Katie Paul and Jeff Horwitz, reporting for Reuters in late April: Meta is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees’ computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and ​keystrokes for use in training its artificial intelligence models, part of a broad initia...

Stu Maschwitz: Prolost Watches is an iPhone app for managing your watch collection. It’s part database, part journal; designed for the detail-obsessed mind of the watch fanatic. As you log each day’s choice of watch, insights are revealed. Wear logs trace a path on the m...

I’m sure there’s a scene marker right at the cut, so that’s why an ad got inserted there. But, my god. Someone at Amazon should go to prison for this.

(I think it’s a total coincidence that the Febreze ad seems roughly color-matched to the sky. But scroll down in the Bluesky thread for some links to the absolute genius campaign from Cerveza Cristal beer, with spots specifically designed to integrate into Star Wars when it was broadcast on commercial TV in Chile. “Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough” might be the funniest TV commercial ever made.)

Update: Here’s Todd Vaziri’s 2026 HD remaster of the original jump cut, for your comparison. Enjoy.

Link: bsky.app/profile/gethill.bsky.social/post/3ml6fyfv7kc2l

Great stuff around MLB: Those around the league quickly honored that legacy during Monday night’s slate of games. Tributes rolled in from across the league, with various play-by-play announcers deviating from their typical routines to give a nod to Sterling’s distinct st...

That previous item led me to look at Claris’s website for the first time in a while. And, lo, there’s a banner promoting a message from CEO Ryan McCann that was posted just yesterday, under the headline “How Claris Is Building for What’s Next”: Every AI-generated applica...

Apple Newsroom, back in August 2024: Apple today announced that Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri will transition from his role on January 1, 2025. Maestri will continue to lead the Corporate Services teams, including information systems and technology, information se...

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple has removed more desktop Macs from its online store as the global memory shortage continues. Mac mini models with 32GB and 64GB of RAM are no longer available for purchase, nor is the M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 256GB RAM.

The M3 Ultra Mac Studio is now available only in a 96GB RAM configuration, with higher-tier options eliminated. Both M3 Mac Studio and M4 Max Mac Studio models have delivery estimates of 9 to 10 weeks.

Link: macrumors.com/2026/05/05/apple-mac-studio-mac-mini-ram-cuts…

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: Last March, Apple was hit with a class action lawsuit after delaying the launch of the “more personalized Siri” that was first announced at WWDC 2024. Apple agreed to settle the case in December, and the full settlement terms are now available. Ap...

Taegan Goddard, quoting the Financial Times last week: The Pentagon said President Trump’s Iran war has cost the United States at least $25 billion, driven primarily by the military’s use of munitions, the Financial Times reports. The New York Times had an interesting ...

Back in 2009, Merlin Mann and I jointly gave a talk at SxSW titled “Obsession Times Voice”. Regarding how it turned out, I wrote: My muse for the session was this quote from Walt Disney: “We don’t make movies to make money; we make money to make more movies.” To me, that...

David Smith, “Six Years Perfecting Maps on watchOS”: I love going on wilderness adventures. I am rarely happier than when I am far off into the mountains without a soul in sight. As a result, I have spent a lot of time learning how to safely explore and navigate when I’m...

If you’re building B2B SaaS, especially AI, you quickly need enterprise features like SSO, SCIM, and audit logs. Your developers shouldn’t waste cycles rebuilding that infrastructure. Free them to focus on what sets you apart.

WorkOS gives you production-ready APIs for auth and access control that integrate directly into your product. Trusted by over 2,000 companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel.

Build faster with WorkOS →

Link: workos.com/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter…

Nick Heer: If you do a little poking around in Adobe’s application bundles, a key reason for the jankiness of these user interfaces becomes apparent: it is because they are little webpages. These dialog boxes are HTML files that reference a chunky CSS file and oodles of ...

Chess Peace — a new iOS game by Sam Shepherd — is my kind of logic puzzle. Each puzzle is a board with a few unplaced chess pieces. To solve you need to place all the pieces so that none of them attack each other. There’s a timer if you care, but I don’t. (And you can hide the clock.) Clever name too: the pieces need to be ... at peace with each other. You can download Chess Peace and try it out free of charge, and it’s just a one-time payment of $7 to unlock everything. Great simple premise, really well implemented.

Link: chesspeace.app/

Paul Thurrott:

I may or may not write and publish a short e-book about Markdown sometime this year, most likely as part of a monthly focus. But l’ve written small parts of it already, as I do, and I figured it might be interesting for at least some readers. And so here’s an early draft of an introductory chapter that may or may not be called “On writing.” We’ll see.

It’s odd how things turn out in life. Thurrott’s and my careers are almost uniquely parallel, but have seldom intersected. This book would have been a very surprising outcome to me, if you’d told me about it 20 years ago. Sort of a fun outcome, though, and I must admit to being curious what comes of it.

