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Beyond the Game: Toronto’s Casa Loma

Reporter Elah Feder ventures into one of her hometown’s biggest tourist attractions: A 98-room castle in the middle of Toronto that bankrupted a 19th century electricity multimillionaire.

This episode is part of our ongoing coverage of the soccer world championship. In each episode, we take you beyond the stadium, and to a nearby wonder that’s off the beaten track.


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Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Auth.md — an Open Protocol for Agent Registration From WorkOS

workos.com/auth-md?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=q22026

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week to promote Auth.md, their new open protocol for AI agent registration. (Who’d have thunk that I’d be getting paid to promote new uses for Markdown 22 years after releasing it?)

Sign-up forms were built for humans in browsers, so how do AI agents programmatically register with services? That’s the question Auth.md aims to answer. It’s a single Markdown file you host at your domain that tells agents how to register your users, which flows you support, what scopes you expose, and how credentials get issued. It’s like robots.txt but for agent registration.

Cloudflare, Firecrawl, and Resend have already adopted it.

An open protocol authored by WorkOS. Read the spec.

Link: workos.com/auth-md?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium…

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Daniel Agee: ‘Remembering Om’

glass.photo/highlights/remembering-om

Daniel Agee, an early member of the team at Glass, writing on the Glass blog: It’s not lost on us that Om’s photography, often taken in frozen lands in or around the arctic circle, was the polar opposite of his personality. While he focused on subtle shapes and hidden la...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Matt Mullenweg: ‘All Roads Lead to Om’

ma.tt/2026/06/om-forever/

Matt Mullenweg: Fundamentally, Om was a lover of humanity. He became a fast “regular” everywhere he went. He wouldn’t just buy coffee, he would also learn the name and story of every barista, the dogs and people in South Park. His deep curiosity and respect weren’t just ...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

The New York Times: ‘Om Malik, Whose Blog Shaped How Silicon Valley Saw Itself, Dies at 59’

nytimes.com/2026/06/26/technology/om-malik-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.t1A.AyPT.p7GhDrDcJSfa

Clay Risen, writing for The New York Times (gift link): Mr. Malik started his blog just as the dot-com bubble burst, leading to a recession that also took down many of the journalism start-ups that wrote about tech, like The Industry Standard and Inside.com. He was among...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention Valid
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Quoting Jon Udell

Human Agent in the loop

I dislike the phrase “human in the loop” because it cedes authority to the machines. Let’s flip the narrative. It’s our loop, we work the same way we always have, now we recruit agents to join the team. An agent-assisted process need not be a black box that takes in prompts and emits features. [...]

Let’s do agentic software development like that. Not as a loop we’ve been excluded from, instead as one we invite agents into.

— Jon Udell, “Doctor, it hurts when agents create unreviewable PRs.” “Don’t do that.”

Tags: jon-udell, coding-agents, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention Valid
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Hack Your Summer

Hack Your Summer I learned about this initiative from DJ Patil this morning: It’s a 4-week, high-velocity production sprint for undergraduate students, graduate students, and recent graduates who want to build something real this summer. You’ll learn how to identify a proje...

Rick Beato Updates instantly via WebSub
Video

The Dumbest Argument in Music

I Just Had The Strangest 2 Weeks…

In today's video, I discuss a false argument that I often see made in my comment section!

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kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

Who wins the 2026 World Cup if “not football” decides?...

Who wins the 2026 World Cup if “not football” decides? This starts with the same 64-team bracket as the actual WC but uses metrics like life expectancy & CO2 per capita to decide matches.

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

PuffPal, an App for Accessing Cannabis Clubs, Leaked 1 Million Users’ Passports

theverge.com/tech/947157/passports-data-breach-cannabis-club-systems-nefos-puffpal?view_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpZCI6IjdjV0Y5TTBuM0ciLCJwIjoiL3RlY2gvOTQ3MTU3L3Bhc3Nwb3J0cy1kYXRhLWJyZWFjaC1jYW5uYWJpcy1jbHViLXN5c3RlbXMtbmVmb3MtcHVmZnBhbCIsImV4cCI6MTc4MzA5NDY0NiwiaWF0IjoxNzgyNjYyNjQ2fQ.7SjX6B8AAGhzsdrtD5asJWBwzQvTDUD31hWte7K1oec

Sean Hollister, writing for The Verge (gift link): If you’ve visited a cannabis club in Spain, [Sammy] Azdoufal says, chances are your photo ID was among them — and possibly your phone number, address, your favorite strains of cannabis, and how much you consumed each mon...

