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John Dvorak back in 2014, two months before Apple Watch was announced:

I got a lecture from a potential buyer, who will only purchase an iTime as a replacement for the iPhone rather than an accessory. But all evidence leads me to believe this device will be an accessory.

Doing that limits the appeal to people who were promised a sleeker gadget profile, which they desperately need, because they never manage to pare down anything. It’s tablet computing all over again.

If he’d meant that Apple Watch would be like the iPad, in terms of being a durable long-term many-billion-dollars-in-sales-per-quarter platform, he’d have been correct. But he meant that both were duds.

Dvorak is still writing, but alas, only occasionally.

Link: daringfireball.net/linked/2014/07/30/dvorak

Sean Hollister, reporting for The Verge: The details of how, when, and where Google would charge its fees are complicated, and they seem to be somewhat tailored to the needs of a game developer like Epic Games. Google can charge 20 percent for an in-app purchase that pro...

France enshrines need for consent into rape law in wake of Gisèle Pelicot case. The bill states that consent must be “free and informed, specific, prior and revocable”.

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Edith Zimmerman: How I Broke My Drinking Habit. “How do you fill your time after deciding to get sober?” See also an extended convo on the How to Be a Better Human podcast.

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I don’t even know what this is — classical pop? surrealist orchestral? — but it goes hard and is kind of fantastic. Wow. A few comments from YouTube:

This is the most insane lead single from a pop artist I’ve ever come across! I’m absolutely stunned.

The only criticism I’m going to make is that the song should last at least 8 minutes.

I feel this needs to replace whatever was stolen from that museum in France.

Berghain by Rosalía is available to stream or buy on many of the usual platforms.

Tags: Bjork · music · Rosalía · video · Yves Tumor

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I'm worried that they put co-pilot in Excel because Excel is the beast that drives our entire economy and do you know who has tamed that beast? Brenda. Who is Brenda? She is a mid-level employee in every finance department, in every business across this stupid nation and th...

Decision Desk HQ calls the NYC mayoral race for Zohran Mamdani. (Eric Adams: 0.3% of the vote. Worst mayor ever.)

America’s Dumbest Billionaires Fail to Stop Zohran Mamdani. “…a bunch of rich guys who have been comically out of touch with normal people for many decades, and more recently have blowtorched their brains into a smoking pile of ash on Twitter…”

Code execution with MCP: Building more efficient agents When I wrote about Claude Skills I mentioned that I don't use MCP at all any more when working with coding agents - I find CLI utilities and libraries like Playwright Python to be a more effective way of achieving the s...

John Voorhees, writing at MacStories: With iOS 26, Apple placed two big buttons onscreen when an alarm went off. One was for stop and the other snooze. That wasn’t a big deal for many of the alarms you set throughout the day, but when you’re waking up in the morning blur...

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

Apple has launched a dramatic new web interface for the App Store. You can now get the full App Store experience right in your browser, with dedicated pages for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision, Watch, and TV app libraries.

Previously, Apple’s “apps.apple.com” domain simply redirected you to a generic page about the App Store on Apple’s website. Now, it takes you to a full-fledged version of the App Store you can browse on your computer.

This new website is nice, but it’s not the “full” App Store experience, insofar as you can’t buy or download apps from it. It’s more like a full website mirror of the App Store than a web version of the App Store.

Link: 9to5mac.com/2025/11/03/apple-launches-rich-new-web…

“Stone Simulator is a meditative idle game where you live as a rock enduring endless seasons and absurd events. Survive storms, unlock quirky achievements, and observe a serene, ever-changing world…” Includes a multi-player mode.

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Datasette 1.0a20 is out with the biggest breaking API change on the road to 1.0, improving how Datasette's permissions system works by migrating permission logic to SQL running in SQLite. This release involved 163 commits, with 10,660 additions and 1,825 deletions, most of w...

Pebbling: sending little links and memes to the people that you love. Derived from the behavior of gentoo penguins, who “pick up pebbles in their beak and carry them to their partners or potential partners as a gift”.

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Papers is a 3-minute animated short film made by Yoshinao Satoh from what must be thousands of newspaper scans. The animation set to Different Trains by Steve Reich & Kronos Quartet. I love this style of collage animation.

Tags: animation · Kronos Quartet · Steve Reich · video · Yoshinao Satoh

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Conde Nast is watering down Teen Vogue by folding it into the Vogue website. “Management plans to lay off six of our members, most of whom are BIPOC women or trans…” Teen Vogue’s political reporting has been excellent: direct & courageous.

“Originally released in 1982, the Vectrex was a truly unique console, featuring its own built-in vector display and colorful screen overlays. Forty-three years after its creation, this iconic console is reborn in a brand-new miniature edition.”

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MCP Colors: Systematically deal with prompt injection risk Tim Kellogg proposes a neat way to think about prompt injection, especially with respect to MCP tools. Classify every tool with a color: red if it exposes the agent to untrusted (potentially malicious) instructions, ...

Thanks to Great Wave Today, I was able to see an original woodblock print of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa at the Creative Museum here in Tokyo. My first time seeing an original IRL! And an amazing exhibition as well.

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The Ringer’s Bill Simmons and Chris Ryan are joined by actor Glen Powell to rewatch Jim Carrey’s 1998 classic ‘The Truman Show,’ directed by Peter Weir and starring Laura Linney and Ed Harris. Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Ronak Nair, Chia Hao Tat, and Eduardo Ocampo Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the Personal Price Plan®. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there®. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices