A cartographer posits that our maps should be messier. “The idea that we must have a crisp line dividing one country from another is often inaccurate when it comes to what states are actually claiming.”

Sean Hollister, The Verge (gift link): After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it’s starting to mess with headlines in the traditional “10 blue links,” too. We’ve found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did not, sometimes changing their meaning in the process. For example, Google reduced our headline “I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything” to just five words: “‘Cheat on everything’ AI tool.” [more]

This is a diabolical phishing attack. “That generated a real case ID, and triggered real Apple emails to my inbox, properly signed, from Apple’s actual servers.”

Regarding my earlier post expressing confusion/discomfort with Bluesky announcing a $100 million funding round almost an entire year after it closed, I had an interesting back-and-forth with Adam Vartanian on Bluesky (natch), where he wrote: If you see press reports that says a company “has raised” some money but no date on when the round closed, it probably happened some time in the past. Bluesky is actually unusual in disclosing a date that’s so far in the past. I kept thinking that I must be [more]

This is hilarious. A man was pictured in two different photos on the same front page of a local newspaper: one of him painting a holiday sign and a gs station security cam still of him taking a wallet.

“Some countries are better positioned to weather this energy crisis than they would have been just a few years ago. That’s because of the rapid growth of renewable energy, battery systems and electric vehicles…”

Of the current 200 nations in the world, the British have invaded all but 22 of them. The lucky 22 include Sweden, Luxembourg, Mongolia, Bolivia, and Belarus. The full analysis is available in Stuart Laycock’s book, All the Countries We’ve Ever Invaded. Stuart Laycock, the author, has worked his way around the globe, through each country alphabetically, researching its history to establish whether, at any point, they have experienced an incursion by Britain. Only a comparatively small proportion [more]

Read to the end for The Peg

An online museum of Chinese cigarette packaging art.

Bluesky: In April 2025, Bluesky raised $100 million in Series B funding led by Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from Alumni Ventures, Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Knight Foundation and True Ventures. In the months since, we’ve focused on scaling our team to meet the rapid growth of both the AT Protocol (atproto) and Bluesky app. We’re excited to share more as we move into a new era of leadership and further growth. This raise was led by Bluesky founder Jay Graber, who recently transiti [more]

The words shark (the animal) and shark (a predatory scoundrel) may have two different origins. “This would make ‘shark’ possibly the only word borrowed from a Mayan language into English directly.”

Quiche Browser is a rather astonishing app from the one-man indie developer Greg de J./Quiche Industries. (What a killer domain name that is.) Quiche Browser is a very robust, exquisitely designed, stunningly handsome web browser exclusively for iPhone. Just iPhone — although an iPad version is currently in beta. I switched to it as my default iPhone web browser last summer, thinking I’d only stick with it for a day or two before going back to Safari, and I wound up sticking with it for a few we [more]

Parachord is “a new kind of music player that invites all your streams, local audio files, and playlists scattered across multiple services to the same party”. Interesting!

Every Fashion Designer, Explained. If you don’t know anything about fashion, this video will get you up to speed quickly. Vivienne Westwood, Nigo, Issey Miyake, Miuccia Prada, Dapper Dan, Hubert de Givenchy, etc. etc.

The company's new support chatbot is better than what came before — but still missing the one feature that millions are clamoring for

300+ issues of the UK music magazine NME from 1969-1983. The ads alone are incredible.

Jeff Johnson, linking to my “Your Frustration Is the Product” piece: My browser extension StopTheMadness Pro stops autoplaying videos and hides Sign in with Google on all sites. It also hides sticky videos and notification requests on many sites. For more extreme measures, try my Safari extension StopTheScript. It kills JavaScript dead on websites you select. For example, from the blog post, it makes The Guardian readable. These are both great extensions, and I have both installed for use in Saf [more]

Javier C. Hernández, reporting for The New York Times: He was responding to a question about why Japan and other allies had received no advance notice of the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran. “We didn’t tell anybody about it because we wanted surprise,” he said. “Who knows better about surprise than Japan, OK? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor, OK? Right?” There was some laughter from the officials and journalists gathered in the room. “You believe in surprise, I think, much more so than us, [more]

