Elizabeth Lopatto, reporting for The Verge (gift link): Today was closing arguments in the Musk v. Altman trial, and I almost feel bad writing about the unbelievable demolition derby I just witnessed. Steven Molo, Musk’s lawyer, stumbled over his words. He at one point called Greg Brockman — a co-defendant — Greg Altman. He erroneously claimed that Musk wasn’t asking for money and had to be corrected by the judge. He made it clear we’ve heard from many liars over the past few weeks, but offered [more]

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

After posting the previous item referencing dickpanels, a term I’ve been using since 2022, it occurred me that they could also be called dickovers (like popovers, but dickheaded). The latter sounds more clever, but I worry it’s less clear. I’m seldom so indecisive, so I’m running a Mastodon poll.  ★

Una Hajdari, reporting for Euronews: A new independent institute dedicated to making artificial intelligence safer for children will beformally [sic] presented at the Danish Parliament on Tuesday, with former European Commission executive vice-president Margrethe Vestager among those co-hosting the event. The institute’s approach, as explained in a statement before the launch, is “modelled on independent crash-test ratings” for cars. The idea, ostensibly, is that just as consumers can check whet [more]

Calif, a security research team, on their blog: Many security experts consider Apple devices to be the most secure consumer platform. The latest flagship example is MIE (Memory Integrity Enforcement), Apple’s hardware-assisted memory safety system built around ARM’s MTE (Memory Tagging Extension). It was introduced as the marquee security feature for the Apple M5 and A19, specifically designed to stop memory corruption exploits, the vulnerability class behind many of the most sophisticated compr [more]

Paresh Dave, Lauren Goode, Steven Levy, and Zoë Schiffer, reporting for Wired (News+ link): As Meta employees brace for layoffs next Wednesday, May 20, many say the vibes are horrifically, historically low. “Everyone is unhappy; the only people who are not unhappy are, literally, executives,” says an employee who works on Instagram. I’ve never heard of a company bracing for layoffs where the morale was good. But this Wired report — with some all-star bylines — paints a particularly dark picture [more]

Geoffrey Fowler, on his blog, which, alas, he calls “a Substack”: I’m joining the Youth AI Safety Institute as its first new employee. It’s a research and testing organization launching today under the umbrella of children’s nonprofit Common Sense Media. Backed by a $20 million annual budget, the Institute aims to do something that doesn’t really exist yet: systematically test the AI products kids use, set safety standards, and publicly hold tech companies accountable for meeting them. Think cra [more]

One of the biggest assholes in the Trump regime is Russell Vought — and that’s really saying something; it’s a fierce competition. He’s the guy who said in 2023 that he wanted to put federal workers “in trauma”. ProPublica produced a video in Oct 2025 about how Vought is acting as a shadow president in his drive to dismantle the US federal government. Russell Vought is one of the most powerful people in the Trump administration. For almost three decades, he worked in Congress and held prominent [more]

Owen Scott, reporting for The Independent: The list of tech and financial industry titans joining the commander-in-chief during his summit with China’s president Xi Jinping includes Elon Musk, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, and Apple CEO Tim Cook. [...] Trump earlier confirmed a number of high-profile attendees in a lengthy post on Truth Social, albeit referring to Cook as “Tim Apple” in the process. While he’s in such a jocular nickname-y mood, he should drop a reference to Winnie the Pooh into some [more]

Antonio G. Di Benedetto, reporting for The Verge (gift link): Google is announcing a new line of laptops coming in the fall called Googlebooks. Details are sparse for now, as the tease is just a small part of various Android announcements during Google’s Android Show. But we do know this is a major new initiative in the laptop space for Google, seemingly designed to succeed Chromebooks with something more capable: a platform running a long-rumored new operating system based on a fusion of Androi [more]

Omg, Amazon Prime inserted an ad for Febreze in the midst of the most famous match cut in the history of cinema (in Kubrick’s 2001, when the ape-thrown bone turns into a spacecraft). I don’t know whether to laugh or cry (rn, it’s both).

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg under the headline, “Apple-OpenAI Alliance Frays, Setting Up Possible Legal Fight”: OpenAI lawyers are actively working with an outside legal firm on a range of options that could be formally executed in the near future, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. That could include sending the iPhone maker a notice alleging breach of contract without necessarily filing a full lawsuit at the outset, according to the [more]

Dominic Preston, at The Verge: Trump Mobile CEO Pat O’Brien first confirmed the release plans to USA Today, telling the outlet that all preorders will be fulfilled within the next few weeks. The company later confirmed the news on its social media accounts, using a very normal number of exclamation marks in the process. The T1 Phone has arrived!! Those who pre-ordered the T1 Phone will be receiving an update email. Phones start shipping this week!!! In a press release the company added that dema [more]

A very good, very 2026 headline: Japan Runs Out of Robot Wolves in Fight Against Bears. “Starting at around $4,000, each bespoke Monster Wolf is now equipped with battery power, solar panels, and detection sensors.”

