This Github project from Ankur Gupta allows you to “generate beautiful, minimalist map posters for any city in the world”. There are a variety of different themes you can choose from and the resulting images are big enough to print out actual posters (20-inch height maximum). You can install the Python scripts on your computer or use this website (which seems quite slow). Also, I wonder if the height/width minimums can be changed to output bigger posters? Tags: Ankur [more]

The full trailer for The Devil Wears Prada 2. The pitch perfection of Miranda completely forgetting Andy gives me hope that this will be a worthy sequel. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Been thinking a lot about this Ted Chiang quote recently: “I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Vibe-coding gone wild. “Stories of family groceries delivered to data centers, and “world burnt bacon day” became memes — and resulted in class-action lawsuits against kitchen appliance manufacturers like Breville, Viking, and Cusinart.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A collection of thousands of photographs of NYC restaurants (2002-2008) taken by Noah Kalina. Quite an archive of interior design from that era. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A couple of weeks ago, AI company Anthropic published the constitution that they use to train their Claude LLM (“under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Deed, meaning it can be freely used by anyone for any purpose without asking for permission”). From the company’s news release: We’re publishing a new constitution for our AI model, Claude. It’s a detailed description of Anthropic’s vision for Claude’s values and behavior; a holistic document that explains the context in which Claude operates and the [more]

The Case of the Green Covers is a risograph-printed zine that documents the history of the “Green Penguins”, “a series of hundreds of crime novels published with green covers by the UK publisher Penguin in the 1960s”. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Podcast interview with two photojournalists who have been covering ICE in Minnesota. “It’s a conversation about what they’ve seen, the vital role of photojournalism at this moment, and the personal toll of doing this work.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Haven’t watched this 90-minute video yet, but I’ve seen so many recommendations for it that I’m posting it as a to-do list item for myself: You are being misled about renewable energy technology. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A group of 50 Chileans recently spent several hours powering a human-operated chatbot. Some questions were answered quickly but “when they didn’t know the answer, they walked around the room to see if someone else did”. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Late last week, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello led a crowd gathered at the iconic First Avenue music venue in a spirited rendition of the band’s Killing In the Name. The band handled the music while the crowd, in the absence of Rage frontman Zack De La Rocha, sang the lyrics. Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses How many ICE/BPD/DHS officers marched in Charlottesville, assaulted Congress on Jan 6, and/or are Proud Boy/Stormfront members, I wonder? (They’re t [more]

The Border Patrol Is the Problem. It Always Has Been. “If you are uncomfortable with what the Border Patrol is doing in Minneapolis, you are uncomfortable with the Border Patrol, full stop.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Elon Musk and other internet racists started an internet war over Christopher Nolan’s casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, thereby immediately disproving their point. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Early this month, a wily coyote swam across San Francisco Bay to Alcatraz. He was in such rough shape, observers thought he’d probably die, but he’s been snacking on birds and rodents and was recently observed fat as a pickle. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

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

For his 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson enlisted Brazilian musical artist Seu Jorge to perform several of David Bowie’s songs in Portuguese. Jorge released an album of the songs about a year or so later. A few weeks ago, to mark the 10th anniversary of Bowie’s death, Jorge released a hour-long set of him performing those songs: Just an acoustic guitar, a microphone, and the beautiful coastline of São Paulo. Tags: movies · music · Seu Jorge · T [more]

The Accidental Winners of the War on Higher Ed. “Well-resourced and prestigious small colleges are less exposed in almost every way to the crises that higher ed faces.” (My kid goes to a liberal arts school & anecdotally can confirm.) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A recent paper in Nature details what scientists found at the Huayuan biota: Here we report the Huayuan biota — a lower Cambrian (Stage 4, approximately 512 million years ago) BST Lagerstätte from an outer shelf, deep-water setting of the Yangtze Block in Hunan, South China. The Huayuan biota yields remarkable taxonomic richness, comprising 153 animal species of 16 phylum-level clades dominated by arthropods, poriferans and cnidarians, among which 59% of species are new. The biota is comprised [more]

Culinary Students Given Live Baby To Learn How To Care For Bag Of Flour. I laughed so hard at this. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

