Jeff Johnson: These purported reviews, all but one of which is 5 stars, are all in English. Yet none of them is in the US App Store. I also looked at other English-speaking countries such as Australia and Canada but found no reviews. Also suspicious is that the name of e...

Watch this. No words needed, everyone can feel it. Genes are a hell of a thing.

Link: x.com/sabrinahalper/status/2086964813788258588?s=46

Basic Apple Guy:

Apple just dropped the hardest icon glow-up for the new Chess icon in macOS 27 Beta 5.

This is not just a tweak or small improvement. This is the difference between total shit and a really nice icon.

Link: mastodon.social/@BasicAppleGuy/117073366339407186

The Economist (‘twas a gift link, but alas, I guess gift views have been used up — here’s an archive link in case the gift link is vexing you): You can discover AI’s hallmarks by comparing the writing of man and machine. To do this you need a baseline that is distinctive...

Alex Micek:

In the future, I will feel angry if my car strands me on the side of the road.
I will feel angry if the motor brushes fail expectedly.
I will feel angry if it leaks water.

By contrast, I don’t feel anger when the car tricks me into seeing an advertisement. Instead, I feel a deep, smothering, let-down at the promise of futurism. Bottomless despair is probably inappropriate; a symptom of the misanthropy I should grow out of. But. In the meantime, I feel helpless, discouraged, deeply sad.

Such a good take. I should not let 19 years pass again between linking to his writing.

Link: tumbledry.org/2026/08/07/idrive_ads

This didn’t occur to me but should have — BMW paid Sony to place BMWs throughout the new Spider-Man: Brand New Day movie. They’re not just in the movie but part of the story. So it’s probably the case not that Sony paid BMW to put Spider-Man animations in the dashboards of every late model BMW on the road, but that BMW offered to do it as part of the promotional deal they paid Sony. So BMW probably paid Sony for something that ultimately infuriated a bunch of BMW’s own customers. Geniuses.

Link: press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T0459622EN/bmw…

Two weeks ago Zuckerberg published a 1,000-word essay, “The AI Future Is for Everyone”. This week he published an expanded 6,500-word version of the essay on Meta’s website. Somehow it almost says nothing more than the original. This tidbit, however, struck me as notable: ...

Chance Miller returns to the show. Topics include iOS 27’s progress over summer, live baseball in Vision Pro, the RAM crisis, Apple’s trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI and io, and the EU/DMA situation.

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Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/08/10/ep-454

Andrew Sharp, writing at Sharp Text last month after Netflix’s earnings, asking “Is Netflix Washed Now?”: I offer this observation as a swirl of heightened anxiety surrounds the company, so let me clarify one thing up front: I’m not predicting imminent doom. Netflix cont...

Anthropic support page: Anthropic has signed the EU AI Act’s Article 50(2) Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content, as a provider of both generative AI models and generative AI systems. This article describes how we’re planning to put those commitments i...

Leverage autonomous AI agents to automate compliance, manage internal and third-party risk, and continuously prove your security posture.

Link: drata.com/daring

Zac Hall at 9to5Mac has a good rundown of new features and changes in beta 5. Some app icons got tweaks (the Siri app in particular looks much cooler now), and a bunch of the existing American and British Siri speaking voices now have the Pace and Expressivity adjustment sli...

Apple Newsroom: For the first time, baseball fans can take in all the action of “Friday Night Baseball” live in Apple Immersive on Apple Vision Pro, leveraging 3D video recorded in 8K with a 180-degree field of view. On August 28, viewers with Vision Pro will experience ...

Michael Tsai:

I’m really unhappy about this, both for my role in spreading a false story and because I think it will hurt the cause of reforming App Review. I know there are many crazy rejections and have experienced some first-hand. This story was believable because of that well-known history and because Godier didn’t seem like a nobody trying to get attention — he was the developer of another highly regarded app. But now people are going to point to true developer stories and accuse them of being fakes, too.

Same.

Link: mjtsai.com/blog/2026/08/07/dark-hours-rejected-from-the-app…

Ernie Smith at Tedium:

I’m seeing email after email suggesting these users built a thing they’re truly passionate about. But if we can’t trust that this passion is real, legit, and from the heart, we’re in trouble.

Take a step back. Is this thing you built a reflection of you?

