Here's your Garbage Intelligence for August 2025

Florida Decided There Were Too Many Children. “Florida is the first state to take the courageous step toward decluttering itself of excess children, but under the inexpert guidance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., other states may follow.”

How Are You Supposed To Get The COVID Vaccine Now? An Explainer. “If you are not in one of the 16-ish states requiring a prescription for a COVID vaccine, you should be able to self-report a condition and receive your vaccine.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

David Pierce, writing for The Verge: Mike Cannon-Brookes, the CEO of enterprise software giant Atlassian, was one of the first users of the Arc browser. Over the last several years, he has been a prolific bug reporter and feature requester. Now he’ll own the thing: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company, the New York-based startup that makes both Arc and the new AI-focused Dia browser. Atlassian is paying $610 million in cash for The Browser Company, and plans to run it as an independent ent [more]

Dave Michaels and Katherine Blunt, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): “There are strong reasons not to jolt the system and to allow market forces to do the work,” Mehta wrote. Wall Street analysts scored the ruling a huge win for Google and Apple since it allowed an existing arrangement to continue in which Google pays Apple more than $20 billion a year to be the default search provider on the Safari browser. I’m picking nits here, but I think part of the ruling is that Google ca [more]

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, British American artist Jo Hay began a series of engaging portraits called Persisters “that depict contemporary, trailblazing women in pursuit of civil rights and justice”. Pictured above are her paintings of Letitia James, Elizabeth Warren, Greta Thunberg, Christine Blasey Ford, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Marie Yovanovitch. The portraits are quite large, as you can see in this photo of AOC’s painting. I also quite like Hay’s other portraits, including t [more]

There are finallys, and there are finallys. Apple shipped the original iPad in April 2010. Instagram shipped in October 2010 — and was iPhone-exclusive until 2012. That Instagram didn’t ship a native iPad version of its app until now is really one of the strangest things in tech. But here it is. One significant difference from Instagram on phones is that on iPad, it defaults to the Reels view, and you have to tap below Reels in the sidebar to get to your following timeline. Adam Mosseri explains [more]

David McCabe, reporting for The New York Times: Google must hand over its search results and some data to rival companies but does not need to break itself up by selling its Chrome web browser, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday. The decision, by Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, falls short of the sweeping changes proposed by the government to rein in the power of Silicon Valley. Judge Mehta said in the 223-page ruling that Google must share some of its [more]

“I almost admire the confidence it must take to tell people what to do online. But I long for the days when the internet wasn’t just lists of bossy self-optimisation plans.”

Shane Schieffer is attempting to swim the entire 140-mile length of Lake Powell in 10 days, self-supported. Yeah, that means he’s dragging 215lbs of gear behind him on a paddle board while he swims. He’s documenting the whole thing on Instagram; here’s a video where he explains all the gear he’s taking with him. I’m attempting to be the first person ever to swim across Lake Powell. Here’s how I’m preparing for this massive journey- I will be swimming from Hite Crossing Bridge in Utah to Glen Can [more]

The Rise of the Traveling Third Space. “Traveling third spaces are not physically fixed; they move across cafes, malls, restaurants, and host various programming for a singular community in a particular city.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Lucasfilm recently released an official map of the galaxy that Star Wars takes place in. And it’s huge. The map is slightly interactive; you can zoom and scroll it, but you can’t search or, say, click to highlight all the star systems featured in Andor. But you can do manual lookups using this massive 59-page PDF listing of Star Wars star systems. Tags: maps · Star Wars 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A thoughtful essay about e-bikes as a metaphor for AI, augmentation vs amputation, and the bargain of innovation. “We often consider what technology promises to enable for us, without considering what it will almost certainly disable.”

From Lewis Hine, a photograph of Clyde Bradford. Hine’s photos of child laborers resulted in some of the first laws in the US against child labor. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

In 1987, choir director Dennis Bell arranged a version of U2’s #1 hit I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For for his choir, the New Voices of Freedom. After hearing a recording of the arrangement, U2 asked Bell & the choir to join the band for an upcoming show at Madison Square Garden in NYC. Before the show, the band and the choir rehearsed together at Greater Calvary Baptist Church in Harlem: Here is some behind-the-scenes footage of the rehearsal (more); Bono’s arm is in a sling for some [more]

A list of 29 heroes and interesting people that few people have heard of. I’ve only heard of one or two of these folks. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

The Baltimore Museum of Art is exhibiting Amy Sherald’s American Sublime show after Sherald pulled it from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery due to attempted censorship. I saw this in NYC; it’s fantastic. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