During an exhibition, Japanese volleyball player Yuji Nishida hit a courtside judge in the back with an errant serve. He immediately sprinted across the court and dove prostrate in apology. The gesture was a sort of sliding dogeza: Even in a country where a sincere apology can go a long way, Nishida’s mea culpa was an extreme example. The most extravagant form in Japanese culture is the dogeza, which can also be used to express deep respect. When used as an apology, the person in the wrong pro [more]

As part of their coursework, students at UC Berkeley are contributing edits to Wikipedia about “LGBTQ+ history, with an emphasis on queer and trans people of color”. They’ve added 300,000+ edits and 3,000+ citations. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

The Schoolchildren of Minneapolis. “As thousands of ICE agents arrived, kids started staying home from school. A local principal, teachers, and parent volunteers have banded together to keep the families safe.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Autocratic backfire: when dictators construct echo chambers, overestimate their abilities, and dismiss their adversaries’ capabilities, leading to weakening or ruin. Examples: Mussolini, Putin, and now (hopefully) Trump. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Darren Aronofsky’s AI Studio Used Artificial Intelligence Tools for Revolutionary War Animated Series. Interesting use of “animated” to mean “AI-generated photorealism”. I watched the trailer…everything looks vaguely plastic. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Do you know about the original vampire ending for Marty Supreme? (You heard me.) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Tim Burton on Catherine O’Hara: “Catherine’s so good, maybe too good. She works on levels that people don’t even know. I think she scares people because she operates at such high levels.” Loved her. RIP. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Roundup 02/02/2025

ProPublica: “The two federal immigration agents who fired on Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti are identified in government records as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and CBP officer Raymundo Gutierrez.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Another brutal Melania pan: “First Lady is a preening, scowling void of pure nothingness in this ghastly bit of propaganda” and “the vulgar, gilded lifestyle of the Trumps makes them look like…Hermann Göring’s staring up at his looted Monet”. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

When horrible people make bad art, the reviews are fun to read. Melania doc review: “Trump film is a gilded trash remake of The Zone of Interest” and “it’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality”. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

“The end of Temporary Protected Status has Holocaust survivors offering to hide Haitian staffers, according to the CEO of a senior-living center in Florida.” The CEO of the center: “That reminds me of Anne Frank.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Illustrator Chris Piascik has made several of his “Fuck ICE”/”No Kings” pieces available for free, high-res download. Print them out and use them for protest signs. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

On his Filatelia Grafica Instagram account, graphic designer Diego Bucciero shares some of his favorite postage stamps, with an emphasis on “iconography, form, typography and branding”. (via it’s nice that) Tags: design · Diego Bucciero · stamps 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

I learned two important pieces of news in this post: 1) Frozen OJ from concentrate as a product is being discontinued by major producers. 2) Beverage analysts refer to market share as “share of throat.” And I think that’s just lovely. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Apple Newsroom, yesterday: “Today, Apple is proud to report a remarkable, record-breaking quarter, with revenue of $143.8 billion, up 16 percent from a year ago and well above our expectations,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “iPhone had its best-ever quarter driven by unprecedented demand, with all-time records across every geographic segment, and Services also achieved an all-time revenue record, up 14 percent from a year ago. We are also excited to announce that our installed base now has more t [more]

Is it based or soy to kill yourself?

Maybe Trump is right and we should go to war against Denmark.  ★

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

Mike Swanson: What if your car worked like so many apps? You’re driving somewhere important…maybe running a little bit late. A few minutes into the drive, your car pulls over to the side of the road and asks: “How are you enjoying your drive so far?” Annoyed by the interruption, and even more behind schedule, you dismiss the prompt and merge back into traffic. A minute later it does it again. “Did you know I have a new feature? Tap here to learn more.” It blocks your speedometer with an overlay [more]

This guy built an autonomous flying umbrella (powered by drones) that automagically follows you around in the rain. (A possible counter to a personal raincloud?) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

For his Spurious Correlations project, Tyler Vigen compares data sets that are the very definition of “correlation is not causation”. For instance, the number of Walmart stores worldwide correlates very strongly with the current distance between the Earth & Saturn. Or Google searches for “avocado toast” closely tracks biomass power generated in the Philippines. Tags: infoviz · Tyler Vigen 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

