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Text • John Gruber

WorkOS: Agents Can Now Sign Up for Your App

workos.com/auth-md?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=q32026

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring the Daring Fireball weekly newsletter this week to promote their Agent Registration. Agents are hitting your signup flow and they’re bouncing off a browser login that was designed for humans. Every one that gives up is a signup you never see.

WorkOS Agent Registration turns that traffic into signups. Enroll via the dashboard and AuthKit publishes an auth.md file that agents read to register for scoped, short-lived credentials you control.

Make your app agent-ready today.

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

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Dutch Regulator Fines Uber $1 Billion for Suspending Dishonest Drivers

reuters.com/world/dutch-regulator-fines-uber-966-million-automating-driver-suspensions-document-2026-08-21/

Toby Sterling, reporting for Reuters: The Dutch Data Protection Authority has fined Uber €825 million ($966 million) for deactivating driver accounts through automated systems without adequately informing them, according to an August 17 decision reviewed by Reuters. The...

Dan’s Polaroids
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21.08.2026

A blue and a yellow pedalo on a pebble beach in the sun. The lake in front of dark clouds and mountains.
Last rays of sunshine before the rain started.

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

The Fourth Horseman of the File-Format-Hegemony Apocalypse

techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/onedriveblog/introducing-markdown-support-in-sharepoint-and-onedrive/4512174

Microsoft’s iPhone app for OneDrive has long supported creating three new document types via a big “+” button right in its file viewer: Excel, Word, PowerPoint. It recently came to my attention that they’ve added a fourth document type, and they even gave it real Microsoft-style “they just have no taste” file icon. Just look at it. The whole world’s coming to an end, Mallory.

Link: techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/onedriveblog/introducing…

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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llm 0.32.1

Release: llm 0.32.1

Fresh installs of LLM stopped working the other day because the OpenAI Python library dropped its usage of httpx, and it turned out LLM depended on that library but only installed it via a transitive openai dependency.

This dot-release fixes that for the moment by pinning to openai<3, and a soon-to-drop 0.33 release will switch from httpx to httpx2.

Tags: httpx, openai, llm

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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llm-openrouter 0.7

Release: llm-openrouter 0.7

Now that this plugin is compatible with LLM 0.32 it works much better with reasoning LLMs available through OpenRouter.

Tags: llm, openrouter

xkcd.com Valid
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xkcd store reopening

store.xkcd.com/

The xkcd store is back, with shirts, stickers, and posters for sale. a>

xkcd.com Valid
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Archery Feat

Update: I would not have embarked on this powerscaling venture if I'd known how thoroughly Mark Twain was going to roast me.

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Walmart Finally Caves, Will Soon Support Apple Pay

corporate.walmart.com/news/2026/08/21/more-ways-to-pay-tap-to-pay-is-coming-to-walmart-and-sams-club

Walmart:

When we think about convenience, we think about a lot of things, but making shopping feel simpler and more seamless from start to finish is a big part. And one of the moments where that matters most is at checkout.

We want customers and members to have choice in how they pay, so they can check out in the way that works best for them. Now, beginning Aug. 24, we will be adding Tap to Pay to our payment options at select Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations, with plans to roll it out to all U.S. stores and clubs by the end of 2026 and to fuel stations by mid-2027.

When I think about convenience, I think about CurrentC, scanning stupid-ass QR codes, and waiting 12 years to adopt Apple Pay.

Link: corporate.walmart.com/news/2026/08/21/more-ways-to-pay-tap…

Longreads Valid
Text • Carolyn Wells

The End of the European Summer

"As extreme heat overwhelms the Continent’s great cities, they are racing to transform themselves for a climate that they were never built to withstand."

Marques Brownlee Updates instantly via WebSub
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I Said Yes to Every Email for a Month! (Again)

I said yes to every review request I got for an entire month. I'm sorry? You're welcome?

