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Elon Musk, Friday:
Join @xAI and help build a purely AI software company called Macrohard. It’s a tongue-in-cheek name, but the project is very real!
In principle, given that software companies like Microsoft do not themselves manufacture any physical hardware, it should be possible to simulate them entirely with AI.
If it’s “a purely AI software company” why do they need to hire anyone?
johnmccoy.org/2025/08/25/less-fun-than-a-barrel-of-crackers/
Right on schedule: second Tuesday of September, so long as that second Tuesday doesn’t fall on September 11. (Last year’s event went on Monday 9 September, probably because the Harris-Trump debate was already scheduled for Tuesday the 10th.) There’s an interactive animated version of the “heat map” event logo on Apple’s homepage. (A little bit odd that the second item below the event announcement, after a back-to-school promotion, is a “Meet the iPhone 16 family” promotion.)
Expected announcements for this event include:
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, on page 17 of her dissent in National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Association:
In a broader sense, however, today’s ruling is of a piece with this Court’s recent tendencies. “[R]ight when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law’s constraints,” the Court opts instead to make vindicating the rule of law and preventing manifestly injurious Government action as difficult as possible. This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules.6 We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.
The footnote refers to the OED’s entry for “Calvinball”.
Daring Fireball
• Daring Fireball Department of Commerce
apps.apple.com/us/app/walk-the-world-virtual-trails/id6743502929
Do you miss being excited about cool new apps?
We’ve made some before like Clear and Heads Up!, and today, we have a new one for you.
Walk the World turns your steps into a new kind of virtual globe-trotting adventure.
Wouldn’t it be cool to know you’ve walked the length of the Boston Marathon this past week?
You can conquer iconic hikes and trails from around the world presented as gorgeous map milestones to complete with your hard earned steps.
If you enjoy or aspire to go on walks more regularly, and beautiful indie apps with a fun new twist, this is your new healthy addiction.
My thanks to Fly.io for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Phoenix.new, their new AI app-builder. Just describe your idea, and Phoenix.new quickly generates a working real-time Phoenix app: clustering, pubsub, and presence included. Ideal for multiplayer games, collaborative tools, or quick weekend experiments. Built by Fly.io, deploy wherever you want. Just try it, and see how far you can go.
Nice update to Menial’s excellent SQLite developer tool for the Mac. Worth the wait.
9to5mac.com/2025/08/21/apple-tv-subscription-price-increase/
New video game, just out:
Herdling is a brand new adventure from Okomotive, creators of the atmospheric and acclaimed FAR games, and Panic, publishers of Firewatch.
Looks absolutely beautiful. Painterly. Darth says it’s good.
Available now for Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Epic Games Store. Not (yet?) in the Mac App Store — not because of any hassles regarding the App Store, but because there’s not (yet?) a Mac port of the game, period.
Link: herdling.game/
daringfireball.net/2025/08/msnbc_ms_now_rebranding#fn1-2025-08-20
Added this footnote just now to yesterday’s piece on MSNBC’s rebranding to “MS NOW”:
Historical pedantry: from 1975–1979, Microsoft spelled its name “Micro-Soft”, with, yes, an uppercase S. But that’s not camel-case, and that hyphenated spelling is as much a footnote to Microsoft’s brand history as the woodcut Isaac-Newton-under-a-tree logo is to Apple. Microsoft’s logo from that era was very disco-’70s and kind of cool — but while “Micro” and “Soft” were broken across two lines, there’s no hyphen in the logotype.
Link: daringfireball.net/2025/08/msnbc_ms_now_rebranding#fn1-2025…
businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-code-3-to-6-months-2025-3
Kwan Wei Kevin Tan, reporting for Business Insider five months ago:
Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI startup Anthropic, said on Monday that AI, and not software developers, could be writing all of the code in our software in a year.
“I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code,” Amodei said at a Council of Foreign Relations event on Monday.
Complete bullshit, but, I guess he still has one month to go. (Via Dave Winer on Threads.)
Link: businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-code-3-to-6…
Five-minute short film from Apple, about people with severe hand tremors from Parkinson’s disease using the iPhone’s Action mode to shoot steady video — including filmmaker Brett Harvey, who was diagnosed at the way-too-young age of 37. There’s also a brief short with Harvey explaining the settings to shoot in Action mode by default, or to use voice controls to avoid needing to tap buttons.
Apple at its very best. If this doesn’t hit you, you’re not hooked up right.
Daring Fireball
• Daring Fireball Department of Commerce
Resurrect your side projects with Phoenix.new, the new AI app-builder from Fly.io. Just describe your idea, and Phoenix.new quickly generates a working real-time Phoenix app: clustering, pubsub, and presence included. Ideal for multiplayer games, collaborative tools, or quick weekend experiments. Built by Fly.io, deploy wherever you want.
theverge.com/news/695743/threads-dms-direct-messaging-launch
Dieter Bohn left The Verge to work for Google on their “Platforms & Ecosystems” team. He hasn’t had much of a visible presence since, or least not one that I’ve noticed. But this 90-second video he made showing off the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 is nice. It’s a better pitch for the device than anything I’ve seen from Samsung itself, and it’s a good pitch for Google Gemini too.
