Please enjoy this article on its own webpage. Trust me.

Paul Krugman, describing a few striking data visualizations: YouGov’s surveys subdivide Republicans into those who do and those who don’t support MAGA — and the economic views of these two groups are very different. A remarkable 65 percent of non-MAGA Republicans say tha...

I’m not sure if this link works outside the US, but Apple TV’s MLS Wrap-Up show has highlight from the LA Galaxy vs. Houston Dynamo FC match they shot exclusively using iPhone 17 Pros. Follow the link, choose “English”, and then choose “Full Replay” — then skip to 40m:15s or so.

They show one of the professional camera rigs they used, with a long lens attached. I’d say the match footage looks good, but also definitely does not look as good as usual. Impressive for a phone camera, but I’d be a tad annoyed if I were a Galaxy or Dynamo fan and one of my team’s matches was used for a stunt like this.

Link: tv.apple.com/us/sporting-event/mls-wrap-up/umc.cse…

Dan Goodin, reporting for Ars Technica: The technique, laid out in a research paper, exploits a side channel, a form of leak resulting from physical manifestations such as electromagnetic emanations, data caches, or the time required to complete a task. By measuring the ...

A cloud for the agent era. Use exe.dev to get a pool of VMs with SSH, root, and web auth by default. Secrets injected at the network edge stay out of the LLM’s hands. Persistent servers, internal tools, vibe coding, disposable devboxes, whatever. It’s just a computer.

Link: exe.dev/?df

Here’s a fun one. Back in 2014 I linked to a post by Jay Haynes in which he projected that with a very reasonable level of annual growth, Apple ought to reach a $3 trillion market cap within 10 years. At the time of his writing, Apple’s market cap was “just” $450 billion, an...

Lizzie Dearden and Amelia Nierenberg, reporting for The New York Times (gift link): The crime Alex Pikula reported to the police was one they had heard before: An e-bike rider had zoomed past as Mr. Pikula left a theater in London’s West End, ripping his phone from his h...

Catie McLeod, The Guardian: Trump Mobile said in a statement that it was investigating the issue — “with the assistance of independent cybersecurity professionals” — in which the full names, addresses and phone numbers of people who filled out preorder forms appeared to ...

Merriam-Webster: The 1820s and 1830s shared another linguistic fad with today: an appreciation for deliberate misspellings. (Kewl, rite?) This trend, which had humorists adopting now-cringey bumpkin personas with ignorance manifested in uneducated spellings, turned no go...

My thanks to WorkOS for once again sponsoring DF last week. The context that actually matters isn’t in your database. It’s in the tools your users live in every day. Multi-stage agents stall the moment they hit a step they can’t see. And every missing integration is a different OAuth flow, a different token lifecycle, weeks of plumbing before the agent reads a single record.

WorkOS Pipes connects your agent to the tools your users live in. 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. Your agent pulls context at every step, for as long as the task runs.

Give your agent context.

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

Terrific, poignant profile of Warriors head coach Steve Kerr by Wright Thompson for ESPN: Kerr doesn’t want the Warriors to end up like the New England Patriots, marred by grudges and grievances. He watched Michael Jordan retire, then unretire, then retire, then unretire...

The 13 circuits of the U.S. federal courts of appeals operate with a fair amount of independence, including their typographic choices. I was reminded of this today while reading the aforelinked decision from the Ninth Circuit in Epic v. Apple, because the Ninth Circuit sets ...

Following up on yesterday’s item re: Apple’s petition to the Supreme Court, here’s the Ninth Circuit ruling. It starts with a “Summary” that is specifically intended for the convenience of the reader. Page 50 is where it covers Apple’s argument regarding Trump v. CASA as precedent that an injunction on commissions should apply only to Epic Games, not to all developers in the U.S. App Store.

Link: cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2025/12/11/25-2935…

James Poniewozik, writing for The New York Times (gift link): He didn’t land the pope, but he got a Beatle. He didn’t have a new project to announce, but he left us with a song (in fact two). He didn’t choose to end his show, but he ended it his own weird, wonderful way....

Kieran Healy kindly accepted my implicit homework assignment yesterday, and wrote a piece on Apple Sports’s bizarre “zero sum” team stats visualization: It also doesn’t do away with the core problem. That problem is principally one of information design rather than data ...

