Taegan Goddard, two weeks ago at Political Wire:
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has become an almost
too-perfect metaphor for Donald Trump’s presidency.
He promised a quick, cheap fix.
Instead, taxpayers got a no-bid project that ballooned to more
than $14 millio...
Anthropic:
On Friday, June 12, the US government applied export controls to
our newest models, Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5. This
required us to restrict access to foreign nationals, whether
inside or outside the United States. Because the order took effect
immedia...
Gergely Orosz, writing at The Pragmatic Engineer (which, sadly, is a Substack blog):
The biggest problem: people stop caring about real work and focus
on performative work. Let’s check the four ingredients that
Meta’s leadership has decided to introduce to their workplac...
MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass:
Yes, that’s right, for a third time in as many years, I’ve been
banned by Meta. What for? Do you really have to ask? Nobody
knows. My suspicion is that it’s directly tied to the
claiming of usernames on WhatsApp, which Meta opened up
yest...
Jason Koebler, a month ago at 404 Media:
Over the last several days, Telegram groups for security
researchers and hacking groups have been sharing videos and
screenshots of the steps taken to steal an account, which appeared
to be shockingly easy. One video shows a hacke...
Marko Zivkovic, reporting for AppleInsider regarding some of the data revealed by Tata Electronics’s massive data breach:
For the U.S. variant of the iPhone 18 Pro, which will feature
mmWave compatibility, Apple seemingly plans to use Qualcomm modem
hardware. Multiple Qu...
Following up on my earlier post on Valve’s righteous objection to selling game console hardware at a loss, I should have noted that PlayStation Plus starts at $11/month (and goes up to $20/month) and Xbox Game Pass starts at $10/month (and goes up to $23/month). One draw of ...
Valve, in a statement to The Verge, explaining why it doesn’t sell its handheld Steam Deck or new Steam Machine gaming devices at a loss (gift link):
While this might seem like an easy solution, it doesn’t align with
our beliefs about how healthy ecosystems are built. If...
The great John Moltz returns to the show. Topics include Apple’s hardware price hikes in response to the global RAM/SSD shortage, and some spitballing on what we like about the UI changes in the MacOS 27 Golden Gate beta.
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Joseph Cox, reporting for 404 Media:
404 Media is not revealing the exact details of the vulnerability
because it can still be exploited as of Monday, when 404 Media
verified the issue with one of our own hidden email addresses.
“Apple Hide My Email is leaking email add...
Gnome is a deceptively clever animated GIF app by Lex Friedman:
The truest thing about animated GIFs is that they are a critical
pillar of modern human communication, and yet getting one into a
Slack message or an iMessage thread or an email reply usually
requires openin...
Speaking of the Supreme Court’s end-of-term rulings, they today agreed to grant certiorari to Apple’s petition from last month, ordering:
APPLE INC. V. EPIC GAMES, INC.
The petition for a writ of certiorari is granted limited to
Question 1 presented by the petition.
Q...
Josh Marshall, writing at TPM (gift link):
As you’ve seen, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of
birthright citizenship by a 6 — or perhaps 5½ — vote margin.
See Kate Riga’s report on the majority decision and Josh
Kovensky’s piece on the dissenters’ goal of ...
Amy Howe, writing at the ever-excellent SCOTUSblog:
The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that when law enforcement
officials used a “geofence warrant” — a warrant that instructed
Google to provide location data for cellphone users who were near
a particular place during a s...
‘Steering’ — the ability for developers to engage with customers
about off‑platform options — is currently banned by Apple and
restricted by Google in the UK. Lifting these constraints would
allow developers to bypass mandatory fees set by platforms.
The CMA’s consultation includes principles to ensure that the fees
Apple and Google charge for steering are fair and reasonable.
Using an evidence-based framework, the CMA would expect steering
fees to be lower than current app store charges, with savings
passed onto UK customers or invested back into the developers’
businesses to support future innovation.