Anne Applebaum, writing for The Atlantic (gift link): Specifically, they remember that for 14 months, the American president has tariffed them, mocked their security concerns, and repeatedly insulted them. As long ago as January 2020, Trump told several European officials that “if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you.” In February 2025, he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he had no right to expect support either, because “you don’t have any ca [more]

“The Tenth Muse is an art discovery engine. Over 120,000 artworks from museums and institutions — searchable by feeling, mood, atmosphere, era, and medium.”

Mark Simonson: Just by coincidence, I discovered a copy of U&lc magazine in the graphics classroom. U&lc was published by ITC, the International Typeface Corporation, a typeface publisher, and the designer and editor was the legendary Herb Lubalin. I’d never seen such beautiful typography and design. It was a motherlode for an aspiring typophile like me. [...] I decided right then that someday, somehow, I wanted to design typefaces.  ★

Adamya Sharma, reporting for Android Authority: When Google execs previously said sideloading would become a high-friction process on Android, they really weren’t kidding. The company is finally sharing what Android’s new sideloading flow will look like in practice, and if you’re someone who installs apps outside the Play Store, you’re going to feel it immediately, and you’re going to feel it deeply. [...] When Android’s new sideloading rules come into force, installing apps from developers with [more]

Typos Have Plagued Us for Centuries. There’s the 1631 Bible that says “thou shalt commit adultery” but James Joyce resisted some of his corrections: “These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.”

Paris now has a cycling network bigger than Amsterdam and “more daily trips in Paris are now made by bike than by car”.

One of the most controversial opinions I’ve long espoused, and believe today more than ever, is that it was a terrible mistake for web browsers to support JavaScript. Not that they should have picked a different language, but that they supported scripting at all. That decision turned web pages — which were originally intended as documents — into embedded computer programs. There would be no 49 MB web pages without scripting. There would be no surveillance tracking industrial complex. The text on [more]

Photographer and drone pilot Pio Andrea Peri captured this overhead photo of a Sicilian city called Centuripe. Perched atop hilltops, the city looks like a person from above — even on Google Maps. (via daily overview) Tags: drones · pareidolia · photography · Pio Andrea Peri

Here’s a simple AppleScript I wrote this week — one that solves a minor itch I’ve had for, jeez, 20 years. Almost every item I post to Daring Fireball goes through MarsEdit, the excellent Mac blogging client from Red Sweater Software (my friend Daniel Jalkut). MarsEdit has a built-in “local drafts” feature, where you can save unpublished drafts within a library in MarsEdit itself. It doesn’t happen often but I occasionally wind up with partially written posts that I don’t publish, but don’t want [more]

Gender Play in Nineteenth-Century Theater. “The most popular Shakespearean roles for women in the tragic repertoire were Romeo and Hamlet, but women also played Macbeth, Cardinal Wolsey, Shylock, Richard III, and Iago…”

A study pitted adults vs little kids to see which was better at making paintings in the style of Jackson Pollock. “The researchers found that the kids’ paintings made in this manner resembled genuine Pollocks more than did those from adult painters.”

Dawn Wilcox’s quest to chronicle the life & death of every woman in the US killed by a man. “Did women have no choice, Wilcox wondered, but to wander the world hoping never to step on a landmine of a man?”

Checking in with Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests, kinetic machine sculptures that move under their own power along the beach. Some of the most recent versions are quick fast and can even tow humans along behind them.

A recording of our livestream for paying subscribers

Special guest David Pogue discusses his excellent and amazingly comprehensive new book, Apple: The First 50 Years. Sponsored by: Notion: The AI workspace where teams and AI agents get more done together. Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow. Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off your first box, plus free breakfast for 1 year, with code talkshow50off.  ★

Shubham Bose, “The 49MB Web Page”: I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones. It is the same story across top publishers today. This is an absolutely devastating deconstruction of the current web landscape. I implore you to pause here, and read Bose’s entire amp [more]

This is maybe the best baseball catch you’ll ever see. Or the most fun one anyway.