Well, this is ridiculous. Klack is a $5 Mac utility by Henrik Ruscon that simulates mechanical keyboard clacking while you type. Absurd. My keyboard makes its own beautiful sounds as I type. So of course I went to buy a copy immediately, because I love an absurd utility, that serves no purpose other than fun, crafted with exquisite attention to detail. But when I did, the Mac App Store informed me that a member of my family sharing group had already purchased it. (I presume that was my son, not [more]

This is a smart piece about where we are in America right now, post-Citizen’s United, post-Voting Rights Amendment, post-Dobbs, mid-MAGA: The VRA Was the Nice Version (archive). First, let’s be honest about what the Voting Rights Act actually was, because everything here on out flows from it. It wasn’t a gift, not charity, and definitely not some magnanimous extension of democracy to people who’d been waiting their turn. It was architecture. Lyndon Johnson, who had few illusions about how power [more]

James Lockman: This small driver enables the Griffin PowerMate, a nifty little device from days gone by. What does the PowerMate do? It is a knob that you can twist or that you can press. That’s it. It also has a blue LED in the base that can change intensity based on what you’re doing. When it was released, it was intended to assist video and audio production by adding a scrollable knob to your desktop. Of course, modern controllers exist that offer many more literal bells and whistles, but the [more]

“I believe in myself. That’s why I commit.” A young skater doesn’t give up trying to land a three-stair kickflip.

Zendaya co-created a new collection for On, the Swiss fashion company, and Spike Jonze directed this cool promotional video starring the actress. I’ve always loved his aesthetic — along with Michel Gondry, no one makes these types of videos seem “hand-crafted” (in a way that is hard to articulate) more than Jonze. Tags: Spike Jonze · video · Zendaya

The Guardian asked authors, critics, and academics to help compile a list of the best 100 novels of all time. They’ve done 41-100 so far. Selecting a book will show you who voted for it, then click on the voter’s name to see their other choices.

The 2026 National Recording Registry inductees were announced today. “The 2026 selections mark the first recordings by Taylor Swift and Beyoncé chosen for the registry.” Also: music from Weezer, The Go-Go’s, Chaka Khan, and Johnny Cash.

This Tiny Celestial Body Past Pluto Shouldn’t Have an Atmosphere—but Astronomers Say They May Have Detected One.

A Moment That Changed Me: I Saw My First Total Solar Eclipse — and Its Beauty Shook Me to My Core. “I knew the theory, but I was not ready for the experience.”

I loved this post by Kelsey Miller for Cup of Jo about “childlore”. “Remember typing ‘BOOBS’ on a calculator?!” someone will blurt. “Or — or that thing when you’re driving by a cemetery and you have to hold your breath?” I love hearing the tiny differences in details (some people grew up lifting their feet off the floor when passing a graveyard). But what’s wild is how many of us grew up doing, drawing, singing, and believing the exact same funny little things: Miss Susie had a steamboat, Batma [more]

I Want to Live Like Costco People. “Embracing the Costco lifestyle means accepting the fact that I am, in many ways, becoming my father.”

Robin Sloan writes about the personalized, AI-written, promo emails he’s been getting recently (I have too). “The form is subtler than a one-sized-fits-all promo blast, but it sucks way worse, because it’s fundamentally dishonest.”

Palantir, the data analysis defense contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel, was named after the magical seeing stones from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books. This video compares the ethos of the company with that of Tolkien. The palantiri of The Lord of the Rings are sort of like crystal balls or “seeing stones” that allow their users to communicate across vast distances, see events from afar, and sometimes even peer into the future. But just about everybody who tries to use a palantir in T [more]

Read to the end for a really good casserole recipe.

Meet the Sad Wives of AI. “Princess Diana famously said there were three people in her marriage. For the sad wives of AI, the third is a chatbot.”

Just dropped: Foo Fighters’ Tiny Desk Concert. The setlist includes Learn to Fly, My Hero, and Everlong.

And you're getting a free month!

Two sequences from Dr. Strangelove done in Lego: Muffley’s call to Kissoff on the hotline in the war room and Dr. Strangelove’s increasingly erratic presentation of his plan to preserve humanity in a mine shaft. This is really well done. (via bb) [This is a vintage post originally from Oct 2012.] Tags: Dr. Strangelove · Lego · movies · stop motion · timeless posts · video

Adam Serwer: “Violence serves an authoritarian agenda.”