When I wrote last week about the false narrative that iOS 26 is seeing bizarrely low adoption rates compared to previous years, I neglected one source: Apple itself. Apple’s Developer site publishes a page with iOS and iPadOS usage for devices that “transacted on the App Store”. The hitch is that they only seem to update those numbers twice a year — once right around now, and once again right before WWDC. As of today, those numbers are still from 4 June 2025. Last year, going from the Internet A [more]

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

Minnesota community leaders are calling for an “ICE Out” general strike and protests on Friday, January 30. “No work. No school. No shopping. Stop funding ICE.” KDO will be participating. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A huge collection of graphic design archives and resources, like The People’s Graphic Design Archive, Book Cover Archive, and Letterform Archive. This is great! 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

“There isn’t a lot of reliable information out there about how to buy a gas mask, especially for the specific purpose of living under state repression. But hopefully after reading this guide you’ll feel equipped to make an educated decision.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

For a project called Tag Clouds, street artist Mathieu Tremblin paints over graffiti tags and makes them more legible. The result looks like when Word says that the Hardkaze and Aerosol fonts are used in the document you’re trying to open but are missing from your computer and you click OK to replace them with whatever’s available. I think the font above is Arial, which is perfect. I also like this faux-watermark piece he did: [This is a vintage post originally from Jul 2016.] [more]

“AI skeptics need to update their priors: Plenty of cause for concern, plenty of room to hit these companies for unethical behavior, resource demands, etc, but we are so, so far past the era of ‘stochastic parrots’”. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Vimeo was recently acquired by a private equity firm and you know what comes next: Vimeo Lays Off ‘Most’ of Its Staff, Allegedly Includes ‘the Entire Video Team’. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Your Friends Are Still Acting Like Everything is Normal in America. What Do You Do? “The first obligation we all have is an epistemic one: It’s to know what kind of reality we are actually inhabiting.” (gift link) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Jeremy Fuster, reporting for TheWrap: But save for some theaters in Republican-heavy states, the film is unlikely to leave much of an impact at a slumping box office, with theatrical sources telling TheWrap that “Melania” is projected for an opening of around $3 million this weekend. That would put it below the last right-wing documentary, the Daily Wire-produced Matt Walsh film “Am I Racist?,” which opened to $4.5 million from 1,517 locations in September 2024, finishing with a $12.3 million to [more]

Nicole Sperling and Brooks Barnes, reporting for The New York Times: Amazon paid Ms. Trump’s production company $40 million for the rights to “Melania,” about $26 million more than the next closest bidder, Disney. The fee includes a related docuseries that is scheduled to air later this year. The budget for “Melania” is unknown, but documentaries that follow a subject for a limited amount of time usually cost less than $5 million to produce. The $35 million for marketing is 10 times what some ot [more]

Ged Maheux, The Iconfactory: This week we announced a new Kickstarter that’s aimed at expanding the game offerings of Ollie’s Arcade, the fun, ad-free retro gaming app we introduced back in 2023. Ollie’s Arcade has always been a great way to escape doomscrolling, even if just for a little while, and now we have an opportunity to bring these retro games to even more people on iOS. The Kickstarter aims to raise enough money to make all of the in-app purchase games in the app completely free for ev [more]

Defund Science, Distort Culture, Mock Education. “We have a very focused and intense effort across the board to set America back a generation, at least, for education, health, research, climate policy.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Thing I did not know I was looking for (but totally was): a deep dive into ASCII rendering. Super interesting! 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Adam Engst, back in November, at TidBITS: Did you know that, regardless of view, you can now swipe left on any call to reveal a blue clock icon that lets you create a reminder to call back in 1 hour, tonight, tomorrow, or at any custom time (below left, slightly doctored)? Reminders appear at the top of the Calls list and in your default Reminders list. You can also touch and hold a call associated with a contact to connect with them in other ways (below right), or touch and hold a call from an [more]

New Mac app by Mikey Clarke, and it’s just what it says on the tin: a “lovingly crafted Bluesky app designed and built just for the Mac”. I’ve been beta testing Aeronaut for months, and it’s the only interface to Bluesky I actually like. It’s a real Mac app — written mostly in AppKit, supporting all the right UI idioms and platform integrations. It’s not just the best Bluesky client I’ve seen, for any platform, but maybe the best new Mac app I’ve seen in years, period. Certainly the one whose ve [more]

Bruce Springsteen: I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Best line from the lyrics: Their claim was self-defense, Whistles, phones, and birds.  ★

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]