Miuccia Prada is worth $4.8 billion. How good of a person do you expect her to be? “I got to thinking about all this the other day while mulling the curious, oft-repeated fact that Miuccia Prada was, in her 1960s youth, a Communist.”

This support page is a fascinating footnote regarding the recent changes Apple has made to their U.S. key cap labels.  ★

Who do you turn to when you’re Christie’s and you want to commission the finest rostrum the world has ever seen? Who else but Jony Ive and LoveFrom. I mean, I’d love to snark about this, but goddamnit, that’s a lovely piece of furniture.  ★

“Birds in the United States are not only declining, but they are declining faster, especially in areas with intensive agriculture, according to new research.”

A playable CSS-only Super Mario Bros game. Wow.

A generator for VHS slipcovers, cassette tape inserts, CD labels & inserts. You can paste in Spotify URLs, search for movies, etc. Really cool and fun.

David Heaney, writing for UploadVR: Meta Horizon Worlds is dropping VR support in June, meaning it will only be available as a flatscreen experience for the web and smartphones. By March 31, Meta says the Horizon Worlds app will be delisted from Quest’s store, and key first-party worlds such as Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju, and Bobber Bay will no longer be accessible in VR. Then, from June 15, the Horizon Worlds app will be removed from Quest headsets, and all worlds will no longer be ac [more]

Here's a good post about Daylight Saving Time

Jake Conley, reporting for Yahoo Finance: If the deal closes, Zaslav will receive $517.2 million in equity that would trigger if and when the sale goes through, along with roughly $34.2 million in cash and $44.2 million in benefits tied to the value of health coverage reimbursement. The Warner Bros. CEO will also get roughly $335.4 million in tax reimbursements. ** Just before the end of February, Warner Bros. agreed to a full acquisition by Paramount Skydance at $31 per share in a deal valued a [more]

The chess program available on Delta Air Lines’ seatback screens is an ELO monster that can beat almost all opponents on easy mode. This guy used a series of increasingly powerful bots to see just how good the Delta chess bot is. Can it beat a grandmaster-level bot? (via clive thompson) Tags: chess · Delta · games · video

What does it feel like to be struck by lightning? “Some have to relearn simple things, things they’ve done their whole life — how to read, how to sing, how to ride a bike.”

Trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day. I like that Tom Holland. I’m into it.

The Fascinating Engineering of the Titanic: How the Great Ocean Liner Was Built. “Issues of the journal The Engineer published between 1909 and 1911 contain detailed photographs of the construction of both the Titanic and Olympic…”

Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years. “Ms. Murguia and another woman, Debra Rojas, say that Mr. Chavez sexually abused them for years when they were girls, from around 1972 to 1977.”

This is a mindblowing time capsule of ordinary life: video of a group of friends taking the NYC subway to Coney Island in 1987. Because it was before mobile phones, they had to arrange to meet one of the group members in the first car of the train along the way. The film was shot by Nelson Sullivan, a videographer who recorded the arts, music, and LGBTQ+ communities in NYC in this same ur-vlogging style. Viewed today, Sullivan’s video record of his life represents a pre-Internet form of vlogging [more]

Jamelle Bouie says the SAVE Act will take us back to Jim Crow South: “a one-party state, backed by the threat of violence, where the law ensures that most people cannot hope for meaningful political representation.”

Do Sam Altman and Fidji Simo have an alignment problem?

MacKenzie Sigalos, writing for CNBC, under the misleading headline “Tim Cook Squashes Retirement Rumors, Says He ‘Can’t Imagine Life Without Apple’”: Asked about reports that he was preparing to step aside, Cook told ABC, “No, I didn’t say that. I haven’t said that. I love what I do deeply. Twenty-eight years ago, I walked into Apple, and I’ve loved every day of it since.” He added that he “can’t imagine life without Apple.” The Good Morning America interview was with Michael Strahan, in a five- [more]

“This is an interactive story about In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) told from two perspectives: Parent and Child. Select one to continue.”

