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Nicolas Lellouche, writing for the French-language site Numerama (block quote below is from Safari’s English translation) (via Joe Rossignol at MacRumors): What is the problem with Europe? Apple does not explain it very clearly, but suggests that the European Union’s req...

John Voorhees, writing at MacStories, regarding a new command-line transcription tool cleverly named Yap written by his son Finn last week during WWDC: On the way, Finn filled me in on a new class in Apple’s Speech framework called SpeechAnalyzer and its SpeechTranscribe...

Bungie: Through every comment and real-time conversation on social media and Discord, your voice has been strong and clear. We’ve taken this to heart, and we know we need more time to craft Marathon into the game that truly reflects your passion. After much discussion wi...

Bill Atkinson died last two weeks ago. I was explaining to a friend why he was so important. Most people who know of him know about MacPaint and Hypercard, both were fantastic contributions to the evolution of personal computers. But underneath all that he created a layer o...

Apple executives were a little light on substantial interviews last week, but a good one dropped today — Craig Federighi talking to Federico Viticci on the vast Mac-style windowing overhaul in iPadOS 26: “We don’t want to create a boat car or, you know, a spork”, Federig...

If there were a Joe Rogan of the left, he would tell you to stfu and vote for Cuomo for mayor of NYC.

NYC is a special place, like the Knicks are a special NBA team.

And btw, Cuomo, like Trump, is from Queens.

PS: If there were a Joe Rogan of the left he would be from Queens too. :-)

PPS: Queens doesn't have an Empire State Building, and they tore down Shea Stadium. So the Unisphere from the last World's Fair will have to do. But Queens is probably the most ethnically diverse place in the world. Think about that for a minute and how the fight for the soul of the US will be fought in Queens.

PPPS: I come from Flushing.

I had a conversation on Bluesky with a writer at the New Yorker saying she didn't have much use for ChatGPT, though she had tried using it. I wanted to see if I could open a door, suggesting that next time there was an issue with a computer, that she bring the question to C...

You may recall from my “Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber” piece back in January that the Dickinson Public Schools District in North Dakota had the rather unfortunate nickname the “Midgets”. Back in March, the school district announced they’d be retiring the nickname, after nearly a century. Last month they announced their new name: the Mavericks. I’m going to call this the best rebranding of the year.

We still have the Estherville, Iowa Midgets to cheer for. But even better: the Yuma Criminals in Arizona. Now that’s a nickname.

Simon Willison, regarding the various rebuttals to “The Illusion of Thinking” research paper (which I linked to here) from Apple’s machine learning team: I thought this paper got way more attention than it warranted — the title “The Illusion of Thinking” captured the att...

Aric Toler, a visual investigations reporter for The New York Times, on X back in April:

For about a year, I worked with a retired British academic named Alasdair Spark to solve a mystery: where did the original photo from the end of The Shining come from, and where/when was it captured?

Last week, we finally found the answer.

See also: This post from 2012 about the original photograph, from (who else?) Lee Unkrich.

These screens make for a useful overview of what Apple thinks the highlight features are in each OS.

WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, back in 2012 (two years before Facebook acquired them for $19 billion, 13 years before this week’s introduction of ads into WhatsApp): Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption...

Fred Lambert, writing for Electrek: Bloomberg has just released an embarrassingly bad report about the self-driving space, in which it claimed Tesla has an advantage over Waymo by misrepresenting data. [...] The report compares Tesla’s and Waymo’s self-driving efforts, g...

Nice piece in Fast Company by Zachary Petit:

One critical moment came in February 2010, when J. Crew featured Field Notes in its catalog, alongside the retailer’s other “personal favorites from our design heroes.” There was a Timex watch, Ray-Bans, Sperry shoes — “and out of fucking nowhere, Field Notes,” Coudal says. “And when that happened, a lot changed for us.”

Coudal says it gave the brand instant credibility — after all, if it was good enough for J. Crew, it was good enough for your store. In time, friends began sending him screenshots of Field Notes in TV shows; he and Draplin would see people jotting notes in them in bars and elsewhere; on the design web, they became an obsession. By 2014, there was even a subreddit dedicated to them titled “FieldNuts.”

Highly recommend reading this review of Trump's parade. We had the wrong idea about what the Army would do. Basically if you order us to do a parade, we will give you a parade.

Podcast: Hold your nose and vote for Cuomo.

Todd Spangler, Variety: Meanwhile, the Trump Mobile “47 Plan” is pricier than the unlimited plans from prepaid services operated by Verizon’s Visible, AT&T’s Cricket Wireless and T-Mobile’s Metro, which are each around $40 per month. The Trump T1 Phone, which runs G...

Eli Tan and Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times:

On Monday, WhatsApp said it would start showing ads inside its app for the first time. The promotions will appear only in an area of the app called Updates, which is used by around 1.5 billion people a day. WhatsApp will collect some data on users to target the ads, such as location and the device’s default language, but it will not touch the contents of messages or whom users speak with. The company added that it had no plans to place ads in chats and personal messages.

(a) I’ve never once looked at the Updates tab in WhatsApp; (b) does anyone believe they’re not going to put ads in the other tabs sooner or later?

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Progress report on linkblogging in WordLand.