Katherine Blunt, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a paywall-puncturing gift link; also on News+):
Artificial-intelligence startup Perplexity on Tuesday offered to
purchase Google’s Chrome browser for $34.5 billion as it works to
challenge the tech gian...
Demetri Sevastopulo and Michael Acton, reporting for the Financial Times:
Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the US government 15 per cent
of the revenues from chip sales in China, as part of an unusual
arrangement with the Trump administration to obtain export
licences ...
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We’re betting you’ll never look at decaf the same way again. But that’s kind of the point.
Amrith Ramkumar and Robbie Whelan, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices have agreed to give the Trump
administration a portion of the sales from their
artificial-intelligence chips to China, unusual agreements that
deepen t...
The president of the United States, on his blog three days ago:
The CEO of INTEL is highly CONFLICTED and must resign,
immediately. There is no other solution to this problem. Thank you
for your attention to this problem!
I met with Mr. Lip-Bu Tan, of Intel, along with Secretary of
Commerce, Howard Lutnick, and Secretary of the Treasury, Scott
Bessent. The meeting was a very interesting one. His success and
rise is an amazing story. Mr. Tan and my Cabinet members are going
to spend time together, and bring suggestions to me during the
next week. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
President Donald Trump on Monday delayed high U.S. tariffs on
Chinese goods from snapping back into place for another 90 days, a
White House official told CNBC. [...]
Monday’s extension is the latest example of how Trump’s on-again,
off-again tariffs have shifted with little prior notice, a dynamic
that has made U.S. trade policy unpredictable for many businesses.
TACO Tuesday, but on a Monday. What a country! America really is great again.
Bonus question for the CNBC copy desk: how much water is the word many carrying in that closing sentence?
Sam Altman, in a long post yesterday on X, following up on OpenAI’s decision last week to make GPT-4o available as a legacy model, at least temporarily:
If you have been following the GPT-5 rollout, one thing you might
be noticing is how much of an attachment some people...
My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week. With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. It provides a complete User Management solution along with SSO, SCIM, and FGA. The APIs are modular and easy-to-use, allowing integrations to be completed in minutes instead of months. WorkOS simplifies MCP authorization with a single API built on five OAuth standards.
Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including Perplexity, Vercel, and Webflow.
For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.
Mark Tyson at Tom’s Hardware:
AOL, now a Yahoo property, will end its dial-up internet service,
the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN)-based internet
connectivity service, on September 30, 2025. Its dial-up service
has been publicly available for 34 years, and has ...
A list of various related news items and clips from this, and recent, weeks:
Apple Newsroom, on Wednesday — “Apple Increases U.S. Commitment
To $600 Billion, Announces American Manufacturing Program”:
Apple today announced a new $100 billion commitment to America, a
s...
OpenAI:
We’re releasing gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b — two
state-of-the-art open-weight language models that deliver strong
real-world performance at low cost. Available under the flexible
Apache 2.0 license, these models outperform similarly sized open
models on reasoni...
Anthropic:
GitHub notes that Claude Opus 4.1 improves across most
capabilities relative to Opus 4, with particularly notable
performance gains in multi-file code refactoring. Rakuten Group
finds that Opus 4.1 excels at pinpointing exact corrections within
large codebases...
Ashley Belanger, writing for Ars Technica:
Porn sites may have blown up Meta’s key defense in a copyright
fight with book authors who earlier this year said that Meta
torrented “at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple
shadow libraries” to train its AI models. [.....
In a new Pixel 10 ad, Google dunks on Apple’s failed promise of
Siri AI improvements, with a narrator that suggests you could
“just change your phone” if you bought “a new phone because of
a feature that’s coming soon, but it’s been coming soon for a
full year.”
The 30-second spot appeared on YouTube and X today, teasing the
launch of Google’s new Pixel 10 devices on August 20th.
Ghost:
When we announced Ghost 5.0 a few years ago, we were proud
to share that Ghost’s revenue had hit $4M — while publisher
earnings had surpassed $10M. It felt great to have such a clear
sign that our goal to create a sustainable business model for
independent creator...
