FeedCity: Featured

US military launches seventh night of Iran strikes

27:36

Iranian state media have reported explosions in different parts of the country, after the United States military carried out a fresh wave of attacks. The cities of Ahvaz, Yazd, and Bandar Abbas, and islands in the Strait of Hormuz were reportedly targeted. Iran's military sa...

Daring Fireball
18 Jul 00:48 • John Gruber

Apple Books and Amazon Are Lousy With AI-Generated Books Ripping Off Legitimate Authors

thenewthings.com/p/apple-big-ai-book-slop-problem

Joanna Stern at New Things, last month: Last month, just days after my book went on sale, AI knockoffs of the ebook version flooded Apple Books. There was Joanna Stern On I Am Not A Robot by Sophie Mercer. I AM NOT A ROBOT by Finn Tech. I AM NOT A ROBOT by Joana Stern — ...

Daring Fireball
17 Jul 23:54 • John Gruber

Google Runs Out of Appeals, Must Pay Record $4.7 Billion EU Antitrust Fine

cnbc.com/2026/07/02/alphabet-google-android-eu-antitrust-fine-4-1-billion-euro-appeal.html

Arjun Kharpal, reporting for CNBC, back on July 2: Europe’s top court on Thursday upheld Google’s fine of around 4.1 billion euros ($4.67 billion) over alleged anti-competitive practices. In 2018, the European Commission slapped Google with the record-breaking penalty o...

Rick Beato
17 Jul 21:39

Billy Joel on his understanding of Jazz #piano #billyjoel #shorts

Daring Fireball
17 Jul 21:33 • John Gruber

Roblox Set to Introduce AI Game-Building Feature, Including on iOS

about.roblox.com/newsroom/2026/07/build-without-limits-on-roblox

Roblox executives Nick Tornow and Vlad Loktev, on the Roblox blog: Twenty years ago, Roblox launched with a simple idea: “You make the game.” At the time, that was a radical proposition — most games were made by studios and professionals, and the idea that anyone could b...

Daring Fireball
17 Jul 21:12 • John Gruber

Apple Raises Prices for Apple Music and Apple One Subscriptions

9to5mac.com/2026/07/17/apple-raises-prices-for-apple-music-and-apple-one-subscriptions/

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

Here are the new monthly prices for Apple Music and Apple One as of today:

Apple Music:

Individual: $11.99 (up from $10.99)

Family: $19.99 (up from $16.99)

Student: $6.99 (up from $5.99)

Apple One:

Individual: $19.95 (unchanged)

Family: $27.95 (up from $25.95)

Premier: $39.95 (up from $37.95)

Link: 9to5mac.com/2026/07/17/apple-raises-prices-for-apple-music…

Daring Fireball
17 Jul 20:39 • John Gruber

OpenAI’s Product Shake-Up Put the Complexifiers in Charge

wired.com/story/openai-reorg-greg-brockman-product/

Wired, back on May 15: OpenAI says it’s folding ChatGPT, its AI coding agent Codex, and its developer-facing API into one core product team. The company says that Codex is increasingly powering its consumer and enterprise offerings, which are gaining the ability to perfo...

xkcd.com
17 Jul 20:09

Latitude and Longitude

NGS and IERS are complaining that they left CLEAR instructions to set the washing machine to WGS84 (G2296) instead of WGS84 (G730).

Daring Fireball
17 Jul 19:54 • John Gruber

MG Siegler: ‘OpenAI Makes ChatGPT ChatGPT Again’

spyglass.org/chatgpt-brings-back-chatgpt/

MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass: In that light, we can see the dilemma. But there were also probably about a dozen better ways to do this roll-out — as highlighted by how fast they’re fixing these things — and they just missed the mark. While they undoubtedly knew there ...

Daring Fireball
17 Jul 19:30 • John Gruber

OpenAI Starts Cleaning Up the Utter Mess It Made of ChatGPT

x.com/thsottiaux/status/2077928427936710901

Thibault “Tibo” Sottiaux, the OpenAI engineering lead who’s taking the most public credit for this and thus probably deserves the most blame, on Twitter/X: Evening! We’ve gotten lots of great feedback on the new ChatGPT desktop app (which we didn’t get totally quite righ...

