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

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

Read to the end for a really good World Cup fan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read to the end for a good song

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Search Results Are Getting Sloptimized. SEO (and Google’s embrace of it) has spent the last 25 years ruining the internet and search results. Now it’s GEO’s turn (generative-engine optimization).

The Best Headlights in the World Are Illegal in America. “America’s roads are now full of tactical-grade headlights, and no one is happy about it.”

Read to the end for AAA Mario with full voice acting

Charity Majors, writing about how high-performing engineering teams are dealing with the transition from pre-AI to AI-native development: AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy. This is not a situation where one side is right and the other is huffing paint. (O, that it were!) Each side is grappling with a real, alarming, escalating threat to the company’s existence, and the closer they look the more (again: real, alarming) evidence they find. The ent [more]

Unsurprising open corruption from FIFA & the Trump regime: FIFA rents an office in Trump Tower. “The rent goes to President Trump’s family business, but soccer officials say the space sits largely idle.” That’s called a bribe.

Thomas Bangalter, one half of the legendary duo Daft Punk, played a 75-minute DJ set for The Lot Radio the other day. He played tracks by Boards of Canada, Burial, Sonic Youth, and even Daft Punk (full setlist). The set is also available on Soundcloud. Bangalter also put recent rumors of a Daft Punk reunion to rest: Was it scary to be that big? “It was almost performance art where you create these characters and blur the line between fiction and reality.” So it felt like fame was happening to th [more]

I Work Very Hard, And I Would Like To Try Cake. “I am a nice horse. I do not fuss. I do not bite the human woman’s face, even though her hair smells nice. I do not ask to go live free in the woods like the deer. I do my duties. I must try cake. Please.”

The teaser trailer for the sequel to David Fincher’s The Social Network is here — they’re calling the movie “a companion piece” to the first film. It’s based on The Facebook Files: Primarily, the reports revealed that, based on internally commissioned studies, the company was fully aware of negative impacts on teenage users of Instagram, and the contribution of Facebook activity to violence in developing countries. Other takeaways of the leak include the impact of the company’s platforms on spre [more]

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

Every time I see a link to one of of Car Pal’s BeamNG car simulator videos, I have to stop what I’m doing and watch it. (It’s becoming a problem.) This one was particularly good: Is it possible to reach the speed of light with perpetual speed boosters?

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

Anthropic has launched a streaming music video on YouTube for “thinking and building” called Claude FM. “Made and curated by musicians.”

CrankGPT. “Just a hand crank, a little computer, and a small stack of speech and language models running locally. Provided the electronics are kept dry and at a reasonable temperature, there’s no reason this thing won’t still work in a thousand years.”

On the Difference Between Rest and Idleness. “The wellness industry loves rest [because] rest can be sold, because rest promises a return.” But: “[Idleness] does not promise to make you better at anything. It offers no return on investment.”

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

I (weirdly?) love Amy Casey’s paintings of buildings in peril — being swallowed by the sea, being flung into the sky by wind. There’s an element of the Kowloon Walled City to Casey’s work, as well as Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (specifically the tomato tornado). (via colossal) Tags: Amy Casey · architecture · art

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

Everything Wrong With the 2026 World Cup. “By far the most grave of those is a World Cup host starting a war against one of the participant nations, as happened with the USA’s attack on Iran at the end of February.”

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

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

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

Yesterday, Ollie and I hiked up to Delta Lake (via Lupine Meadows Access) in Grand Teton National Park. It was perhaps a bit aggressive given my current lack of fitness, my non-acclimation to the altitude (we topped out at 9000’), and the rock scrambling we had to do near the top, but we were rewarded with one of the best views I’ve ever seen. That’s the Grand Teton (13,775’) in the background. The lake was so enchantingly blue…the photos don’t do it justice. I shared a few more photos from the [more]

TIL about variant sudoku puzzles, “sudoku with strange rules like thermometers, ratio dots, cages, and other things that you’re probably already confused by”.

The excellent Scene on Radio podcast is back with a new season on The News. “Just about everyone is mad at the media, and Americans seem helpless to solve our problems, in large part because we have no shared narrative and few shared facts.”

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

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

“For the first time, wind and solar generated more electricity than gas worldwide in April 2026.”

A lovely story by Mary H.K. Choi about her husband and wedding. “A green card wedding was the story I was selling…but it became clear I’d wanted to get married for all the typical risky reasons most of us do: love, understanding, hope.”

From the New Yorker, a long and difficult-to-read report by Heidi Blake about how the truly disgusting and evil Tate brothers built a sexual slavery empire.

