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I loved watching this. My takeaway: don’t just say what it does, explain how it does what it does.

Link: m.youtube.com/watch?v=w9xTE2EuAt8

My thanks to TextJam for sponsoring this past week at DF. TextJam just launched last week, it’s a remarkable “1.0” release — a multi-player text editor / word processor with a novel twist on how humans interact with AI. TextJam introduces the metaphors of “pen” mode for writ...

MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass: And so you can’t help but wonder if part of the equation in this settlement wasn’t decidedly more cynical. Fresh off a new massive fundraise — one in which they raised far more than they were initially targeting, I might add — Anthropic h...

And so you can’t help but wonder if part of the equation in this settlement wasn’t decidedly more cynical. Fresh off a new massive fundraise – one in which they raised far more than they were initially targeting, I might add – Anthropic has a lot of money. More than perha...

Hayden Field, reporting for The Verge:

In what’s potentially the first major payout to creatives whose work was used to train AI systems, Anthropic has reached an agreement to pay “at least” a staggering $1.5 billion, plus interest, to authors to settle its class-action lawsuit. The amount breaks down to smaller payouts expected to be approximately $3,000 per book or work. Lawyers for the plaintiffs said it’s “believed to be the largest publicly reported recovery in the history of US copyright litigation.”

Link: theverge.com/anthropic/773087/anthropic-to-pay-1-5-billion…

David Pierce, writing for The Verge: Mike Cannon-Brookes, the CEO of enterprise software giant Atlassian, was one of the first users of the Arc browser. Over the last several years, he has been a prolific bug reporter and feature requester. Now he’ll own the thing: Atlas...

Dave Michaels and Katherine Blunt, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): “There are strong reasons not to jolt the system and to allow market forces to do the work,” Mehta wrote. Wall Street analysts scored the ruling a huge win for Google and Apple since i...

David McCabe, reporting for The New York Times: Google must hand over its search results and some data to rival companies but does not need to break itself up by selling its Chrome web browser, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday. The decision, by Judge Amit P. Mehta of the...

There are finallys, and there are finallys. Apple shipped the original iPad in April 2010. Instagram shipped in October 2010 — and was iPhone-exclusive until 2012. That Instagram didn’t ship a native iPad version of its app until now is really one of the strangest things in tech. But here it is.

One significant difference from Instagram on phones is that on iPad, it defaults to the Reels view, and you have to tap below Reels in the sidebar to get to your following timeline. Adam Mosseri explains their thinking behind this in this Reel (natch).

Link: about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/instagram-for-ipad/

We’re excited to launch TextJam this week, a multi-player editor with a novel twist on how humans interact with AI. Ever tried to “AI chat” your way to a polished piece of writing, and wanted more control over the result?

TextJam has new inventions that make it easy to tell the AI what to keep and what to change, so you can get from draft to done faster. From typing in pen and pencil, to multi-touch gestures that intelligently resize text, TextJam is a bold new take on what a word processor can be. Try it today for free.

Link: textjam.com/show/demo?df

William Foege, William Roper, David Satcher, Jeffrey Koplan, Richard Besser, Tom Frieden, Anne Schuchat, Rochelle P. Walensky, and Mandy K. Cohen — all of them former directors of the CDC, under every president from Jimmy Carter to Trump — in a co-bylined op-ed for the NYT: ...

Bernie Sanders, in a NYT op-ed: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, is endangering the health of the American people now and into the future. He must resign. Mr. Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and over, that...

For your holiday listening enjoyment: Special guest Andru Edwards joins the show. Topics include Google’s Pixel 10 event and the Pixel 10 family of devices, AI’s effect on computational photography, foldable phones, and some speculation on Apple’s September 9 “Awe Dropping” event.

Sponsored by:

• Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow.
• Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Get 3 months and 150,000 errors free.
• Notion: The best AI tool for work, with your notes, docs, and projects in one space.

Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/08/31/ep-430

One more for my weekend spate of developer posts, but from the opposite of the LLM-assisted cutting edge: this wonderful collection of classic-era Mac programming books, carefully scanned as PDFs. These evoke nostalgia both for the classic Mac era and for the entire notion of “programming books”. (Via Michael Tsai and Rui Carmo.)

Link: vintageapple.org/macprogramming/index_year.html

Sosumi.ai: Ever notice Claude struggling to write Swift code? It might not be their fault! Apple Developer docs are locked behind JavaScript, making them invisible to most LLMs. If they try to fetch it, all they see is “This page requires JavaScript. Please turn on Java...

My thanks to Impending for sponsoring last week at DF to promote their new app, Walk the World. You surely know some of Impending’s other apps, like the innovative checklist/task app Clear. Walk the World turns your steps — your real-world activity — into a new kind of virtu...

From Apple’s Xcode 26 Beta 7 release notes: Claude in Xcode is now available in the Intelligence settings panel, allowing users to seamlessly add their existing paid Claude account to Xcode and start using Claude Sonnet 4. (155826755) When using ChatGPT in Xcode, users ...