The gang at Present & Correct found a cache of pre-war tourist maps of Japan while rummaging around in Tokyo’s Jinbōchō used book district. They photographed them for a new self-published book called Paper Trails. Tags: books · design · Japan · maps · Paper Trails 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

The Copyrightability of Fonts Revisited by Matthew Butterick, a type designer & copy­right liti­gator. “If a court were asked to directly consider the copy­righta­bility of an ordi­nary digital font, it would likely rule in the nega­tive.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Clint Smith visits the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. “The goal of the sites is to force visitors to confront the violence of the past without the counterweight of a more uplifting narrative to assuage their distress.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Read to the end for a good Bluesky post

Tim Cook, in a company-wide memo (first published by Mark Gurman): Team, This is a time for deescalation. I believe America is strongest when we live up to our highest ideals, when we treat everyone with dignity and respect no matter who they are or where they’re from, and when we embrace our shared humanity. This is something Apple has always advocated for. I had a good conversation with the president this week where I shared my views, and I appreciate his openness to engaging on issues that m [more]

Bruce Springstein wrote & recorded a song about Minnesota’s battle against tyranny: Streets Of Minneapolis. “Our city’s heart and soul persists / Through broken glass and bloody tears / On the streets of Minneapolis.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

In one of his final on-camera interviews, David Lynch recounts going to the very first Beatles concert in the US in 1964. I ended up going to this concert. I didn’t really have any idea that it was the first concert. I didn’t have any idea how big this event was. And it was in a gigantic place where they had boxing matches. The Beatles were in the boxing ring. It was so loud, you can’t believe. Girls shuddering… crying… screaming their heart out. It was phenomenal. Lynch continued: Music i [more]

Why do RSS readers look like email clients? “When we applied that same visual language to RSS (the unread counts, the bold text for new items, the sense of a backlog accumulating) we imported the anxiety without the cause.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A collection of “well-made apps and sites” gathered by Marcin Wichary. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Andy Stone, VP of communications at Meta, responding, in a series of tweets on Twitter/X, to Jeff Horwitz’s report at Reuters yesterday, linked here last night, which claimed that “Zuckerberg blocked curbs on sex-talking chatbots for minors”: Never let the facts get in the way of a good story, eh, @Reuters, @JeffHorwitz! The documents you cite in the story itself contradict this headline. The headline says “Zuckerberg blocked curbs on sex-talking chatbots for minors” But the story cites a docume [more]

For his project called Homo Mobilis, Martin Roemers travelled the globe and photographed people with their cars, bikes, scooters, etc. You can see a selection of the photos on Roemers’ website, at The Guardian, or in his forthcoming book, Homo Mobilis (Amazon). (via @steveportigal.bsky.social) Tags: cars · Martin Roemers · photography 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Why Some People See Collapse Earlier Than Others: Perception, pattern-seeking, and the role of neurodivergence in a failing civilisation. “Collapse awareness is fundamentally a pattern-recognition event. Some people are wired for that.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Kristen Radtke remembers Alex Pretti. “I didn’t realize, in the hours before his name was released to the public, that the man millions of people had seen lying facedown on the pavement from multiple angles…was my childhood best friend.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

The “moral panic” framing misses how platforms actually harm kids. PLUS: Newsom investigates TikTok over Trump, and the Clawdbot frenzy

Jeff Horwitz, reporting for Reuters: Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg approved allowing minors to access AI chatbot companions that safety staffers warned were capable of sexual interactions, according to internal Meta documents filed in a New Mexico state court case and made public Monday. The lawsuit — brought by the state’s attorney general, Raul Torrez, and scheduled for trial next month — alleges that Meta “failed to stem the tide of damaging sexual material and sexual propositions deli [more]

Adam Serwer, reporting from the streets of Minneapolis for The Atlantic, “Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong” (gift link): The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive — because of its diversity and not in s [more]

Om Malik: Cook is not stupid. He is not evil. He is trapped. The iron clasp of market expectations has turned him into what he never meant to be: a man who goes to parties at the White House while nurses die. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Roy Bland captures a cynical, post-ideological, corrupt English society: “You scratch my conscience; I’ll drive your Jag.” You could say the same of today’s Silicon Valley. It used to believe it could change the world. Now it just hopes the world won’t change i [more]