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

The Supreme Court Has Invented a Right to Discriminate. “The Roberts Court has replaced the Fifteenth Amendment’s ban on racial discrimination in voting with a right to engage in racial discrimination in voting.”

Nominations are open for this year’s Tiny Awards. “The Tiny Awards exist because we thought it was important to shine a spotlight on the sorts of personal web projects that tend to get overlooked.”

Interesting question and resulting thread: have you talked with someone who was alive in the 1800s? I think I technically have (a relative in the 80s when I was a kid) but I don’t remember the circumstances. Anyone have a good memory to share?

The folks at Fred Rogers Productions have launched a YouTube channel dedicated to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. They plan to post compilations, clips, and full episodes, some of which haven’t been seen on PBS in years & years. One of the first complete episodes they’ve posted is the one about how crayons are made! Other full episodes include A Visit with Officer Clemmons, The Very First Episode (from 1968), and Koko the Gorilla Meets Mister Rogers. And there’s also this 30-minute compilation [more]

My Students Can’t Read. “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.”

Yeah, I’ll read the hell out of a Wesley Morris profile of Steven Spielberg. “Spielberg has always known that his movies are attempts to understand his boyhood and his parents, to try to heal them through fiction and illuminate parts of himself.”

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

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

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

Ben Sandofsky, writing on the Lux Camera blog: After decades of shooting digital, I returned to analog photography in 2023. I thought it would be challenging, given the limited selection of film stocks, only to be surprised by how freeing it felt. It felt so much better to have a handful of amazing choices rather than photo-editor with thousands of presets. We owe that to film engineers who spent years developing versatile film stocks that work in a variety of situations. Inspired by “Less, but [more]

Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim, in a memo to the 60 Minutes staff obtained by The New York Times (gift links): We have had a hard time deciding whether to stay at 60 Minutes. We’re still deeply upset by the firings of Tanya and Draggan, strong leaders who everyone respected. As far as we can tell — because no explanation has ever been offered, they were expelled because they fought for our 60 Minutes values and stood up to protect our independence and integrity. Newsrooms are not [more]

Josh Marshall: In a hearing today about the president’s bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House and plans to build a vast ballroom, a judge asked if the president could also bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and be subject to no legal challenge. The DOJ lawyer, Yaakov Roth, said that yes, President Trump could decide tomorrow to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and no one could stop him. It was a good question from DC Court of Appeals Judge Patricia Millett since it brings the arguments and th [more]

Laura Hazard Owen, writing for Nieman Journalism Lab back in April: I used Claude to help me scrape the 200 most recent tweets from 18 large publishers’ X accounts and track the engagement (likes + comments + retweets) on each. Six of those publishers have paywalls: Bloomberg, CNN, Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Nine don’t: Al Jazeera English, AP, BBC, Breitbart News, CBS News, Daily Wire, Fox News, NBC News, and Reuters. The last three accounts I l [more]

Nate Silver, back in April, under the headline “Social Media Is Turning Into a Freak Show”, where by “social media” he mostly discusses Twitter/X: But what does that remaining traffic consist of? I recently came across a bubble chart depicting the Twitter accounts that had received the most “engagement” in February 2026. It was depressing: most of the top accounts were extremely low-quality and highly partisan. I hadn’t even heard of many of them and only follow a handful of the top accounts. So [more]

Here's your Garbage Intelligence for May 2026

Yours truly, last August: I can’t see why Apple would want to get involved with a company like this though. Gurman’s report makes it sound like his sources are inside Apple, but man, this “Apple + Perplexity” thing feels more like something Perplexity would be seeding than one that Apple executives would be leaking. Perplexity is still occasionally in the news (often not in good ways), but it seems to me they’ve slipped into the “afterthought” tier of AI startups — which is exactly why they star [more]

I’m observing summer Fridays here at KDO again this year, which means I (mostly) won’t be posting here on Fridays. If past years are any guide, this doesn’t actually have too much of an effect on how much I work or post…more of a redistribution of time & effort. But it’s nice to have the extra non-weekend day to catch up on other things. This morning, I lounged in bed a little, sat on my deck and read while drinking my morning chai, and stared off into the distance on this lovely day. Then I nee [more]

Illustrated break-downs of how common objects work. Currently featuring a mechanical pencil, PEZ dispenser, retractable pen, and Zippo lighter.

