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

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...

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/

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...

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 ...

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...

Fred Vogelstein (Om’s partner at Crazy Stupid Tech): We met a week later at his outdoor office — a bench in SF’s South Park. He told me that he was going emeritus at True Ventures, the VC firm, and that he was going to spend more of his time writing. It was awesome to s...

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg (paywalled, alas): Apple was quickly alarmed by OpenAI’s recruiting drive, which included poaching senior hardware and design leaders and ravaging several teams across its engineering organizations. The practice continued as recently ...

Drew Pusateri, director of communications at OpenAI, on Twitter/X (or XCancel):

Our statement in response to this suit: We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.

Let’s say I think you stole my wallet. I approach a police officer and tell him my suspicion and describe the evidence that makes me think you have my wallet in your pocket. “Is that his wallet in your pocket?” the cop asks.

“I have no interest in other people’s wallets” would be a rather curious answer.

Link: x.com/drewpusateri/status/2075708238650089981

Alex Heath, on Threads: At WWDC, Apple execs I met with were ice-cold when I asked about their OpenAI partnership. Now we know why: Apple just sued OpenAI for allegedly stealing trade secrets related to consumer hardware (Apple and OAI senior leaders are in Sun Valley t...

The AP:

Fellow passengers pulled back a man who was partially sucked out of a dislodged airplane window on Friday, a few minutes after takeoff on a flight from northern Greece to Germany. The plane subsequently returned to the airport in Greece.

The incident happened on a morning flight from the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki to Memmingen, near Munich, operated by Malta Air, a subsidiary of Ryanair, Europe’s largest budget carrier.

Worse than bad date math.

Link: apnews.com/article/greece-germany-ryanair-passenger…

Frank Landymore, writing for Futurism: Look past its gaudiness, though, and you’ll notice some things that’re a little off in the finer details. The talons are horribly deformed and shaped differently from each other. The entire legs are uneven, too, and the base of them...

Cryan.com: The “View as Buttons” option was a distinctive feature of the Macintosh OS 9 Finder. It allowed users to view the contents of a folder as clickable buttons, each representing a file or application. This view was particularly useful for quickly accessing freque...

Another bit of follow-up on squircle jail on MacOS. The most-asked question in my inbox from readers is this: Is mandating the squircle a concession to the much-rumored upcoming touchscreen MacBooks?

No.

The visible shape and appearance of an app icon is unrelated to its clickable — or, perhaps soon, tappable — area. Rendering a visible squircle doesn’t change the shape of the clickable/tappable target area around an icon. In the bygone days when MacOS permitted delicious app icons — and Apple crafted delicious icons for its own apps — you could click in the middle of, say, the QuickTime Player icon and it just worked. It would have been pretty nutty if it didn’t.

Link: daringfireball.net/2026/07/whats_good_for_the_ios_goose_is…

“Yeah, who’s this?”

“You know who this is.”

“Yes I do, yes I do. I sent a guy to deliver the package ... he didn’t call. Is everything alright?”

“Tell you what. Forget the money.”

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=ClASuxd8jQY

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: The lawsuit names Chang Liu and Tang Tan as two of the defendants. Tang Tan served as VP of product design at Apple, leading iPhone and Apple Watch product design. He departed the company in February 2024 to work with Jony Ive. Chang Liu, meanwhil...

Berber Jin and Anissa Gardizy, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s No. 2 executive, plans to step down from her full-time role after an extended medical leave. She communicated her decision in a note to staff Thursday, saying that her ...

Zac Hall, writing at 9to5Mac about OpenAI’s sprawling product announcements today: To summarize today’s desktop app changes: The existing ChatGPT app is now ChatGPT Classic. Codex is now the new ChatGPT desktop app. It still looks like Codex and includes the Codex icon...

Some historical follow-up regarding just-click-it launching and apps as tiled buttons with a uniform square shape. Back in the System 7 era in the 1990s, Apple sold (sold!) a product called At Ease (via Nathan Lineback’s venerable GUI Galley): I don’t recall ever usin...

