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Longreads Valid
Text • Peter Rubin

The Forgotten Bombing of LaGuardia Airport

“It’s been called ‘one of the greatest cold cases of the 20th century.’ It remains unsolved. But what happened next is almost a worse crime.”

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

Can we agree to pause the AI race? “If we can’t,...

Can we agree to pause the AI race? “If we can’t, then we are not as sovereign as we imagine; if we can’t, a machine god has already taken over this planet, and it’s called the market.”

Longreads Valid
Text • Cheri Lucas Rowlands

The Lucrative Bird-Singing Contests That Are Pushing Species to the Brink

"Millions of songbirds in Southeast Asia are trapped and smuggled each year for keeping as pets or entering in competitions. Scientists warn that it's fueling a crisis."

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Audio • SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Beyond the Game: Take A Seat in Dallas

Visitors to the Truck Yard beer garden in The Colony, Texas (outside Dallas) are treated to a very unusual art collection: a sweeping array of around 1400 hand-painted toilet seats, many of which are also collaged with objects ranging from tortoise shells to Zippo lighters t...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI)

Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI) I went looking for a definition of "Directly Responsible Individuals" and the best I found was in the GitLab handbook. Apparently the term originated at Apple, where it's used to describe the person who is "ultimately accountable for th...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

shot-scraper 1.11

Release: shot-scraper 1.11 Some minor improvements, mainly around command option consistency and making the server: mechanism used by both shot-scraper video and shot-scraper multi work if the server takes longer than a second to start serving traffic. server: pro...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

sqlite-utils 4.1.1

Release: sqlite-utils 4.1.1 Mainly a fix for an edge case that regular Claude chat spotted while experimenting with the 4.1 release to answer a question about ON DELETE. table.transform() now raises a TransactionError if called while a transaction i...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

WorkOS Pipes

workos.com/pipes?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=q32026

My thanks, once again, to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week. Users expect apps and agents to reach the tools they already work in. Every integration that gets you there is a different OAuth flow, a different token lifecycle, and weeks of infrastructure before you write a line of product code.

WorkOS Pipes handles it with one API call. Pre-built connectors for GitHub, Slack, Salesforce, Google Drive, and more. Pipes handles OAuth, token refresh, and credential storage. You call the real provider API with a fresh token, every time.

Connect to 100+ providers with WorkOS Pipes.

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

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

Fable gets another bump

One of the consequences of GPT-5.6 Sol being clearly a Fable/Mythos class model is that Anthropic have, once again, bumped the date that Fable stops being available in their Claude Max plans: We're extending Claude Fable 5 access on all paid plans, as well as keeping Claude...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Paulo Andrade: ‘A WWDC 26 Update on Building a Mac-Assed App With SwiftUI’

pfandrade.me/blog/swiftui-mac-assed-wwdc27-update/

Paulo Andrade:

My last post on using SwiftUI to build a Mac-assed app got a bit more traction than I expected. It was mentioned on Mastodon several times, included in iOS Dev Weekly, inspired May’s edition of the Swift Blog Carnival, and was eventually mentioned by John Gruber, arguably the person most to blame for popularizing the term “Mac-assed”, on Daring Fireball.

All this attention also resulted in an engineer from Apple reaching out with some notes. We exchanged a few emails, I filed a few radars, and now that WWDC 27 is behind us, this post serves as a small update to the issues I wrote about before.

There’s real progress here, but I think my main point still stands: SwiftUI is now seven years old and it does not make it easy to create great Mac apps.

Link: pfandrade.me/blog/swiftui-mac-assed-wwdc27-update/

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

How UIs Degrade Over Time

grumpy.website/1723

These examples are from Windows, but the same degradation is true for the standard look for MacOS alerts too. There was a time when system UI chrome was improving in clarity, everywhere. Today we live in an age when it’s degrading in clarity, everywhere. It’s rather inexplicable.

