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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

After reading my posts earlier today about Eliza, the first “hit” chatbot from the 1960s, DF reader AP sent me a link to the Kickstarter page for Searching for SmarterChild, a project from documentary filmmakers Lindsey Sitz and Zan Gillies to make a movie about SmarterChild, an AOL Instant Messenger chatbot that once had 30 million “friends” (a.k.a. users). I don’t recall ever hearing of SmarterChild before, let alone using it. (I think I was on a very different level of the Internet back then.)

But this looks like a great indie nerd documentary. The Kickstarter campaign has just one week left and they’re a wee bit short of their primary goal, and quite a bit short of their stretch goals. I just chipped in.

Link: kickstarter.com/projects/smarterchild/searching-for…

What’s the Point of Sex, Anyway? “There is yet another kind of male, known among ichthyologists as a ‘sneaky mater.’ This type dispenses altogether with nest-building and partnering and simply darts around squirting.”

The Open Source AI Gap Map shows the current capabilities of open source AI tools with an eye toward answering an important question: “What building blocks are missing for creating completely open source AI products?”

I vaguely recall first trying some version of Eliza back in the 1990s. I never found it all that impressive nor understood its stature in the AI literature. It’s better than a bunch of if/then statements but not by much. There’s some natural language grammar parsing that is ...

The Eliza Archaeology Project: ELIZA is the original and highly influential chatbot that launched the genre of human-computer interactions using text-based agents. It was created at MIT in the 1960s as part of Project MAC by it’s [sic] designer and programmer, Joseph Wei...

The End of Reading Is Here. “The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization.”

"When an alligator kills someone in America, it can make international headlines. What happens to the thousands of gators that people deem 'nuisances' does not."

David Epstein, author of the recent Inside the Box (a book about the value of constraints), did a fascinating video on “anticipatory skill” and “chunking” and how players like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo (who can accurately head the ball even in the dark) use them t...

Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI. “This book presents the rediscovered original source code of ELIZA alongside previously unseen scripts…, revealing a far more sophisticated system than previously documented.”