“Archivio Grafica Italiana is the first online archive dedicated to the entire Italian graphic design heritage.” (via sidebar) Tags: design 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

MG Siegler: Tim Cook is captured. There is simply no other explanation for his actions over the past year or so. But it perhaps culminated this weekend when Cook went to a special private showing of the documentary Melania at the White House. Yes, that Melania. That in and of itself would have probably been fine. I mean, it’s potentially problematic for a host of reasons that I’ll get to, but such is our world right now. Then one shot — a gunshot — turned attending that movie screening into a st [more]

Ben Terris, writing for New York Magazine: Fred Trump died in 1999 at age 93. He had, Trump said, a “heart that couldn’t be stopped” with almost no health conditions to speak of throughout his long life. “He had one problem,” Trump said. “At a certain age, about 86, 87, he started getting, what do they call it?” He pointed to his forehead and looked to his press secretary for the word that escaped him. “Alzheimer’s,” Leavitt said. “Like an Alzheimer’s thing,” Trump said. “Well, I don’t have it.” [more]

An impressive isometric map of NYC, built with AI agents. “I’m particularly interested in scaling up the grindy repetitive tasks that make many ideas practically impossible.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Sesame Street has uploaded a bunch of classic episodes to YouTube that are free to watch, including the very first episode from 1969, the one where Mister Rogers visits, and the episode where Mr. Snuffulupagus is finally revealed. The most recent one was uploaded just a couple of days ago, so it appears to be an ongoing effort. (via open culture) P.S. From Four Things About Mr. Snuffleupagus: Snuffy was finally introduced to the main human cast mainly due to a string of high profile and somet [more]

From the footer on the project’s website: Moltbot was formerly known as Clawdbot. Independent project, not affiliated with Anthropic. Makes sense, to be honest, that Anthropic would object to naming it a homonym for Claude. One additional followup to my post the other day. In his terrific introduction to ClawdMoltbot, Federico Viticci wrote: I’ve been playing around with Clawdbot so much, I’ve burned through 180 million tokens on the Anthropic API (yikes), and I’ve had fewer and fewer conversati [more]

You Need A Kitchen Slide Rule. “Kitchen work is all about proportions, and nothing beats the slide rule for proportions.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Whoa, this is a fantastic archive of tangible media objects — like gramophone records, punch cards, 8-tracks, floppy disks, etc. (via unsung) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Jonathan Rauch, writing for The Atlantic, “Yes, It’s Fascism” (gift link): Until recently, I resisted using the F-word to describe President Trump. For one thing, there were too many elements of classical fascism that didn’t seem to fit. For another, the term has been overused to the point of meaninglessness, especially by left-leaning types who call you a fascist if you oppose abortion or affirmative action. For yet another, the term is hazily defined, even by its adherents. From the beginning, [more]

Science magazine: US government has lost more than 10,000 STEM PhDs since Trump took office. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

The Comics Journal’s obituary for Scott Adams. “Dilbert’s tone shifted during the 2010s, punching down at targets, mocking and belittling societal shifts and perceived “political correctness,” with more cynical, even bitter humor…” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Ella Chakarian, writing for Rolling Stone (News+): On a recent Saturday afternoon, Kendall Mayes was mindlessly scrolling on X when she noticed an unsettling trend surface on her feed. Users were prompting Grok, the platform’s built-in AI feature, to “nudify” women’s images. Mayes, a 25-year-old media professional from Texas who uses X to post photos with her friends and keep up with news, didn’t think it would happen to her — until it did. “Put her in a tight clear transparent bikini,” an X use [more]

Daniel Jalkut returns to the show so we can both vent about MacOS 26 Tahoe. 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. Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off your first box, plus free breakfast for 1 year, with code talkshow50off.  ★

Truth and terror in Minneapolis. PLUS: TikTok conspiracy theories, and Dario Amodei's Oppenheimer moment

Good tip from “DifferentDan” on the Realmac customer forum, posted back in November: I saw on macOS Tahoe 26.1, Apple finally added an option in the Column View settings to automatically right size all columns individually and that setting would persist, but I don’t really like Liquid Glass (yet) so I haven’t updated to Tahoe. Looks like someone found a workaround however for those that are still on Sequoia. Just open up Terminal on your Mac, copy in the below, and press return. The one-line com [more]