The Mysterious Redditor Who’s Changing the Way We Do Laundry. “Most of the world uses powdered laundry detergent, which allows for more enzyme flexibility; Americans generally prefer liquid, which doesn’t always contain these precious enzymes.”

Am I a sucker for these kinds of ultra-detailed images by Richard Nadler because I am a fan of Richard Scarry books and Wes Anderson movies or am I a fan of Scarry & Anderson because I’m a sucker for these kinds of ultra-detailed images? (Or is it because I’m aphantasic and require external imagery for this level of detail?) See also Mark Alan Stamaty’s NYC Illustrations and Infinite Illustrations. Tags: Richard Nadler

Fox Sports, on Twitter/X: Tonight, watch the WBC Final in a full immersive experience on the Fox Sports XR app for the Galaxy XR headset powered by Android XR! The Fox Sports app in the App Store is native only on iOS (iPhone and iPad), Apple TV, and Apple Watch. So, unless I’m missing something, not only are they not streaming it immersively on VisionOS, they don’t even have a native VisionOS app.  ★

Twin adventurers are cleverly testing modern vs. historic gear. “If they went on an expedition, and Ross wore modern kit while Hugo wore historic replicas, any difference in performance…could be attributed solely to the gear, not genetics.”

The teaser trailer for Dune: Part Three. I am nonplussed by this trailer, both in the traditional and modern senses.

Extreme Macro Photos of Insect Wings. Hundreds of images are stacked to create a deep depth of field that’s impossible to do optically, ensuring everything is in focus.

I love this planet & stars chart from XKCD because it’s technically correct but also completely useless. Tags: astronomy · infoviz · science · xkcd

Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity. “You can’t write a compelling narrative about the thing you didn’t build. Nobody gets promoted for the complexity they avoided.”

Battery prices continue to fall. “Lithium-ion battery prices don’t get constantly discussed the way crude is, but these declines add up to a decisive shift that will determine the energy landscape of the next decade.”

“The US is hurtling towards autocracy at a faster rate than Hungary and Turkey”. The Varieties of Democracy Institute: “Our data on the USA goes back to 1789. What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever…”

Jess Weatherbed, The Verge: Samsung is preparing to axe its first three-panel foldable phone less than three months after launching the device in the US. Sales of the $2,899 Galaxy Z TriFold will first be wound down in Korea and then discontinued in the US once remaining inventory has been cleared, an unnamed Samsung spokesperson told Bloomberg. Maybe five blades on a razor is too many?  ★

Stephen Hackett: I was just going about my day then James Thomson of PCalc and other fine applications dropped these images on me and said I could share them. Also, something fun for those of you with 3D printers.  ★

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

In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg called privacy the future of social networking. Not anymore

Video isn’t just something to watch; it’s a boatload of context and data. Mux makes it easy to ship and scale video into anything from websites to platforms to AI workflows. Unlock what’s inside: transcripts, clips, and storyboards to build summarization, translation, content moderation, tagging, and more. Mux stewards Video.js, the web’s most popular open source video player. Video.js v10 is a complete architectural rebuild, with the beta now available at videojs.org. Mux is video infrastructur [more]

Gorgeous: rural Kyoto in the heavy snow.

Gullible, Cynical America. “They’ll insist that you can’t trust scientists, because they’re part of the conspiracy. The podcaster selling you his special creatine gummies, though? He seems trustworthy.”

“In today’s new Gilded Age, the 900-plus billionaires in the US have far too much influence over our elections, our economy, our government policies and our news media, and it’s urgent for Americans to create a movement to curb their power…”

Read to the end for a game that will absolutely give you a headache

The Holocaust History Podcast: “In this episode, I talk with Andrea Pitzer about the long, global history of the concentration camp and its evolution over time. We talk about what the definition is, what qualifies something as a concentration camp…”

The Louvre has the Mona Lisa. Here’s what other institutions consider their Mona Lisas. For instance: the National Portrait Gallery in London has a portrait of William Shakespeare and MoMA has the Gold Marilyn Monroe.

