Sheets.works put together an excellent but — perhaps ironically — unbylined visualization with this simple premise: Billions of phones run on code looked after by a handful of people. We counted them from the code itself. I had no idea SQLite or sudo were maintained by such a small number of individuals and — like […]⌥ Permalink

Aparna Pappu of YouTube: This builds on the incredible success we’ve seen with other Studio tools like A/B testing, where creators have run more than 40 million experiments to find the perfect titles and thumbnails for their videos since the feature officially launched in 2024. Coming soon, you’ll also be able to test up to […]⌥ Permalink

Meta: Drive people directly to your website, shop or latest offer by adding a clickable link to your Instagram posts and reels. People can visit the website from your post or reel. If you subscribe to a Meta One plan, you can add links to a set number of posts and reels each month based […]⌥ Permalink

Josh Dzieza, in a Verge feature about Kevin O’Leary’s data centre in Utah and the citizens protesting its development, has a small update on how things are going for O’Leary’s proposal in Alberta: For developers, this presents what [Paul] Palandjian, the CEO of O’Leary Digital, calls a “chicken-and-egg problem.” In order to finance construction of […]⌥ Permalink

Kate Knibbs, Wired: Verifact Markets, a new startup that bills itself as a “prediction market for disputed facts,” is betting that people will be eager to weigh in on questions like these. The company’s premise is so quirky it sounds like something a couple of philosophy and economics majors dreamed after too many bong rips […]⌥ Permalink

Apple, in a Developer News post I am reproducing in its entirety, segment-by-segment: We give developers powerful APIs to build incredible capabilities into their apps for Apple products, backed by a set of controls designed to protect users’ private data. Full Disk Access largely sidesteps these controls in order to allow backup apps to function […]

The White House issued an executive order last week: The terminology used by the Federal Government should reflect the transformative capabilities of these technologies and the limitless opportunities they create for the American people. Accordingly, the term “Super Intelligence” more appropriately captures the promise, potential, and rapidly advancing capabilities of these technologies. It is therefore […]⌥ Permalink

Semafor published a graph earlier this week purportedly showing a staggering decline in tourism to the United States from five countries. Among them, it appeared to illustrate a decline from over twenty million Canadian visitors a few years ago to under eight million this year. That felt fishy to me as I had also recently […]⌥ Permalink

Glenn Fleishman, writing at Six Colors: ElevationLab has released an AirTag product I find appalling, and I strongly urge they immediately withdraw it from sale and recall all inventory. The AirTag Silencer is a simple device: remove the back panel and battery from an AirTag, position the Silencer’s highly engineered pin over the speaker, tap […]⌥ Permalink

Ryan Whitwam, Ars Technica: Like Chromebooks, Googlebooks are guaranteed 10 years of software support. However, the latest Chromebook models won’t get that in the traditional way. Google’s support page says that it plans to continue ChromeOS support through “mid-2034,” so there are already devices with support windows beyond that. […] Rather than get into a […]⌥ Permalink

Echo Wang, Reuters: Anthropic is making a massive bet that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than ​industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters. But the cost to get there will be staggering. Anthropic reported a net loss of $42 billion in 2025, and plans to spend […]⌥ Permalink

Kashmir Hill, Jesse Drucker, Eli Tan, and Mike Isaac, New York Times: Here’s what Meta is doing: For tax purposes, the company classifies its enormous, multibillion-dollar data centers as “pilot models.” Under a tax credit created in the 1980s to spur innovation, companies can get a rebate for supplies, but only if they are being […]⌥ Permalink

David Pogue sums up his experiences with Apple’s new Siri: As you can see by the Farmer’s Fridge food fail, the new Siri doesn’t always get it right. But overall, it’s an enormous leap in efficiency and precision. It’s a personal assistant, a second brain, a ChatGPT of your own life. You just have to […]⌥ Permalink

Casey Newton, Platformer: “The centerpiece of our vision for what we’re building is Muse,” Zuckerberg said, promoting the app to a central place in the company’s family of apps only a few days after most people first heard of it. “In the coming years, I expect that Muse is going to grow into the personal […]⌥ Permalink

There are some curious subplots in the data centre boom happening now in Alberta that I think go a long way toward explaining why people hate these things. First, even though developers tout their clean electricity bonafides, the fact is the actual power will come from fossil fuels. That is in part because our province […]⌥ Permalink

