Tariq Panja, reporting for The New York Times: The five men should have been in a celebratory mood. FIFA had just pulled off a World Cup that broke records on a number of fronts. Its spectacular culmination, the final, was a day away from kickoff. But their mood was any...

Joseph Cox, writing for 404 Media (paywalled, sans gift links, alas): Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies’ AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides, accord...

Simon Willison, with Cynthia Dunlop for her tech blogger interview series (from back in January, but he just got around to linking to it so I just got around to seeing it): Any lessons learned that you want to share with the community? My number one tip for blogging is ...

Jeremy Hsu, Ars Technica:

Google briefly allowed anyone to create AI-modified versions of satellite imagery available in Google Earth — before quickly reversing its decision as people shared examples of AI-generated pictures that illustrated the potential for misinformation and disinformation.

Momentum!

A bunch of mine are stored here.

Simon Willison:

So that’s Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta. Google Gemini really needs to catch up on accidentally cyberattacking other companies.

I’m surprised Willison hasn’t heard about how much momentum Gemini has.

Meta AI: We’re excited to release Muse Code (beta), a terminal coding agent powered by Muse Spark 1.2, our newest model. This marks our next step toward the frontier, with larger and much more capable models on the way. [...] Muse Code takes on complex software engineer...

Joe Fabisevich, on Mastodon:

I submitted Plinky 6.0.4 for review last week. The macOS app was approved in 4 hours, the iOS app is still waiting for review. Sure do love to distribute software this way.

He’s not an outlier; I see comments like this from App Store developers everywhere I look.

(Plinky, by the way, is an intriguing link-bookmarking app that syncs across iOS and MacOS. It’s not for me, but the nature of my work is such that I have very unusual bookmarking needs. Plinky offers a bunch of convenient ways to stash new bookmarks with low friction. It’s a labor of love — it’s totally obvious that Fabisevich himself is the number one user of Plinky, and that’s almost always true of the very best apps.)

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, the company’s artificial intelligence research lab: We have arrived at a pivotal moment in human history. I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand. It’s critical that we coll...

Steven Levy, writing for Wired: Today it’s official: After almost 27 years, Dean is leaving Google, along with Ghemawat and two other top-tier AI scientists, to found a company called Discovery Loop. Even though Google will take a stake in the new company, it’s a devast...

https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/07/browsers-have-standards-the-app.html

Meghan Bobrowsky and Erin Mulvaney, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): A New Mexico judge ordered Meta Platforms to pay more than $900 million and limit the time young people in the state can spend on its apps, significantly increasing the cost of the lan...

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg (gift link): OpenAI expects users to rely on the smart speaker throughout the day. It will work similarly to the company’s ChatGPT voice mode on smartphone apps, but with more advanced models for humanlike interactivity. The device is...

This is more like it. No mealymouthing or wishy-washiness here. This is a strident defense. I’ll quote just one line for now: Apple offers nothing because it has nothing because there is nothing. Its Complaint cannot and does not state a misappropriation claim against De...

This comic from Brendan Leonard is a fine companion to yesterday’s items (here and here) on pausing to consider if our use of AI is helping us focus our time on what we love to do, or, instead, robbing us of the things that make us human. The bit about making a sandwich hit close enough to home for me to make me laugh aloud.

Regarding my earlier complaint about it being a slog to open Safari’s preferences in the Settings app on iOS, a few readers pointed me to this tweet last year from Quinn Nelson, showing how to build (or download from iCloud) a simple Shortcuts shortcut that you can add to Control Center to open the current app’s preferences in Settings. Works great.

Update: Stephen Robles:

I made a few riffs off that one as well:

• Jump to current app notification settings
• Current app storage
• Open current app in App Store

Tanya Gazdik, reporting for MediaPost back in December 2023: Despite the ever-expanding screens in its vehicles, including an available 31-inch backseat theatre screen, BMW has no plans to sell advertising on any of them. Radio commercials are intrusive enough, says Step...

Back in March I sung the praises of Jeff Johnson’s StopTheScript and StopTheMadness Safari extensions. I want to re-link to StopTheScript in particular. I wrote last week about ad-blocking content blockers, and I’ve gotten a slew of wonderful feedback from readers about that...

James Hibberd, The Hollywood Reporter: BMW owners are taking to social media to express outrage that the automaker suddenly started pushing ads for Spider-Man: Brand New Day onto their dashboards. The ads began appearing last week on newer-model vehicles and some driver...

I find most poetry obtuse, dancing around a point rather than making one sharply. Not this one.

Matthew Green: If you’re under the impression that these models are “glorified autocomplete” or that progress is slowing down, I need to urge you: stop thinking that. The models are very intelligent and capable, they are getting better at a fast clip. I can cite measurab...

New York Times Magazine story editor Willy Staley tried Sean O’Mara’s “Living Diet” (nothing but steak and fermented foods like sauerkraut) for a week: To O’Mara, the diet is not just a temporary means of losing weight but a way to eat for good. He has been doing it for ...

Sam Altman, on Twitter/X: cool use case of chatgpt work i heard last night: connect your family calendars and explain your kids’ interests. every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid’s soccer game that afternoon, one kid’s up...

David Pogue, at Pogue’s Posts:

Amazon’s “50+ things to try” list mentions that Alexa can “find a home maintenance professional.” So I tried it.

ME: I need a septic-system repair.

ALEXA: That service isn’t currently supported. I can help with plumbing services instead.

ME: Okay, fine. Plumbing services.

ALEXA: What’s your plumbing issue?

ME: I have untreated sewage pouring out of my kitchen faucet.

ALEXA: Is this urgent?

Uh … what do YOU think, dumbass? But OK:

ME: Yes.

ALEXA: When do you need it by?

Displays four responses: ASAP, Within a week, Further out, and I haven’t decided yet.

ME: ASAP.

ALEXA: I’m Alexa, not Shaq.

This could only have been funnier if Alexa had responded “The Aristocrats!”

(Which great film, is, in fact, available to stream on Amazon Prime.)

I look forward to this level of class and brand prestige coming to Apple Maps.

Paul Thurrott: We didn’t need more evidence that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 compute platform is superior to anything in the x86 world. But here it is, regardless: The HP OmniBook Ultra 14 is yet another nearly-perfect laptop running Windows 11 on Arm, an ideal combination ...

There’s an old adage that you should never bring a knife to a gunfight. My take on OpenAI’s response yesterday was expressing incredulity that OpenAI was bringing, like, a box of chocolates to the gunfight. Apple is trying to kill io, and OpenAI’s public response is basically “We love you guys, can’t we just be friends?”

This thread on Hacker News though points out that their response doesn’t even explain what they’re responding to. There’s no context. They just assume the reader is up to date on the lawsuit Apple filed. If you didn’t know anything about the suit and started with this post, it would make no sense at all. I’ve heard from friends there that the OpenAI culture is “too online”, and this might be the best proof of it.

A blog post is an unusual way to respond to a high-stakes lawsuit, but OpenAI is an unusual company. A few snippets from their post, and some commentary.

TBPN seems like a show I wouldn’t enjoy guesting on, but I actually enjoy it quite a bit.

Reuters: Apple on Monday asked a U.S. judge for a preliminary injunction barring two former employees ​and OpenAI from accessing, acquiring, using or disclosing alleged confidential information as it moves ahead with its trade secrets case. [...] The iPhone maker also f...