Daring Fireball
17 Jul 18:33 • John Gruber

Linus Torvalds: ‘AI Is a Tool, Just Like Other Tools We Use. And It’s Clearly a Useful One.’

lore.kernel.org/linux-media/CAHk-=wi4zC+Ze8e+p3tMv8TtG_80KzsZ1syL9anBtmEh5Z40vg@mail.gmail.com/

Linus Torvalds:

I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I’m willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer.

Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.

Or just walk away.

AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one.

It may not have been that “clearly” even just a year ago, but it’s no longer in question today.

There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but “is it useful” is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn’t actually used it.

Link: lore.kernel.org/linux-media/CAHk-=wi4zC+Ze8e+p3tMv8TtG…

Longreads
17 Jul 18:06 • Brendan Fitzgerald

My Mother Died On Screen But Survived Hollywood

"Making sense of a complicated family legacy."

Daring Fireball
17 Jul 17:57 • John Gruber

BBEdit 16

barebones.com/products/bbedit/bbedit16.html

Speaking of BBEdit, version 16 dropped just before WWDC, and adds a slew of nifty improvements, headlined by vastly expanded support for Shortcuts. You can also search for text in images, use the W3C HTML syntax checker, and of all things, use vi keyboard emulation. There’s a lot more, of course — and as always the changes, improvements, and additions are copiously documented in the release notes.

New licenses are $60, upgrades from v15 cost $30, and upgrades from older versions are $40. In the Mac App Store it’s a $5/month or $50/year subscription.

See also: Jason Snell at Six Colors and Adam Engst at TidBITs.

Link: barebones.com/products/bbedit/bbedit16.html

Daring Fireball
17 Jul 17:27 • John Gruber

ArtfulType: Markdown Writing App for the 68K Macintosh

github.com/ActionRetro/ArtfulType

Sean Malseed — “Action Retro” on YouTube — created a Markdown editor for the original Macintosh. Source code on GitHub; intro video on YouTube. It’s written in C, not Pascal, and uses the modern Retro68 GCC-derived compiler. I absolutely love that this exists. I don’t like ...

Daring Fireball
17 Jul 17:27 • John Gruber

Happy iCal Day

threads.com/@joannastern/post/Da5rgIvjrLM

Joanna Stern explains why this emoji is correct today: 📅. (This one too: 📆)

Link: threads.com/@joannastern/post/Da5rgIvjrLM

Simone Giertz
17 Jul 16:15

I can't leave this table until I finish this puzzle

Daring Fireball
17 Jul 16:12 • John Gruber

Google and Epic Give Up Fighting — Third-Party Android App Stores Are Coming Next Week

theverge.com/policy/965792/google-epic-withdraw-injunction-third-party-app-stores-coming-google-play?view_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpZCI6IkZpdmhlVXFoV0giLCJwIjoiL3BvbGljeS85NjU3OTIvZ29vZ2xlLWVwaWMtd2l0aGRyYXctaW5qdW5jdGlvbi10aGlyZC1wYXJ0eS1hcHAtc3RvcmVzLWNvbWluZy1nb29nbGUtcGxheSIsImV4cCI6MTc4NDczNTA1NSwiaWF0IjoxNzg0MzAzMDU1fQ.zPHCDeRVkCOK73sdt6bKC2evAofTI582EsJ0N-rk79g

Sean Hollister, reporting for The Verge (gift link): Here’s Google’s full statement on withdrawing its proposed modifications to Judge Donato’s permanent injunction, via Google spokesperson Dan Jackson: We’ve agreed with Epic to withdraw our motion to modify the US C...

Global News Podcast
17 Jul 16:06

UK's Andy Burnham confirmed as new Labour leader

28:25

Britain's governing Labour Party has officially declared Andy Burnham its new leader paving the way for him to replace Keir Starmer as prime minister. In his first speech as leader, he pledged to 'bring back hope'. China's President Xi Jinping has called for global cooperati...

Radiolab
17 Jul 14:42 • WNYC Studios

Neither Confirm Nor Deny

29:05

In an episode we first ran back in 2019, we explore how a sunken nuclear submarine, a crazy billionaire, and a mechanical claw gave birth to a phrase that has hounded journalists and lawyers for 40 years and embodies the tension between the public’s desire for transparency a...

Simon Willison's Weblog
17 Jul 14:06

Quoting Kimi K3

Is there something I can actually help you with today?

— Kimi K3, after refusing to leak its system prompt

Tags: kimi, ai-personality, generative-ai, ai, llms