A map of the regions of the US, as voted on by Reddit users. I think this seems mostly correct? One funny artifact: Washington state got some votes for “Northeast”, probably because ppl confused it with D.C. or with “Northwest”.

Windows Notepad is, more or less, the Windows peer to MacOS’s TextEdit — the built-in system text editor. For years, it was really basic — so much more basic than TextEdit that it engendered no affection. You don’t see paeans to Notepad in The New Yorker. Recently though, Microsoft has started beefing it up, culminating last year when they added fucking Markdown support. Which still blows my mind. Notepad++ is a longstanding open source (GPL) Windows text editor by Don Ho, which debuted back in [more]

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

Kagi’s documentation: Typing @r headphones will search for “headphones” but limit the results to reddit.com (r is the short code for Reddit). This allows you to quickly find relevant content on a specific site using Kagi’s powerful index. It is effectively the same as doing headphones site:old.reddit.com. Its relative, Bangs feature, invoked by using “!r headphones”, would redirect the user to Reddit’s internal search. I learned about the snaps feature from a Kagi blog post a few months ago, and [more]

Quoting from a post I wrote a year ago: Like, even if I use the magic &udm=14 parameter with Google search, to get “disenshittified” results from Google, I find I get better results from Kagi. When I know there’s one right answer (say, a specific article I remember reading and want to find again), Kagi is more likely than Google to list it first. If it’s a years-old article, Kagi is way more likely than Google to find it at all. For me, Google (and, alas, DuckDuckGo too) have largely stopped wor [more]

Dawn Gilbertson, writing for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Calder says that he tried to rebook at the given link a few times but that it wouldn’t work. He became worried new flight options were dwindling, so he googled the airline’s customer-service number. (There was a link to customer-service contacts way down in the email that he initially overlooked.) The rest of the story is sadly familiar to the Better Business Bureau, Federal Trade Commission, airlines and consumer advocates. It’s [more]

Jacob Parry and Laura Greenhalgh, reporting for Politico, one month ago: The EU’s landmark tech regulations are a “success story” that are beginning to level the playing field between Silicon Valley’s giants and their digital competitors in Europe, said European Competition Commissioner Teresa Ribera on Friday. [...] Ribera’s comments come as Brussels prepares for a formal review of the DMA to determine what is working and where the law may need to be reformed. The regulation aims to prevent “ga [more]

“So, at about 14, I became the team’s unofficial basketball musician,” writes Theocharis Papatrechas. “A big shot earned a triumphant snare drum roll with a resolving crash. And if someone missed badly — an airball — I’d drop in a ‘du-ba-dum’”.

Foo Yun Chee, reporting for Reuters back on March 23: Google, Amazon, Apple and Samsung’s smart TVs and virtual assistants should fall under the EU’s toughest tech rules because of their growing market power, the world’s largest broadcasters told EU antitrust chief Teresa Ribera on Monday. The call by the Association of Commercial Television and Video on Demand Services in Europe (ACT) whose members include Canal+, RTL, Mediaset, ITV, Paramount+, NBCUniversal, Walt Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, [more]

Since Reporters Without Borders started tracking their World Press Freedom Index 25 years ago, the global rating has never been lower than the 2026 score. From a summary of their analysis: For the first time in the history of the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index, over half of the world’s countries now fall into the “difficult” or “very serious” categories for press freedom. In 25 years, the average score of all 180 countries and territories surveyed in the Index has neve [more]

Juli Clover, MacRumors: To comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, Apple is letting third-party wearables access some features that have historically been limited to the Apple Watch and AirPods. Proximity pairing — Third-party earbuds are able to use proximity pairing to connect to an iPhone, similar to the AirPods. Bringing a set of earbuds that support the feature near an iPhone will initiate an AirPods-like one-tap pairing process, so third-party wearables like earbuds will no longer requir [more]

Sounds of the 60s: the IBM 1401 (punchcard collation, reel-to-reel recorder, etc). These aren’t the sounds of my computing childhood but I imagine they’re nostalgic for some of you.

Jamelle Bouie thinks Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is positioning herself for a 2028 presidential run. “Yeah, she’s running.”

From an interview (gift link) with Don Hertzfeldt, creator of World of Tomorrow: Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare stuff. Spotify is way more convenient, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out and to feel like you’re hunting, to feel like you’re living your life. I’m going to the movies, I’m going to this show. What streaming has done—it’s very convenient, but it’s taken the feeling of going hunting and [more]

Study: “A few weeks of X’s algorithm can make you more right‑wing – and it doesn’t wear off quickly.” People using the “For You” feed were more likely to favor GOP policies, less likely to want Trump prosecuted, and were more pro-Russia (vs Ukraine).

