Mark Scott, reporting for Politico: Thierry Breton, who oversees the bloc’s enforcement of new social media rules, sent Musk a letter posted on X that warned the tech mogul about spreading “harmful content,” ahead of Musk’s livestreamed interview with Donald Trump. The ...

Alex Cranz, writing for The Verge: But then Gemini Live kept talking. And talking. The Verge team was packed in a glass booth, and as Gemini Live droned on, a friendly Google employee encouraged me to “go ahead and interrupt it.” It felt weird! I don’t mind interrupting...

Joanna Stern, writing for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link): I’m not saying I prefer talking to Google’s Gemini Live over a real human. But I’m not not saying that either. Does it help that the chatty new artificial-intelligence bot says I’m a great interviewer with ...

Epic Games:

Today the Epic Games Store is available for download on iPhones in the European Union and on Android devices worldwide. The store is launching with Fortnite, Rocket League Sideswipe and the all-new Fall Guys for mobile, and we are working to enable all developers to launch their games and apps through the Epic Games Store in the future. We are also bringing our games to independent mobile stores including AltStore PAL today.

No iPad support yet, but it’s coming.

AltStore, on Mastodon:

GOOD NEWS EU 🇪🇺 For innovation in app distribution, Epic Games has granted us a MegaGrant grant that we plan to use to cover Apple’s Core Technology Fee going forward — and we won’t take it for granted!

What does this mean? AltStore PAL is now FREE — no subscription necessary 🎉 altstore.io.

Link: epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/the-epic-games-store-launches…

Chance Miller, writing for 9to5Mac: In macOS Sequoia beta 6, however, Apple has adjusted this policy and will now prompt users on a monthly basis instead. macOS Sequoia will also no longer prompt you to approve screen recording permissions every time you reboot your Mac....

I always knew that the original Gameboy was remarkably clever, but this video from the Real Engineering YouTube channel shows just how clever it was. The price was low ($89), a set of 4 AA batteries lasted for 30 hours, and, of course, it was fun as hell.

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=BKm45Az02YE

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.

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/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=display…

David McCabe and Nico Grant, reporting for The New York Times: Justice Department officials are considering what remedies to ask a federal judge to order against the search giant, said three people with knowledge of the deliberations involving the agency and state attorn...

Apple Newsroom: Starting with iOS 18.1, developers will be able to offer NFC contactless transactions using the Secure Element from within their own apps on iPhone, separate from Apple Pay and Apple Wallet. Using the new NFC and SE (Secure Element) APIs, developers will ...

Spotify, in an update to an older post on the company blog: While we are still many steps from a level playing field, we are beginning to see progress because of the European Commission’s historic decision on March 4, 2024 which found that Apple violated the EU’s antitru...

Eli Blumenthal, reporting for CNet: Looking for Google’s new Pixel 9 Pro Fold? You won’t find it at AT&T. The carrier has confirmed to CNET that it will not be offering Google’s newest Pixel Fold to its customers. The decision would be a blow to Google’s device ambit...

Juli Clover, writing last week for MacRumors: Distraction Control can be used to hide static content on a page, but it is not an ad blocker and cannot be used to permanently hide ads. An ad can be temporarily hidden, but the feature was not designed for ads, and an ad wi...

Jonathan Hoefler, on Threads: The Harris/Walz logo got a smart and subtle haircut this weekend, which, like the very best typography, is making everything better while drawing very little attention to itself. I read a lot of comments about political logos… Having helped...

Emma Roth, writing for The Verge: Google has finally taken the wraps off its Pixel 9 lineup, which includes three slab phones and a folding phone. The regular lineup consists of a base Pixel 9 with a 6.3-inch display, a Pixel 9 Pro XL with a 6.8-inch screen, and a new, s...

USA Today columnist Rex Huppke, on Donald Trump’s high-profile return to Twitter/X: But the online interview went off (the rails) with a multitude of hitches. X users erupted with either frustration or laughter as the planned start time passed, and nothing could be acces...