I think it’s fun and exciting that I’m getting a lot more emails about a lot more new apps. But a fair chunk of those emails are themselves clearly written by an AI chatbot. It’s so obvious. Those go straight in the trash.

Link: tedium.co/2026/08/09/vibe-coding-insincerity/

Kalley Huang, reporting from San Francisco, and Ana Swanson, from Washington, for The New York Times (gift link): Apple, which has cited the memory chip shortage for recent price increases, is working with other consumer electronics companies to push for permission to bu...

My thanks to WorkOS for, once again, sponsoring DF last week. What’s the best way to connect AI agents to your API? REST is great for human developers; MCP serves the agents. Many teams treat REST and MCP as competing standards, and through choice or necessity, pick one. But they ought not be considered rivals. They’re separate layers. Most MCP servers just call REST internally to do the real work. The best ones don’t convert every endpoint into a tool, they focus on what the agents are actually trying to accomplish.

That layered approach also means shipping OAuth 2.1 with scoped tokens. WorkOS AuthKit already speaks that spec, so you skip building an auth provider on top. Check out WorkOS’s breakdown on MCP vs. REST.

Link: workos.com/blog/mcp-vs-rest?utm_source=daringfireball&utm…

Yesterday I published an article titled “App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours”. I have retracted it. Its premise was so fundamentally wrong that there’s no point merely correcting or editing it. Even the title, as I explain below, was inaccurate. Although the original...

Tariq Panja, reporting for The New York Times: The five men should have been in a celebratory mood. FIFA had just pulled off a World Cup that broke records on a number of fronts. Its spectacular culmination, the final, was a day away from kickoff. But their mood was any...

Joseph Cox, writing for 404 Media (paywalled, sans gift links, alas): Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies’ AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides, accord...

Simon Willison, with Cynthia Dunlop for her tech blogger interview series (from back in January, but he just got around to linking to it so I just got around to seeing it): Any lessons learned that you want to share with the community? My number one tip for blogging is ...

Jeremy Hsu, Ars Technica:

Google briefly allowed anyone to create AI-modified versions of satellite imagery available in Google Earth — before quickly reversing its decision as people shared examples of AI-generated pictures that illustrated the potential for misinformation and disinformation.

Momentum!

Link: arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/google-earth-releases-swiftly…

A bunch of mine are stored here.

Link: newyorker.com/cartoon/a62045

Simon Willison:

So that’s Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta. Google Gemini really needs to catch up on accidentally cyberattacking other companies.

I’m surprised Willison hasn’t heard about how much momentum Gemini has.

Link: simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/6/an-ai-model-from-meta/

Meta AI: We’re excited to release Muse Code (beta), a terminal coding agent powered by Muse Spark 1.2, our newest model. This marks our next step toward the frontier, with larger and much more capable models on the way. [...] Muse Code takes on complex software engineer...

Joe Fabisevich, on Mastodon:

I submitted Plinky 6.0.4 for review last week. The macOS app was approved in 4 hours, the iOS app is still waiting for review. Sure do love to distribute software this way.

He’s not an outlier; I see comments like this from App Store developers everywhere I look.

(Plinky, by the way, is an intriguing link-bookmarking app that syncs across iOS and MacOS. It’s not for me, but the nature of my work is such that I have very unusual bookmarking needs. Plinky offers a bunch of convenient ways to stash new bookmarks with low friction. It’s a labor of love — it’s totally obvious that Fabisevich himself is the number one user of Plinky, and that’s almost always true of the very best apps.)

Link: macaw.social/@mergesort/117055390966724799

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, the company’s artificial intelligence research lab: We have arrived at a pivotal moment in human history. I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand. It’s critical that we coll...

Steven Levy, writing for Wired: Today it’s official: After almost 27 years, Dean is leaving Google, along with Ghemawat and two other top-tier AI scientists, to found a company called Discovery Loop. Even though Google will take a stake in the new company, it’s a devast...

[Update, Saturday 8 August: This story is retracted. Details forthcoming.] Terry Godier, “Browsers Have Standards, the App Store Has Judgment”: A while ago I tried to submit an iOS app for Dark Hours, my astronomy website for normal people. It was rejected on the ground...

Meghan Bobrowsky and Erin Mulvaney, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): A New Mexico judge ordered Meta Platforms to pay more than $900 million and limit the time young people in the state can spend on its apps, significantly increasing the cost of the lan...