When I wrote this week about Anthropic’s announcement that all Claude models, worldwide, would soon begin “watermarking” everything they generate, including text, to comply with this EU regulation, we were left to speculate how this was going to work, because Anthropic offer...

Cory Weinberg, Jemima McEvoy, Jessica E. Lessin, and Stephanie Palazzolo, writing for the paywalled-without-gift-links The Information: As Amodei has hopscotched the globe to preach about the potential and risks of AI — from New Delhi to Davos to Sun Valley — Clark has a...

James Padolsey, on the Claude-text-watermarking-to-comply-with-an-EU-regulation imbroglio: The same thought that led to this law could have applied to calculators at the time of their inception, had their outputs revealed themselves through artefacts. Thankfully, a sum b...

The Wall Street Journal (gift link): To help alleviate the supply crunch, Apple is looking to Chinese manufacturers. “The Trump administration is not in favor of that,” Lutnick said in an interview after touring an Apple manufacturing facility in Houston. There have to ...

XCancel: XCancel is an instance of Nitter. Nitter is a free and open source alternative Twitter front-end focused on privacy and performance. The source is available on GitHub at https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [...] Using an instance of Nitter (hosted on a VPS for ex...

My thanks to Drata for sponsoring last week at DF. Their message is short and sweet: Leverage autonomous AI agents to automate compliance, manage internal and third-party risk, and continuously prove your security posture.

Link: drata.com/daring

Following up on my post yesterday about modern iPhones and scratch resistance, and my personal habits of (a) almost never using an iPhone case, and (b) never setting the iPhone face down except on soft (cloth) surfaces. I should have anticipated this, because I’ve had this ...

This page from Google Design on their “Material 3” UI language came to my attention after my snarky post about the ungainly new to-do app they bizarrely bragged about on Twitter/X this week. I don’t think this “Material 3” page is new — I think it’s a few years old — but I’d...

Philip Michaels, writing last September for Tom’s Guide: iPhone 17 torture test videos done by JerryRigEverything indicate that Ceramic Shield 2 certainly resists scratching, with scratch testing leaving only light scratches at level 7 on the Mohs scale of hardness. Scra...

A few years ago I’d have looked at this post and maybe leaned toward the idea that a precocious 8th grader somewhere hacked into the @GoogleDesign Twitter account and tried to pass off their little to-do app as having come from Google’s design team. But this is apparently real. I almost hope it’s AI slop and that there aren’t any human designers there who think anything in this app has appropriate proportions or is aesthetically pleasing.

(Here’s an XCancel link for the x.com averse. You can just change any x.com/* URL to xcancel.com/*. But, alas, the XCancel mirror of the original tweet loses the animation showing the UI in motion — for some, but not all, users.)

Link: x.com/googledesign/status/2087195277094695096

Joanna Stern, writing at The New Things (gift link): I used to love the blinking notification light on my BlackBerry, and later my Droid 2. It was a simple way to know I had a message without actually looking at my messages. Then BlackBerry let you customize the color, a...

David Imel, The Verge: But in our current moment, the photos people are drawn to are not flawless — and that’s created a real problem for the people making smartphone cameras. “The gap between what two random people want from their camera is growing dramatically,” says I...

Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch: With this year’s Pixel 11 series launch, Google is thinking more agentic AI to complete your tasks. With Gemini, U.S.-based users will be able to order groceries, book rides, or get coffee, for instance. Plus, Gemini can call businesses on users’ ...

Sam Rutherford, writing for Engadget: Granted, the P11 Pro Fold still includes IP68 dust and water resistance, which is better than what you get on the Z Fold 8 line (IP48). But after making an absolute tank of a foldable phone with last year’s model, I said Google reall...

Victoria Song, The Verge: The $399 Google Pixel Watch 5 isn’t about the hardware. Sure, there’s a new satin pyrite case finish, a few new strap colors, and a Steph Curry Special Edition. Under the hood, there’s a slightly faster Qualcomm processor and an itty-bitty batte...

Mia Sato, The Verge: Earlier this summer, Amazon customers began noticing that emails related to their online orders looked sparse: Order confirmation emails didn’t name specific items anymore, and instead listed only item categories. “Your Beauty item is confirmed!” an...