Aphantasia (the inability to visualize) is one of those things that I find endlessly fascinating; I’ve written about it a few times since 2016, most recently in response to Larissa MacFarquhar’s 2025 piece for the New Yorker: Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound. Many of his correspondents, he learned, had discovered their condition very recently, after reading about it or hearing it described on the radio. Their whole lives, they had heard people talk about picturi [more]

We’re Diversifying the University by Hiring More Crackpots. “For too long, the university has ignored the wisdom of the donor class and hired based on academic excellence. Regrettably, this has led to the underrepresentation of discredited viewpoints…”

Digg has (sorta) relaunched (again) and instead of an underwhelming Reddit clone, it’s now just scraping noted fascist cesspool “X” for AI news and telling us that Sam Altman is influential in AI? This is embarrassing. It’ll probably be a huge success.

How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer. “Every subsystem must be designed to survive cosmic-ray bit flips, radiation-induced latch-ups, and hardware faults without a single second of downtime.” (A: An extreme level of redundancy.)

Leverage autonomous AI agents to automate compliance, manage internal and third-party risk, and continuously prove your security posture.  ★

Apple Newsroom: Starting today, end-to-end encrypted RCS messaging begins rolling out in beta for iPhone users running iOS 26.5 with supported carriers and Android users on the latest version of Google Messages. When RCS messages are end-to-end encrypted, they can’t be read while they’re sent between devices. Users will know that a conversation is end-to-end encrypted when they see a new lock icon in their RCS chats. Encryption is on by default and will be automatically enabled over time for new [more]

Remember Desktop Tower Defense? I played it for a bit this weekend and it’s still great fun. One of the very best games from the Flash era.

Taken: this is a web page that shows how much data your browser can collect that websites can use to “fingerprint” your device, even without cookies. “It identified your device with enough specificity to distinguish it from most others on the internet.”

Samsung phones took spots 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9. The one phone not from Apple or Samsung in the top 10 was the Xiaomi Redmi A5 at #10. As I always say, take these numbers with a grain of salt, but according to Counterpoint, the bestselling phones, in order, are: iPhone 17 iPhone 17 Pro Max iPhone 17 Pro And Apple’s phone in spot #6 was not the iPhone Air, alas, but the year-old iPhone 16. (Via Horace Dediu.)  ★

Seán Doran, who I’ve featured here many times before for his remastered astronomy photos & videos, has taken photographs captured by a Japanese weather satellite of Typhoon Sinlaku in April 2026 and “repaired, remastered and transformed” the images into this breathtaking 4K video. The beauty of the storm as seen from above belies its fury and destructiveness. Sinlaku was the “strongest tropical cyclone in the Northern Hemisphere” since 2021 and the strongest overall storm so far in 2026. The Mar [more]

Interesting thread about why rural towns don’t vote blue: they don’t have to because small towns “actually operate very similarly to the ‘socialist agenda’ they pretend to be so afraid of” and “they’ve already been having to take of their own…”

Apple stopped selling the Power Mac G5 (with space) in August 2006, so I’m not sure how much they care about Kraft using “PowerMac” (sans space) as a trademark for protein-enhanced macaroni and cheese. (I feel like there’s got to be a joke to be made here about a “cheese grater”...)  ★

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

Mark Gurman, in his Power On newsletter for Bloomberg over the weekend: Though the Mac software introduced the same Liquid Glass interface seen in iOS 26, the design language hasn’t translated as smoothly to the larger displays and different input methods of desktops and laptops. Part of the reason is that Liquid Glass was created with more modern hardware in mind: the crisp OLED displays that are used on iPhones, some iPads and Apple Watches. The software also will be well-suited to the more gl [more]

Aardman’s official Wallace & Gromit YouTube channel is livestreaming what appears to be the four shorts featuring the duo: A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave, and A Matter of Loaf or Death. I can’t find any further information about the stream — if those are the only animations that are available, if any of the movies are included, how long the stream will be up. But I’m watching The Wrong Trousers right now and eating a bit of cheese, so all is right with the world. [more]

People Who Don’t Like People Are Making All of Our Decisions. “We are living in the ultimate revenge of the nerds, driven by a crew of socially awkward tech bros who won’t stop until the society that they never quite fit into is obliterated.”