From Orbital Mechanics, a visualization of the 2153 nuclear weapons exploded on Earth since 1945. 2153! I had no idea there had been that much testing. According to Wikipedia, the number is 2119 tests, with most of those coming from the US (1032) and the USSR (727). The largest device ever detonated was Tsar Bomba, a 50-megaton hydrogen bomb set off in the atmosphere above an island in the Barents Sea in 1961. Tsar Bomba had more than three times the yield of the largest bomb tested by the US. [more]

3books, a site that features the books recommended by guests at the end of each Ezra Klein Show podcast. Built by my pal Michael Sippey. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Great interactive feature on how former world record holder Max Park solves the Rubik’s Cube. You scroll through his slow-motion solve — he makes 12 moves in the first second. “It’s like playing chess at the speed of ping pong.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

I loved this: The History of The New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department. “The writer had already engaged in the charm and betrayal inherent in reporting. We were in the harm-reduction business.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Read to the end for kids in the hole

In the mid-70s, Mike Mandel traveled around the United States photographing photographers as if they were baseball players, capturing the likes of Imogen Cunningham, Ed Ruscha, William Eggleston, and Ansel Adams. I photographed photographers as if they were baseball players and produced a set of cards that were packaged in random groups of ten, with bubble gum, so that the only way of collecting a complete set was to make a trade. I travelled around the United States visiting about 150 photograp [more]

How the Richest People in America Avoid Paying Taxes. “The country’s billionaires pay lower tax rates than many of its millionaires do. Indeed, they pay lower tax rates than many middle-class professionals.”

I ran across this delightful account that explores and explains everyday scientific questions through maddeningly catchy songs. Like why a cast saw cuts through plaster but spares your skin: How working principle of an electric kettle is another banger: My gateway into this account was why are steel coils placed upright when trucks are hauling them: These will get stuck in your head. Available on YouTube and TikTok (e.g. how is a football made). Tags: science · video 💬 Join the discussion on [more]

Thetrusize.com, by James Talmage and Damon Maneice, is a website that lets you move a country or state around a Mercator projection map of the world so you can see how big or small a country really is. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A paper recently published in a behavioral sciences journal describes a high school student’s hyperthymesia, an extraordinary ability to retrieve autobiographical memories. Teenager With Hyperthymesia Exhibits Extraordinary Mental Time Travel Abilities: The subject of the study, referred to as TL, was a 17-year-old high school student in France when she came to the researchers’ attention. She had long known her memory was different. As a child, she would casually mention her ability to mentally [more]

Oh wow, after 26 years and 1000+ episodes, Melvyn Bragg is stepping down from hosting the In Our Time radio series. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Apologies: You Have Reached the End of Your Free-Trial Period of America! “We are retaining some features for premium users. Want rule of law? That’s premium. The right to run your company without government interference? That’s a paid feature now.”

We’re excited to launch TextJam this week, a multi-player editor with a novel twist on how humans interact with AI. Ever tried to “AI chat” your way to a polished piece of writing, and wanted more control over the result? TextJam has new inventions that make it easy to tell the AI what to keep and what to change, so you can get from draft to done faster. From typing in pen and pencil, to multi-touch gestures that intelligently resize text, TextJam is a bold new take on what a word processor can [more]

This video features a number of scientists who were working on stuff like HIV treatments and life-saving cancer research but whose work has been shut down or curtailed by the Trump regime cutting their funding.

The Network of Time is a project that links people together, in the style of six degrees of separation, by appearance together in photographs. Every photo you take with someone else links you into the vast network of people caught together in images. It’s a collage millions of pictures deep – every actor you’ve seen on screen, every politician you’ve seen in the news, almost everyone you’ve seen in a history textbook. Network Of Time is the world’s first interactive snapshot of this network. F [more]

“New York City is marking its 400th birthday this year and almost no one gives a damn.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

In tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, a choir of 7000+ people sang Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. Lovely. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

For her newest film, director Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) has adapted Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet; both book and movie are about William Shakespeare and his wife in the aftermath of the death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet. Paul Mescal stars as William Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as his wife Agnes. Here’s the trailer. The film recently premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and the reviews are very good. Premiering at the Telluride Film Festival ahead of a November theatrical release, [more]

Scientists Have Found the First Branch on the Tree of Life. “The sister to all other animals, the first to branch off, and the most genetically isolated animal is … drumroll please … the comb jelly!” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Alexander Chee: How Can I Write At A Time Like This? “We are being hit with what I would call advanced resilience targeting, an attack on our ability to be in community, to be healthy, to make a living, to know our rights, to have a government.”