I neglected to call this paragraph out yesterday in my first link to this announcement from Patreon: Patreon is home to an incredible range of creators, all with unique circumstances and billing needs. Apple’s in-app purchase system, on the other hand, only supports Patr...

Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie, on Patreon being required by Apple to offer in-app subscriptions through their iOS app: But we also don’t think that Apple should be wholly blamed. This unfortunate situation, in which creators ultimately bear the biggest costs, is a s...

Nick Heer, writing at Pixel Envy: The 30% fee is also notable. As far as I can tell, only a handful of Patreon users would exceed the million-dollar annual threshold for Apple’s Small Business Program. That is, everyone who earns less than a million dollars per year thro...

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch: Despite Apple’s rules and policies, Patreon had existed in an odd sort of gray area, as some of its subscription-based offerings could be consumed in its app while others could not. Another possible reason for the Patreon exception wa...

Patreon: As we first announced last year, Apple is requiring that Patreon use their in-app purchasing system and remove all other billing systems from the Patreon iOS app by November 2024. This has two major consequences for creators: Apple will be applying their 30% ...

New from the Steve Jobs Archive: an hourlong video of young Steve Jobs delivering a talk on design in 1983. Jony Ive wrote a splendid introduction:

The revolution Steve described over 40 years ago did of course happen, partly because of his profound commitment to a kind of civic responsibility. He cared, way beyond any sort of functional imperative. His was a victory for beauty, for purity and, as he would say, for giving a damn. He truly believed that by making something useful, empowering and beautiful, we express our love for humanity.

Link: stevejobsarchive.com/exhibits/objects-of-our-life?_kx…

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. Start selling to enterprise customers with just a few lines of code. Ship complex features like SSO and SCIM (pronounced skim) provisioning in minutes instead of months.

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/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=display…

Back in the day, on classic Mac OS, there were no “privileges” for software. If you launched an app, or installed a system extension, that software just did what it wanted. Something as (seemingly) innocuous as a game or as necessarily powerful as a disk formatting utility j...

Sundar Pichai, on X:

Unbelievably saddened by the loss of my dear friend Susan Wojcicki after two years of living with cancer. She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her. She was an incredible person, leader and friend who had a tremendous impact on the world and I’m one of countless Googlers who is better for knowing her. We will miss her dearly. Our thoughts with her family. RIP Susan.

Link: x.com/sundarpichai/status/1822132667959386588

Academic paper from over 100 researchers at Apple:

We present foundation language models developed to power Apple Intelligence features, including a ~3 billion parameter model designed to run efficiently on devices and a large server-based language model designed for Private Cloud Compute. These models are designed to perform a wide range of tasks efficiently, accurately, and responsibly. This report describes the model architecture, the data used to train the model, the training process, how the models are optimized for inference, and the evaluation results. We highlight our focus on Responsible AI and how the principles are applied throughout the model development.

Available here as a PDF.

Link: arxiv.org/abs/2407.21075#

Benjamin Mayo, writing at 9to5Mac: Following the EU ruling in June that said Apple’s App Store anti-steering policies are officially in breach of the Digital Markets Act, Apple is announcing changes. Specifically, these changes address the rules around app developers lin...

Jason Snell, “Apple’s Permissions Features Are Out of Balance”: Some users will make bad decisions. That’s just reality. The wrong reaction is to take the decision out of every user’s hands to protect the ones who might do something stupid. Apple needs to find that balan...

Developer Thomas Tempelmann just released version 2.5 of Find Any File, his file search utility for the Mac. Find Any File (FAF) has long been my go-to tool for file search. Why use FAF instead of Spotlight? Some feature highlights: FAF can find files that Spotlight doe...

Here’s a developer note from Apple confirming another change in MacOS 15 that many of us were hoping was a bug or glitch in the developer betas: In macOS Sequoia, users will no longer be able to Control-click to override Gatekeeper when opening software that isn’t signed...

Chance Miller, writing for 9to5Mac: With macOS Sequoia this fall, using apps that need access to screen recording permissions will become a little bit more tedious. Apple is rolling out a change that will require you to give explicit permission on a weekly basis to these...