Shelby Talcott, reporting under the euphemistic headline “White House Fires CDC Director Over Vaccine Disagreements”: A showdown at the CDC culminated in the White House formally firing its director, Susan Monarez, on Wednesday night. Monarez was ousted earlier in the d...

Truly phenomenal video from Real Engineering about a genuinely phenomenal product. In my review of the AirPods Pro 2 in 2023 — a year after they originally shipped, when the cases were changed to use USB-C — I called them “the best single expression of Apple as a company today”. That remains true. AirPods exemplify everything that sets Apple apart: miniaturization, “it just works” ease of use, opinionated design (you get them in any color you want, so long as it’s white), and, most of all, joyfulness.

It occurs to me that Apple doesn’t brag enough about its engineering accomplishments these days. Under their previous CEO, they’d spend more time in product introduction explaining how things work, like a lecture in a 101 college course. I miss that. This Real Engineering video fills in those gaps.

Link: nebula.tv/videos/realengineering-the-hidden-design-of-the…

Christopher Yasiejko, reporting last week for Bloomberg Law: CBP exceeded its authority in an Aug. 1 internal advice ruling that overturned its own January decision without notice or input from Masimo, the medical-device maker said in a complaint filed Wednesday in the U...

Matthew Panzarino returns to the show. Topics include 007 logo creator Joe Caroff’s death at 103, Google’s weird “Made by Google” event hosted by Jimmy Fallon, the UK supposedly dropping its demand for an iCloud encryption backdoor, and Apple’s workaround for the Apple Watch blood oxygen sensor patent stalemate.

Sponsored by:

• Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow.
• Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Get 3 months and 150,000 errors free.
• Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box.

Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/08/25/ep-429

Supply chain leaker Majin Bu has the scoop, including photos of the cases and their packaging, of Apple’s second attempt at a fabric-based successor to leather iPhone cases. Apple’s first attempt two years ago, FineWoven, was so unpopular that they didn’t even offer a premiu...

After a 25-year run, the website MacSurfer closed in 2020. But, as brought to my attention two weeks ago by Nick Heer, MacSurfer quietly returned in June. No one seemed to notice until this month. The original MacSurfer was a bit of a weird site. Content-wise it was a daily...

Tulsi Gabbard — who, believe it or not, is the US director of national intelligence — on X last week: Over the past few months, I’ve been working closely with our partners in the UK, alongside @POTUS and @VP, to ensure Americans’ private data remains private and our Cons...

Elon Musk, Friday:

Join @xAI and help build a purely AI software company called Macrohard. It’s a tongue-in-cheek name, but the project is very real!

In principle, given that software companies like Microsoft do not themselves manufacture any physical hardware, it should be possible to simulate them entirely with AI.

If it’s “a purely AI software company” why do they need to hire anyone?

Link: x.com/elonmusk/status/1958852874236305793

John McCoy, on the supposedly controversial Cracker Barrel rebranding: But just because I doubt that these choices were motivated by politics doesn’t mean the detractors don’t have a point: something basic is being lost here. In both cases the companies have discarded ch...

Right on schedule: second Tuesday of September, so long as that second Tuesday doesn’t fall on September 11. (Last year’s event went on Monday 9 September, probably because the Harris-Trump debate was already scheduled for Tuesday the 10th.) There’s an interactive animated version of the “heat map” event logo on Apple’s homepage. (A little bit odd that the second item below the event announcement, after a back-to-school promotion, is a “Meet the iPhone 16 family” promotion.)

Expected announcements for this event include:

• iPhones 17 (regular, Pro, Air)
• Apple Watch Series 11 and Ultra 3
• AirPods Pro 3

Link: macrumors.com/2025/08/26/apple-september-2025-event/

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, on page 17 of her dissent in National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Association:

In a broader sense, however, today’s ruling is of a piece with this Court’s recent tendencies. “[R]ight when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law’s constraints,” the Court opts instead to make vindicating the rule of law and preventing manifestly injurious Government action as difficult as possible. This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules.⁶ We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.

The footnote refers to the OED’s entry for “Calvinball”.

Link: supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/25a103_kh7p.pdf

Do you miss being excited about cool new apps?

We’ve made some before like Clear and Heads Up!, and today, we have a new one for you.

Walk the World turns your steps into a new kind of virtual globe-trotting adventure.

Wouldn’t it be cool to know you’ve walked the length of the Boston Marathon this past week?

You can conquer iconic hikes and trails from around the world presented as gorgeous map milestones to complete with your hard earned steps.

If you enjoy or aspire to go on walks more regularly, and beautiful indie apps with a fun new twist, this is your new healthy addiction.

Try it free today for your iPhone.

Link: apps.apple.com/us/app/walk-the-world-virtual-trails…

MacOS has shipped with a collection of “utility” apps since the prehistoric era of classic Mac OS. A good rule of thumb for what makes an app a “utility” is that it’s a tool for doing something to or about your computer. Ever since Mac OS X 10.0, most of these apps have been...