We Already Know a Way to Save a Bunch of Lives. (Giving wounded people blood earlier, in ambulances, increases their chance of survival. But insurance won’t pay for it so we don’t do it in the US. 🤬)

I didn’t know this about eels: No one has ever seen an eel reproduce naturally. Not in the wild, not in captivity, not even once. And yet, eels are everywhere. In rivers, in lakes, in oceans, slippery, ancient, and inexplicably present. For centuries, the world’s greatest thinkers tried to solve the mystery of the eel. Aristotle thought they emerged from mud. Others believe they simply appeared, formed by sunlight and dew. Even today, there’s only one place on Earth where we think all eels are b [more]

Bernie Sanders, in a NYT op-ed: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, is endangering the health of the American people now and into the future. He must resign. Mr. Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and over, that they want to Make America Healthy Again. That’s a great slogan. I agree with it. The problem is that since coming into office President Trump and Mr. Kennedy have done exactly the opposite. Powerful and to the point. Sanders, unl [more]

William Foege, William Roper, David Satcher, Jeffrey Koplan, Richard Besser, Tom Frieden, Anne Schuchat, Rochelle P. Walensky, and Mandy K. Cohen — all of them former directors of the CDC, under every president from Jimmy Carter to Trump — in a co-bylined op-ed for the NYT: What the health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has done to the C.D.C. and to our nation’s public health system over the past several months — culminating in his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as C.D. [more]

For your holiday listening enjoyment: Special guest Andru Edwards joins the show. Topics include Google’s Pixel 10 event and the Pixel 10 family of devices, AI’s effect on computational photography, foldable phones, and some speculation on Apple’s September 9 “Awe Dropping” event. Sponsored by: Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow. Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Get 3 months and 150,000 errors free. Notion: The best [more]

After 9 months on Substack, Disconnect is back on Ghost. Paris explains why the migration was necessary.

Roundup 09/01/2025

My thanks to Impending for sponsoring last week at DF to promote their new app, Walk the World. You surely know some of Impending’s other apps, like the innovative checklist/task app Clear. Walk the World turns your steps — your real-world activity — into a new kind of virtual globe-trotting adventure. Wouldn’t it be cool to know you’ve walked the length of the Boston Marathon this past week? You can conquer iconic hikes and trails from around the world presented as gorgeous map milestones to c [more]

One more for my weekend spate of developer posts, but from the opposite of the LLM-assisted cutting edge: this wonderful collection of classic-era Mac programming books, carefully scanned as PDFs. These evoke nostalgia both for the classic Mac era and for the entire notion of “programming books”. (Via Michael Tsai and Rui Carmo.)  ★

Sosumi.ai: Ever notice Claude struggling to write Swift code? It might not be their fault! Apple Developer docs are locked behind JavaScript, making them invisible to most LLMs. If they try to fetch it, all they see is “This page requires JavaScript. Please turn on JavaScript in your browser and refresh the page to view its content.” This service translates Apple Developer documentation pages into AI-friendly Markdown. Perfect little audio easter egg on the page. Beautiful Markdown output too. L [more]

From Apple’s Xcode 26 Beta 7 release notes: Claude in Xcode is now available in the Intelligence settings panel, allowing users to seamlessly add their existing paid Claude account to Xcode and start using Claude Sonnet 4. (155826755) When using ChatGPT in Xcode, users can now start a new conversation with either GPT-4.1 or GPT-5, with GPT-5 set as the default. (158342780) ChatGPT in Xcode provides two model choices. “GPT-5” is optimized for quick, high-quality results, and should work well [more]

Here’s the trailer for Bugonia, dir. by Yorgos Lanthimos & starring frequent collaborator Emma Stone. “Two conspiracy obsessed young men kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company, convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet Earth.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

The long shadow of crypto

One year out from Trump's threat to imprison him, Zuckerberg now has the administration fighting battles for him around the world

I Am An AI Hater. “But I am a hater, and I will not be polite. The machine is disgusting and we should break it. The people who build it are vapid shit-eating cannibals glorifying ignorance. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”

Dan Wang on his forthcoming book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. “China is an engineering state, which brings a sledgehammer to problems both physical and social, in contrast with America’s lawyerly society…” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A group of 15-20 families in South Portland, Maine have installed landlines for their kids instead of giving them cellphones. The landlines “helped their children become better listeners and more empathetic communicators”. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