Sam Tabahriti, reporting for Reuters:
Britain’s competition regulator on Tuesday proposed allowing app
developers to steer users to alternative payment options outside
Apple and Alphabet’s Google app stores to cut fees and boost
competition. The Competition and Markets ...
Munsif Vengattil, Aditya Kalra, and Stephen Nellis, reporting for Reuters:
Sensitive lists of components and suppliers, and photos of
Apple’s upcoming iPhone 18 Pro models are part of files
posted on the dark web by the ransomware group that stole data
from the U.S. fir...
Day One recognizes that many people struggle with journaling not because they can’t write, but because they don’t know how to begin or what a “good” journal entry about their day looks like. That’s why we built Daily Chat, a guided reflection experience that helps you talk through your day, organize your thoughts, and shape them into a journal entry.
Early testers commented: “Day One’s new Daily Chat is a true game changer for my daily journaling. The AI-powered chat makes capturing thoughts effortless and inspires creativity like never before. Writing my diary has never been this intuitive and fun!”
Try it for yourself, it will change the way you think about journaling.
My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week to promote Auth.md, their new open protocol for AI agent registration. (Who’d have thunk that I’d be getting paid to promote new uses for Markdown 22 years after releasing it?)
Sign-up forms were built for humans in browsers, so how do AI agents programmatically register with services? That’s the question Auth.md aims to answer. It’s a single Markdown file you host at your domain that tells agents how to register your users, which flows you support, what scopes you expose, and how credentials get issued. It’s like robots.txt but for agent registration.
Cloudflare, Firecrawl, and Resend have already adopted it.
Daniel Agee, an early member of the team at Glass, writing on the Glass blog:
It’s not lost on us that Om’s photography, often taken in frozen
lands in or around the arctic circle, was the polar opposite of
his personality. While he focused on subtle shapes and hidden
la...
Matt Mullenweg:
Fundamentally, Om was a lover of humanity. He became a fast
“regular” everywhere he went. He wouldn’t just buy coffee, he
would also learn the name and story of every barista, the dogs and
people in South Park. His deep curiosity and respect weren’t just
...
Clay Risen, writing for The New York Times (gift link):
Mr. Malik started his blog just as the dot-com bubble burst,
leading to a recession that also took down many of the journalism
start-ups that wrote about tech, like The Industry Standard and
Inside.com. He was among...
Sean Hollister, writing for The Verge (gift link):
If you’ve visited a cannabis club in Spain, [Sammy] Azdoufal says, chances
are your photo ID was among them — and possibly your phone
number, address, your favorite strains of cannabis, and how much
you consumed each mon...
From the bottom of Rolfe Winkler’s report for The Wall Street Journal Thursday, on Apple’s unprecedented price increases (gift link):
Apple’s price hikes arrived the day after Micron Technology, the
big American maker of memory and storage, reported blowout
quarterly ear...
Bernie Sanders, posting on Twitter/X Thursday (don’t complain to me that he doesn’t use his Bluesky account):
Corporate greed is Tim Cook, the billionaire Apple CEO, claiming
that hiking prices on Apple products by over $200 is “unavoidable”
after it made $112 billion in...
From a September 2022 letter to then-Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, co-signed by Marco Rubio (then a Republican senator from Florida, currently secretary of state) and Mark Warner (Democratic senator from Virginia):
We write to convey our extreme concern...
Microsoft’s Xbox blog:
Effective August 1, 2026, we will be updating prices worldwide.
The price of XBOX consoles will increase by US$100 for 512 GB
models and US$150 for 1 TB models. We will also be sunsetting our
2 TB model.
Last October, we increased XBOX console pri...
Demetri Sevastopulo and Michael Acton, reporting for the Financial Times (paywalled, alas):
Apple is lobbying the Trump administration for clearance to buy
memory chips from CXMT, a Chinese company that the Pentagon has
put on a blacklist because of alleged connections t...
Grace Kay and Theo Wayt, writing for the paywalled-with-no-gift-links The Information:
xAI launched an upgraded video model last week, highlighting how
it’s pushing ahead with its own visual efforts even as it brings
in outside help to compete with rivals in areas like c...
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