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Text • John Gruber

The Youth AI Safety Institute Has Margrethe Vestager’s Backing

euronews.com/next/2026/05/12/margrethe-vestager-backs-new-ai-safety-institute-for-children-after-decade-regulating-big-

Una Hajdari, reporting for Euronews: A new independent institute dedicated to making artificial intelligence safer for children will beformally [sic] presented at the Danish Parliament on Tuesday, with former European Commission executive vice-president Margrethe Vestage...

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Currently listening: The Danish String Quartet, Keel Road. Healing music. ♫ 

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Text • John Gruber

Aided by Mythos Preview, Researchers Announce MacOS Kernel Exploit Circumventing M5 Memory Integrity Enforcement

blog.calif.io/p/first-public-kernel-memory-corruption

Calif, a security research team, on their blog: Many security experts consider Apple devices to be the most secure consumer platform. The latest flagship example is MIE (Memory Integrity Enforcement), Apple’s hardware-assisted memory safety system built around ARM’s MTE ...

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Speaking of being ahead of the curve: there’s a new book on what’s wrong with the whole “cultural Marxism” discourse, but I showed what’s wrong with it in this 2018 blog post. 

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in Breaking Bread with the Dead I have a riff on R. A. Lafferty’s 1965 story “Slow Tuesday Night” — which, in light of this report by Charlie Warzel puts me ahead of the curve and puts Lafferty waaaaaay ahead of the curve.

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Text • John Gruber

Wired on the Dark Mood Inside Meta

wired.com/story/meta-layoffs-bad-vibes-mark-zuckerberg-ai/

Paresh Dave, Lauren Goode, Steven Levy, and Zoë Schiffer, reporting for Wired (News+ link): As Meta employees brace for layoffs next Wednesday, May 20, many say the vibes are horrifically, historically low. “Everyone is unhappy; the only people who are not unhappy are, l...

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I have Claude Code hooked up to Chrome. It's crawling around inside the DOM of the running system, like humans do in a debugger. It's a bit like Fantastic Voyage if you've ever seen it. I've been waiting for this moment. Now we can do some really nice UI work.

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Text • John Gruber

Geoffrey Fowler and the Launch of the Youth AI Safety Institute

geoffreyfowler.substack.com/p/what-is-ai-doing-to-our-kids-im-going

Geoffrey Fowler, on his blog, which, alas, he calls “a Substack”: I’m joining the Youth AI Safety Institute as its first new employee. It’s a research and testing organization launching today under the umbrella of children’s nonprofit Common Sense Media. Backed by a $20 ...

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Text • Adrian Vila

The Castle, IX

Galicia, May 2026.

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Text • John Gruber

Tim Cook Is in Trump’s Executive Entourage for China Summit

the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/elon-musk-tim-cook-trump-china-tech-ceo-b2975568.html

Owen Scott, reporting for The Independent:

The list of tech and financial industry titans joining the commander-in-chief during his summit with China’s president Xi Jinping includes Elon Musk, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, and Apple CEO Tim Cook. [...]

Trump earlier confirmed a number of high-profile attendees in a lengthy post on Truth Social, albeit referring to Cook as “Tim Apple” in the process.

While he’s in such a jocular nickname-y mood, he should drop a reference to Winnie the Pooh into some of these posts on his blog.

 ★ 

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Text • John Gruber

Google Announces Its Chromebook Successor: The Googlebook

theverge.com/tech/928479/google-googlebook-laptops-android-tease-aluminium-chromebook?view_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpZCI6IjNVSjlWdlZESmgiLCJwIjoiL3RlY2gvOTI4NDc5L2dvb2dsZS1nb29nbGVib29rLWxhcHRvcHMtYW5kcm9pZC10ZWFzZS1hbHVtaW5pdW0tY2hyb21lYm9vayIsImV4cCI6MTc3OTIxNjg2NiwiaWF0IjoxNzc4Nzg0ODY2fQ.a74WT34THV0Ih1pGO7NH4daq39ytQXdhO4EAgE6HCeI

Antonio G. Di Benedetto, reporting for The Verge (gift link): Google is announcing a new line of laptops coming in the fall called Googlebooks. Details are sparse for now, as the tease is just a small part of various Android announcements during Google’s Android Show. Bu...

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Text • John Gruber

Gurman Reports that OpenAI Is Unhappy With Apple Deal

bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-14/openai-apple-partnership-frays-setting-up-possible-legal-fight?srnd=undefined&embedded-checkout=true

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg under the headline, “Apple-OpenAI Alliance Frays, Setting Up Possible Legal Fight”: OpenAI lawyers are actively working with an outside legal firm on a range of options that could be formally executed in the near future, said the peop...

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Read "Genre glitches and unexpected promotional phrases as a sign of AI writing"

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.

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Text • Ton Zijlstra

A Short Walk

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 […]

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Text • John Gruber

The Trump T1 Phone Starts Shipping This Week, Supposedly

theverge.com/gadgets/929471/trump-mobile-t1-phone-shipping-this-week

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 ...

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Text • John Gruber

Klack

tryklack.com/

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.

 ★ 

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Text • John Gruber

New Driver for the Old Griffin PowerMate

github.com/jameslockman/Griffin-PowerMate-Driver

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.)

 ★ 

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

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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.

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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.