Marcus Mendes, reporting for 9to5Mac: Apple today filed a request with the Supreme Court in an attempt to reverse key lower court rulings over the App Store injunction in its long-running legal battle with Epic Games. [...] In its petition, Apple is asking the Supreme Co...

Speaking of Apple and sports, here’s another one from Apple Newsroom: This Saturday, May 23, Apple TV will present a special live Major League Soccer match captured exclusively on iPhone 17 Pro — marking the first time iPhone will be used to capture the entirety of a maj...

Apple Newsroom: Apple Sports — the free app for iPhone that gives fans access to real-time scores, stats, and more — is now available to download on the App Store in more than 170 countries and regions around the world, including more than 90 newly added markets. Designe...

Tight edit but covers the whole thing. (XCancel link; Threads link.)

Link: x.com/ArtemR/status/2056961743142957143

Derek Sivers:

When someone speaks of a place, you have to ask, “When?” Geography is four-dimensional. You can’t know a place — only a place as it was at a time. Where is bound to when. Unless you are in a place right now, you can only speak of it in past-tense.

Link: sive.rs/4d

Andrew Liszewski and Stevie Bonifield, writing for The Verge (gift link):

Google’s I/O 2026 keynote today was once again full of AI-related announcements including a new family of Gemini 3.5 AI models, new features for Search and Gmail, and updates about its Project Aura smart glasses.

If you weren’t able to tune into the event’s livestream today or follow along with our live blog, you can catch up on everything you missed in our roundup below.

This roundup was the only way I could really make sense out of Google I/O.

Link: theverge.com/tech/933415/google-io-2026-biggest…

Katherine Blunt and Rolfe Winkler, reporting for The Wall Street Journal from Google I/O (gift link): Google is supercharging its Gemini artificial-intelligence model to become more competitive in the era of agentic AI. The company has started rolling out what it calls ...

Tripp Mickle, Kate Conger, and Brian X. Chen, opening The New York Times’s report on yesterday’s Google I/O keynote (gift link): For 25 years, Google’s iconic search box was a long, slender bar where people typed in keywords like “World Cup.” But over the past three yea...

22-year-old pop singer-songwriter Brye, on TikTok: “Lemons”, my biggest song ever, that went like super viral during quarantine back in 2020, was actually produced, if you can believe it, in GarageBand on my school iPad. My high school gave us all iPads and I produced “...

Andrej Karpathy, on Twitter/X (XCancel link):

Personal update: I’ve joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

Karpathy is, to say the least, a star in the AI research field. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015, was director of AI at Tesla (reporting directly to Elon Musk) from 2017–2022, went back to OpenAI in 2023, and then left again in 2024 to start an AI education company named Eureka Labs. He coined the term “vibe coding” in February last year.

Link: x.com/karpathy/status/2056753169888334312

The context that actually matters isn’t in your database. It’s in the tools your users live in every day. Multi-stage agents stall the moment they hit a step they can’t see. And every missing integration is a different OAuth flow, a different token lifecycle, weeks of plumbing before the agent reads a single record.

WorkOS Pipes connects your agent to the tools your users live in. 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. Your agent pulls context at every step, for as long as the task runs.

Give your agent context →

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

Cade Metz and Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times (gift link): A nine-person jury found that Elon Musk did not bring his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman until after the expiration of the three-year statute of limitations. Mr. Musk filed his suit against t...

Here’s a great take from last month re: the Cook/Ternus transition, from Om Malik: When he took over from Steve Jobs in August 2011, Apple’s market capitalization was around $350 billion. As of this morning, it sits near $4 trillion. That is more than a 1,000 percent inc...

While I’m linking to pieces on Apple’s CEO transition, here’s an annoying tidbit from Tripp Mickle and Karl Russell’s piece for The New York Times, under the headline “Tim Cook Was Very, Very Good at Making Money” (gift link): Even though it has largely missed out on the...

Simultaneously audacious and humble, a combination that epitomizes Ted Turner’s entire life. (Shades, too, of Walt Disney’s apartment above the fire department at Disneyland.)

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=OUIVs58oyPI