Jeff Johnson: These purported reviews, all but one of which is 5 stars, are all in English. Yet none of them is in the US App Store. I also looked at other English-speaking countries such as Australia and Canada but found no reviews. Also suspicious is that the name of e...

Watch this. No words needed, everyone can feel it. Genes are a hell of a thing.

Link: x.com/sabrinahalper/status/2086964813788258588?s=46

Basic Apple Guy:

Apple just dropped the hardest icon glow-up for the new Chess icon in macOS 27 Beta 5.

This is not just a tweak or small improvement. This is the difference between total shit and a really nice icon.

Link: mastodon.social/@BasicAppleGuy/117073366339407186

The Economist (‘twas a gift link, but alas, I guess gift views have been used up — here’s an archive link in case the gift link is vexing you): You can discover AI’s hallmarks by comparing the writing of man and machine. To do this you need a baseline that is distinctive...

Alex Micek:

In the future, I will feel angry if my car strands me on the side of the road.
I will feel angry if the motor brushes fail expectedly.
I will feel angry if it leaks water.

By contrast, I don’t feel anger when the car tricks me into seeing an advertisement. Instead, I feel a deep, smothering, let-down at the promise of futurism. Bottomless despair is probably inappropriate; a symptom of the misanthropy I should grow out of. But. In the meantime, I feel helpless, discouraged, deeply sad.

Such a good take. I should not let 19 years pass again between linking to his writing.

Link: tumbledry.org/2026/08/07/idrive_ads

This didn’t occur to me but should have — BMW paid Sony to place BMWs throughout the new Spider-Man: Brand New Day movie. They’re not just in the movie but part of the story. So it’s probably the case not that Sony paid BMW to put Spider-Man animations in the dashboards of every late model BMW on the road, but that BMW offered to do it as part of the promotional deal they paid Sony. So BMW probably paid Sony for something that ultimately infuriated a bunch of BMW’s own customers. Geniuses.

Link: press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T0459622EN/bmw…

Two weeks ago Zuckerberg published a 1,000-word essay, “The AI Future Is for Everyone”. This week he published an expanded 6,500-word version of the essay on Meta’s website. Somehow it almost says nothing more than the original. This tidbit, however, struck me as notable: ...

Chance Miller returns to the show. Topics include iOS 27’s progress over summer, live baseball in Vision Pro, the RAM crisis, Apple’s trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI and io, and the EU/DMA situation.

Sponsored by:

• Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code TALKSHOW.
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Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/08/10/ep-454

Andrew Sharp, writing at Sharp Text last month after Netflix’s earnings, asking “Is Netflix Washed Now?”: I offer this observation as a swirl of heightened anxiety surrounds the company, so let me clarify one thing up front: I’m not predicting imminent doom. Netflix cont...

Anthropic support page: Anthropic has signed the EU AI Act’s Article 50(2) Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content, as a provider of both generative AI models and generative AI systems. This article describes how we’re planning to put those commitments i...

Leverage autonomous AI agents to automate compliance, manage internal and third-party risk, and continuously prove your security posture.

Link: drata.com/daring

Zac Hall at 9to5Mac has a good rundown of new features and changes in beta 5. Some app icons got tweaks (the Siri app in particular looks much cooler now), and a bunch of the existing American and British Siri speaking voices now have the Pace and Expressivity adjustment sli...

Apple Newsroom: For the first time, baseball fans can take in all the action of “Friday Night Baseball” live in Apple Immersive on Apple Vision Pro, leveraging 3D video recorded in 8K with a 180-degree field of view. On August 28, viewers with Vision Pro will experience ...

Michael Tsai:

I’m really unhappy about this, both for my role in spreading a false story and because I think it will hurt the cause of reforming App Review. I know there are many crazy rejections and have experienced some first-hand. This story was believable because of that well-known history and because Godier didn’t seem like a nobody trying to get attention — he was the developer of another highly regarded app. But now people are going to point to true developer stories and accuse them of being fakes, too.

Same.

Link: mjtsai.com/blog/2026/08/07/dark-hours-rejected-from-the-app…