Ed Morrissey, writing for Hot Air, thinks Scott Pelley got what he deserved and Bari Weiss is doing a good job running CBS News: And Pelley forgot the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. Instead, Pelley convinced himself of his own virtue and torched his own position — and if Bilton’s letter is accurate, in as mean-spirited and conceited a manner as possible. Pelley could have chosen a dignified resignation under protest, but instead pulled a power move in an attempt to intimidate [more]

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

Location: The California Theatre, San Jose Showtime: Tuesday, 9 June 2026, 7pm PT (Doors open 6pm) Special Guest(s): For sure Price: $45 The annual live audience episode of The Talk Show during the week of WWDC. If you can make it, you should come. You’ll even enjoy the prelude, mingling with fellow DF readers and listeners.  ★

“Descartes Against Humanity” and Other Games Designed by Famous Philosophers.

All this Sturm und Drang surrounding 60 Minutes has me thinking about a re-watch of The Insider, Michael Mann’s great 1999 movie. Letterboxd’s synopsis: “A research chemist comes under personal and professional attack when he decides to appear in a 60 Minutes exposé on Big Tobacco.” It’s a great movie, and feels apt AF at the moment. Here’s the original segment on 60 Minutes, which ran an entire half hour. What’s going on today is like if — instead of getting shady, threatening, and litigious —  [more]

Hayden Field and Tom Warren, writing for The Verge (gift link): This year’s Build had the vibe of a freshly single divorcée posting a thirst trap on Instagram. “It’s always fun to be at developer conferences in times of great change,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said onstage Tuesday, adding that events like this are about “coming to grips with the new opportunity.” AI chief Mustafa Suleyman, in an interview with The Verge, put it even more bluntly. “The goal is to prove that we can become one of [more]

Chipotlai Max is an AI agent that runs on “stolen compute” from Chipotle’s AI chat bot. They are looking to borrow from bots from Ikea, Expedia, Home Depot, and others.

Team Spirit is a wonderful short film for ESPN by Errol Morris about the funerals of die-hard sports fans. I love the Steelers fan laid out in a recliner under a Steelers blanket in front of a television with a Steelers game on as if “he just fell asleep watching the game”. [This is a vintage post originally from Aug 2012.] Tags: Errol Morris · sports · timeless posts · video

The official trailer for season three of Silo. Looks like we finally get some origin story stuff (well, more than a brief scene at least).

Peter Borg: Lingon makes scheduling apps, scripts, shortcuts, and commands feel simple. Create a task in minutes, run it on a schedule, and stay in control. Lingon helps you run whatever you want whenever you want without living in Terminal. Schedule apps, scripts, shortcuts, and commands with a clear, friendly UI. Run tasks at specific times, on intervals or at login. Optional notifications make it easy to keep control. Two separate apps. Lingon is the simpler Mac App Store version and free to [more]

Loren Brichter, back in 2020: Short story: Google Chrome installs an updater called Keystone on your computer, which is bizarrely correlated to massive unexplained CPU usage in WindowServer (a system process)[1], and made my whole computer slow even when Chrome wasn’t running. Deleting Chrome and Keystone made my computer way, way faster, all the time. Long story: I noticed my brand new 16” MacBook Pro started acting sluggishly doing even trivial things like scrolling. Activity Monitor showed no [more]

On this date in 2004, the Killdozer rampage took place. “The bulldozer effortlessly demolished cars and buildings, including the home of a former mayor, the office of a newspaper that had sided against him in an editorial…”

Two months ago Google launched a new native Mac app for Gemini. I’ve been trying it, on and off, since. It’s ... not bad. Certainly better than Claude’s Electron shitbox. But the Gemini app isn’t all that good, either. I’m sticking with ChatGPT, which remains far and away the best native Mac client to an LLM. (And ChatGPT is not that great of a Mac app — it’s just the closest to good of the bunch.) The thing that really turns me off about the Gemini Mac app is Google’s gall. The Gemini app insta [more]

Jamelle Bouie: The cruelty is still the point of the Trump regime. “This isn’t a border security policy. It’s cruelty as governance — directed at people this administration has decided don’t deserve dignity.”

Throughout most of human history, the weather has resisted humanity’s desire to change it. For thousands of years, we have sacrificed children, sung songs and danced, brewed alchemical concoctions, chanted prayers, fired cannons, and made many other futile efforts in the attempt to somehow change the weather a little more to our liking. And then, with the Industrial Revolution, all that changed. Humans modified the weather on a planet-wide, unpredictable scale. Climate change is an enormous a [more]

Jason Snell at Six Colors, looking ahead to WWDC next week: These days, I’m getting emails pitching me for an endless stream of new Mac apps. It’s quite remarkable because there was a period five or ten years ago when it seemed like all app development on Apple’s platforms was focused on iOS. Even more interesting, these are all indie Mac apps that seem to be built using native Mac frameworks, not the product of big corporations that are just rolling their cross-platform development system out e [more]