Link: grumpy.website/1723

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

‘Every Frame Perfect’

tonsky.me/blog/every-frame-perfect/

Nikita “Tonsky” Prokopov: The rule of thumb is: If I take a screenshot of your app at any moment, you should be able to explain what I see. Why care about every frame? It builds trust. Users can’t see the code, so UI is the only way for them to judge the quality of the...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

TwoMillionKit: Use Private Cloud Compute in MacOS 27 Foundation Models Without an Entitlement

github.com/insidegui/TwoMillionKit

Guilherme Rambo: Apple ships the fm command-line tool in macOS 27, which can be used to run inference with the local system model or Private Cloud Compute from Terminal or scripts. You know what else can run command-line tools? Mac apps! 😃 I decided to spend some of my ...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Sam Altman and Elon Musk Argue Over Who’s Running the Bigger Scam

x.com/sama/status/2075982617976230043

Elon Musk, linking to his own tweet from March that “Sam Altman is super good at scamming”:

He takes scamming to a whole new level

Sam Altman:

homeboy you’re the one sellling public market investors on short-term space datacenters

Musk:

We start flying them next year. Maybe you can come see them if your parole officer approves.

After stealing an open source AI charity, you then stole all of Apple’s phone technology! Wow.

What do you plan for an encore? That’s tough to beat.

(All spelling, capitalization, and punctuation sic.)

These are two of the CEOs of the most valuable companies on the planet. Say what you want about it, but Musk’s Twitter/X is like nothing else that’s ever existed. Screenshot of the thread for posterity, and an XCancel link for those icked by X itself.

Link: x.com/sama/status/2075982617976230043

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Lunacy — Jeff Halter’s Lunatic Fringe Player

morphing.cloud/lunacy/

After linking to Stacks, his remarkable new modern HyperCard player, I made the terrible mistake of clicking around the rest of Jeff Halter’s website, and fell upon Lunacy: Created by Ben Haller and released in the early ’90s as part of the Macintosh More After Dark soft...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Stacks — HyperCard Player for Modern MacOS

morphing.cloud/hypercard/

Well this is just delightful:

  • Run HyperCard stacks directly on your modern Mac. No emulator required!
  • Browse the Internet Archive’s HyperCard collection and run stacks with one-click.
  • Period-accurate typography.
  • Sound, instruments, and MacinTalk speech synthesis.
  • Cross-stack navigation.

Stacks is a really beautiful native Mac app, and its presentation of classic HyperCard stacks is exquisitely faithful to the era. It’s simultaneously Mac-assed 2026-style and Mac-assed 1987-style. Crackerjack work from developer Jeff Halter.

Link: morphing.cloud/hypercard/

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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sqlite-utils 4.1

Release: sqlite-utils 4.1 The first dot-release since 4.0 a few days ago, introducing a number of minor new features. sqlite-utils insert and sqlite-utils upsert now accept a --code option for providing a block of Python code (or a path to a .py file) that defines...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Can Someone Explain to Me How to Get ‘ChatGPT Classic’?

help.openai.com/en/articles/20001276-moving-to-the-new-chatgpt-desktop-app

One more link from OpenAI’s Help Center, this one explaining how to upgrade from the old Mac app to the new “super” app version: Follow the prompt in the app to download the new ChatGPT desktop app. Then sign in with the same ChatGPT account. The new app may install alo...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

OpenAI Help Center Describes What Is Wrong With the New ChatGPT

help.openai.com/en/articles/20001275-chatgpt-work-and-codex

OpenAI Help Center, “Where Work and Codex are available”: Work is available on ChatGPT web and mobile for eligible paid plans. Work is also available in the ChatGPT desktop app when included for your plan and workspace. Work on web and mobile runs in the cloud. Work in ...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Benedict Evans on the New ‘Super App’ ChatGPT

threads.com/@benedictevans/post/Dano_uvDr8F

Benedict Evans with a succinct review on Threads: Wow, what a total mess. What is the difference between a project, a task and a chat? Why did chats get a crappy floating window but tasks and projects don’t? Why does choosing ‘plugins’ get me ‘templates’? Am I not al...