Anyone of any age can stop by the Grandma Stand in New York’s Central Park to shoot the breeze with a grandmother. The concept has spread around the US and is now the subject of an hour-long documentary on PBS. At a time when the lack of connection is epidemic, wise witty grandmas sit behind a lemonade-like stand, offering life lessons to passersby in NYC’s Central Park. We see 20 diverse people candidly share their feelings. “Just a little love, a little talking. She’s speaking to my soul,” sa [more]

Where are the public benches on the internet? “Like cities that have prioritized cars, visiting the Internet now entails controlled apps and search engines, designed for extraction. There’s nowhere to rest because the benches are covered in spikes.”

Now open in NYC: a pop-up called The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room, which consists of “all 3.5 million pages, 3,437 volumes, and 17,000 pounds of the released and partially redacted Epstein files”.

The Hidden Cassettes. “This is going to sound insane, but when I was a kid I found out my dad secretly recorded our phone calls.” (Be sure to read the “What?!” link.)

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

My thanks for WorkOS for, once again, sponsoring Daring Fireball for the last week. If you’re ready to sell to enterprise customers, your product may be ready — but is your auth infrastructure? If you’re building B2B SaaS, especially AI, you quickly need enterprise features like SSO, SCIM, and audit logs. Your developers shouldn’t waste cycles rebuilding that infrastructure. Free them to focus on what sets you apart. WorkOS gives you production-ready APIs for auth and access control that integra [more]

Katie Paul and Jeff Horwitz, reporting for Reuters in late April: Meta is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees’ computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and ​keystrokes for use in training its artificial intelligence models, part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers in internal memos seen by Reuters. The tool, called Model Capability Initiative (MCI), will run on work-related apps and websites and wil [more]

In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress submitted a petition to the UN charging that the “brutality and discrimination” of Jim Crow constituted genocide by the US govt. The US prevented any debate on the petition and CRC leaders were persecuted thereafter.

Someone in a private forum I belong to mentioned fountain pens and thus I became acquainted with the role of a nibmeister, a person who can remake the nib of your pen more to your liking (different angle, better flow, etc).

PBS Kids and The Jim Henson Company have collaborated on a kids special called Wowsabout! that focuses on the experience of wonder. Wowsabout is rooted in a rich curriculum developed by Dr. Dacher Keltner, one of the world’s foremost emotion scientists and author of “AWE: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.” The special, shot on location in breathtaking Sequoia National Park, aims to help children recognize and name the feeling of awe by experiencing moments of [more]

An analysis of 18 years of Guardian blind dates. “A surprising number of successful dates include something embarrassing: the bill, a late arrival, a misread moment. Awkward doesn’t mean doomed.”

Read to the end for a very good otter video

Pioneering abstract artist Hilma af Klint’s Paintings for the Temple (1906‑1915) will be on display at the Grand Palais in Paris from May 6 - Aug 30, 2026.

Screwdriver handles are sneakily well-designed for a variety of different uses. I mean, who thinks about a screwdriver? But if you look at the handles, well, that’s a complicated shape. And it lets you do a lot. It’s comfortable to hold, but it won’t roll off your bench. And you can turn it one-handed or use both hands. And you get a couple of different grips. That’s a good design. In this video, woodworker & tool enthusiast Rex Krueger walks us through the design history of the screwdriver a [more]

What Can We Do About Partisan Gerrymandering? Jamelle Bouie has been on a tear with his analysis and historical contextualizing of the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act.

Nolen Royalty: “My latest project is Marc Andreessen Egg Game - a game about drawing on eggs to make them look like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.”

Last year in an Alaskan fjord, a surprise landslide triggered a tsunami 1578 feet tall. That’s not a typo…the wave was taller than all but 13 of the world’s tallest buildings. In the early hours of August 10, 2025, an enormous landslide triggered a massive tsunami down the fjord. The tsunami was 1,578-feet-tall, or one-and-a-half times the height of the Eiffel Tower. Fortunately, no one was caught in the wave since it hit around 5:30 a.m. local time. If the tsunami hit later that day, about 20 c [more]

Prophecy At 1420 MHz is the first single from Boards of Canada’s upcoming album. (It’s paired with a short intro track, so we’re basically getting the first five and a half minutes of the album here.)

It’s David Attenborough’s 100th birthday today! One of my few genuine heroes.

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

“In nine experiments involving 1,800 participants, researchers found that people consistently underestimated how interesting and enjoyable conversations about boring topics would be.”

