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Emanuel Maiberg and Joseph Cox, reporting for 404 Media: Users from 4chan claim to have discovered an exposed database hosted on Google’s mobile app development platform, Firebase, belonging to the newly popular women’s dating safety app Tea. Users say they are rifling t...

Jason Snell returns to the show to talk about the early PC platform rivalries of the 1980s, iOS 26 leaks (and Apple suing YouTuber Jon Prosser), the various Apple OS 26 public betas and the state of Liquid Glass, and more. (Where by “more” I mean a little baseball and keyboard nerdery.)

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From time to time we get criticized for making "yet another to-do list" product. Or a chat product. Or a messaging product. Or something we've kinda sorta already made before, just in a different form, combination, or approach. "How about something else? How about somethin...

I've rarely been this happy to receive a new feature.

I have a plan of course. I'll let you know how it goes! :-)

I got tired of my old sound system, too many wires, a big receiver whose functions I never used, all designed long before the 4-year-old 65-inch OLED screen on top of it all, so I downscaled to a Sony soundbar, figured that was as simple as you could get, for $300, thinking ...

“The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don't know what to do with it” — Edward Weston

I’ve talked about consistency many times on this blog.

We need to give our tools and style some time to mature, we need to give ourselves enough room to grow with our current tools. Don’t try to photograph everything, focus on a few things.

The public betas are out for iOS/iPadOS/WatchOS/MacOS 26, and Dan Moren and Jason Snell cover them all at Six Colors. Here’s Moren on iOS 26: Apple’s new design language, dubbed Liquid Glass, applies across all their platforms, but unsurprisingly, it feels most at home o...

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To maintain anonymity and store zero user data, there is and can be no web app version of ICEBlock. There is and can be no Android version. Only iOS supports the security and privacy features for ICEBlock to offer what it does, the way it does.

BTW, this business with Trump and the Fed is almost exactly what I wanted Obama to do with Garland when McConnell refused to hold hearings. Walk him over to the Supreme Court, unlock his office, swear him in and get back to work. Sometimes you just do it. The Dems weren't pragmatic that way.

When trying to "work" with ChatGPT, realize that it's mistakes could be much worse than you could possibly imagine. It could be leading you down a blind alley. You must always consider how full of shit it is. It may not just be making things up, but it could not understand something very basic about what you're doing. There's no limit to the ways it can be wrong. And you can waste whole programming sessions chasing a solution where none could possibly every under any circumstances be found.

Question: I have a site with a well developed set of categories, I've added to it carefully over a few months, it covers most of the topics I write about. Another site has a small set of categories. I write all my WordPress posts in the same editor, and could easily set it up so that all categories were available to me in every site I post to. The question: Is that a good practice in the world of WordPress? I noticed that categories are given global ID's so if I use a category like "movies" it will have the same ID as yours has on your sites. I love this idea of a global namespace for categories, and see it as something that could be adopted by sites written in any other writing environment. Anyway, if you have a moment to comment, I'd appreciate your ideas.

You can see from this Bluesky post that I do copy-edit my linkblog items, but not enough. The web isn't a write-only medium, so to say that Bluesky is part of the web, well in this way it isn't.

If you could look into people's minds and see if, at their core, they feel it can't happen here, most of us would have that belief. We'll probably still believe it when the last of our freedoms is gone.

Here's a benchmark. I just asked ChatGPT for 250 words on climate change. Let's check that out in a year and two years and see if they're still telling the truth.

David Barnard:

On the podcast I talk with John about the fascinating 40-year history of Apple’s developer relations, how almost going bankrupt in the 1990s shaped today’s control-focused approach, and why we might need an “App Store 3.0” reset.

Yet another fun appearance on a podcast. There’s a good transcript too, if you’re more of a reader than a listener.

Question. If you have to choose between Google's web browser or one from your favorite AI company, which would you go with? And let me know which is your favorite AI "universe." Also yeah Google is destroying the web, as is ChatGPT and Claude etc. Because the people who tried to capture flow using SEO made you wade through mountains of garbage before you got the info you were coming there for. If instead, they had some focus on providing a product that made people happy and built respect for theri brand, they'd still have a seat at the table. It's too late to complain, you had a chance to view your efforts as a business. But there's still plenty of potential for the web, esp if developers get imaginative in how to use the new browser platforms. I don't imagine Google's going to rock and roll too much with Chrome, but maybe they will. 😄

Trump says he's going to give AI companies freedom except with DEI and climate change. Here we go.

I hate it when journos say the Dems are in trouble, or hopeless or whatever, it shows how poisoned their point of view is.

When people are fed up with Trump, if that should happen, then whatever the Democratic Party is meant to become it will become exactly that at that moment.

The voters are where your attention should be, and think of them as people not as numbers.

That's my best advice for a Tuesday.

I think I figured out why the AI companies want to do web browsers. It’s so that they can create an application development platform for people who want to write apps that run inside a new environment where the OS is a LLM. Lots of interesting possibilities. Imagine how the OS API might work. You could restructure a database by explaining in English how you want it restructured. In the freaking code. Could we bury Algol-like languages the same way we buried assembly and machine languages? Do we have the courage to imagine such things?