Another crackerjack essay on design and attention from Terry Godier. (Note that the Casio in the essay not only shows the actual time, but has functional buttons.)  ★

Apple Newsroom today: Apple today announced AirPods Max 2, bringing even better Active Noise Cancellation (ANC), elevated sound quality, and intelligent features to the iconic over-ear design. Powered by H2, features like Adaptive Audio, Conversation Awareness, Voice Isolation, and Live Translation come to AirPods Max for the first time. The new AirPods Max also unlock creative possibilities for podcasters, musicians, and content creators, with useful features like studio-quality audio recording [more]

The 20 Best Food Scenes in Movies. Ratatouille, Big Night, When Harry Met Sally, Tampopo, etc. What’s missing?

Some camera-equipped Apple devices have dedicated camera indicator lights. E.g. recent MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs have them in the notch, next to the camera itself. The Studio Display has one in the bezel, next to its camera. Other devices — like iPhones and, now, the MacBook Neo — render a green indicator dot on the device’s display. One might presume that the dedicated indicator lights are significantly more secure than the rendered-on-display indicators. I myself made this presumption in t [more]

Would you like to watch a puppet DJ a chill set of French house music in a cool workplace meeting space? Trick question because of course you would. This went right into my Underscore collection. (via undermanager) Tags: music · video

“Pay enough, and you can jump to the front of the queue for almost anything.” Concierge Nation: Welcome to White-Glove America. “Exclusivity — even if it comes at the cost of social cohesion — is the business model.”

Maybe it’s because I’m a little bit allergic to hype, but I just now got around to reading this review of the Macbook Neo by Sam Henri Gold that absolutely everyone has been recommending and, well, this might be the best product review ever written? The consensus is reasonable: $599, A18 Pro, 8GB RAM, stripped-down I/O. A Chromebook killer, a first laptop, a sensible machine for sensible tasks. “If you are thinking about Xcode or Final Cut, this is not the computer for you.” The people saying th [more]

The Trump regime is deliberately destroying the scientific community in the US. “This is not efficiency. This is not streamlining. This is the systematic elimination of scientific stewardship at the world’s largest biomedical research funder.”

David Pogue absolutely killed it hosting this live event last week. Glad I saved it to watch on my TV. Special guests include Chris Espinosa, John Sculley, and Avie Tevanian. A legit treat.  ★

My thanks to Finalist for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. Finalist is a remarkable, ambitious, and novel app for iPhone, iPad, and the Mac from indie developer Slaven Radic. It’s a planner — a digital take on traditional paper planners — that (with permission) pulls in your calendars, reminders, and health data. Its motto: “Most productivity apps help you organize tasks. Finalist helps you finish them.” Finalist first sponsored DF back in December, and I wrote quite a bit about it then. [more]

Sam Henri Gold: Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something. The machine’s limits become a map of the territory. You learn what computing actually costs by paying too much of it on hardware that can barely afford it. I know this beca [more]

Resume.org, summarizing their survey of 1,000 U.S. hiring managers: 59% admit they emphasize AI when explaining hiring freezes or layoffs because it plays better with stakeholders than citing financial constraints. Reminds me of the “Not Me” ghost in Bil Keane’s The Family Circus comic strip.  ★

Horace Dediu, under the headline “The Most Brilliant Move in Corporate History?”: Apple used to be the biggest capex spender, mainly because it paid for most of the property plant and equipment in the factories that made its phones and computers. [...] But that all changed with AI. Amazon is spending $200 billion this year on AI data centers. Google, $185 billion. Microsoft, $114 billion. Meta, $135 billion. Combined: $650 billion. (Not including OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX/XAI.) That is like b [more]

Katie Paul, Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, reporting for Reuters: Meta is planning sweeping layoffs ​that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers. No date has been set for the cuts and the magnitude has not been finalized, the people said. Top executives have recently signaled the plans to oth [more]