Kif Leswing, CNBC: Nvidia will become TSMC’s largest customer this year, according to analyst estimates and Huang himself. Apple is believed to currently be TSMC’s largest customer, mostly to manufacture A-series chips for iPhones and M-series chips for PCs and servers. The positional swap will mark a fundamental shift in the semiconductor industry, reflecting Nvidia’s growing importance amid the artificial intelligence infrastructure build-out. [...] Ben Bajarin, principal analyst at Creative S [more]

Connecting user accounts to third-party APIs always comes with the same plumbing: OAuth flows, token storage, refresh logic, and provider-specific quirks. WorkOS Pipes removes that overhead. Users connect services like GitHub, Slack, Google, Salesforce, and other supported providers through a drop-in widget. Your backend requests a valid access token from the Pipes API when needed, while Pipes handles credential storage and token refresh. Simplify integrations with WorkOS Pipes.  ★

Joe Rossignol, writing at MacRumors: Apple offers a Share Item Location feature in the Find My app that allows you to temporarily share the location of an AirTag-equipped item with others, including employees at participating airlines. This way, if you put an AirTag inside your bags, the airline can better help you find them in the event they are lost or delayed at the airport. [...] Below, we have listed most of the airlines that support the feature. Apple’s announcement claims that 36 airlines [more]

Apple Newsroom: Apple’s second-generation Ultra Wideband chip — the same chip found in the iPhone 17 lineup, iPhone Air, Apple Watch Ultra 3, and Apple Watch Series 11 — powers the new AirTag, making it easier to locate than ever before. Using haptic, visual, and audio feedback, Precision Finding guides users to their lost items from up to 50 percent farther away than the previous generation. And an upgraded Bluetooth chip expands the range at which items can be located. For the first time, user [more]

I’ve been meaning since last month to link to Apple’s lists of the top iPhone apps in the U.S. for 2025. Here’s the list of the top 20 free iPhone apps: ChatGPT Threads Google TikTok — Videos, Shop & LIVE WhatsApp Messenger Instagram YouTube Google Maps Gmail — Email by Google Google Gemini Facebook CapCut: Photo & Video Editor Temu: Shop Like a Billionaire T-Life [“All things T-Mobile”] Telegram Messenger Lemon8 — Lifestyle Community Spotify: Music and Podcasts Google Chrome Snapchat rednote Al [more]

Yours truly back in 2009, hitting upon the same themes from the item I just posted about TextEdit vs. Apple Notes: This, I think, explains the relative popularity of Mac OS X’s included Stickies application. For years, Stickies’s popularity confounded me. Why would anyone use a note-taking utility that requires you to leave every saved note open in its own window on screen? The more you use it, the more cluttered it gets. But here’s the thing: cluttered though it may be, you never have to save a [more]

Perhaps at the opposite end of the complexity and novelty spectrum from Federico Viticci’s intro to Clawdbot is this piece by Kyle Chayka, writing at The New Yorker, from October: Amid the accelerating automation of our computers — and the proliferation of assistants and companions and agents designed to execute tasks for us — I’ve been thinking more about the desktop that’s hidden in the background of the laptop I use every day. Mine is strewn with screenshots and Word documents and e-books. Wh [more]

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

Federico Viticci, writing at MacStories: If this intro just gave you whiplash, imagine my reaction when I first started playing around with Clawdbot, the incredible open-source project by Peter Steinberger (a name that should be familiar to longtime MacStories readers) that’s become very popular in certain AI communities over the past few weeks. I kept seeing Clawdbot being mentioned by people I follow; eventually, I gave in to peer pressure, followed the instructions provided by the funny crust [more]

Roundup 01/26/2025

My thanks to Meh for sponsoring last week at DF. Meh puts up a new deal every day, and they do it with panache. As they say, “It’s actual, real, weird shit you didn’t know existed for half the price you would’ve guessed.” Don’t tell any of my other sponsors, but Meh is my favorite longtime DF sponsor. I love the way their orange graphics look against DF’s #4a525a background. And I always love their sponsored posts that go into the RSS feed at the start of the sponsorship week. I’ll just quote th [more]

A few weeks ago there were a rash of stories claiming that iOS 26 is seeing bizarrely low adoption rates from iPhone users. The methodology behind these numbers is broken and the numbers are totally wrong. Those false numbers are so low, so jarringly different from previous years, that it boggles my mind that they didn’t raise a red flag for anyone who took a moment to consider them. The ball started rolling with this post from Ed Hardy at Cult of Mac on January 8, “iOS 26 Still Struggles to Gai [more]