These contact lenses give their wearers the ability to see infrared light, even with their eyes closed. Sign me up!! 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A collection of kooky-but-rideable bikes (treadmill bike, pull-up bike, etc.) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Light pollution has lengthened birds’ days. “Their day is almost an hour longer. They start vocalizing about 20 minutes earlier in the morning and they stop vocalizing about 30 minutes later in the evening.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Shelby Talcott, reporting under the euphemistic headline “White House Fires CDC Director Over Vaccine Disagreements”: A showdown at the CDC culminated in the White House formally firing its director, Susan Monarez, on Wednesday night. Monarez was ousted earlier in the day, after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked her to step down amid disagreements over changing vaccine policies, The Washington Post reported — and HHS confirmed her departure. But Monarez’s lawyer, Ma [more]

Truly phenomenal video from Real Engineering about a genuinely phenomenal product. In my review of the AirPods Pro 2 in 2023 — a year after they originally shipped, when the cases were changed to use USB-C — I called them “the best single expression of Apple as a company today”. That remains true. AirPods exemplify everything that sets Apple apart: miniaturization, “it just works” ease of use, opinionated design (you get them in any color you want, so long as it’s white), and, most of all, joyfu [more]

Hear a Prehistoric Conch Shell Musical Instrument Played for the First Time in 18,000 Years. “The shell may have had more range, and been more comfortable to play, with its mouthpiece, likely made of a hollow bird bone.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Kevin Kelly recently published a guide called “Everything I Know about Self-Publishing”. “The way I approach publishing today is with as much self-publishing as I can handle.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Conceding to Trump’s demands only guarantees new threats. It’s time to reject the US and its tech companies.

Werner Herzog doesn’t use a cell phone, but he has joined Instagram.

“The world’s biggest frogs build their own ponds” is art as a headline because it sounds like an adage your grandfather would tell while fishing one afternoon, but also oops the adage has now been corrupted by grind culture tech bros. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

“More than 80 years after it was looted by the Nazis from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, a portrait by an Italian master has been spotted on the website of an estate agent advertising a house for sale in Argentina.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Just wanting to let y’all know the cops have never had to chase a bear out of my ice cream shop, though I suppose that’s what an ice cream shop would say if they had had to have cops chase a bear out of it at some point. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Are the AirPods Pro 3 coming soon? Here’s what the rumors say. “Apple is said to be testing a faster audio chip that drives ‘much better’ Active Noise Cancellation than the already‑impressive ‌AirPods Pro‌ 2 manage.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

This hilarious commercial for a 90s mail-order punk CD is for a compilation with hardly any punk music on it. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

I love these author cards from McSweeney’s in the style of baseball cards. For years you’ve seen athletes, web-slinging superheroes, orcs, and pocket monsters get the trading-card treatment, while you’ve sat in your room hoping upon hope that the heroes of magical realism or giants of New Journalism would get their own. The wait is over, friends. They have three sets: the first set is a part of their 74th issue, series 2, and series 3. The authors featured in the sets include Octavia Butler, J [more]

Prosecutors Fail to Secure Indictment Against Man Who Threw Sandwich at Federal Agent. It’s nice to hear that ordinary citizens still have some power and some sense in wielding it.

Christopher Yasiejko, reporting last week for Bloomberg Law: CBP exceeded its authority in an Aug. 1 internal advice ruling that overturned its own January decision without notice or input from Masimo, the medical-device maker said in a complaint filed Wednesday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. Masimo brought claims under the Administrative Procedure Act and the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause. The CBP ruling is available here. As I read the CPB ruling, Apple’s argume [more]

“The evidence for millionaire tax flight is scant. If high earners were truly fleeing high taxes, low-tax states would be swarming with millionaires. Instead, the highest concentrations of millionaires are found in high-tax states.”

A thoughtful post by Philip Bump on the careful use of your power. “[Substack authors] have transferred their power to a company that has used it to promote toxic rhetoric in the guise of ‘having a debate.’”