In September 2014, in the wake of a series of hacks that stole private photos from the iCloud accounts of multiple celebrities, Tim Cook wrote an open letter to customers that was published at apple.com/privacy. Apple seemingly no longer hosts a copy of the letter. (That ten...

Eli Tan, reporting for The New York Times (gift link): The company’s new A.I. image generator has a surprising twist: It allows people to use images from public Instagram accounts. When Meta unveiled an artificial intelligence image generator called Muse Image on Tuesda...

Tobias Steinke, replying on Mastodon to my “Apple Should Eliminate the App Icon ‘Squircle Jail’” piece: But iOS app icons (and iPadOS) were always in squircle shape. Why is and was this okay for you, but it’s not for macOS? This is a good and fair question. But I not o...

Back in the primordial days of AI, Parry was an ELIZA-style chatbot created by psychiatrist Kenneth Colby to simulate the words of a paranoid schizophrenic. Someone had the genius idea to connect it to Eliza (a.k.a. “Doctor”). Vint Cerf published the transcript as an RFC in 1973, and I laughed my ass off reading it. A taste:

Do you know anything about bookies?

What makes you think I know anything about bookies?

A bookie didn’t pay me off once.

What does that suggest to you?

I beat up the bookie who did not pay off, and I thought he might use his friends in the underworld to get even with me.

What else would you like to discuss?

What do you know about racketeers?

Thanks to Bob Peterson for the link.

Vint Cerf, by the way, retired from Google last week at the spry age of 83.

Link: rfc-editor.org/info/rfc439/

Tyler Hall:

We all know about macOS Tahoe’s terrible app icons and how 3rd party developers have been confined to squircle jail.

If you’re lucky enough to distribute an app outside the Mac App Store, you can break free of squircle jail using NSDockTilePlugIn. It’s not strictly the intended use-case of that API. And it’s not allowed in the Mac App Store, either. But it can solve the problem.

So today’s release of Iris adds three additional app icons to choose from in the app’s Special Preferences Settings pane. And since they use the NSDockTilePlugIn API, the custom icon remains even when you quit the app.

Iris is far from the only app using this or other techniques to sort-of escape squircle jail. All the apps I’m aware of doing something like this are Mac-assed apps. It’s a good litmus test.

Link: tyler.io/2026/07/05/escape-from-squircle-jail/

After reading my posts earlier today about Eliza, the first “hit” chatbot from the 1960s, DF reader AP sent me a link to the Kickstarter page for Searching for SmarterChild, a project from documentary filmmakers Lindsey Sitz and Zan Gillies to make a movie about SmarterChild, an AOL Instant Messenger chatbot that once had 30 million “friends” (a.k.a. users). I don’t recall ever hearing of SmarterChild before, let alone using it. (I think I was on a very different level of the Internet back then.)

But this looks like a great indie nerd documentary. The Kickstarter campaign has just one week left and they’re a wee bit short of their primary goal, and quite a bit short of their stretch goals. I just chipped in.

Link: kickstarter.com/projects/smarterchild/searching-for…

I vaguely recall first trying some version of Eliza back in the 1990s. I never found it all that impressive nor understood its stature in the AI literature. It’s better than a bunch of if/then statements but not by much. There’s some natural language grammar parsing that is ...

The Eliza Archaeology Project: ELIZA is the original and highly influential chatbot that launched the genre of human-computer interactions using text-based agents. It was created at MIT in the 1960s as part of Project MAC by it’s [sic] designer and programmer, Joseph Wei...

Dr. Drang, in a post replete with examples of icons of popular apps from the original Macintosh, in their one-bit glory: You can see that Apple liked the idea of app icons being a tilted rectangle with some image inside the rectangle to indicate what the app did. The han...

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, 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 →

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

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch: With the latest iOS 27 developer beta, Apple is giving testers an early look at one of the upcoming improvements to its AI-powered Siri: the ability to adjust how quickly and expressively the AI assistant speaks. In iOS 27 beta 3, out...