Matt Mullenweg: One evening last month, my Apple Watch, iPhone, and Mac all lit up with a message prompting me to reset my password. This came out of nowhere; I hadn’t done anything to elicit it. I even had Lockdown Mode running on all my devices. It didn’t matter. Someone was spamming Apple’s legitimate password reset flow against my account — a technique Krebs documented back in 2024. I dismissed the prompts, but the stage was set. What made the attack impressive was the next move: The scammer [more]

iFixit: Is Apple’s most affordable laptop ever also one of its most repairable? For years, opening a MacBook has usually meant fighting your way through glue and buried parts. But the Neo stands out, with increasingly good day-one manuals, less-painful keyboard repairs, and a screwed-in battery tray that sent cheers across the iFixit office. This laptop proves that things can be made more affordable and more repairable at the same time. That conclusion is backwards, I think. I suspect the MacBoo [more]

Antonio G. Di Benedetto, The Verge: Somehow, the PC makers still don’t see it coming. Here’s how [Asus CFO Nick] Wu described the MacBook Neo, specifically its 8GB of RAM limitation: “I think when Apple positioned the product, it’s probably focused more on content consumption. This differs somewhat from mainstream notebook usage scenarios, because in that case, the Neo feels more like a tablet — because tablets are mostly for content consumption.” Hang on. Can we hold up for a second here? [...] [more]

Maggie Harrison Dupré, writing for Futurism: Earlier this month, Ars retracted the story after it was found to include fake quotes attributed to a real person. The article — a write-up of a viral incident in which an AI agent seemingly published a hit piece about a human engineer named Scott Shambaugh — was initially published on February 13. After Shambaugh pointed out that he’d never said the quotes attributed to him, Ars’ editor-in-chief Ken Fisher apologized in an editor’s note, in which he [more]

Basic Apple Guy: Where I and the rest of the internet take this from here remains to be seen. All I know is that Apple should definitely keep this Lil Finder around. But no, I do not think this is the last we’ve seen of Lil Finder Guy… Apple’s MacBook Neo ad campaign on TikTok — and seemingly exclusive to TikTok — is the most fun they’ve had with a campaign in ages. I love it.  ★

It’s getting a little ridiculous, isn’t it? 28 years of kottke.org, as of today. Older than Google. Older than The Matrix. Older than Christopher Nolan’s feature film career. Older than Elle Fanning. Older than Kurt Cobain when he died. 47,300 posts since March 14, 1998. It might outlast American democracy. KDO retains its old school vibe but with some new tricks. Friends and readers have remarked recently that I seem to be having fun with the site again and that’s true. Still excited by the pos [more]

Tim Cook: At Apple, we’re more focused on building tomorrow than remembering yesterday. But we couldn’t let this milestone pass without thanking the millions of people who make Apple what it is today — our incredible teams around the world, our developer community, and every customer who has joined us on this journey. Your ideas inspire our work. Your trust drives us to do better. Your stories remind us of all we can accomplish when we think different. If you’ve taught us anything, it’s that the [more]

For the first time in awhile, copies of two lost episodes of classic Doctor Who have been discovered. Both are from the William Hartnell era and feature the Daleks.

The Great Friendship Flattening. “I amass bits of knowledge about my loved ones — my sister’s boyfriend published a poem; my friend left her job — as a spectator, in the same way that I might learn about an influencer’s favorite books…”

Why Movies Just Don’t Feel “Real” Anymore. “A deep dive into the first principles of movie immersion: on perceptual realism, indexicality, haptic visuality, and cinematic qualia.”

Some genius has taken an audio sample of the hum of a grocery store freezer, cleaned it up, and extended it into a 10-hour video. The freezer’s hum, variously compared to Brian Eno’s music and “an electrical gong bath”, went viral enough to warrant an article in the Guardian last month: “Anyone noticed how nice the freezers sound in the eccy road co-op?” someone wrote on the Sheffield Reddit page in January. “It’s like all the fans have been carefully tuned to the calmest droning chord ever, it’ [more]

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Recommendations of 25 medieval manuscripts to explore online. “Almost every institution with a significant collection of medieval manuscripts digitizes many of their most significant works and makes them freely accessible online.”

