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From Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer:

Shortly before the American Revolution … the Anglican Society for the Propagation of Gospel sent missionaries to Massachusetts for the conversion of the “heathen.” They built one of their missions not on the frontier but across the street from Harvard College and labored to convert the sons of Congregational New England. The head of this Anglican organization, Bishop Thomas Seeker, made no secret of his contempt for the colonists, whom he collectively characterized in 1741 as “wicked, and dissolute and brutal in every respect.”

An excellent idea whose time has come again.

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The Washington Post editorial board yesterday (News+ link), “Why Europe Won’t Have the New Siri”: Brussels insists the decision is “Apple’s and Apple’s only” and that nothing in its flagship Digital Markets Act forbids the launch. That’s technically true and wholly besid...

Read: “Anthropic's Safety Superpower”. Ben Thompson in Stratechery. Published June 15, 2026. Here’s the thing about these safety justifications: I think they work because, to Anthropic, they aren’t justifications. The company really believes that they are the only ones...

Read: “Choosing to Stay Human”. Ethan Mollick in One Useful Thing. Published May 26, 2026. To be clear, I am cool with a lot of cognitive surrender. I don’t remember phone numbers anymore because my phone does that for me. I am happy my kids didn’t need to learn cursiv...

Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica: What’s striking about the Intel Mac era is that Apple switched to and away from Intel chips for basically the same reason: It was looking for a more compelling processor roadmap and the best possible performance-per-Watt for its chips. When Intel was executing well—and during the decade between the mid-00s and […]⌥ Permalink

Apple’s WebKit team has lots of news about what to expect in Safari 27, and maybe the best is customizable Select: Customizable select is coming to Safari 27. With this technology, developers can fully control the appearance of <select> elements — custom arrows, option layouts, color swatches, icons, full visual styling — without the need […]⌥ Permalink

If Claude were human it would learn from you even if they didn't record what it learned in a notebook, two or three times and they would remember. Not so with Claude. If it isn't written down it will not remember it. Its mind doesn't have memory. It remembers things by writing them in a markdown file. It's like the movie Memento, where the main character tatoos the info he needs on his body. And then proceeds to misunderstand it. Claude is just like that.

It’s been a year since I retired — my last working day was June 6, 2025 — and I like being able to say that I’ve spent the year adding nothing, not one penny, to shareholder value. 🌴 * * * My hope for retirement was to get a lot of work done on NetNewsWire. A year ago it ...

Galicia, June 2026.

Ryan Whitham, writing for Ars Technica back in April: European regulators are proposing several broad changes to the way AI tools operate on Android phones. Some of this is straightforward, like allowing third-party AI tools to be invoked system-wide via hot words or but...

Edward Mendelson:  Oxford reprinted the anthology in hard covers until the mid-1960s, then issued it in paperback in 1973, a few weeks before Auden's death, under the title W.H. Auden's Oxford Book of Light Verse, as if to signal that it was more of a personal selectio...

Paris Marx, with a thoughtful take on the recently announced Bill C-34, the “Safe Social Media Act”: The media focused on the higher age limit — it’s been happening in other parts of the world and is easier for people not well-versed in tech policy to understand, including many journalists — but it was not […]⌥ Permalink

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week to promote Auth.md, their new open protocol for AI agent registration.

Sign-up forms were built for humans in browsers, so how do AI agents programmatically register with services? That’s the question Auth.md aims to answer. By exposing a single, machine-readable Markdown file at your service root, AI agents can dynamically discover your OAuth Protected Resource Metadata, parse required scopes, and authenticate seamlessly.

Markdown, baby. Who’d have thunk it?

With native support in WorkOS AuthKit, you can now implement this protocol out of the box, giving AI tools a standardized, secure way to log into your application. Read the Auth.md docs, and watch its on-stage introduction at the MCP Night: Agent Night keynote.

Ben Thompson, in his weekly free column at Stratechery: On one hand, I actually don’t begrudge Anthropic not wanting to help its competitors; on the other hand, what should be blisteringly clear is that Anthropic does not think that anyone else other than them should eve...

Currently reading: Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer 📚

Just now, to Claude: "amazing how we get lost in the weeds, that's why you have cut way down on the verbiage. i am a human -- you can absorb all that info in an instant. my brain does not work that way."

Now that the basketball is over, can we ask why the San Antonio arena played the cartoon music while introducing the Knicks. I was surprised they did it again in Game 5 considering the butt-kicking they got in Game 4

I keep seeing these petulant-to-angry stories in the London sports pages about how vast North America is and how hot — as though ICE had expanded the continent and heated it up to make Europeans uncomfortable. Sorry, but it’s always been this way. North America is more than twice the size of Europe (excluding Russia) and most of it is further south: London’s latitude = that of Calgary, Alberta; Madrid = Chicago; Kansas City = Rome. Miami is at the same latitude as Luxor, Egypt and Dubai. And Calgary, Chicago, and Kansas City are in the midst of an enormous continent with no ocean to moderate temperatures. This is reality.

Incidentally: Waco, where I live, is at the same latitude as Jerusalem. The Lord knoweth His own.