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A love letter to the rocket that everyone is too chicken to build

The European Commission: The European Commission adopted a delegated act today (14 July) introducing new rules that exempt additional products from EU requirements on the removability and replaceability of portable batteries. Under the EU’s Batteries Regulation, portabl...

Firefox in WebAssembly This is absurdly cool: Puter compiled Firefox to WebAssembly such that the whole browser runs in another browser. Here's my blog, running in Firefox, running in WebAssembly, running in Chrome: They chose Firefox/Gecko because it has strong single-proc...

Tool: Mermaid to ASCII art (mermaid-ascii)

After building the Mermaid to ASCII tool based on Grok Build's Rust code I learned that there's an older, more fully-featured Go library called AlexanderGrooff/mermaid-ascii that implements a similar pattern, so I had Claude Fable 5 compile that one to WebAssembly as well so I could compare the two.

This one includes support for colors!

Tags: go, tools, webassembly, mermaid

Quiche Industries (Greg de J.): Starting today, Quiche Browser disables AI overviews in search results by default, out of the box. Compare how much space and time they waste. I love the web too much to let that nonsense bury links to real websites made by humans. This ...

Tuesday’s episode of Dithering was a good one, especially for the DF audience, so we’ve moved it outside the paywall and made it free-to-listen on the web. (We don’t (yet?) have an RSS feed that you can put in your podcast player for these occasional free episodes, alas.) I have a slightly different take on Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI than I’ve seen expressed elsewhere.

If you don’t subscribe to Dithering, you probably should. Two episodes per week, 15 minutes per episode. Not a minute less, not a minute more. $7/month or $70/year — or, get it included with the Stratechery Plus bundle.

Link: dithering.passport.online/member/episode/apple-sues-open-ai

In this episode I discuss why neither Paul McCartney nor The Rolling Stones will be on my channel.

Check Out The Lefsetz Letter Here: https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/

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
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Gregory Reedy
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CL Turner
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Jon Beezley
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Rich Germano
Brian Bloom
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Toby Guidry

Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI announced Kimi K3 this morning, describing it as their "most capable model to date, with 2.8 trillion parameters". It's currently available via their website and API, but an open weight release is promised "by July 27, 2026". Moonshot are calling t...

What Training My Chaotic Dog Taught Me About Power, Control — and Human Beings. “As any parent of a toddler knows, being morally liable for something that is incapable of moral liability is a fraught and stressful business.”

OpenAI, in a statement to Bloomberg this week:

“While we take these allegations seriously, we’re not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit. We believe in fair competition and allowing people the freedom to work wherever they choose, and we’re focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.”

“We’re not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit” is very different from, say, “This complaint has no merit.” Again, a curious response.

Link: bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-14/openai-says-it-s-not…

Building a World Map With Only 500 Bytes.

David Ingram, reporting for NBC News (which recently added a paywall without gift links, alas): Apple alleged in a lawsuit last week that OpenAI “never responded” to its concerns this year about what Apple believed was trade secret theft. But emails reviewed by NBC News ...

This video from Kurzgesagt is a great little primer on how the human brain stores memories.

Memory is one of the strangest abilities you possess. Your brain uses an incredibly complex biological system to preserve moments from your past that no longer exist, allowing you to revisit experiences from years ago. But memories are not always recordings of reality. In fact, every time a memory comes under the spotlight of your attention, it can melt and change a tiny bit.

What exactly is a memory, how is a moment in time stored inside your brain, and why does remembering something slowly rewrite the story of your life?

Tags: brains · neuroscience · science · video

On file deletions. We’ve investigated a handful of reports where GPT-5.6 unexpectedly deleted files.

What we have found is that this most commonly occurs when:

• Full access mode is enabled and codex is run without sandboxing protections, including without auto review being enabled
• The model attempts to override the $HOME env var to define a temporary directory.
• The model makes an honest mistake and mistakenly deletes $HOME instead.

— Thibault Sottiaux, describing a pretty gnarly Codex bug

Tags: codex, coding-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms

Pre-show: Anniversary Corner! catatp (see also Statistics) Bootleg visualization Follow-up: Public beta check-in Casey’s iMessage notification issue Cache in front of CloudFlare Workers! Apple keeps futzing with rendering of .icon files Mac-assed Mac Apps Steve Tr...

Louie Mantia, with a thoughtful essay on app icon design and the squircle-jail controversy on the Parakeet blog: It’s worth noting that some of the platform’s best icons look worse, while some of the platform’s worst icons look better. Ultimately this is what I object ...

Remember back in March when then-co-CEO Fidji Simo announced to the company that “We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests”? And then weeks later they spent “low hundreds of millions” to purchase the TBPN YouTube show? In their continuing effort to focus on core product, they’re now selling a $230 hardware keypad ostensibly for working with Codex, which is no longer an app but just a tab in their craptacular super app.

Quinn Nelson:

No way, that’s crazy. I’ve just been using the keyboard and trackpad that came on my laptop for free like a stupid idiot.

Link: openai.com/supply/co-lab/work-louder/

From the Brooklyn Public Library, a list of “the 250 most influential books in United States history”. Incl. Neuromancer, The Fire Next Time, Nickel and Dimed, The Power Broker, and The Snowy Day.

"The fragility and fantasy of old America."

New-to-me podcast that looks really interesting: Time Sensitive, “a podcast featuring candid, revealing long-form conversations with leading minds about their life and work through the lens of time”.