The main reason I’m sticking with MacOS 15 Sequoia, refusing to install 26 Tahoe, is that there are so many severe UI regressions in Tahoe. The noisy, distracting, inconsistent icons prefixing menu item commands, ruining the Mac’s signature menu bar system. Indiscriminate transparency that renders so many menus, windows, and sidebars inscrutable and ugly. Windows with childish round corners that are hard to resize. The comically sad app icons. Why choose to suffer? But the thing that makes the d [more]

Ken Case, on The Omni Group blog: The features noted above already make for a great upgrade. But as I mentioned last year, one of the interesting problems we’ve been pondering is how best to link to documents in native apps. We’ve spent some time refining our solution to that problem, Omni Links, which are now shipping first in OmniOutliner 6. With Omni Links, we can link to content across all our devices, and we can share those links with other people and other apps. Omni Links support everythi [more]

Free Mac utility by Zendit Oy: A macOS app that enhances control over Elgato lights, offering features beyond the standard Elgato Control Center software. Features: Automatically turn lights on and off based on camera activity Turn lights off when locking your Mac Sync light temperature with macOS Night Shift Lolgato also lets you set global hotkeys for toggling the lights and changing their brightness. I’ve had a pair of Elgato Key Lights down at my podcast recording desk for years now. Elgato’ [more]

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?

Dr. Drang: For weeks — maybe months, time has been hard to judge this past year — Trump has been telling us that he’s worked out deals with pharmaceutical companies to lower their prices by several hundred percent. Commentators and comedians have pointed out that you can’t reduce prices more than 100% and pretty much left it at that, suggesting that Trump’s impossible numbers are due to ignorance. Don’t get me wrong. Trump’s ignorance is nearly limitless — but only nearly. I’ve always thought th [more]

Jeff Johnson: Finder has four view modes, represented by the four consecutive toolbar icons in the screenshot below, if you can even call that free-floating monstrosity a toolbar anymore: Icons, List, Columns, and Gallery. My preference is columns view, which I’ve been using for as long as I remember, going back to Mac OS X. At the bottom of each column is a resizing widget that you can use to change the width of the columns. Or rather, you could use it to change the width of the columns. On mac [more]

Managers say it makes them more productive. Workers don't. What gives?

Chance Miller, writing at 9to5Mac: When you use Walmart Pay, it’s incredibly easy for Walmart to build that customer profile on you. When you use Scan and Go, all of that same information is handed over. When you use Apple Pay or other payment methods, it’s much harder for Walmart (and other retailers) to do this. Apple Pay’s privacy and security protections, like not sharing any information about your actual card with the retailer, makes this type of tracking trickier. This is why Walmart wants [more]

Violet Jira, reporting for NOTUS: The White House communications team posted a digitally altered photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Minnesota social justice activist, on Thursday that makes it appear that she was weeping during her arrest by federal agents. The image is highly realistic, bearing no watermark or other indicator that the image has been doctored. The change is only apparent when compared to a different version of the same image posted by the Department of Homeland Security earlier i [more]

Aaron “Homeboy” Tilley and Wayne Ma, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas, and with a miserly gift-link policy): But there are also potential risks to making Federighi head of AI. Giving oversight of AI to him reflects Apple’s cautious approach to the technology. He is known at Apple as a penny-pincher who keeps a tight rein on salaries and hesitates to invest in risky projects when the payoff from them isn’t clear, according to people who have worked with him. He tends to scrutinize e [more]

Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas): Apple is developing an AI-powered wearable pin the size of an AirTag that is equipped with multiple cameras, a speaker, microphones and wireless charging, according to people with direct knowledge of the project. The device could be released as early as 2027, they said. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that because existing AI pins have sucked (and in one notable case, flopped in spectacular fashion), they’re all going t [more]

Mark Gurman, reporting at Bloomberg: Apple Inc. has expanded the job of hardware chief John Ternus to include design work, solidifying his status as a leading contender to eventually succeed Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook. Cook, who has led Apple since 2011 and turned 65 in November, quietly tapped Ternus to manage the company’s design teams at the end of last year, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That widens Ternus’ role to add one of the company’s most critical functions. A [more]