Simone Giertz Updates instantly via WebSub
Video

This table is 10 years in the making

Get it at Yetch.Studio!

Daniel Pietzsch’s Photo Journal
Text

March 2026

A bike tour, my birthday, playing two gigs with two bands, attending one other concert, Halde Hoheward with Florian, and the usual random frames in between. (43 photos)

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Micron Executive Sumit Sadana Tells Tim Cook to Stop Hitting Himself

wsj.com/tech/apple-raises-prices-on-macs-ipads-by-200-or-more-on-some-models-a7463f99?st=B1aQCP&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

From the bottom of Rolfe Winkler’s report for The Wall Street Journal Thursday, on Apple’s unprecedented price increases (gift link): Apple’s price hikes arrived the day after Micron Technology, the big American maker of memory and storage, reported blowout quarterly ear...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

★ Bernie Sanders: Ideologue and Economic Ignoramus

Bernie Sanders, posting on Twitter/X Thursday (don’t complain to me that he doesn’t use his Bluesky account): Corporate greed is Tim Cook, the billionaire Apple CEO, claiming that hiking prices on Apple products by over $200 is “unavoidable” after it made $112 billion in...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Apple Faced Bipartisan Opposition When It Last Lobbied to Buy Chinese RAM in 2022

warner.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warner-rubio-urge-dni-to-review-risk-chinese-chipmaker-ymtc-presents-to-national-security/

From a September 2022 letter to then-Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, co-signed by Marco Rubio (then a Republican senator from Florida, currently secretary of state) and Mark Warner (Democratic senator from Virginia): We write to convey our extreme concern...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Microsoft Raises Xbox Prices, Drops High-End Storage Model From Lineup

news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/06/25/xbox-console-price-update/

Microsoft’s Xbox blog: Effective August 1, 2026, we will be updating prices worldwide. The price of XBOX consoles will increase by US$100 for 512 GB models and US$150 for 1 TB models. We will also be sunsetting our 2 TB model. Last October, we increased XBOX console pri...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

FT Reports That Apple Is Lobbying to Buy Memory Chips From Blacklisted Chinese Company CXMT

ft.com/content/d72a25e2-7bde-4aa9-bd8d-0c4f3d6cb2cb

Demetri Sevastopulo and Michael Acton, reporting for the Financial Times (paywalled, alas): Apple is lobbying the Trump administration for clearance to buy memory chips from CXMT, a Chinese company that the Pentagon has put on a blacklist because of alleged connections t...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Grok Is a Generative Porno App

theinformation.com/articles/xai-bets-groks-racy-side?rc=jfy0lk

Grace Kay and Theo Wayt, writing for the paywalled-with-no-gift-links The Information: xAI launched an upgraded video model last week, highlighting how it’s pushing ahead with its own visual efforts even as it brings in outside help to compete with rivals in areas like c...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

OpenAI Announces, But Is Blocked From Releasing, New GPT-5.6 Models

openai.com/index/previewing-gpt-5-6-sol/

OpenAI yesterday: We’re beginning a limited preview of the GPT‑5.6 series: Sol, our flagship model; Terra, a balanced model for everyday work; and Luna, a fast and affordable model. Terra has competitive performance to GPT‑5.5 while being 2× cheaper and Luna brings stron...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

White House Grants Access to Anthropic’s Mythos Model to 100+ U.S. Institutions; Fable Still Shut Down

semafor.com/article/06/27/2026/us-releases-powerful-anthropic-model-mythos-to-some-us-companies

Reed Albergotti and Ben Smith, reporting last night for Semaphor: The decision, in a letter sent Friday afternoon to Anthropic, is a major de-escalation in the confrontation between the Trump Administration and one of the world’s most valuable private companies. Two week...