Thanks Best Buy for sponsoring this video. You can find the tech upgrades you need to elevate your daily life at https://www.bestbuy.com/discover

MKBHD Merch: http://shop.MKBHD.com

DC Rainmaker Garmin CIRQA video: https://youtu.be/2K4x0CnuQug?si=9k68ymP8IUkciJUE

Playlist of MKBHD Intro music: https://goo.gl/B3AWV5

~
http://twitter.com/MKBHD
http://instagram.com/MKBHD
http://facebook.com/MKBHD

0:00 Intro
2:01 Xbook Laptop
5:02 Garmin CIRQA
6:51 Smart Toilet Seat
8:29 The Busy Bar
9:50 Beni Robot
13:33 Fan Mouse
15:02 Personal EKG
16:33 Honor Robot Phone
18:27 "AI Powered" Chair
21:03 Skullcandy Headphones
23:05 Gaming PC
25:24 Sony "True RGB" TV
28:19 What we learned

Rick Beato Updates instantly via WebSub
Video

DOMi and JD Beck play “Lovely Masquerade” #drums #piano #shorts

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

Walking the Length of Manhattan . I did this, solo,...

Walking the Length of Manhattan. I did this, solo, right before I moved out of NYC. Loved it. Will do it again someday.

Colossal Valid
Text • Grace Ebert

An Inflatable Pool Party by Craig & Karl Fills a Dubai Atrium with Summer Fun

An Inflatable Pool Party by Craig & Karl Fills a Dubai Atrium with Summer FunCraig & Karl's expressive inflatables infuse oft-overlooked architecture with play and whimsy.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article An Inflatable Pool Party by Craig & Karl Fills a Dubai Atrium with Summer Fun appeared first on Colossal.

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

“When Jason Ganos was asked to help sell an old box full...

“When Jason Ganos was asked to help sell an old box full of NES cartridges…” How 97 Copies of an Unreleased Version of Super Mario Bros. Duck Hunt Were Discovered in a Wisconsin Warehouse.

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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Stop Making TUIs

Stop Making TUIs

Thomas Ptacek advocates for building real native user interfaces for even the smallest of personal tools, because coding agents have reduced the cost of getting a usable-enough GUI up and running to almost nothing.

I wrote about my vibe-coded bandwidth and GPU monitoring macOS task bar apps back in March, and I'm still using both of those on a daily basis.

I'm not habitually knocking out real UIs for my other projects yet, but I'm running out of excuses!

Thomas:

If you haven’t tried your hand at turning one of your 500 throwaway CLIs into a native app, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Go build a native UI. It’ll probably change the way you think.

Tags: thomas-ptacek, ai, generative-ai, llms, vibe-coding, coding-agents

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

What a great idea for a book: Cookbooking: A Fan’s...

What a great idea for a book: Cookbooking: A Fan’s Guide. “An eclectic, visually stunning pop-history, Cookbooking explores the most influential and beloved cookbooks through photographs, listicles, graphics, and snappy writing.”

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

★ When New DF Posts Drop in a Forest and No One Is There to Read Them

It occurred to me last night that I’d gotten less feedback regarding recent posts than usual. There were a few items I’d posted in recent days that I felt sure to hear from readers about, both yea and nay. But: nothing. Crickets chirping. I almost always hear from squeaky wh...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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Quoting Matt Webb

After I released version 1.0, I figured I would have to do the rotations myself. So I sat down with ChatGPT and I didn’t get it to write the code, but I got it to educate me. With a patient, interactive tutor, I was able to finally do what I hadn’t by reading books and asking mathematician friends – I learnt how to use quaternions just enough to make the app work.

So learning doesn’t stop just because I outsource a bunch of thinking to AI. It pushes me to learn more. I like that as an outcome.

— Matt Webb, Galactic Compass 2: now with new augmented reality mode

Tags: matt-webb, generative-ai, chatgpt, education, ai, llms

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Bluesky’s Active User Base Is Shrinking, and Remains Tiny Compared to Threads and Twitter/X

techcrunch.com/2026/08/11/blueskys-active-user-base-is-shrinking-as-its-focus-expands-beyond-the-app/

Sarah Perez, writing at TechCrunch last week: Decentralized social network Bluesky was one of the bigger beneficiaries of the exodus from Elon Musk’s X in November 2024, following the U.S. elections. But now, nearly two years later, the social network and would-be X comp...