Matthew Panzarino returns to the show. Topics include 007 logo creator Joe Caroff’s death at 103, Google’s weird “Made by Google” event hosted by Jimmy Fallon, the UK supposedly dropping its demand for an iCloud encryption backdoor, and Apple’s workaround for the Apple Watch blood oxygen sensor patent stalemate. Sponsored by: Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow. Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Get 3 months and 150,0 [more]

After a 25-year run, the website MacSurfer closed in 2020. But, as brought to my attention two weeks ago by Nick Heer, MacSurfer quietly returned in June. No one seemed to notice until this month. The original MacSurfer was a bit of a weird site. Content-wise it was a daily headline aggregator, with no original news or commentary. That made a lot of sense in 1995 and for a few years thereafter, when the web was new. I remember reading it somewhat regularly back then. But one never really “read” [more]

The chatbot mental health crisis is here

Supply chain leaker Majin Bu has the scoop, including photos of the cases and their packaging, of Apple’s second attempt at a fabric-based successor to leather iPhone cases. Apple’s first attempt two years ago, FineWoven, was so unpopular that they didn’t even offer a premium level of Apple-branded cases last year with the iPhones 16. Apple dropped all use of leather two years ago, including watch bands and wallets. FineWoven was kind of shitty for those too — it just wasn’t a durable material, [more]

Rock guitarist Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine) has made a playlist called Fuck ICE, “a rocking little soundtrack to enjoy while you drive those bastards out of your neighborhood”. Springsteen, Public Enemy, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie, etc. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Elon Musk, Friday: Join @xAI and help build a purely AI software company called Macrohard. It’s a tongue-in-cheek name, but the project is very real! In principle, given that software companies like Microsoft do not themselves manufacture any physical hardware, it should be possible to simulate them entirely with AI. If it’s “a purely AI software company” why do they need to hire anyone?  ★

Tulsi Gabbard — who, believe it or not, is the US director of national intelligence — on X last week: Over the past few months, I’ve been working closely with our partners in the UK, alongside @POTUS and @VP, to ensure Americans’ private data remains private and our Constitutional rights and civil liberties are protected. As a result, the UK has agreed to drop its mandate for Apple to provide a “back door” that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens and en [more]

John McCoy, on the supposedly controversial Cracker Barrel rebranding: But just because I doubt that these choices were motivated by politics doesn’t mean the detractors don’t have a point: something basic is being lost here. In both cases the companies have discarded character and context in an effort to streamline their identity. I have written previously about the often misguided penchant art directors have towards simplifying their brands. I suspect that the lion’s share (ha) of this tendenc [more]

Artist Amy Sherald: Censorship Has Taken Hold at the Smithsonian. I Refused to Play Along. “History shows us what happens when governments demand that museums perform loyalty. Nazi Germany weaponized them. So did the Soviet Union.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

“Welcome to the Atlas of Space — an interactive visualization to explore the planets, moons, asteroids, and other objects in the Solar System.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Right on schedule: second Tuesday of September, so long as that second Tuesday doesn’t fall on September 11. (Last year’s event went on Monday 9 September, probably because the Harris-Trump debate was already scheduled for Tuesday the 10th.) There’s an interactive animated version of the “heat map” event logo on Apple’s homepage. (A little bit odd that the second item below the event announcement, after a back-to-school promotion, is a “Meet the iPhone 16 family” promotion.) Expected announcemen [more]

Silicon Valley is full of wealthy men who think they’re victims. “I couldn’t, and still can’t, understand this deeply unattractive combination of machismo and self-pity.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, on page 17 of her dissent in National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Association: In a broader sense, however, today’s ruling is of a piece with this Court’s recent tendencies. “[R]ight when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law’s constraints,” the Court opts instead to make vindicating the rule of law and preventing manifestly injurious Government action as difficult as possible. This is Calvinball jurisprudenc [more]

I don’t know exactly what my expectations were of how lettering is painted on city streets, but this was not it. The level of precision and artistry is surprising. Reminds me of this video of a hand-lettering master at work. Update: Sure, he’s using a vehicle, but this guy is pretty good at line painting as well. [This is a vintage post originally from Mar 2014.] Tags: art · timeless posts · typography · video

Do you miss being excited about cool new apps? We’ve made some before like Clear and Heads Up!, and today, we have a new one for you. Walk the World turns your steps into a new kind of virtual globe-trotting adventure. Wouldn’t it be cool to know you’ve walked the length of the Boston Marathon this past week? You can conquer iconic hikes and trails from around the world presented as gorgeous map milestones to complete with your hard earned steps. If you enjoy or aspire to go on walks more regul [more]

The New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz profiles Patricia Lockwood. Regarding her forthcoming novel: “‘I wrote it insane and edited it sane’; it is a collaboration between two different people, both of whom happen to be her.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Jamelle Bouie on Democratic politicians who maddeningly cannot recognize and acknowledge what is going on in the country. From my perspective, the story of American politics right now is that the president, who fashions himself a kind of king of America, is attempting to barricade himself in the capital by unleashing a military occupation on its residents. And he’s promised to extend this military occupation to other cities and other states that he views as political opponents. That to me is the [more]

Dan Froomkin of Press Watch: “The top story of the moment is the one story that our most influential newsrooms won’t touch: That the United State has become an authoritarian state.”

