FeedCity

Ken Walters (via Hacker News): The bottom edge of the MacBook is very sharp. Indeed, the industrial designers at Apple chose an aluminum unibody partly for the fact that it can handle such a geometry. But, it is uncomfortable on my wrists, and I believe strongly in customizing one's tools, so I filed it off. […]

Tey Bannerman (Hacker News): A few weeks ago, I tried to explain to someone what Microsoft Copilot is. I couldn’t… because the name ‘Copilot’ now refers to at least 75 different things. Apps, features, platforms, a keyboard key, an entire category of laptops - and a tool for building more Copilots. All named ‘Copilot’. Zac […]

Charlie Sorrel: Apple’s MacBooks haven’t always been monolithic, barely repairable slabs of aluminum, glass, and glue. They used to be almost delightful in their repairable features, from their batteries to their Wi-Fi cards. Powerbooks, iBooks, and especially early MacBooks showed what happens when Apple applies its design skills directly to repairability and maintenance, instead of […]

Why your AI assistant is suddenly selling to you:

Chatbots are employed every day as teachers, counsellors, coders and escorts. Now they are taking on another role: salesmen. Advertisements are popping up ever more frequently in users’ conversations with large language models, punctuating chats with promotions. Consumers’ search queries, editing sessions and even intimate moments are increasingly at risk of interruption by sponsored messages. 

Who could possibly have predicted this??? 

Malick, Emerson, the Sphinx.

Robin Sloan:

I believe the notebook provides a basically comprehensive model for information technology:

• Easy to manufacture anywhere on Earth
• Available in many configurations, from cheap to luxe
• Never runs out of power
• Never surprises you with an OS update
• Totally flexible interface: becomes whatever you imagine
• Totally private … yet never locks you out for lack of a password
• Can be shared when needed: as easy as tearing out a page
• Durable and reliable
• Data is sensibly partitioned: loss of a notebook is annoying, not life-ruining
• Compostable 😌

I know some of those sound a bit silly, even glib, but I think they’re all very serious, even the last one. I have purchased and trashed enough e-readers!! I don’t want any more plastic confections. I don’t want any more accounts. 

I am so enjoying Robin’s metamorphoses. 

I asked ChatGPT if the term glass palace had been used to talk about pre-PC computer data centers. Yes.

I'm creating new software in ways I never would have conceived of last year. I see solutions to one of the most significant code management problems we used to have, our inability to remember how our code works unless the app is very small and they never seem to be. This is ...

Marc Malkin, Variety:

Jessica Chastain says Apple TV is finally going to release her political thriller series “The Savant.” [...]

“Before it was like, ‘I don’t know if we’re going to see it,’ but now I can say, ‘We’re going to see it,’” Chastain told me exclusively on Saturday at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony in Santa Monica.

As for when, sources tell me that Apple is planning for a July release.

Previously, re: The Savant’s limbo release date.

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Every AI agent demo looks magical, but most hit a wall in enterprise deployment. It’s not model quality or latency. It’s authorization. Authentication proves an agent’s identity. Authorization defines its blast radius.

The winners in enterprise AI won’t have the most features. They’ll be the ones enterprises can safely trust. Learn how WorkOS FGA scopes that blast radius with resource-level permissions, and read their deep dive for more.

You Can’t Game Your Way to a Real Education - The New York Times:

Besides, so the thinking goes, kids today are digital natives. Because they’ve grown up around screens, their brains must be fundamentally different from those of older generations. Teachers need to “meet them where they are” by catering to shorter attention spans and swapping books for multimedia lessons. The more that math and language assignments resemble a video game, the more students will learn.

Every step in this argument is wrong.

A format like RSS needs to be loved.

I'm doing a programming project with Claude and it's great, like a puzzle, finding out what works for me and building something I normally wouldn't have time to maintain, but -- Claude has nothing but time for stuff like that. I'm building it to pass off, a common code structure that we both understand and I know how to evolve because I design my code for evolution. And it's going well. But then I realized it's the same Claude I ask general questions of so I tried this. "I would love to pass off wpIdentity to an open source development organization. The ideal would be the WordPress's community. Is there any precedent for this, one community acquiring a new product?" You can try typing that prompt in yourself and see what you get. One thing I learned is that the Apache Foundation was set up for this. And Claude is pretty firm that WordPress is not set up for that.

A few months ago, some guys from Netscape came out with a way to get AI to pay called Really Simple Licensing or RSL. I was really put off by the way they took the name that everyone knows came from me with no help from anyone. Maybe I could have done something about it, in...

Max Seelemann: The parameters are documented, but the optimal combination is not. Here’s what I learned:kCGImageSourceCreateThumbnailFromImageAlways: While this seems optional for correct functionality, without it there will be error logged for images that might include embedded thumbnails (like JPEG or HEIC), but don’t. There’s a FromImageIfAbsent variant, but it did not silence these logs in […]

Caleb Jacobs (via Hacker News): While the agricultural manufacturing giant pointed out in a statement that this is no admission of wrongdoing, it agreed to pay $99 million into a fund for farms and individuals who participated in a class action lawsuit. Specifically, that money is available to those involved who paid John Deere’s authorized […]

Tim Hardwick (Hacker News): Amazon and Globalstar have announced a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire the satellite operator. […] Alongside the acquisition, Amazon and Apple have signed a separate agreement for Amazon’s Leo satellite network to power existing iPhone and Apple Watch satellite features, including Emergency SOS, Messages via satellite, Find My, […]

OpenAI (Hacker News): Codex can now operate your computer alongside you, work with more of the tools and apps you use everyday, generate images, remember your preferences, learn from previous actions, and take on ongoing and repeatable work. The Codex app also now includes deeper support for developer workflows, like reviewing PRs, viewing multiple files […]

Perplexity: Personal Computer brings the multi-model orchestration of Computer to your machine. It can work across your local files, native applications, connectors, and the web to complete complex and even continuous workflows. Personal Computer makes Perplexity Computer a more personal orchestrator, elegantly hybridizing the local and server environments for maximum security and productivity. Juli Clover: […]

Apple (xip, downloads): Fixed crash for MetricKit apps built with Xcode 26.4 due to missing symbols when running on iOS, macOS, and visionOS versions below 26.4. […] Fixed stack-allocation bugs in async functions that caused “freed pointer was not the last allocation” crashes, particularly in swift_asyncLet_finish. These long-standing issues became more frequent in Swift 6.2 […]