banana bread dance

A new report says X is resurgent — but it may be missing the bigger picture

Read to the end for a really good casserole recipe.

And you're getting a free month!

In the first episode of the Platformer podcast, Box CEO Aaron Levie makes the case that you'll keep your job — but soon, you might not recognize it

Read to the end for an Australian town everyone on Reddit agrees is haunted

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

Read to the end for a very good otter video

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

Elon Musk had lots of reasons to make a deal with Anthropic — but he wouldn’t have done it if he were ahead. PLUS: The incredible testimony of Shivon Zilis, and a big new study on school phone bans

Read to the end for a really good video from Ryan’s home town

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

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

Roundup 05/03/2026

Plus, a recap of stories you missed in April 2026

A Read Max re-run

A little state of the union

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

Roundup 04/27/2026

A message to the Apple faithful

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 […]

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

Roundup 04/20/2026

PLUS: Has Forum Brain crossed the gender divide?

Roundup 04/14/2026

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

Video of our conversation from Night of IDeas

11 books to get your brain moving through the spring

Roundup 04/06/2026

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

Plus, all the tech news you missed in March 2026

Roundup 03/29/2026

A Read Max re-run

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

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

What you missed in February 2026

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

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

Your recap of January 2026 and an update on my relationship with digital tech

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, […]

Art director Antonio Alcalá, one of four art directors employed by the USPS, talks a little bit about the history behind US postage stamps and how they are designed and produced. [This is a vintage post originally from Dec 2016.] Tags: Antonio Alcala · design · stamps · USPS · video