Stu Maschwitz: Prolost Watches is an iPhone app for managing your watch collection. It’s part database, part journal; designed for the detail-obsessed mind of the watch fanatic. As you log each day’s choice of watch, insights are revealed. Wear logs trace a path on the map. Events from the past are resurfaced at opportune times. Finances mange themselves as you buy and sell. Your entire collection lives in your pocket, and you get to enjoy all your watches, even the ones you’re not wearing. [... [more]

David Kaylor is re-editing Rogue One into what he calls “The Andor Cut”; the trailer seems pretty compelling and well-done. He says this is Rogue One if it was produced after Andor: The original version is the events of Rogue One as seen through Jyn’s perspective, and this is through Cassian’s. The remixed Rogue One will be out on May 25, available in 4K with 5.1 surround sound. Kaylor has previously produced cuts of all three original trilogy Star Wars movies, Star Wars: Episode III - The Si [more]

A brief history: lessons from the rise and fall of Reconstruction. “Must America be forever defined by strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth – or can the nation finally realize its promise of egalitarian pluralism?”

The website for the Abolitionist Guide to NYC is just getting started, but the site does house an Abolitionist Map of NYC. The Abolitionist Map of NYC offers a geographic survey of incarceration and anti-carceral resistance in Manahatta from the Dutch colonization of Lenapehoking to the present day. The map highlights some of the first jails and prisons to exist in the area, the movement of facilities from one place to the next, and sites of rebellion against the expansion of the prison industri [more]

Chess Peace is an iOS puzzle game where you have to place chess pieces on a board so that none of them attack each other. Simple + clever!

One of the coolest things about honey is its theoretically infinite shelf-life. 3000-year-old jars of still-edible honey have been found in Egyptian tombs — they used it medicinally for all sorts of things.

I’m sure there’s a scene marker right at the cut, so that’s why an ad got inserted there. But, my god. Someone at Amazon should go to prison for this. (I think it’s a total coincidence that the Febreze ad seems roughly color-matched to the sky. But scroll down in the Bluesky thread for some links to the absolute genius campaign from Cerveza Cristal beer, with spots specifically designed to integrate into Star Wars when it was broadcast on commercial TV in Chile. “Your father wanted you to have t [more]

Ok, this is incredible: this person on Reddit discovered that if you take a bunch of the sequential photos of the Earth captured by the Artemis II crew and animate them, you can see that some of what appear to be stars are actually satellites, buzzing around the Earth like flies. You can see them really clearly in Seán Doran’s remastered animation. Totally totally gobsmacking. Literally awesome. Tags: artemis · astronomy · Earth · photography · science · Sean Doran · space

“Podcast sloplords” are flooding the zone with AI-generated podcasts. By one count, almost 40% of new podcasts are written by AI chatbots and presented by “AI voice synthesizers [that] can sound eerily humanlike”.

Lines, Ranked. “2. Assembly. It’s not glamorous, but hot damn is it effective.”

A supercut of context-free intertitles from Adam Curtis documentaries. Even if you don’t know who Adam Curtis is, this is entertaining.

Great stuff around MLB: Those around the league quickly honored that legacy during Monday night’s slate of games. Tributes rolled in from across the league, with various play-by-play announcers deviating from their typical routines to give a nod to Sterling’s distinct style. It started with the Yankees and TV man Michael Kay, who called Aaron Judge’s first-inning home run exactly as Sterling would have: “It is high, it is far, it is gone!” Kay said, continuing: “Aaron Judge, a Judgian blast! Her [more]

That previous item led me to look at Claris’s website for the first time in a while. And, lo, there’s a banner promoting a message from CEO Ryan McCann that was posted just yesterday, under the headline “How Claris Is Building for What’s Next”: Every AI-generated application creates the same problems: Where does it run, and how is it deployed, secured, and managed? The app needs a database. It needs user authentication, role-based permissions, and audit logging. It needs backup and recovery. It [more]

Apple Newsroom, back in August 2024: Apple today announced that Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri will transition from his role on January 1, 2025. Maestri will continue to lead the Corporate Services teams, including information systems and technology, information security, and real estate and development, reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook. As part of a planned succession, Kevan Parekh, Apple’s Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis, will become Chief Financial Officer and join the [more]

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

Juli Clover, MacRumors: Apple has removed more desktop Macs from its online store as the global memory shortage continues. Mac mini models with 32GB and 64GB of RAM are no longer available for purchase, nor is the M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 256GB RAM. The M3 Ultra Mac Studio is now available only in a 96GB RAM configuration, with higher-tier options eliminated. Both M3 Mac Studio and M4 Max Mac Studio models have delivery estimates of 9 to 10 weeks.  ★