The Z9GT model EV from China’s BYD “can be 70 percent charged in five minutes and be almost full in 12 minutes, even in temperatures as low as -30° C” and “has a range of up to 800 km” (~500 miles). The US is sooooo far behind here.

Read to the end for some Flash games

Eli Tan, reporting for The New York Times: Meta’s new foundational A.I. model, which the company has been working on for months, has fallen short of the performance of leading A.I. models from rivals like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic on internal tests for reasoning, coding and writing, said the people, who were not authorized to speak publicly about confidential matters. The model, code-named Avocado, outperformed Meta’s previous A.I. model and did better than Google’s Gemini 2.5 model from [las [more]

Dade Hayes, reporting for Deadline: While the rise of sports programming in recent years has been well-documented, new figures from Nielsen illustrate the extent of its dominance. The measurement firm said sports accounted for 29.2% of all advertising-supported TV viewing by people 25 to 54 years old during the fourth quarter. The stat, spanning broadcast, cable and streaming, was part of a report on viewership trends in the fourth quarter of 2025, released Thursday in the runup to upfronts. Loo [more]

Business Insider, one year 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. I’d marked this one on my claim chowder calendar a year ago [more]

Since the comments are back open and folks here can now share a little about themselves with each other, I thought I’d open this post up for whatever you guys want to chat about. What are you particularly interested in these days? Working on any fun projects? Got a new hobby? What’s the best thing you’ve seen this week? What’s something you’re struggling with? Tags: kottke.org

Craig Mod, on creating his own custom accounting software with Claude Code: Simply put: It’s a big mess, and no off-the-shelf accounting software does what I need. So after years of pain, I finally sat down last week and started to build my own. It took me about five days. I am now using the best piece of accounting software I’ve ever used. It’s blazing fast. Entirely local. Handles multiple currencies and pulls daily (historical) conversion rates. It’s able to ingest any CSV I throw at it and r [more]

Craig Mod is software bonkers. “I’m software bonkers: I can’t stop thinking about software. And I can’t stop building software.”

Les Orchard: I started programming in 1982. Every language I’ve learned since then has been a means to an end — a new way to make computers do things I wanted them to do. AI-assisted coding feels like the latest in that progression. Not a rupture, just another rung on the ladder. But I’m trying to hold that lightly. Because the ladder itself is changing, the building it’s leaning against is changing, and I’d be lying if I said I knew exactly where it’s going. What I do know is this: I still get [more]

Balcony solar finally seems to be taking off in the US. “As of Wednesday, Democratic and Republican lawmakers in 28 states and Washington, D.C., have announced their own legislation to make these systems permissible.”

Mahdi Bchatnia: Accents is an app that lets you use the iMac/MacBook Neo accent colors on any Mac. It’s a fun idea from Apple to have default accent colors that are, by default, exclusive to specific Mac hardware. But what exemplifies the Mac is that a clever developer like Bchatnia can make these accent colors available to any user on any Mac via a simple utility like Accents. (Via Michael Tsai.)  ★

Some overdue reflections by its CEO, and a class-action lawsuit, bring an end to “expert review”

Apple Platform Security Guide: MacBook Neo combines system software and dedicated silicon elements within A18 Pro to provide additional security for the camera feed. The architecture is designed to prevent any untrusted software — even with root or kernel privileges in macOS — from engaging the camera without also visibly lighting the on-screen camera indicator light. That’s the whole note, I believe. There aren’t any technical details regarding how exactly this is achieved. Until reading this n [more]

Alex Weprin, reporting for The Hollywood Reporter: In a sign of strength for the streaming platform, Apple’s senior VP of services Eddy Cue tells The Hollywood Reporter that viewership for last week’s Australian Grand Prix was up year over year compared to the 2025 race, which aired on ESPN. “The 2026 Formula 1 season on Apple TV is off to a strong start, with fans responding positively and viewership up year over year for the first weekend, exceeding both F1 and Apple expectations,” Cue says. A [more]

Dr. Drang, back in 2017: If you write about Mac keyboard shortcuts, as I did yesterday, you should know how to do it right. Just as there’s a proper order for adjectives in English, there’s a proper order for listing the modifier keys in a shortcut. I haven’t found any documentation for this, but Apple’s preferred order is clear in how they show the modifiers in menus and how they’re displayed in the Keyboard Shortcuts Setting. The order is similar to how you see them down at the bottom left of [more]

Read to the end to find out why

Jay Graber built something impressive but stagnant. Can a new CEO get it growing again?