I think Meta is a perversely interesting company which means this week I watched, as I do every year, its Connect presentation. It is once again a glimpse into what Meta aspires toward — Apple-quality hardware matched with Google-quality services — compared to what it actually does: track users’ digital and physical activities to sell […]⌥ Permalink

If you are uninterested in Apple Intelligence features, Apple has documentation on how to turn them off for Golden Gate, Tahoe, and Sequoia — kind of. While there are more granular controls for individual features in Golden Gate, Apple’s way of limiting access in older versions is only through Screen Time. But there is a […]⌥ Permalink

One of the things I was most looking forward to when Apple announced it was moving to a new connector in the iPhone was the prospect of faster data transfers. It had been years since this new USB specification was finalized, and Apple was already supporting it in its newest computers, so it seemed predestined […]

Rodrigo Ghedin on the Audio Intelligence features in the new Apple Watch models: And… it doesn’t matter. The message that sticks in people’s minds is that the Apple Watch has become a constantly listening device. And although the new feature only works on the just-announced watches (Series 12 and Ultra 4), the distrust extends to […]⌥ Permalink

After agreeing in August with Germany’s competition authority to make changes to the App Tracking Transparency prompt, Apple has now announced the options available to developers. Unfortunately, the post on its Developer News page is terribly brief; here it is in its entirety: As part of agreements with select European competition authorities, Apple is introducing […]⌥ Permalink

Apple is very excited about all its software updates, naturally, but I am particularly appreciative of MacOS 27. While it does not hit the thoughtful design highs of the pre-Yosemite era, Apple has corrected a bunch of problems it introduced in last year’s Tahoe release and, as a matter of fact, from the past decade […]⌥ Permalink

Karl Bode: Earlier this month a 27-year-old who had been employed at Anthropic for all of four months declared he was quitting the software company because he believed that software automation poses an existential risk to humankind. […] The problem is – and shockingly the ad-based clickbait press didn’t do a very good job explaining […]⌥ Permalink

Marcus Werner, of the Breach, put together a video illustrating the persuasion tactics Canadian politicians are using as they argue for greater A.I. data centre development. It is what referred me to the fracking discussion I referenced in the article I published last night, so I wanted to shout it out for that reason. But […]⌥ Permalink

Last month, within a day of each other, two writers published contrasting takes regarding the backlash to artificial intelligence and its infrastructure. I do not think they were knowingly writing in opposition to each other — the second does not reference the first — but they set up the titular question I find intriguing: will […]

David Smith on Mastodon: The eve of iPhone 18 Pro pre-orders seems a good time to look back at the iPhone 17 family’s adoption. Here’s the 17 family data as a percentage of overall usage for Widgetsmith. Generally they followed the usual adoption pattern, and overall did very well ending at around 20% of total […]⌥ Permalink

Brian X. Chen, New York Times: But even though they’ve been around for years, foldable phones aren’t particularly popular. They’re expensive, awkward and not as durable as regular smartphones. So why did Apple build one? […] Foldable phones, which account for less than 2 percent of the handset market, may be the only part of […]⌥ Permalink

Apple held its annual September major product rollout today announcing, among other things, updated Apple Watch models with “Audio Intelligence” features. One of those features is “Live Rewind”: A double press of the Digital Crown shows the previous 15 seconds of a conversation as a text snippet, so the user can catch something they may […]⌥ Permalink

Michael Crider, PCWorld: […] So somebody at LG decided that, in addition to the basic monitor driver and management app delivered to its users via Windows Update, it would slip in an additional program, “LG Monitor App Installer.” This extra bit of software includes McAfee, or an ad for it — as if there was […]⌥ Permalink

Heather Burns: I cannot tell you how much it disgusts me that so much of the archival footage from September 11 has now been age-gated and restricted as “mature” or “sensitive or adult” content, as in this example from this Reddit film archive. It’s history. It’s archival footage of history. It’s a thing that happened. […]⌥ Permalink

Aaron Vegh and Ben Rice McCarthy have been steadily updating Indigo since they launched it in May. In the latest version, you can now swipe between different filtered timelines, the scroll position is synced between devices, and there is a new lower price point if you use it exclusively for a single network. As for […]⌥ Permalink