I look forward to pseudoscience like this finally getting some airtime on 60 Minutes. For 58 long years the program has been hopelessly biased toward actual science.  ★

Back in 2011, when he was a tech columnist at The New York Times, Nick Bilton figured out that Apple was soon going to launch an Apple branded-television set, with no remote control. You’d just talk to it. This made no sense of course, as I pointed out. Bilton closed his column thus: The company is now close enough that it could announce the product by late 2012, releasing it to consumers by 2013. It is coming though. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. Maybe it’ll launch in time for [more]

Scott Pelley, in a statement posted on Instagram (which I’ll quote in full, as the original is locked behind a dickwall if you’re not signed in to an Instagram account): There has never been anything in America like 60 Minutes. The Sunday tradition is the most successful program of any kind in history. For more than a decade, its innovative growth on every major online platform has extended its reach to countless millions around the world. This spring, at the end of our 58th season, 60 Minutes g [more]

Paramount’s “Press Express” page promoting 60 Minutes still lists all eight correspondents from the 2025–2026 season, the program’s 58th. (Perhaps they fired the person responsible for keeping the cast page up to date.) In the order they appear on Paramount’s listing: Lesley Stahl Scott Pelley — fired today Bill Whitaker Anderson Cooper — left on his own after 20 years Sharyn Alfonsi — fired last week L. Jon Wertheim Cecilia Vega — fired last week Norah O’Donnell A big part of the brand for 60 M [more]

Benjamin Mullin and Michael M. Grynbaum: In a formal letter to Mr. Pelley, which was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Bilton wrote that the correspondent had been “terminated for cause effective immediately.” The letter is a must-read. No summary of it can capture just how pathetic a man Nick Bilton is. He disputes nothing Pelley said in the Monday staff meeting, and firing Pelley proves that Pelley was exactly right. Mr. Pelley, in a telephone interview on Tuesday evening shortly after he wa [more]

Joanna Stern, on YouTube: People across the country are offering a service on Facebook Marketplace to disable the recording light on Ray-Ban Meta glasses. They call it “Stealth Mode.” Joanna paid $100 for the modification and went inside the growing business of turning smart glasses into covert cameras. She investigates who is doing it, whether it’s legal and what some are doing to try and stop it. Of course there’s a market for this. But the true chef’s kiss is that the market to find people wh [more]

Read to the end for a good Bluesky post

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

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

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Read to the end for some good journalism

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

Read to the end for a good cat meme

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

A trip to Zambia (temporarily) gone awry

Read to the end for a good Drake song

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

Read to the end for succulent Chinese wheels

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read to the end for a good Drake song

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

Read to the end for the banana bread dance

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

Read to the end for a really good casserole recipe.

And you're getting a free month!

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

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

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

Read to the end for a very good otter video

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

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

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

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

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

Roundup 05/03/2026

Plus, a recap of stories you missed in April 2026

A Read Max re-run

A little state of the union

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

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

Roundup 04/27/2026

A message to the Apple faithful

With Quinn Slobodian, Ben Tarnoff, and John Ganz

Let’s pretend it’s January, because I’m ready and excited to present to you the #new chips, cookies, cereals, and assorted garbage I found in the wild during 2025!! Last year, we started a new (temporary?) Panic tradition — at the very end of our Monday status meeting, I run through all the new snacks I’d found […]

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

Roundup 04/20/2026

PLUS: Has Forum Brain crossed the gender divide?

Roundup 04/14/2026

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

Video of our conversation from Night of IDeas

11 books to get your brain moving through the spring

Roundup 04/06/2026

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

Plus, all the tech news you missed in March 2026

Roundup 03/29/2026

A Read Max re-run

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

Roundup 03/23/2026

A recording of our livestream for paying subscribers

Roundup 03/17/2026 (Plus: a bonus book rec!)

This newsletter is brought to you by Squarespace.

Roundup 03/09/2025

What you missed in February 2026

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

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

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

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

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

Long ago, I was in the studio audience of a local PDX TV kids show called Ramblin’ Rod. “Local kids show” is a format that is completely lost to time, which is pretty wild, because it was such a thing. Think Krusty the Clown — kids sitting in a studio, a goofball host, time filled with […]

Welcome to 2025. The vibes are a little heavy, so, I’m trying very hard to focus on the things I can control — and yes, that includes remembering to share things that delight me like the latest #new snacks and cereals I find at the grocery store!! Yeah. It’s an age-old, very-odd Cabel tradition. This time, […]