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: Last March, Apple was hit with a class action lawsuit after delaying the launch of the “more personalized Siri” that was first announced at WWDC 2024. Apple agreed to settle the case in December, and the full settlement terms are now available. Apple is set to pay $250 million to settle the lawsuit, equating to an estimated $25 per device. That number could reach up to $95 per device, depending on how many users submit claims. [...] As part of the settlement, Apple is not [more]

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

Taegan Goddard, quoting the Financial Times last week: The Pentagon said President Trump’s Iran war has cost the United States at least $25 billion, driven primarily by the military’s use of munitions, the Financial Times reports. The New York Times had an interesting piece trying to put that number in context (gift link): $25 billion is similar to: The annual budget of NASA. Spending on military aid to Israel after Oct. 7. Spending by U.S.A.I.D. before it was disbanded. The cost to expand Obama [more]

Back in 2009, Merlin Mann and I jointly gave a talk at SxSW titled “Obsession Times Voice”. Regarding how it turned out, I wrote: My muse for the session was this quote from Walt Disney: “We don’t make movies to make money; we make money to make more movies.” To me, that’s it. That’s the thing. Merlin and I were talking about independent writers and podcasters, because that’s what we were (and remain), but the concept applies just as perfectly to independent developers. This came to my mind afte [more]

David Smith, “Six Years Perfecting Maps on watchOS”: I love going on wilderness adventures. I am rarely happier than when I am far off into the mountains without a soul in sight. As a result, I have spent a lot of time learning how to safely explore and navigate when I’m away from civilization. The most important habit I’ve found for not getting lost is to be very regular in checking your location as you go, and the best way I’ve found to do that is to have a map on my wrist. For more than six y [more]

If you’re building B2B SaaS, especially AI, you quickly need enterprise features like SSO, SCIM, and audit logs. Your developers shouldn’t waste cycles rebuilding that infrastructure. Free them to focus on what sets you apart. WorkOS gives you production-ready APIs for auth and access control that integrate directly into your product. Trusted by over 2,000 companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel. Build faster with WorkOS →  ★

Chess Peace — a new iOS game by Sam Shepherd — is my kind of logic puzzle. Each puzzle is a board with a few unplaced chess pieces. To solve you need to place all the pieces so that none of them attack each other. There’s a timer if you care, but I don’t. (And you can hide the clock.) Clever name too: the pieces need to be ... at peace with each other. You can download Chess Peace and try it out free of charge, and it’s just a one-time payment of $7 to unlock everything. Great simple premise, re [more]

Nick Heer: If you do a little poking around in Adobe’s application bundles, a key reason for the jankiness of these user interfaces becomes apparent: it is because they are little webpages. These dialog boxes are HTML files that reference a chunky CSS file and oodles of JavaScript, and appear to be built with React. [...] I was going to write about how this stuff should have been tried with people who actually use Adobe’s apps in a high-pressure environment, but I am sure it was and, also, it do [more]

Paul Thurrott: I may or may not write and publish a short e-book about Markdown sometime this year, most likely as part of a monthly focus. But l’ve written small parts of it already, as I do, and I figured it might be interesting for at least some readers. And so here’s an early draft of an introductory chapter that may or may not be called “On writing.” We’ll see. It’s odd how things turn out in life. Thurrott’s and my careers are almost uniquely parallel, but have seldom intersected. This boo [more]

Speaking of companies with valuable minority stakes in AI companies, there’s one thing that stuck in my craw about the blockbuster Ronan Farrow / Andrew Marantz investigative piece on Sam Altman and OpenAI last month for The New Yorker. It didn’t come up during Nilay Patel’s excellent interview with Farrow on Decoder, either. Sam Altman was the president of Y Combinator for several years, and left to become the full-time CEO of OpenAI. The New Yorker quotes Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham mu [more]

The New York Times, back in March last year (gift link): To win the artificial intelligence race, Google not only has developed its own technologies, but has also pumped money into prominent A.I. start-ups. And to preserve its competitive edge, Google has kept its ownership stakes in those start-ups a secret. Court documents recently obtained by The New York Times reveal Google’s stake in one of those start-ups, Anthropic, as well as how its investment in the young company is set to change. Goog [more]

Jeremy Provost, on the blog for Think Tap Work, his mobile app development company: iOS App Store search is no longer about relevance. It’s about ad inventory. With Apple’s introduction of a second search ad, for any query where we weren’t #1, we’ve effectively moved down one position. [...] If you’re counting at home, roughly 70% of the interface is covered in ads. A casino ad, to boot. That was a month ago. Two weeks later, he posted a follow-up, showing the effect on Think Tap Work’s apps in [more]