I disagree with Quentin Tarantino on what his best film is. “So I think Kill Bill is the movie I was born to make, I think Inglourious Basterds is my masterpiece but Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is my favourite.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Stanford's Mark Lemley on xAI's whiny lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI

MacOS has shipped with a collection of “utility” apps since the prehistoric era of classic Mac OS. A good rule of thumb for what makes an app a “utility” is that it’s a tool for doing something to or about your computer. Ever since Mac OS X 10.0, most of these apps have been neatly filed away in /Applications/Utilities/. Others — some because they’re obscure (e.g. Ticket Viewer), some because they’re effectively deprecated (e.g. DVD Player, whose copyright date in MacOS 15 Sequoia is 2019), and [more]

Read to the end for some real good copyright infringement

Roundup 08/25/2025

My thanks to Fly.io for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Phoenix.new, their new AI app-builder. Just describe your idea, and Phoenix.new quickly generates a working real-time Phoenix app: clustering, pubsub, and presence included. Ideal for multiplayer games, collaborative tools, or quick weekend experiments. Built by Fly.io, deploy wherever you want. Just try it, and see how far you can go.  ★

Nice update to Menial’s excellent SQLite developer tool for the Mac. Worth the wait.  ★

The death of a livestreamer

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac: Apple today announced that the monthly price of Apple TV+ is rising in the United States and some international markets. From today, the monthly subscription will cost $12.99, up from $9.99. Existing subscribers will see the price change 30 days after the next renewal date. The pricing for yearly TV+ subscriptions and the Apple One services bundle remains unchanged. The annual price for a standalone TV+ subscription — unchanged, as Mayo reports — remains $99. The usual ru [more]

Fox (capitalization verbatim): Fox Corporation today announced the official launch of FOX One, a bold new streaming service that brings together the full portfolio of FOX’s News, Sports and Entertainment branded content — all in one place, both live and on demand. Available today across major web, mobile and connected TV platforms, FOX One is priced at $19.99/month with a 7-day free trial or $199.99/year, with the option to add-on B1G+ or bundle FOX Nation for an even greater value. Starting Oct [more]

Sean Hollister, reporting for The Verge back in February: Two weeks ago, we exclusively reported Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks on how many pairs of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses the company had recently sold and might theoretically sell: 1 million pairs in 2024, with the possibility of reaching 2 million or even 5 million by the end of 2025. But glasses giant EssilorLuxottica, which produces those glasses for Meta, has now publicly revealed 2 million pairs of Meta Ray-Bans have sold since thei [more]

New video game, just out: Herdling is a brand new adventure from Okomotive, creators of the atmospheric and acclaimed FAR games, and Panic, publishers of Firewatch. Looks absolutely beautiful. Painterly. Darth says it’s good. Available now for Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Epic Games Store. Not (yet?) in the Mac App Store — not because of any hassles regarding the App Store, but because there’s not (yet?) a Mac port of the game, period.  ★

What I gave up, what I kept, and what's new. PLUS: How I'm using AI

Added this footnote just now to yesterday’s piece on MSNBC’s rebranding to “MS NOW”: Historical pedantry: from 1975–1979, Microsoft spelled its name “Micro-Soft”, with, yes, an uppercase S. But that’s not camel-case, and that hyphenated spelling is as much a footnote to Microsoft’s brand history as the woodcut Isaac-Newton-under-a-tree logo is to Apple. Microsoft’s logo from that era was very disco-’70s and kind of cool — but while “Micro” and “Soft” were broken across two lines, there’s no hyph [more]

Sara Fischer, Axios: MSNBC, the progressive cable network owned by NBCUniversal, is rebranding to MS NOW, an acronym that stands for My Source for News, Opinion and the World. The rebrand is part of a wider effort by NBCU to create a distinction between the cable networks it plans to spin out and the remaining NBCU parent company. As part of the rebrand, select cable networks that will be spun out into Versant, including CNBC, Golf Channel, GolfNow, MSNBC and SportsEngine, will all drop the icon [more]

Kwan Wei Kevin Tan, reporting for Business Insider five months ago: Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI startup Anthropic, said on Monday that AI, and not software developers, could be writing all of the code in our software in a year. “I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code,” Amodei said at a Council of Foreign Relations event on Monday. Complete bullshit, but, [more]