Bridger Beal-Cvetko and Daniel Woodruff, reporting for KSL News: SB138, sponsored by Cullimore, R-Sandy, would make Android, the world’s most popular mobile device operating system, an official state symbol, joining the ranks of the official state cooking pot (the dutch oven), the official state crustacean (the brine shrimp), and the official state mushroom (the porcini). “Someday, everybody with an iPhone will realize that the technology is better on Android,” Cullimore told reporters during a [more]

Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire, in a post that pairs perfectly with Om Malik’s re: velocity bestowing authority: The new Democratic argument isn’t about restoring guardrails. It’s about moving fast — and using power unapologetically — to undo what Trump has done. New Jersey will inaugurate Mikie Sherrill as governor today, one of the party’s rising stars who steamrolled Republicans in November. She has promised to govern with urgency — leaning on emergency powers, acting decisively, a [more]

Om Malik: That’s why we get all our information as memes. The meme has become the metastory, the layer where meaning is carried. You don’t need to read the thing; you just need the gist, compressed and passed along in a sentence, an image, or a joke. It has taken the role of the headline. The machine accelerates this dynamic. It demands constant material; stop feeding it and the whole structure shakes. The point of the internet now is mostly to hook attention and push it toward commerce, to keep [more]

Everything sucks. The whole world’s going to shit, especially our part of it, and it can feel like anything fun or silly is sticking your head in the sand. And yet. It doesn’t help to just be miserable. If you’re going to last, you’ve got to find your little moments of joy, or as a break from the misery. Buying our crap at Meh is not how you solve the world’s problems. We’re not that crass. But maybe a minute a day of reading our little write-up, and a couple minutes of catching up with the Meh [more]

Read to the end for insider trading and money laundering

Plus: Writers react to Claude Code for writers; Elon Musk vs. OpenAI; and ChatGPT gets ads

Read to the end for Dr. House In 2025

Donald Trump, in a message (I wouldn’t call it a letter) sent to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, confirmed by several news organizations: Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and [more]

Roundup 01/18/2025

Read to the end for a good TikTok

Canada needs real digital sovereignty, not our own digital colonizers

Five useful things I’ve built so far. Plus: Grok caves, and Thinking Machines implodes

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

12 books to keep you thinking through the winter

Read to the end for Randall Girl

Announcing Platformer+, a new way to listen to our columns

More than a week into a deepfake scandal, a handful of foreign governments have found the strength to do what Apple, Google, and the United States will not

Four days on the ground in Minneapolis

Roundup 01/11/2025

Here's your Garbage Intelligence for December 2025

I feel great about the website I’m building — and terrible for professional website builders. PLUS: Who will stop Grok? And ChatGPT will see you now

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

X.com, c'est moi

Read to the end for a very cool real estate listing

At ConCon, researchers and tech workers debate whether future systems could develop an inner life — and how you would know if they did

A “whistleblower” tried to corroborate his viral post with AI-generated evidence. This is how I caught him. PLUS: Grok's image-generation crisis, and the rapture over Claude Opus 4.5

Read to the end for a crab tureen

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

A Read Max year-end roundup

Besides the word of the year

PLUS: What I got right (and wrong) about 2025

Also: Bari Weiss!

We're back, baby

The US is retaliating against the EU after it fined X — and now some of Europe's biggest companies are caught in the crossfire

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

A fresh investigation reveals the scope of Meta's problem in China. Will a pending court case force the company to crack down — or destroy Section 230?

Read to the end for a good comic

Roundup 12/15/2025

Read to the end for a very happy sheep

The latest edition of our biweekly conversation

Read to the end for a very good menu

Read to the end for the only place you should go when your wife becomes a sex addict and starts cheating on you with everybody

Roundup 12/08/2025

Some notes on A.I. writing

Here's your Garbage Intelligence for November 2025

Read to the end for the Graveyard Gliders

Roundup 12/01/2025

Two key recipes to being popular

28 or so things we want for the holidays this year

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.

Grab your copy of Road to Nowhere

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 […]

In January, I was invited to GDC, the Game Developers Conference, to give a talk about Playdate. That talk — “The Playdate Story: What Was it Like to Make Handheld Video Game System Hardware?” — has been made available free for all to view. Now, it’s been 10 years since my last talk at XOXO here […]