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Scripting News Valid

An idea I read in this blog post is one I hadn't considered, is super important. AI is going to be part of programming forever. There's no way to go back. This has made StackExchange obsolete, because it basically aggregates everything that was there, and it was worth it beca...

Scripting News Valid

DNS fix: pagepark.scripting.com now redirects to the GitHub repo for PagePark. Somehow I lost the pagepark.io domain, but I don't really want it, so it's kind of ok. But there are some broken links. I recall there was a nice site with menus and stuff that was built from the GitHub repo but archive.org isn't able to find it for some reason. Moral of the story, don't buy so many domain names thinking you're really clever. But of course I still do. Someday they'll all be gone, of course. Will they have a ceremony for the last domain to be turned off, kind of like the last Blockbuster was. Does anyone remember Blockbuster.

Scripting News Valid

Toby Ziegler: "They'll like us when we win."

Scripting News Valid

Interesting thread between Jake and Ted Howard about Frontier.

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

Court Filing Claims Zuckerberg Blocked Curbs at Meta on Sex-Talking Chatbots for Minors

reuters.com/legal/government/meta-ceo-zuckerberg-blocked-curbs-sex-talking-chatbots-minors-court-filing-2026-01-27/

Jeff Horwitz, reporting for Reuters: Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg approved allowing minors to access AI chatbot companions that safety staffers warned were capable of sexual interactions, according to internal Meta documents filed in a New Mexico state court case...

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

‘The Secret Fear of the Morally Depraved’

theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/the-neighbors-defending-minnesota-from-ice/685769/?gift=Je3D9AQS-C17lUTOnl2W8L893jn-xkg4gA0ahaD_Ltw

Adam Serwer, reporting from the streets of Minneapolis for The Atlantic, “Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong” (gift link):

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive — because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

 ★ 

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

‘A CEO, Captured’

om.co/2026/01/27/a-ceo-captured/

Om Malik:

Cook is not stupid. He is not evil. He is trapped. The iron clasp of market expectations has turned him into what he never meant to be: a man who goes to parties at the White House while nurses die.

In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Roy Bland captures a cynical, post-ideological, corrupt English society: “You scratch my conscience; I’ll drive your Jag.” You could say the same of today’s Silicon Valley. It used to believe it could change the world. Now it just hopes the world won’t change its stock price.

Amy Jane Gruber:

If I ever meet Tim Cook I’m going to ask him if Mike Tyson enjoyed the movie.

 ★ 

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

‘Aside From That, Mr. Cook, What Did You Think of the Movie?’

spyglass.org/tim-cook-captured/

MG Siegler:

Tim Cook is captured. There is simply no other explanation for his actions over the past year or so. But it perhaps culminated this weekend when Cook went to a special private showing of the documentary Melania at the White House. Yes, that Melania. That in and of itself would have probably been fine. I mean, it’s potentially problematic for a host of reasons that I’ll get to, but such is our world right now. Then one shot — a gunshot — turned attending that movie screening into a statement...

While Cook was enjoying his popcorn and champagne with the likes of Mike Tyson, Tony Robbins, and other “VIPs”, it was complete and utter chaos on the streets of Minnesota. Just hours earlier, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was shot and killed by ICE agents. Maybe, just maybe, postpone the movie premiere?

 ★ 

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

‘Whatever’

nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-addresses-health-hand-bruise-stroke-mri-greenland.html

Ben Terris, writing for New York Magazine:

Fred Trump died in 1999 at age 93. He had, Trump said, a “heart that couldn’t be stopped” with almost no health conditions to speak of throughout his long life. “He had one problem,” Trump said. “At a certain age, about 86, 87, he started getting, what do they call it?” He pointed to his forehead and looked to his press secretary for the word that escaped him.

“Alzheimer’s,” Leavitt said.

“Like an Alzheimer’s thing,” Trump said. “Well, I don’t have it.”

“Is it something you think about at all?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think about it at all. You know why?” he said. “Because whatever it is, my attitude is whatever.”

 ★ 

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

Clawdbot Is Now Moltbot

molt.bot/

From the footer on the project’s website:

Moltbot was formerly known as Clawdbot. Independent project, not affiliated with Anthropic.

Makes sense, to be honest, that Anthropic would object to naming it a homonym for Claude.

One additional followup to my post the other day. In his terrific introduction to ClawdMoltbot, Federico Viticci wrote:

I’ve been playing around with Clawdbot so much, I’ve burned through 180 million tokens on the Anthropic API (yikes), and I’ve had fewer and fewer conversations with the “regular” Claude and ChatGPT apps in the process.

Those tokens aren’t free. I asked Viticci just how much “yikes” cost, and he said around US$560 — using way more input than output tokens.

 ★ 

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

iOS 26.2.1

Juli Clover (release notes, no security, no enterprise, no developer): iOS 26.2.1 adds support for the next-generation AirTag that Apple introduced today. […] The update also includes unspecified bug fixes, according to Apple’s release notes. Juli Clover: The iOS 26.2.1 update that Apple released today further addresses an issue preventing some older mobile phones from […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

watchOS 26.2.1

Juli Clover (no release notes, no security, no developer): Today’s update enables Precision Finding for the new AirTag 2 on the Apple Watch Series 9 and later and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and later. Prior to now, Precision Finding for the AirTag has been limited to the iPhone. It is not yet clear if […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

Swift Pitch: Borrowing Sequence

Ben Cohen: A sequence provides access to its elements through an Iterator, and an iterator’s next() operation returns an Element?. For a sequence of noncopyable elements, this operation could only be implemented by consuming the elements of the iterated sequence, with the for loop taking ownership of the elements individually. While consuming iteration is sometimes […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

curl Removes Bug Bounties

Jan Tångring (Hacker News): “AI slop and bad reports in general have been increasing even more lately, so we have to try to brake the flood in order not to drown”, says cURL maintainer Daniel Stenberg to Swedish electronics industry news site etn.se. Therefore, cURL is terminating the bounty payouts as of the end of […]

Scripting News Valid

I was looking at some of the first posts in in 1998 in discuss.userland.com and came across this post that talked about my decision to stop doing the Mail Pages, now that we had the discussion group.

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

★ The Names They Call Themselves

*Fascist* and *Nazi* weren’t slurs that were applied to the Italians and Germans by their political or military opponents. That’s what they called themselves. The job won’t be done, this era of madness will not end, until we make *the names Trump’s regime calls themselves* universally acknowledged slurs.

On my Om Valid
• Om Malik

A CEO, Captured. 

I keep thinking about a line Lawrence Sanders wrote: a character asks whether money makes the world go round. The reply: “I do not believe it is money itself. After all, that is just metal and paper. No, it is the power money confers that makes the world go ’round.” Power. Comfort. A seat at the table. Or, in this case, …

Scripting News Valid

A lot of online discourse is us vs them. If you find yourself doing that, that's a sure sign that you're not working on the web.

Scripting News Valid

If you make a product for discourse, yet your own product can't be used for discourse because of some major limit, then you have a feature to add, and get busy. No product does everything everyone wants, but when there's a consensus among users, then you have something worth doing.

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

What It’s Like to Get Undressed by Grok

rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/grok-sexualized-image-xai-elon-musk-women-1235501436/

Ella Chakarian, writing for Rolling Stone (News+): On a recent Saturday afternoon, Kendall Mayes was mindlessly scrolling on X when she noticed an unsettling trend surface on her feed. Users were prompting Grok, the platform’s built-in AI feature, to “nudify” women’s ima...