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Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong. “Activists have made the decision to emphasize protection, aid, and observation. When matters escalate, it is usually the choice of the federal agents.”

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A stranger on an overnight bus ride causes a woman to contemplate her future. This essay originally appeared in Off Assignment.    

Plus, Off Assignment is offering a writing course this spring, called Writing the Mundane. Early bird pricing is on until February 9! Sign up here: https://offassignment.com/writing-the-mundane

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Daniel Jalkut returns to the show so we can both vent about MacOS 26 Tahoe.

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Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/01/26/ep-439

Someone asked on Hacker News if I had any tips for getting coding agents to write decent quality tests. Here's what I said: I work in Python which helps a lot because there are a TON of good examples of pytest tests floating around in the training data, including things lik...

Good tip from “DifferentDan” on the Realmac customer forum, posted back in November: I saw on macOS Tahoe 26.1, Apple finally added an option in the Column View settings to automatically right size all columns individually and that setting would persist, but I don’t real...

Kif Leswing, CNBC:

Nvidia will become TSMC’s largest customer this year, according to analyst estimates and Huang himself. Apple is believed to currently be TSMC’s largest customer, mostly to manufacture A-series chips for iPhones and M-series chips for PCs and servers.

The positional swap will mark a fundamental shift in the semiconductor industry, reflecting Nvidia’s growing importance amid the artificial intelligence infrastructure build-out. [...]

Ben Bajarin, principal analyst at Creative Strategies, said he projects Nvidia to generate $33 billion in TSMC revenue this year, or about 22% of the chip foundry’s total. Apple, by comparison, is projected to generate about $27 billion, or about 18% of TSMC’s revenue.

Link: cnbc.com/2026/01/26/nvidia-set-to-supplant-apple-as-tsmcs…

Connecting user accounts to third-party APIs always comes with the same plumbing: OAuth flows, token storage, refresh logic, and provider-specific quirks.

WorkOS Pipes removes that overhead. Users connect services like GitHub, Slack, Google, Salesforce, and other supported providers through a drop-in widget. Your backend requests a valid access token from the Pipes API when needed, while Pipes handles credential storage and token refresh.

Simplify integrations with WorkOS Pipes.

Link: workos.com/docs/pipes?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium…

Joe Rossignol, writing at MacRumors:

Apple offers a Share Item Location feature in the Find My app that allows you to temporarily share the location of an AirTag-equipped item with others, including employees at participating airlines. This way, if you put an AirTag inside your bags, the airline can better help you find them in the event they are lost or delayed at the airport. [...] Below, we have listed most of the airlines that support the feature.

Apple’s announcement claims that 36 airlines support it today, and 15 more are coming soon.

Link: macrumors.com/2026/01/26/airtag-2-airlines-lost-bags/

Apple Newsroom: Apple’s second-generation Ultra Wideband chip — the same chip found in the iPhone 17 lineup, iPhone Air, Apple Watch Ultra 3, and Apple Watch Series 11 — powers the new AirTag, making it easier to locate than ever before. Using haptic, visual, and audio f...

I’ve been meaning since last month to link to Apple’s lists of the top iPhone apps in the U.S. for 2025. Here’s the list of the top 20 free iPhone apps: ChatGPT Threads Google TikTok — Videos, Shop & LIVE WhatsApp Messenger Instagram YouTube Google Maps Gmail — Email b...

A collection of dartboards used in different areas of the UK. “The closure of pubs and leagues not being fed with new players, unfortunately, leads to some of the boards just being consigned to history.”

A collection of dartboards used in different areas of the UK. “The closure of pubs and leagues not being fed with new players, unfortunately, leads to some of the boards just being consigned to history.”

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Yours truly back in 2009, hitting upon the same themes from the item I just posted about TextEdit vs. Apple Notes: This, I think, explains the relative popularity of Mac OS X’s included Stickies application. For years, Stickies’s popularity confounded me. Why would anyon...

Scientists have detected a swole neutrino, a potential signal from a primordial black hole, which may have formed “before there were even atoms, let alone stars”.

Scientists have detected a swole neutrino, a potential signal from a primordial black hole, which may have formed “before there were even atoms, let alone stars”.

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Perhaps at the opposite end of the complexity and novelty spectrum from Federico Viticci’s intro to Clawdbot is this piece by Kyle Chayka, writing at The New Yorker, from October: Amid the accelerating automation of our computers — and the proliferation of assistants and...

One of my favourite features of ChatGPT is its ability to write and execute code in a container. This feature launched as ChatGPT Code Interpreter nearly three years ago, was half-heartedly rebranded to "Advanced Data Analysis" at some point and is generally really difficult...

Every year since 2016, Literary Hub has asked a group of book cover designers for their picks for the best book covers of the year. Using 10 years of data, here are their picks for the best covers of the last decade. I’ve included a few of my personal favorites below. Tags: best of · book covers · books · design · lists