MacRumors, on June 20:
Apple executives have been discussing the possibility of the
company making a bid to acquire Perplexity AI, according
to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Perplexity is one of the
leading AI startups that has proven popular as an AI-infused
web search engin...
The Cloudflare blog:
We are observing stealth crawling behavior from Perplexity, an
AI-powered answer engine. Although Perplexity initially crawls
from their declared user agent, when they are presented with a
network block, they appear to obscure their crawling identity...
Alexandra Steigrad, reporting for The New York Post:
The new publication will be headquartered in Los Angeles and
feature a robust staff of editors, reporters and photographers
dedicated to covering news, entertainment, politics, culture,
sports and business — all with a distinctly California
perspective.
The California Post will be supported by the team in New York
providing national and international news. The content will appear
in a daily print edition and will have its own dedicated homepage
for Californians with stories being published across multiple
other platforms, including video, audio and social media.
Antonio G. Di Benedetto:
Part of me still can’t believe it, but Lenovo did the thing: it
took a bonkers concept for a laptop with a rollable screen
and built the tech into something you can actually own and
use like a normal computer. Except, as conventional as the
Think...
In time for Apple’s 50th anniversary, “CBS Sunday Morning”
correspondent David Pogue tells the iconic company’s entire life
story: how it was born, nearly died, was born again under Steve
Jobs, and became, under CEO Tim Cook, one of the most valuable
companies in the world.
The 600-page book features 360 full-color photos, new facts that
correct the record and illuminate Apple’s subversive culture, and
150 fresh interviews with the legendary figures who shaped Apple
into what it is today.
Jason Snell, at Six Colors:
On Thursday, Apple reported its third-quarter 2025 fiscal
results. Revenue was $94 billion (a fiscal third-quarter
record), up 10% versus the year-ago quarter. Mac revenue was up
15%, iPhone revenue up 13%, and Services revenue up 13%. The
Wea...
With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. It provides a complete User Management solution along with SSO, SCIM, and FGA. The APIs are modular and easy-to-use, allowing integrations to be completed in minutes instead of months. WorkOS simplifies MCP authorization with a single API built on five OAuth standards.
Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including Perplexity, Vercel, and Webflow.
For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.
One last post on my recent Substack kick. Yesterday I linked to Ana Marie Cox’s scathing analysis of Substack’s financials. She published that on June 23, and wrote about Substack’s $100 million funding round, with a $1 billion valuation, in the future tense. Substack indeed...
My thanks to Hello Weather for sponsoring last week at DF. Regular readers know that I am an inveterate aficionado of weather apps. I’m not really much of a meteorology nerd, but I’m a pedestrian in a city with widely varying seasons. But even more so, I find weather apps to...
Google:
While we previously announced discontinuing support for all
goo.gl URLs after August 25, 2025, we’ve adjusted our approach in
order to preserve actively used links. We understand these links
are embedded in countless documents, videos, posts and more, and
we appr...
Simple single-page website with (a) reasons to leave Substack; (b) links to comprehensive step-by-step instructions for how to move to other platforms, such as Ghost, Buttondown, and Beehiiv; and (c) links to severalpopularpublications that moved and are glad they did.
Among the handful of oft-discussed problems with Substack:
Their 90/10 subscription revenue split isn’t usurious, but it’s high compared to competing platforms — especially once you reach an even mid-tier level of popularity.
The only way this independent publishing game w...
Ana Marie Cox, who knows a thing or two about indie publishing and journalism, on her AMC All the Time blog about a month ago:
My take is more dire, because I’m not sure about “savvy and
stamina” as the distinguishing characteristics of those who might
be able to migrate...
Ashley Belanger, writing for Ars Technica:
After Substack shocked an unknown number of users by sending a
push notification on Monday to check out a Nazi blog featuring a
swastika icon, the company quickly apologized for the “error,”
tech columnist Taylor Lorenz reported...
Special guest Louie Mantia joins the show to talk about Liquid Glass, the various OS 26 updates, and the worrisome state of Apple’s UI design overall. Also: sandwiches.
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