Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
Amazon Made AI Podcasts for Products
businessinsider.com/amazon-ai-generated-podcasts-products-2026-4
Katie Notopoulos, a month ago at Business Insider:
Amazon has launched a new feature that uses AI to generate a short, podcast-like audio segment where two “hosts” discuss the merits and reviews of a specific product.
I think it could be one of the funniest, closest endpoints to human civilization we’ve seen yet in our new AI-enabled world. If this sounds a little confusing, here’s an example. I tried it out for diaper rash cream, and, voila! A podcast! (Sound on.)
I don’t know what’s worse: that anyone at Amazon thought actual people would really listen to these, or if actual people really are listening to them.
Link: businessinsider.com/amazon-ai-generated-podcasts-products…
Power Lines: Maps That Shaped the Way We See the World ....
Power Lines: Maps That Shaped the Way We See the World. “A collection of the greatest political maps in history and how these images have an unmatched power to influence our thinking — and our world.”
“ Serena Williams has announced her sensational...
“Serena Williams has announced her sensational return to professional tennis at 44 years old next week at the Queen’s Club in London.” Yessss.
Sunbeam
Israel orders attacks in Beirut suburbs
The Illuminated Windows of NYC
Colossal
• Kate Mothes
‘Keith Haring in 3D’ Highlights the Artist’s Prolifically Art-Filled Life
A new exhibition at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art surveys the artist's art-everywhere approach.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article ‘Keith Haring in 3D’ Highlights the Artist’s Prolifically Art-Filled Life appeared first on Colossal.
Legendary film editor Marcia Lucas died last week ....
Legendary film editor Marcia Lucas died last week. Lucas edited Star Wars (won an Oscar for it), Taxi Driver, Return of the Jedi, and American Graffiti. It was Marcia that suggested to George Lucas that Darth Vader kill Obi-Wan Kenobi.
The Deadliest Year of Your Life
Exclusive | The Verge
• Lauren Feiner
Microsoft could be the next Big Tech antitrust target
Over the past several years, Microsoft has largely managed to withstand populist calls to break up Big Tech while peers faced sweeping lawsuits. But a probe by the Federal Trade Commission suggests that grace period could be nearing an end. Earlier this year, Bloomberg outlined the contents of civil investigative demands (CIDs) - similar to […]
Roost is a messaging app where messages aren’t...
Roost is a messaging app where messages aren’t instant; they travel between users at the speed of whichever bird they use to send it. Note sending is limited by the # of birds in your rookery…if they’re all out, you have to wait until one returns.
Longreads
• Carolyn Wells
What happened to Borat’s village?
Sacha Baron Cohen turned Glod into a punchline.
Right-wing outsider wins Colombian election first round
May 2026 newsletter
I just sent out the May edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here.
This month:
- Al got expensive, and Anthropic had a really good month
- The model releases were a little disappointing
- Conferences and podcasts
- I launched Datasette Agent and made a lot of progress on Datasette
- What I'm using, May 2026 edition
- Miscellaneous extras
Here's a copy of the April newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!
Tags: newsletter
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
exe.dev
My thanks to exe.dev for sponsoring last week at DF (with a very cool graphic ad — just love the way it looks). exe.dev is a cloud for the agent era — it gives you a pool of VMs with SSH, root, and web auth by default. Secrets injected at the network edge stay out of the LLM’s hands. Persistent servers, internal tools, vibe coding, disposable devboxes, whatever. You can share your web server as easily as you can share a Google Doc, and your VMs share CPU/RAM — you pay for underlying resources, not per VM.
It’s just a computer.
Link: exe.dev/?df
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2026: Tuesday June 9
Location: The California Theatre, San Jose
Showtime: Tuesday, 9 June 2026, 7pm PT (Doors open 6pm)
Special Guest(s): For sure
Price: $45
The annual live audience episode of The Talk Show during the week of WWDC. If you can make it, you should come. You’ll even enjoy the prelude, mingling with fellow DF readers and listeners.
Also: at least one sponsorship slot is still available. If you’ve got a product or service you’d like to see me promote at the start of the show, shoot me an email.
Link: ti.to/daringfireball/the-talk-show-live-from-wwdc-2026
‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ With Bill Simmons, Steven Spielberg, and Sean Fennessey
Bill and Sean open up the pod bay doors with director Steven Spielberg to revisit one of the greatest films of all time, Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, and William Sylvester. Producer: Craig Horlbeck, Chia Hao Tat, Eduardo Ocampo, and Matt Pevic The Ringer is committed to responsible trading. Please visit https://fanduel.com/predicts to learn more about the resources and helpline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
Take Two
Mark Gurman, on Twitter/X (XCancel link)
Kelsey Peterson, the Apple AI employee who introduced the never-launched Siri revamp in 2024, just started at OpenAI — so we’ll be getting someone new next month for Attempt 2 at WWDC.
Pretty sure we were going to get someone different for the second crack at a next-gen Siri introduction at WWDC no matter what. If they had made a Titanic II, they would have hired someone new to host the christening.
datasette 1.0a32
Release: datasette 1.0a32
A minor bugfix release. Fixes a bug with INSERT ... RETURNING queries via the new /db/-/execute-write endpoint and a bunch of base_url issues which showed up when I was experimenting with Service Workers yesterday.
Tags: datasette, annotated-release-notes