Five-minute short film from Apple, about people with severe hand tremors from Parkinson’s disease using the iPhone’s Action mode to shoot steady video — including filmmaker Brett Harvey, who was diagnosed at the way-too-young age of 37. There’s also a brief short with Harvey explaining the settings to shoot in Action mode by default, or to use voice controls to avoid needing to tap buttons. Apple at its very best. If this doesn’t hit you, you’re not hooked up right.  ★

Grab your copy of Road to Nowhere

Kieran Healy on, just now — amidst all this — becoming an American citizen: When I sat down to write something about becoming a citizen, I was immediately tangled up in a skein of questions about the character of citizenship, the politics of immigration, and the relationship of individuals to the state. These have all been in the news recently; perhaps you have heard about it. These questions ask how polities work, how they impose themselves upon us, how power is exercised. They are tied up with [more]

I’ve been using two iPhones throughout the summer — one running iOS 18, the other running iOS 26 betas. I found myself wanting to switch between them with iPhone Mirroring on my Mac, but couldn’t figure out how. The answer, from Apple Support, “iPhone Mirroring: Use your iPhone from your Mac”: If you have more than one iPhone that is both signed in to your Apple Account and nearby, you can choose the one that your Mac uses for mirroring and iPhone notifications: Choose Apple menu  > System Sett [more]

What new surveys tell us about the messy state of AI diffusion

Counterpoint Research, in a report titled “Global Smart Glasses Shipments Soared 110 Percent YoY in H1 2025, With Meta Capturing Over 70 Percent Share”: The global smart glasses market grew by 110% YoY in H1 2025, fueled by robust demand for Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses and the entry of new players such as Xiaomi and TCL-RayNeo. Meta’s share of the global smart glasses market rose to 73% in H1 2025, driven by strong demand and expanded manufacturing capacity at Luxottica, its key production partne [more]

It's clear that therapy chatbots can benefit people — but states may have good reason to intervene anyway

Mike Barnes, The Hollywood Reporter: For his first movie job — he would work on more than 300 campaigns during his career — United Artists executive David Chasman hired him to design the poster for West Side Story (1961), then asked him to come up with the letterhead for a publicity release tied to the first Bond film, Dr. No. (Chasman had designed the poster for the 1962 movie.) “He said, ‘I need a little decorative thing on top,’” Caroff recalled in 2021. “I knew [Bond’s] designation was 007, [more]

Roundup 08/18/2025

My thanks to Dekáf Coffee Roasters for sponsoring last week at DF. Dekáf believes that people who drink coffee for its flavor are the true connoisseurs. While other roasters treat decaf as a side project, they’ve made it their entire mission. They’re dedicated to creating exceptional decaffeinated coffee that stands toe-to-toe with the world’s finest caffeinated beans. I drink coffee every single day. I literally can’t remember the last day I didn’t have coffee in the morning. A few years ago, t [more]

Steve Wozniak turned 75 (!) and was profiled by John Blackstone for CBS News (also posted to YouTube). Slashdot linked to it, and in the comments, someone gently jabbed at Woz for having sold, rather than hoarded, his stock in Apple. Woz himself chimed in, with this comment for the ages: I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and the [more]

Jason Lalljee, reporting for Axios Tuesday: President Trump’s nomination of Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Monday drew criticism from economists across the political spectrum. Why it matters: The growing negative consensus among conservative economists is unusual given Antoni’s own conservative pedigree. Here we go with “unusual” as a euphemism for “unprecedented” — or perhaps, most accurately, “crazy” — again. The dichotomy here is that Trump [more]

Emma Roth, reporting for The Verge back on July 1 (emphasis added): Threads’ DMs are currently available to users aged 18 and over on Android, iOS, and the web, but you can only have one-on-one conversations right now. Moving forward, Threads plans to roll out the ability to choose who can send you messages, including people who don’t follow you on Threads and Instagram. You’ll also be able to review a folder dedicated to message requests, similar to what’s offered on X. Threads is working on a [more]

From a press release from the UK’s National Drought Group this week, quoting group chair Helen Wakeham (emphasis added): “We are grateful to the public for following the restrictions, where in place, to conserve water in these dry conditions. Simple, everyday choices — such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails — also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife.” To reaffirm that she did not misspeak, from a list of tips for c [more]

In a wide-ranging conversation with reporters, OpenAI's CEO discusses the GPT-5 backlash, the AI bubble, and whether he would build a social network

