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Ian Austen, reporting for The New York Times (gift link): The morning after he pulled negotiators from trade talks in Washington and set off a new round of American tariffs, Prime Minister Mark Carney on Saturday explained to Canadians why he walked away, calling the U.S...

The key skill required to make productive use of coding agents is being able to confidently instruct them on how to make changes and then confidently verify that those changes have been applied in the correct way.

Sometimes this involves reviewing every line of code they have written, but there are other ways to achieve that goal. Eyeballing every line of code has never been the most effective way to validate a chance to a piece of software.

Tags: code-review, coding-agents, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms

Jodi Ettenberg on living grief and a serendipitous discovery. “Living grief lacks the tapestry of rituals, language, and social permissions around grieving that a person is offered with death.”

Stress can sharpen your focus, but only up to a point. Beyond that, it starts to impair memory, decision-making, and even your eating habits. Here's where the tipping point lies. #kurzgesagt #inanutshell #kurzgesagt_inanutshell #learnwithshorts #science #stress #stressreli...

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…

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...

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…

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

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.

• Updated for compatibility with LLM 0.32.
• Models now use OpenRouter's implementation of the Responses API.
• Three new server-side tools: Shell, WebFetch, and WebSearch. Enable these with options like -T WebSearch.

Tags: llm, openrouter

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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…

"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."

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

~
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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

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

Craig & 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.

“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.

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