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Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that Donald Trump is deeply unsettled about Kamala Harris’s successful launch, even as polls show her edging into a small lead. His anger has led him to escalate the private conspiracy-mongering about Democrats supposedly cheating in the election. We talked to Amanda Carpenter—a leading Never Trump conservative and an editor at Protect Democracy—about why it’s so disturbing that Trump is already laying the groundwork to overturn a loss, a novel way he might try to pull this off, and whether the GOP will ever move beyond MAGA. 
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Hey, friends - here is another instalment in our engineering updates series. This is what has been happening in the code lately. Team Updates At the very end of July we opened a role for an iOS developer to look after the official Mastodon for iOS app. If you are interested,...

Automatically cross-post your newsletter to Twitter directly from Buttondown.

A lot of people are thinking that Threads is the new "nice" version of The Original Twitter, but folks, that's pure bullshit -- remember who owns Threads and ask yourself if you want that dude to be in charge of our political organizing network. We need something better.

Idea for a neat product from Automattic or really anyone: Configure WordPress for writing a book, hook it up to an AI service that can always turn that site into prose, reorganized into chapters, however you'd like, on demand, in an instant. You could use an outliner to arrange the table of contents and it could automatically generate a back of the book index. Technologically I think today's AI is ready to do this, just needs to be packaged. Charge a fair price for the service, esp at the beginning it would totally be worth it. Who knows where it would lead. I bet a lot of writers would use it, I certainly would.

I carry two phones, an iPhone 13 Pro and a Pixel 6 Pro. The latter is my main phone, and I prefer it to the Apple phone, not sure why, it's what I use for most things. I need the iPhone because I use an Apple Watch. Lately there's been some trouble with the screen on the Pix...

According to Mark Gurman, the iPhone 16 Pro will have a new button for the camera. This is very interesting:

Speaking of buttons, there will be a new camera control on the right side of the phone (at least on the new Pros). It will operate like a button on a DSLR camera, allowing you to press in slightly to trigger autofocus. A harder press will take the picture. You can also swipe along the button to zoom in and out while shooting photos and videos.

Because I don’t have an iPad anymore, thinking about getting the Pro Max next time. Will need to hold it.

The back and forth ranking changes for Jordan Chiles and Ana Barbosu is a mess. If there’s no fair solution, give them both the bronze medal. Just a couple days ago we watched the pole vaulters share the gold. The floor exercise wasn’t a tie but it might as well have been.

Continuing to make progress with the new editor. Fixed several things, added support for @-mentions, better styling. There are still a couple quirks with the insertion cursor. If I can work through those, will ship this as soon as I can.

From now on, until further notice, when I feel like watching some mind-numbing "news" program, I'm going to have a look at the Kamala Harris channel on YouTube. I don't mind doing hard work, I just don't want to hear what the NYT-centered media has to say because it's all bullshit. If I have to listen to nonstop bullshit, I'd rather hear from people who tell me we can have a bright future, than the usual NYT-spawned bullshit. It's just bullshit. I'm tired of bullshit. That's all I have to say about bullshit for now at least. Have a nice day.

Manuel Moreale wraps up his first 50 interviews with bloggers, with a nice summary here. I was happy to participate and still read it every week (in my RSS reader of course).

Shoutout to @vincent who has finished a major rewrite of the navigation in our main mobile app. It’s probably not the most fun thing to work on (hey it looks exactly the same!) but sets us up nicely for the future.

At some point ChatGPT will imho be programmed to compile C apps to JavaScript, for example, even large ones with bugs.

Incredible gold medal game, USA vs. France women. So close to going to OT. 🏀

Les Milne was a consultant anesthesiologist, and his wife, Joy, typically found that he came home smelling of anesthetics, antiseptics and blood. But he returned one August evening in 1982, shortly after his 32nd birthday, smelling of something new and distinctly unsavory, o...

This post from John Gruber really hits the key problem with macOS becoming more locked down and even (sometimes) dumbed down, and the balance between the Mac and iPad in Apple’s product line:

But at a certain point, a hammer needs to hammer whatever it strikes, and sometimes, alas, that’s the user’s thumb. That’s the Mac. It’s a Unix workstation that’s friendly enough to be used by the mass market. It is not an appliance intended to prevent any possible malware or scamware from running.

Apple says they don’t want macOS and iPadOS to converge, but it often feels like we’re inching that way.

When to prioritize individual autonomy, and when to standardize for global optimization.

Buescher State Park at lunchtime. Had a picnic, then started listening to USA vs. France on the drive back before we watched the second half back at home.

Enjoying USA vs. France. Love watching Wemby play and cannot wait for the Spurs season to start. Gotta root for USA, though, a truly great team. 🏀