Sign up

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

The Infinite Loop of One LLM Talking to Another

instagram.com/reel/DRd2ldWkQYr

This is very funny, but also a good indication of just how far away these things are from actual intelligence. First, a reasonable human being would never get caught in a loop like this. Second, only humans can not only recognize what’s going on here, but also see the humor in it.

 ★ 

Scripting News Valid

Ann Greenberg's idea

An idea I posted on Facebook in 2021 about an app I wanted. Here's an idea. I have a drone that communicates with my peloton via satellite, so it's not constrained by range. I can send the drone anywhere I like, but I have to ride there on my peloton. Obviously what I see ...

Scripting News Valid

Just wrote a post for Scripting News, then flipped over to Daveverse to see what it looks like. See for yourself. I think we've come pretty close to cloning Scripting in WordPress.

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

Paris Buttfield-Addison’s Apple Account Is in Kafka Mode

hey.paris/posts/appleid/

Paris Buttfield-Addison: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I ha...

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

Apple at the AWS re:Invent 2025 Keynote

youtube.com/watch?v=O46695Y7ab8

Six-minute segment from Amazon’s AWS re:Invent keynote last week: Payam Mirrashidi, VP, Cloud Systems & Platforms, Apple, explains how AWS Graviton helps improve developer velocity at scale. Hear Swift’s journey from the premier programming language for the Apple eco...

blog - aows Valid
• Adrian Vila

Drowned Forest, VI

Oregon, November 2025.

From the video I took a random exit and found photography heaven.

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

Daring Fireball Weekly Sponsorships, End of Year and Q1 2026

daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always r...

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

Special Dyslexia Fonts Are Based on Voodoo Pseudoscience

edutopia.org/article/do-dyslexia-fonts-actually-work

Youki Terada, writing for Edutopia in 2022 (via Jens Kutílek): Under close scrutiny, the evidence for dyslexia-friendly fonts falls apart. In a 2017 study, for example, researchers tested whether OpenDyslexic, a popular font with thicker lines near the bottom of the lett...

Scripting News Valid

The Mets' soul walks out the door

As a lifelong Mets fan since 1962, I say they blew it. And if you follow my sports writing here, mostly about the Knicks and Mets. I can usually see a pro and a con to everything. And I let the team run itself, and I ponder the philosophical intentions, because to me the Met...

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

iMessage Doesn’t Use APNs for Attachments

support.apple.com/guide/security/how-imessage-sends-and-receives-messages-sec70e68c949/web

Small follow-up point re: my post this week on iMessage’s delivery architecture being built atop the Apple Push Notification service: APNs can only relay messages up to 4 or 16 KB in size, depending on the iOS or iPadOS version. If the message text is too long or if an a...

Scripting News Valid

Breakthrough realization

In the world of WordLand and FeedLand I can create my own API for my own client. No more living with all the things the Twitter and Bluesky API designers left out or made fragile, or straight out broke. If there's a missing endpoint, I have a talk with the service devs (ie me), they listen and understand, and in an hour or so there's a new freaking endpoint. This is how we did it in the early days, I had all three components needed to move publishing forward: Manila, my.userland.com and Scripting News. Well folks we're back in business again. Enough for a rebooted writer's web. As they say, still diggin! :-)

Scripting News Valid

The NYT should have started their own Twitter, with exclusive access by people who are quoted in the NYT, so there would have been a connection between the pub, its rep, more inclusive than the masthead, but still fairly exclusive, in the way of the NYT. I'm not being funny or sarcasting, I mean it. They already had a mechanism for deciding who matters. And the software they used could have been employed by all the other pubs, and anyone else. What I'm describing is the alternate reality where the Twitter founders followed the WordPress business model. They might not be worth billions, but they certainly would have far more money than one person can use. And I don't think they could be happier with the way it actually turned out.

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

OpenAI Releases GPT-5.2

openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-2/

OpenAI:

In ChatGPT, GPT‑5.2 Instant, Thinking, and Pro will begin rolling out today, starting with paid plans. In the API, they are available now to all developers.

Overall, GPT‑5.2 brings significant improvements in general intelligence, long-context understanding, agentic tool-calling, and vision — making it better at executing complex, real-world tasks end-to-end than any previous model.

5.1 was released just one month ago, but 5.2 delivers a slew of measurable improvements across the board. Where 5.1 was seemingly more about the feel of responses, the personality, 5.2 was clearly focused on tangible and benchmarkable gains.

 ★ 

Scripting News Valid

Without much of a spoiler, this end of this week's Pluribus made me both emotional and aroused at the same time. People complain because after the first two or three episodes they thought it was going to be an adventure, like Last of Us or Lost, but it turned out to, at least for now, be more thoughtful and emotional, and sexy.

Scripting News Valid

I wonder if the VCs would fund an entirely fictitious implementation of Twitter with AI of course. All the other people can be exactly the kind of people who make you feel good. On "Your Own Twitter," or perhaps "TWTR 4 U" you'd have the most followers of anyone. Elon Musk would kiss your ass. You could change reality at will, have Trump removed from office and watch the MAGAs wail in pain. You could say absolutely whatever you like and never be cancelled. Don't laugh, I bet this happens.

blog - aows Valid
• Adrian Vila

Curls in the sky, VII

Oregon, October 2025.

From the video I couldn't believe what I found.

Scripting News Valid

The real reason the Dems lost in 2024 is they ran the most inept campaign in history. You could argue about who was to blame, but that is, net-net what happened. They were so bad they made Trump look better! And that is hard to do. :-)

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

Trump’s Dogshit White House Signage Typography

yahoo.com/news/articles/white-house-just-revealed-another-210003798.html

Before anyone starts patting the Trump administration on its back for one good typographic decision, take a gander at the hard-to-believe-this-is-real new signage at (and alas, on) the White House. This is the sort of signage that typically spells “Business Center” across from the check-in desk at a Courtyard Marriott. The Biden State Department replacing Times New Roman with Calibri was a typographic misdemeanor. Festooning the White House with signage set in gold-plated Shelley Script ought to land Trump in The Hague.

(The idea that the Oval Office ought to be explicitly labeled “The Oval Office” — whatever the typeface or signage style — brings to mind this classic Far Side cartoon, which I think aptly illustrates the president’s mental faculties.)

 ★ 

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

‘Those Fonts Are Favored Only by the Apathetic and Sloppy’

practicaltypography.com/typography-in-ten-minutes.html

The fifth of five rules in Matthew Butterick’s “Typography in Ten Minutes”:

And finally, font choice. The fastest, easiest, and most visible improvement you can make to your typography is to ignore the fonts already loaded on your computer (known as system fonts) and the free fonts that inundate the internet. Instead, buy a professional font (like those found in font recommendations). A professional font gives you the benefit of a professional designer’s skills without having to hire one.

If that’s impossible, you can still make good typography with system fonts. But choose wisely. And never choose Times New Roman or Arial, as those fonts are favored only by the apathetic and sloppy. Not by typographers. Not by you.

(Via Antonio Cavedoni.)

 ★ 

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

★ The Full Text of Marco Rubio’s Directive on State Department Typography, Re-Establishing Times New Roman

Good on Rubio for rescinding a bad decision, and even better for doing so with a fair and informative explanation.