Mike Barnes, The Hollywood Reporter: For his first movie job — he would work on more than 300 campaigns during his career — United Artists executive David Chasman hired him to design the poster for West Side Story (1961), then asked him to come up with the letterhead for...

My thanks to Dekáf Coffee Roasters for sponsoring last week at DF. Dekáf believes that people who drink coffee for its flavor are the true connoisseurs. While other roasters treat decaf as a side project, they’ve made it their entire mission. They’re dedicated to creating ex...

Jason Lalljee, reporting for Axios Tuesday: President Trump’s nomination of Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Monday drew criticism from economists across the political spectrum. Why it matters: The growing negative conse...

Emma Roth, reporting for The Verge back on July 1 (emphasis added): Threads’ DMs are currently available to users aged 18 and over on Android, iOS, and the web, but you can only have one-on-one conversations right now. Moving forward, Threads plans to roll out the abilit...

From a press release from the UK’s National Drought Group this week, quoting group chair Helen Wakeham (emphasis added): “We are grateful to the public for following the restrictions, where in place, to conserve water in these dry conditions. Simple, everyday choices — s...

Steve Wozniak turned 75 (!) and was profiled by John Blackstone for CBS News (also posted to YouTube). Slashdot linked to it, and in the comments, someone gently jabbed at Woz for having sold, rather than hoarded, his stock in Apple. Woz himself chimed in, with this comment ...

Bloomberg: The Trump administration is in talks with Intel Corp. to have the US government take a stake in the beleaguered chipmaker, according to people familiar with the plan, in the latest sign of the White House’s willingness to blur the lines between state and indus...

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.

Link: x.com/backlon/status/1956075874370933114

Greg Ip, chief economics commentator for The Wall Street Journal, under the euphemistic headline “The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics”: A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resem...

Apple Newsroom this morning, “An Update on Blood Oxygen for Apple Watch in the U.S.”: Apple will introduce a redesigned Blood Oxygen feature for some Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 users through an iPhone and Apple Watch software update coming l...

Alexandra Alper, reporting for Reuters: Donald Trump’s Navy and Air Force are poised to cancel two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined to develop, work initially aimed at overhauling antiquated human resources systems....

The Information (paywalled, alas): In December, Perplexity discussed possibly buying the six-year-old The Browser Co. with that company’s leaders, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. Talks with the company, which operates an AI-powered web browser,...

Max Read, two years ago, “A Literary History of Fake Texts in Apple’s Marketing Materials”: I’m talking about the mocked-up texts and emails Apple puts together to demonstrate new messaging features in its operating-system updates, presumably written by some well-paid pr...

Eric Migicovsky: First off, for those who didn’t catch the news from a few weeks ago — we’ve been able to recover the Pebble trademark! Our new watches will change from being called Core 2 Duo → Pebble 2 Duo, and Core Time 2 → Pebble Time 2. The big news today is that w...

New app from Devin Davies, developer of the ADA-winning Crouton: Cassette is an app for iPhone and iPad that helps you enjoy your home videos like the good old days. With a retro interface Cassette auto plays through videos from your devices’ Photo Library. Mirror your d...

Haleluya Hadero and Christopher Rugaber, reporting for the AP back on January 26, six days into Trump 2.0:

Perplexity AI has presented a new proposal to TikTok’s parent company that would allow the U.S. government to own up to 50% of a new entity that merges Perplexity with TikTok’s U.S. business, according to a person familiar with the matter. The proposal, submitted last week, is a revision of a prior plan the artificial intelligence startup had presented to TikTok’s parent ByteDance on Jan. 18, a day before the law that bans TikTok went into effect.

They should have added a similar provision to their Chrome offer sheet today. Give 25% to the US Treasury and another 25% to Trump’s future presidential “library”.

Link: apnews.com/article/tiktok-bytedance-trump-perplexity…

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.

Link: dekaf.com/df

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!

The president of the United States, on his blog today:

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!

Sane, steady, predictable leadership.

Link: truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114987288040725570

CNBC:

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?

Link: cnbc.com/2025/08/11/trump-china-tariffs-deadline-extended…

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.

Link: workos.com/blog/mcp-authorization-in-5-easy-oauth-specs?utm…

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. [.....

Tom Warren:

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.

The whole Siri/Apple Intelligence thing has been an enormous self-inflicted embarrassment, but when it comes to Pixel phones, all I can think of is that Mad Men “I don’t think about you at all” GIF.

Link: theverge.com/news/718191/google-apple-intelligence-dunk…