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Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Joanna Stern on the Pixel 11 ‘HiLight’ Notification Light

thenewthings.com/p/the-new-pixel-feature-i-want-on-my-iphone?gift_content=e9bf3ebd-db33-4ee5-91b0-84d7acac3263

Joanna Stern, writing at The New Things (gift link): I used to love the blinking notification light on my BlackBerry, and later my Droid 2. It was a simple way to know I had a message without actually looking at my messages. Then BlackBerry let you customize the color, a...

kottke.org Valid
Text Jason Kottke

The Art of the Copyist

Lovely short video about artist Jas Knight, who is a participant in the Met Museum’s Copyist Program: The Copyist Program offers time and space for artists to develop their own interpretation of an artwork through intimate study in the Museum’s galleries. Copyists have cr...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Google Introduces ‘Camera Looks’ With Pixel 11 Phones

theverge.com/tech/978084/google-camera-looks-interview-computational-photography

David Imel, The Verge: But in our current moment, the photos people are drawn to are not flawless — and that’s created a real problem for the people making smartphone cameras. “The gap between what two random people want from their camera is growing dramatically,” says I...

Rick Beato
Video

This Is How Zildjian Cymbals Are Made

In this video I tour the Zildjian factory to find out how they make their world-class cymbals.

My Beato Club supporters:
Justin Scott
Terence Mark
Jason Murray
Lucienne Kilpatrick
Alexander Young
Jason Wagner
Todd Ladner
Rob Kline
Nicholas Long
Tim Benson
Leonardo Martins da Costa Rodrigues
Eddie Perez
David Solomon
MICHAEL JOYCE
Stephen Stubbs
colin stead
Jonathan Wentworth-Linton
Patrick Payne
MATTHEW KARIS
Matthew Barouch
Shaun Samuels
Danny Kurywchak
Gregory Reedy
Sean Coleman
Alexander Verbitskiy
CL Turner
Jason Pappafotis
John Fulford
Margaret Carno
Robert C
David M Combs
Eric Flatt
Reto Spoerli
Herr Moritz Adam
Monte St. Johns
Jon Beezley
Peter DeVault
Eric Nabstedt
Eric Beggs
Rich Germano
Brian Bloom
Peter Pillitteri
Piush Dahal
Toby Guidry

kottke.org Valid
Text Jason Kottke

Here’s how Rocky’s musical language from the Project...

Here’s how Rocky’s musical language from the Project Hail Mary movie was created. The filmmakers didn’t “want it to feel like a human language because he’s supposed to be really more musically communicating”.

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

TechCrunch on Google’s Pixel 11 Lineup

techcrunch.com/2026/08/12/pixel-11-has-few-hardware-changes-and-more-gemini/

Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch: With this year’s Pixel 11 series launch, Google is thinking more agentic AI to complete your tasks. With Gemini, U.S.-based users will be able to order groceries, book rides, or get coffee, for instance. Plus, Gemini can call businesses on users’ ...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Hands-On With Google Pixel 11 Pro Fold

engadget.com/2235294/google-pixel-11-pro-fold-hands-on/

Sam Rutherford, writing for Engadget: Granted, the P11 Pro Fold still includes IP68 dust and water resistance, which is better than what you get on the Z Fold 8 line (IP48). But after making an absolute tank of a foldable phone with last year’s model, I said Google reall...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Google’s Pixel Watch 5

theverge.com/tech/978094/pixel-watch-5-hands-on-made-by-google-gemini-wearables-smartwatch

Victoria Song, The Verge: The $399 Google Pixel Watch 5 isn’t about the hardware. Sure, there’s a new satin pyrite case finish, a few new strap colors, and a Steph Curry Special Edition. Under the hood, there’s a slightly faster Qualcomm processor and an itty-bitty batte...

kottke.org Valid
Text Jason Kottke

I’m Done Using AI . “It made me lazy. It made me...

I’m Done Using AI. “It made me lazy. It made me stop caring. It made me a worse programmer. It made me depressed. Because I stopped doing the hard work, I stopped learning, I stopped growing, I stopped being the one making the software.”

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Amazon Is Spiting Customers With Unhelpful Order Confirmation Emails

theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/977733/amazon-order-emails-google-gmail-ai-agents-data

Mia Sato, The Verge: Earlier this summer, Amazon customers began noticing that emails related to their online orders looked sparse: Order confirmation emails didn’t name specific items anymore, and instead listed only item categories. “Your Beauty item is confirmed!” an...

Dan’s Polaroids
Text

12.08.2026

A child and a woman with eclipse-sunglasses on, illuminated by the sun.
Watching the partial solar eclipse.

kottke.org Valid
Text Jason Kottke

Why weren’t bicycles invented sooner? “Why...

Why weren’t bicycles invented sooner? “Why was no one…even considering the question of human-powered vehicles until the 1400s? Why weren’t there bicycle mechanics in the 1300s, when there were clockmakers, or at least by the 1500s, when we had watches?”

kottke.org Valid
Text Jason Kottke

Death Cab for Cutie’s Tiny Desk Concert

Death Cab for Cutie rolled into the NPR offices for a Tiny Desk Concert, which featured two new songs from their current album and some oldies: Title and Registration and Soul Meets Body. Gibbard noted:

I’m starting to realize that some of our earlier records came out a similar distance away from, like, the Beatles records when I was a kid.

This is Death Cab’s second Tiny Desk…here’s the first one from 2015:

I took this as an opportunity to listen to my favorite Death Cab song, Transatlanticism. And when are we getting a Postal Sevice Tiny Desk? Come on, we’ve been good! We need this!

Tags: Death Cab For Cutie · music · Tiny Desk Concerts · video

Simone Giertz
Video

How I designed my first product

Work Chronicles Valid
Text • Work Chronicles

(comic) Please praise my company

Colossal Valid
Text • Kate Mothes

Suzanne Jongmans Recycles Everyday Materials for Elegant Renaissance-Style Portraits

Suzanne Jongmans Recycles Everyday Materials for Elegant Renaissance-Style PortraitsJongmans' works look to the past but are exquisitely contemporary, prompting us to consider the meaning of value.

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 Suzanne Jongmans Recycles Everyday Materials for Elegant Renaissance-Style Portraits appeared first on Colossal.

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

Quoting Florian Herrengt

But then users start to report a weird bug. It's the 4th time your team has been trying to fix it. I mean... asking AI to fix it. Unfortunately, it seems like not even Fable can figure it out.

You go talk to the person who worked on this feature.

"So where does the data come from?"

"Hmm... actually I don't know. Let me ask Claude."

You sit next to each other watching an endless wall of text appear on the screen. Neither of you has any idea whether any of it is true but Claude seems very confident. [...]

This project has become so convoluted, with so many layers and services, that no one on your team could possibly start to understand what's going on.

Florian Herrengt, AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

Tags: ai-misuse, cognitive-debt, generative-ai, ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

datasette-upload-dbs 0.5a0

Release: datasette-upload-dbs 0.5a0 This plugin has been around for a while - it lets users upload a brand new SQLite database to a hosted Datasette instance, at which point that database will start being served by that instance. It can also be used to atomically swa...

Rick Beato
Video

My first ever in-person workshop! #guitar #musician #shorts

kottke.org Valid
Text Jason Kottke

Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting...

Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same. “A recommender that’s a mediocre predictor of what you’d love in a rich, diverse world becomes an excellent predictor of what you’ll click in the impoverished one it creates.”