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Read: “Genre glitches and unexpected promotional phrases as a sign of AI writing”. Jill Walker Rettberg in her blog. Published May 13, 2026. A genre glitch is a characteristic of LLM-assisted writing where the text suddenly switches genre, typically inserting a short promotional phrase full of sensory details into an informational text. Posted: May 14, 2026 at 6:39 PM UTC. Tagged: artificial intelligence.

As I mentioned in my previous post The Long Walk, I struggle to get out of the house and away from my laptop to take short walks in the neighbourhood during the day. We live at the northern edge of Amersfoort, and across the small Laak river in easy walking distance there’s a polder at […]

Dominic Preston, at The Verge: Trump Mobile CEO Pat O’Brien first confirmed the release plans to USA Today, telling the outlet that all preorders will be fulfilled within the next few weeks. The company later confirmed the news on its social media accounts, using a very ...

Well, this is ridiculous. Klack is a $5 Mac utility by Henrik Ruscon that simulates mechanical keyboard clacking while you type. Absurd. My keyboard makes its own beautiful sounds as I type.

So of course I went to buy a copy immediately, because I love an absurd utility, that serves no purpose other than fun, crafted with exquisite attention to detail. But when I did, the Mac App Store informed me that a member of my family sharing group had already purchased it. (I presume that was my son, not my wife.)

Update: From a DF reader who shall remain nameless:

I bought Klack out of spite. One of my colleagues brought a mechanical keyboard to use in an open office space and I figured it’d be funny to troll him by setting my Mac system volume to 10 and letting it rip.

James Lockman:

This small driver enables the Griffin PowerMate, a nifty little device from days gone by. What does the PowerMate do? It is a knob that you can twist or that you can press. That’s it. It also has a blue LED in the base that can change intensity based on what you’re doing.

When it was released, it was intended to assist video and audio production by adding a scrollable knob to your desktop. Of course, modern controllers exist that offer many more literal bells and whistles, but there is something... quaint... about this early device.

I never bought a PowerMate but I was always on the cusp. I didn’t have a need for it all but it just seemed cool. What a fun idea to create a modern driver. (Lockman credits Cursor Agent as a co-contributor, so this probably wouldn’t have happened if not for AI coding.)

The Unofficial Angus Fan Club has been vocal lately, so here you go, guys.

Every social web needs avatars. In an RSS 2.0 feed look for the channel-level image element. It's how they do it in WordPress.

This is the first day since the NBA playoffs started that there is no scheduled game. I think that's why today feels so weird.

For some reason every day feels like Saturday. I don't know why.

If you happen to see me this week and I am muttering to myself or laughing maniacally, this is why.

Nicholas Christakis:

Halfway through one of my lectures [at the Kyiv School of Economics], the air-raid siren went off. We relocated to this old Soviet-era building and went two or three stories underground into a bomb shelter with huge blast doors. We continued the class. And the students were beaming. It lifted me up to see their enthusiasm, their commitment. It also reinforced something very deep about our common humanity, which is that we humans like to learn, even in a time of war.

I also couldn’t help but notice that these students had a very different understanding of safety than American students. When American students want a safe space, it’s because they don’t want to hear threatening ideas. For Ukrainian students, safety means learning without bombs falling. 

Ken Case: Redesigning and rebuilding all of our toolbars, sidebars, and inspectors for Liquid Glass gave us a great opportunity to cross-pollinate features, making some familiar platform-exclusive features available across all platforms for the first time. And it was also easier than ever to build new features that work in consistent ways across those platforms. […]

Galicia, May 2026.

Typesetting Races before the Age of Linotype:

On the afternoon of Saturday, February 19, 1870, a young compositor named George Arensberg astonished the printing world when he achieved a feat few thought possible: setting more than two thousand “ems” of solid minion type in a single hour (about 760 words, or 13 words a minute).

My son is my biggest fan. 

Groundhog Day, but for book publishing.

‘The digital colonization of flyover states’: how datacenters are tearing small-town America apart. We’re dealing with our own version of the situation here in the Waco area. The first common thread is the contempt the techbros have for any resistance. They make no attempt to win hearts and minds; they just try to trample everyone in their path. The second common thread is their ceaseless lying about water use: a new data center about 30 miles from me denies that it will be using any water from Lake Whitney. It is, we are told, pure coincidence that the data center happens to be located on the lakeshore. 

Our Monterey oak is 10 years old — seems like it was a baby just yesterday.

Apple (xip, downloads): Xcode 26.5 includes Swift 6.3 and SDKs for iOS 26.5, iPadOS 26.5, tvOS 26.5, macOS 26.5, and visionOS 26.5. Xcode 26.5 supports on-device debugging in iOS 15 and later, tvOS 15 and later, watchOS 8 and later, and visionOS. Xcode 26.5 requires a Mac running macOS Tahoe 26.2 or later. […] Messages […]

macOS 15.7.7 (security, full installer): This update provides important security fixes and is recommended for all users. macOS 14.8.7 (security, full installer): This update provides important security fixes and is recommended for all users. Howard Oakley. I don’t know what happened to 15.7.6 or 14.8.6, but they seem to have been skipped. Jesse Squires: I […]