Just over a decade ago, reviewing the then-new iPhones 6S, I could tell which way the silicon wind was blowing. Year-over-year, the A9 CPU in the iPhone 6S was 1.6× faster than the A8 in the iPhone 6. Impressive. But what really struck me was comparing the 6S’s GeekBench scores to MacBooks. The A9, in 2015, benchmarked comparably to a two-year-old MacBook Air from 2013. More impressively, it outperformed the then-new no-adjective 12-inch MacBook in single-core performance (by a factor of roughly [more]

The company tells Platformer it will let experts opt out of the controversial feature — but how different is it than what every other AI company is doing?

Your whole day on one screen. Finalist is an iOS/macOS day planner that pulls in your calendars, reminders, and health data so nothing falls through the cracks. The latest version launches now and adds subtasks, calendar bookmarks, HealthKit in your journal, and a spoken daily briefing you can trigger from your Lock Screen. Run it alongside what you already use. It quietly picks up what your current setup doesn’t. Free trial on the App Store, Lifetime license available.  ★

Read to the end for Zooey Deschanel’s Crumbl Cookie review

Roundup 03/09/2025

Read to the end for Big Papa Huge Time

A protest at OpenAI headquarters suggests the backlash to military AI is growing — even if its politics are still half-formed. PLUS: The Pentagon declares Anthropic a supply chain risk

Here's who's talking about us!

Greetings from Read Max HQ!

Read to the end for the Jigsaw agnostic

Shunned by the government, and newly appealing to consumers, the company is at a crossroads

Sam Altman’s deal with the Pentagon seems too good to be true. What happens when the public realizes that?

Read to the end for the wife emailer

Roundup 03/02/2026

Trying to make sense of the conjuncture

Read to the end for a pretty good video

AI safety researchers have long worried that a government would seek to use AI for domestic surveillance and autonomous killing. The Pentagon’s fight with Anthropic threatens to make it a reality

It's READER SURVEY time

Read to the end for a very good video game

PLUS: The Substack post that tanked the markets, continued

The US government still can’t think beyond “winning.” The rest of the world is still thinking too small

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

Read to the end for a good walking video

Roundup 02/23/2026

Testifying before a jury in LA, Mark Zuckerberg makes the case that platform design is about free expression. But the walls are closing in on Section 230

Talking A.I. and politics with John Ganz?

Read to the end for a magical sounding supermarket freezer aisle

Roundup 02/18/2025

In the company’s latest policy reversal under Trump 2.0, the facial recognition system it blew up in 2021 may be poised for a return

Read to the end for a real bop

A new hype epicycle reaches its climax

Read to the end for a good post about aging

As OpenAI sunsets its most dangerous model, the tensions it exposed remain as tricky as ever. PLUS: Elon's space catapult, and OpenAI vs. Anthropic

Read to the end for a good focaccia recipe

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 […]

Read to the end for a very talented octopus

Roundup 02/08/26

Read to the end for some Tumblr users casting a very powerful spell

Read to the end for a good post about DeviantArt

Plus: Epstein!

Roundup 02/02/2025

Is it based or soy to kill yourself?

Roundup 01/26/2025

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

Which Trump administration official is a former Gawker commenter?

Roundup 01/18/2025

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, […]

Watch now | With special guest Vinson Cunningham

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

9 books to consider for the rest of the year

We need to stop falling for anti-regulation hysteria if we’re to get control of digital harms

The thin iPhone is teeing up a foldable phone likely to come next year

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

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

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 […]