Linus Torvalds:

I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I’m willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer.

Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.

Or just walk away.

AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one.

It may not have been that “clearly” even just a year ago, but it’s no longer in question today.

There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but “is it useful” is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn’t actually used it.

Speaking of BBEdit, version 16 dropped just before WWDC, and adds a slew of nifty improvements, headlined by vastly expanded support for Shortcuts. You can also search for text in images, use the W3C HTML syntax checker, and of all things, use vi keyboard emulation. There’s a lot more, of course — and as always the changes, improvements, and additions are copiously documented in the release notes.

New licenses are $60, upgrades from v15 cost $30, and upgrades from older versions are $40. In the Mac App Store it’s a $5/month or $50/year subscription.

See also: Jason Snell at Six Colors and Adam Engst at TidBITs.

Sean Malseed — “Action Retro” on YouTube — created a Markdown editor for the original Macintosh. Source code on GitHub; intro video on YouTube. It’s written in C, not Pascal, and uses the modern Retro68 GCC-derived compiler. I absolutely love that this exists. I don’t like ...

Joanna Stern explains why this emoji is correct today: 📅. (This one too: 📆)

Sean Hollister, reporting for The Verge (gift link): Here’s Google’s full statement on withdrawing its proposed modifications to Judge Donato’s permanent injunction, via Google spokesperson Dan Jackson: We’ve agreed with Epic to withdraw our motion to modify the US C...

The European Commission: The European Commission adopted a delegated act today (14 July) introducing new rules that exempt additional products from EU requirements on the removability and replaceability of portable batteries. Under the EU’s Batteries Regulation, portabl...

Quiche Industries (Greg de J.): Starting today, Quiche Browser disables AI overviews in search results by default, out of the box. Compare how much space and time they waste. I love the web too much to let that nonsense bury links to real websites made by humans. This ...

Tuesday’s episode of Dithering was a good one, especially for the DF audience, so we’ve moved it outside the paywall and made it free-to-listen on the web. (We don’t (yet?) have an RSS feed that you can put in your podcast player for these occasional free episodes, alas.) I have a slightly different take on Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI than I’ve seen expressed elsewhere.

If you don’t subscribe to Dithering, you probably should. Two episodes per week, 15 minutes per episode. Not a minute less, not a minute more. $7/month or $70/year — or, get it included with the Stratechery Plus bundle.

OpenAI, in a statement to Bloomberg this week:

“While we take these allegations seriously, we’re not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit. We believe in fair competition and allowing people the freedom to work wherever they choose, and we’re focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.”

“We’re not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit” is very different from, say, “This complaint has no merit.” Again, a curious response.

David Ingram, reporting for NBC News (which recently added a paywall without gift links, alas): Apple alleged in a lawsuit last week that OpenAI “never responded” to its concerns this year about what Apple believed was trade secret theft. But emails reviewed by NBC News ...

Louie Mantia, with a thoughtful essay on app icon design and the squircle-jail controversy on the Parakeet blog: It’s worth noting that some of the platform’s best icons look worse, while some of the platform’s worst icons look better. Ultimately this is what I object ...

Remember back in March when then-co-CEO Fidji Simo announced to the company that “We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests”? And then weeks later they spent “low hundreds of millions” to purchase the TBPN YouTube show? In their continuing effort to focus on core product, they’re now selling a $230 hardware keypad ostensibly for working with Codex, which is no longer an app but just a tab in their craptacular super app.

Quinn Nelson:

No way, that’s crazy. I’ve just been using the keyboard and trackpad that came on my laptop for free like a stupid idiot.

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg: OpenAI believes the product’s defining feature will be its personality and ability to connect on a humanlike level with users. The speaker incorporates mechanical elements that can move on their own, creating a sense that it is alive...

Eric Seufert, Mobile Dev Memo:

The new language could simply accommodate the availability of Apple-owned services on the web and through third-party devices and operating systems; the Apple TV app, for instance, is available on smart TVs, streaming devices, and game consoles. But the addition of “other properties” is conspicuously broad and appears to give Apple the contractual latitude to distribute ads beyond its own services entirely. This would allow for a material expansion of the company’s advertising surface area.

Further, if Apple does indeed plan to expand Apple Ads to third-party surfaces, it would explain why the company did not reveal an update to its AdAttributionKit (AAK, formerly SKAdNetwork, or SKAN) attribution framework at this year’s WWDC.

That would be one way to go.

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch: In a newly published Apple Advertising Services policy, effective as of July 14, 2026, the iPhone maker shares its rules for advertising on Apple Maps. Notably, it prohibits the broad category of home services businesses, like plumbing, electrica...

Ben Jiang, reporting from Beijing for the South China Morning Post: Chinese regulators have granted Apple a long-awaited licence to roll out its artificial intelligence service on iPhones in the country, with Alibaba Group Holding and Baidu serving as technical partners....

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Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica back in August 2025: After a public outburst over Grok’s App Store rankings, on Monday, Elon Musk followed through on his threat to sue Apple and OpenAI. At first, Musk appeared fixated on ChatGPT consistently topping Apple’s ...

My thanks, once again, to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week. 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, and weeks of infrastructure before you write a line of product code.

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Paulo Andrade:

My last post on using SwiftUI to build a Mac-assed app got a bit more traction than I expected. It was mentioned on Mastodon several times, included in iOS Dev Weekly, inspired May’s edition of the Swift Blog Carnival, and was eventually mentioned by John Gruber, arguably the person most to blame for popularizing the term “Mac-assed”, on Daring Fireball.

All this attention also resulted in an engineer from Apple reaching out with some notes. We exchanged a few emails, I filed a few radars, and now that WWDC 27 is behind us, this post serves as a small update to the issues I wrote about before.

There’s real progress here, but I think my main point still stands: SwiftUI is now seven years old and it does not make it easy to create great Mac apps.

These examples are from Windows, but the same degradation is true for the standard look for MacOS alerts too. There was a time when system UI chrome was improving in clarity, everywhere. Today we live in an age when it’s degrading in clarity, everywhere. It’s rather inexplicable.

Nikita “Tonsky” Prokopov: The rule of thumb is: If I take a screenshot of your app at any moment, you should be able to explain what I see. Why care about every frame? It builds trust. Users can’t see the code, so UI is the only way for them to judge the quality of the...

Guilherme Rambo: Apple ships the fm command-line tool in macOS 27, which can be used to run inference with the local system model or Private Cloud Compute from Terminal or scripts. You know what else can run command-line tools? Mac apps! 😃 I decided to spend some of my ...

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.

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.

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...

Remembrances, tributes, and stories.