FeedCity

"How China’s short dramas are redefining entertainment."

The International Criminal Court says it has "concrete evidence" the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces committed crimes against humanity in Darfur during Sudan's civil war. The RSF says the scale of the atrocities in el-Fasher and el-Geneina has been exaggerated. Also: Iran ...

Tobias Steinke, replying on Mastodon to my “Apple Should Eliminate the App Icon ‘Squircle Jail’” piece: But iOS app icons (and iPadOS) were always in squircle shape. Why is and was this okay for you, but it’s not for macOS? This is a good and fair question. But I not o...

Rewriting Bun in Rust Jarred Sumner has been promising this blog post (since May 9th) about his Zig to Rust rewrite of Bun for significantly longer than it took him to finish the rewrite. Honestly, it was worth the wait. This is a detailed description of an extremely sophist...

This is a fun and really well-done triple mashup of Outkast’s B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad), Hitchcock’s The Birds, and Sesame Street.

Introducing GPT‑Live OpenAI finally upgraded the model used by ChatGPT voice mode! I've had preview access for a few weeks in the iPhone app, and the new model is very impressive. It also has the ability to spin off harder tasks to GPT-5.5: For questions that require web se...

Back in the primordial days of AI, Parry was an ELIZA-style chatbot created by psychiatrist Kenneth Colby to simulate the words of a paranoid schizophrenic. Someone had the genius idea to connect it to Eliza (a.k.a. “Doctor”). Vint Cerf published the transcript as an RFC in 1973, and I laughed my ass off reading it. A taste:

Do you know anything about bookies?

What makes you think I know anything about bookies?

A bookie didn’t pay me off once.

What does that suggest to you?

I beat up the bookie who did not pay off, and I thought he might use his friends in the underworld to get even with me.

What else would you like to discuss?

What do you know about racketeers?

Thanks to Bob Peterson for the link.

Vint Cerf, by the way, retired from Google last week at the spry age of 83.

Link: rfc-editor.org/info/rfc439/

A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. NES cartridge recently sold at auction for $3 million. “It bears the coveted gloss sticker seal affixed to the top lid, identifying it as a second-production example.”

This is neat: Robin Sloan is rewriting his 2009 short story, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. “The interplay between books and technology has changed since I wrote them…but also that I have become a different writer, and a better one.”

Tyler Hall:

We all know about macOS Tahoe’s terrible app icons and how 3rd party developers have been confined to squircle jail.

If you’re lucky enough to distribute an app outside the Mac App Store, you can break free of squircle jail using NSDockTilePlugIn. It’s not strictly the intended use-case of that API. And it’s not allowed in the Mac App Store, either. But it can solve the problem.

So today’s release of Iris adds three additional app icons to choose from in the app’s Special Preferences Settings pane. And since they use the NSDockTilePlugIn API, the custom icon remains even when you quit the app.

Iris is far from the only app using this or other techniques to sort-of escape squircle jail. All the apps I’m aware of doing something like this are Mac-assed apps. It’s a good litmus test.

Link: tyler.io/2026/07/05/escape-from-squircle-jail/

Stop chasing life goals and start trying tiny experiments to learn from instead. “Chasing goals doesn’t work for life’s most important questions — career, relationships, health. It’s like locking in your answer before you have understood the question.”

I just declared a moratorium against AI-written change descriptions (e.g. PR and commit messages, also issues/tickets) from my team.

AI was writing change descriptions that were worse than useless to me as I tried to review PRs: outlining details of the code that could easily be seen by looking at the code, but omitting the higher-level framing needed to understand broadly what the code is doing.

— Kenton Varda

Tags: kenton-varda, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms

Release: sqlite-migrate 0.2

The version that retires the library, instead implementing a compatibility shim against the new sqlite-utils 4.0 dependency.

Tags: sqlite-utils

Tool: github-code Web Component

An experimental Web Component built using GPT-5.5 and the following prompt:

let's build a Web Component for embedding code from GitHub

<github-code href="https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-ast/blob/437c759129154f05296324a7f82aa1246340dd14/sqlite_ast/parser.py#L9-L18"></github-code>

It takes URLs like that, converts them to https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/sqlite-ast/437c759129154f05296324a7f82aa1246340dd14/sqlite_ast/parser.py, then uses fetch() to fetch them and displays the specified range of lines - with line numbers, no syntax highlighting though

Show me a preview web browser so I can see your work

Here's what it looks like embedded on this page:

Tags: github, web-components, gpt

Release: sqlite-utils 4.0

See sqlite-utils 4.0, now with database schema migrations for details.

Tags: sqlite-utils

Release: sqlite-utils 4.0rc4

The last RC before the 4.0 stable release. Mainly implements feedback from a detailed review by Claude Fable 5.

Tags: sqlite-utils, claude-mythos-fable

Apple lost the AI race. Actually, Apple won the AI race. Wait. That shirt: http://shop.MKBHD.com Playlist of MKBHD Intro music: https://goo.gl/B3AWV5 ~ http://twitter.com/MKBHD http://instagram.com/MKBHD http://facebook.com/MKBHD