Jake Adelstein (author of Tokyo Vice) on his blog Tokyo Paladin: For decades, Japan’s Oreos weren’t made by Nabisco at all. They were produced domestically by Yamazaki Biscuits, under a licensing arrangement with what eventually became Mondelez International. This was, by most accounts, a reasonable arrangement. The cookies were local. The quality was consistent. Nobody was complaining. Then Mondelez did what corporations do when things are working fine. The license expired, and Mondelez moved p [more]

Marcin Wichary at Unsung: I’m angry. (Clearly.) We should all be angry in face of stuff like this. This is how people get fed up with software — because it feels unstable and deteriorates on its own without needing to. I know I brought up that an existing power user base can be a huge pain in the ass, and I am a decades-old Photoshop power user. But this is different than other examples where the product needs or at least wants to evolve past its core audience or toward a different market. For P [more]

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

A follow-up point to Friday’s post about Meta unceremoniously shitcanning its entire contract with Sama, the Kenyan contractor that employed over 1,100 contractors to serve as Mechanical Turks for Meta’s AI efforts, after a few of the contractors told investigative reporters about the incredibly private things they witnessed from footage captured by users of Meta’s AI Glasses. There is no point getting any more outraged or disgusted at Meta for firing these contractors than you already were in t [more]

Roundup 05/03/2026

A Read Max re-run

A little state of the union

Juli Clover, writing at MacRumors under the rather incendiary headline “Apple Has Given Up on the Vision Pro After M5 Refresh Flop”: Apple has all but given up on the Vision Pro after the M5 model failed to revitalize interest in the device, MacRumors has learned. Apple updated the Vision Pro with a faster M5 chip and a more comfortable band in October 2025, but there were no other hardware changes, and consumers still weren’t interested. [...] The Vision Pro has been unpopular since it first la [more]

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

Read to the end for an 108-hour Fred Again mix

On newsletters in the age of AI automation. PLUS: Musk and OpenAI in court, and China blocks Meta's Manus acquisition

Read to the end for a very interesting story about Hollywood

Roundup 04/27/2026

The New York Times PR account, on Twitter/X a week ago: Sunday’s crossword puzzle in the print edition of The New York Times Magazine contains a grid that does not match the clues. The correct version of the puzzle can be found in the news section of Sunday’s print edition of The Times. The puzzle on our app is correct. Maggie Duffy, writing for Vulture: Some solvers who, like Wegener’s wife, complete the Sunday puzzle in the print magazine (often with pen) complained on crossword forums and soc [more]

A message to the Apple faithful

Invasive monitoring and a fresh round of layoffs have workers I spoke to on edge. Is this the future of knowledge work?

With Quinn Slobodian, Ben Tarnoff, and John Ganz

Read to the end for a cool burger fact

PLUS: Everyone has feelings about Tim Cook

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

Tech companies hope a check in the mail will calm the AI backlash — but there are reasons for skepticism

Read to the end for a really good Instagram video

Roundup 04/20/2026

Read to the end for a good post about space travel

PLUS: Has Forum Brain crossed the gender divide?

New research confirms that LLMs often perform better when you encourage them. But why?

Read to the end for a great Bluesky post

Roundup 04/14/2026

OpenAI’s CEO is asking the public to lower the temperature on AI. But who turned it up in the first place?

Read to the end for a really good flowchart

Read to the end for a very good Facebook page

Nine months after an expensive overhaul, the company says it's back in the AI race — but the race keeps getting faster

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

Read to the end for a good Tumblr post

The company says it has built its most dangerous model yet. Can its coalition of internet companies fix the internet before others catch up?

Video of our conversation from Night of IDeas

11 books to get your brain moving through the spring

A strange purchase, executive reshuffling and a New Yorker investigation are raising questions ahead of an IPO

Read to the end for ghoulmaxxing

Roundup 04/06/2026

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

Read to the end for a good Tumblr post

Shifting priorities and budget pressures could bring an end to the company’s experiment in independent governance, sources say

Read to the end for a very good Aprils Fools’ Day post

Read to the end for a really good dinosaur thread

Roundup 03/29/2026

Read to the end for a very motivational TikTok video

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!)

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Roundup 03/09/2025

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 […]

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

Canada needs real digital sovereignty, not our own digital colonizers

When I was kid, on a road trip with my family, we stopped in Vacaville, California. And there, drawing us off the freeway with a wooden glow, was a brand new roadside attraction: Wooz. The pitch? It was a maze. A big maze. Wooz stood for “Wild Original Object with Zoom” (!), opened in 1988, […]

13 books to keep you thinking through the winter

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

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

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

Maybe your grandma doesn’t need that Alexa smart speaker

Governments are deluding themselves into believing investment justifies allowing AI to upend society

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, […]