Bloomberg: The Trump administration is in talks with Intel Corp. to have the US government take a stake in the beleaguered chipmaker, according to people familiar with the plan, in the latest sign of the White House’s willingness to blur the lines between state and industry. A deal would help shore up Intel’s planned factory hub in Ohio, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. The company had once promised to turn that site into the world’s largest [more]

Greg Ip, chief economics commentator for The Wall Street Journal, under the euphemistic headline “The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics”: A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resemble America’s. Instead, capitalism in America is starting to look like China. Recent examples include President Trump’s demand that Intel’s chief executive resign; the 15% of certain chip sales to China that Nvidia and Advanced M [more]

Apple Newsroom this morning, “An Update on Blood Oxygen for Apple Watch in the U.S.”: Apple will introduce a redesigned Blood Oxygen feature for some Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 users through an iPhone and Apple Watch software update coming later today. Users with these models in the U.S. who currently do not have the Blood Oxygen feature will have access to the redesigned Blood Oxygen feature by updating their paired iPhone to iOS 18.6.1 and their Apple Watch to wat [more]

The future of A.I. is more Facebook, not jobs in space

Wildfire responses in Canada stifled by misinformation, particularly on on Facebook

Max Read, two years ago, “A Literary History of Fake Texts in Apple’s Marketing Materials”: I’m talking about the mocked-up texts and emails Apple puts together to demonstrate new messaging features in its operating-system updates, presumably written by some well-paid professionals in Apple’s marketing department. These eerily cheery, aggressively punctuated messages suggest an alternate dimension in which polite, good-natured, rigorously diverse groups of friends and coworkers use Apple product [more]

Read to the end for some poor phrasing from an ophthalmologist

Trailing ChatGPT on the charts, and suspended by its own maker, Elon Musk asks: is this Apple's fault?

In which an industry obsessed with benchmarks and evals finds that its products are being used by real people

Read to the end for a good shower hack

Roundup 08/11/2025

Western automakers are doomed if they keep trying to hide behind tariff walls

Here's your Garbage Intelligence for July 2025

It's big news for free users of ChatGPT, but AGI remains elusive. PLUS: one AI safety idea other labs should borrow

PLUS: A genealogy of "stomp clap"

Read to the end for Gus, 2007

An industry leader releases a powerful model that runs on a laptop. Should we worry?

It’s almost certainly not enough — but it’s a start.

Read to the end for a little guy having a snack

Roundup 08/04/2025

Epistemic arrogance in Silicon Valley

Read to the end for volunteer firefighter Spike the Bearded Dragon

The company has long wanted to be seen as neutral infrastructure — this week, we saw why that’s a fantasy

Read to the end for a subtle message from The Dropkick Murphys

The rocky rollout of age verification in the United Kingdom — and the privacy debacle at Tea — illustrate why a different approach is needed

What readers say I got wrong in our last edition

Canada’s AI agenda ignores potential harms in the hope of short-term economic gain

Read to the end for a man attempting the impossible

A special edition roundup 07/27/2025

The company is deceptively raising prices on existing customers to fund its AI spending

Read to the end for rollerblade dog

A Read Max re-run: How to be a successful content entrepreneur

Read to the end for a cool bowl

Special Edition Roundup 07/20/2025

I’m in the process of dropping US tech services. Here’s how I did it, and options you should consider.

Read to the end for a well-rendered pigeon

Dependence on US tech giants must end if the country is serious about digital sovereignty

Read to the end for a recipe for smack barm pey wet

A Read Max re-run: Exploring the Applecore style

Read to the end for some lettuce cookie bars

Roundup 07/13/2025

Why did Elon Musk's Grok go nuts?

Read to the end for the Labubu fleshlight

The pressure to maximize profit makes even the seemingly good executives compromise their values or move aside

Read to the end for Goose and his watermelon

10 books to check out during your summer vacation

Read to the end for a really good TikTok

Roundup 07/05/2025

Podcast on Podcast: John Ganz and I talk about Peter Thiel on Ross Douthat

Canada’s decision to rescind its digital services tax shows it’s “elbows down” in US trade talks

Roundup 06/30/2025

OR, How to make a best-movies list

Restrictions on Iranian and Chinese technology are about preserving US geopolitical power

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make the effort

It will tell the story of what’s really behind the hyperscale data center boom

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 […]

Here’s a quick and cautionary tale. This eBay auction, spotted by Eric Vitiello, immediately caught my eye: Wow. Someone was selling Apple Employee #10’s employee badge?! What an incredible piece of Apple history! Sure, it’s not Steve Jobs’ badge (despite the auction title), but there are only so many of these in the world — especially […]