Link: thurrott.com/paul/334577/the-markdown-book-on-writing?utm…

Speaking of companies with valuable minority stakes in AI companies, there’s one thing that stuck in my craw about the blockbuster Ronan Farrow / Andrew Marantz investigative piece on Sam Altman and OpenAI last month for The New Yorker. It didn’t come up during Nilay Patel’s...

The New York Times, back in March last year (gift link): To win the artificial intelligence race, Google not only has developed its own technologies, but has also pumped money into prominent A.I. start-ups. And to preserve its competitive edge, Google has kept its owners...

Jeremy Provost, on the blog for Think Tap Work, his mobile app development company: iOS App Store search is no longer about relevance. It’s about ad inventory. With Apple’s introduction of a second search ad, for any query where we weren’t #1, we’ve effectively moved dow...

Jake Adelstein (author of Tokyo Vice) on his blog Tokyo Paladin: For decades, Japan’s Oreos weren’t made by Nabisco at all. They were produced domestically by Yamazaki Biscuits, under a licensing arrangement with what eventually became Mondelez International. This was, b...

Marcin Wichary at Unsung: I’m angry. (Clearly.) We should all be angry in face of stuff like this. This is how people get fed up with software — because it feels unstable and deteriorates on its own without needing to. I know I brought up that an existing power user bas...

Sam Sabin, writing for Axios one year ago: Anthropic expects AI-powered virtual employees to begin roaming corporate networks in the next year, the company’s top security leader told Axios in an interview this week. [...] Virtual employees could be the next AI innovation...

Two months ago, revisiting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s year-prior prediction that AI would soon be writing 90+ percent of all programming code, I wrote: But where I think Amodei’s remarks, quoted above, are facile is that it hasn’t played out as simply that lines of cod...

Two months ago, revisiting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s year-prior prediction that AI would soon be writing 90+ percent of all programming code, I wrote: But where I think Amodei’s remarks, quoted above, are facile is that it hasn’t played out as simply that lines of cod...

Press release last week: SightMD, a leading ophthalmology practice in the greater New England area, today announced a historic milestone in surgical innovation. Dr. Eric Rosenberg, DO, MSE, has become the first surgeon in the world to successfully perform cataract surger...

Bryan Hoch, reporting for MLB.com:

A colorful personality who engaged and entertained fans with a distinct conversational style, Sterling called 5,426 regular-season Yankees games and 225 more in the postseason from 1989 until his retirement in 2024. After initially stepping away from the microphone in April of that year, Sterling returned to call selected games late in the ’24 season, including each contest of the World Series.

At the time of his initial retirement, Sterling said that he considered himself to be “a very blessed human being,” noting that he had lived out a childhood dream of broadcasting on the radio for more than 64 years.

“It’s your medium. You do what you want,” Sterling once said. “You have to paint the picture, which I love doing.”

That’s baseball, Suzyn.

Link: mlb.com/news/john-sterling-passes-away

Gil Durán, posting on Bluesky:

It’s official! I’m permanently banned from X for tweeting “TLDR: Fascism.” (appeal denied)

“TLDR: Fascism” was Durán’s two-word response to this 1,000-word essay from Palantir describing their vision for a “Technological Republic”. (Alternative link to essay if you don’t want to visit x.com.)

Getting perma-banned from Twitter/X by Elon Musk gives Durán a nice Streisand-effect boost to promote his upcoming new book, The Nerd Reich. If the book is even half as good as its title it should be a bestseller.

Link: bsky.app/profile/gilduran.com/post/3mky5taqg3222

I don’t want to spoil any of this story from David Gelphman, which he wrote back in 2013, but which I only came across this week had read so long ago I’d forgotten it. Go read it. But before you do, one bit of context you should keep in mind is that the original iPad was unveiled at a special Apple event on 27 January 2010, but it didn’t ship until early April. Gelphman’s story takes place in that interregnum.

Link: davidgelphman.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/2-letters-from-steve…

A follow-up point to Friday’s post about Meta unceremoniously shitcanning its entire contract with Sama, the Kenyan contractor that employed over 1,100 contractors to serve as Mechanical Turks for Meta’s AI efforts, after a few of the contractors told investigative reporters...

Regarding my earlier post about the cleverness of Tim Cook’s solution to Apple’s dilemma regarding how to apply for, and accept, a potential tariff refund check without drawing the ire of Donald “Tariff Is My Favorite Word” Trump, at least one reader asked why Tim Cook comm...

Remember the appalling but utterly-unsurprising story two months ago where a team of investigative reporters in Sweden uncovered a company in Kenya contracted by Meta to review video content captured by Meta’s “smart” glasses? They spoke to some of the workers, who told tale...