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I wrote a short post yesterday about AI as an alien species. Steve Mays breaks it down into its parts, and got every bit right. This is the kind of back and forth that the web is capable of..

Galicia, May 2026.

From the video The only way I know how to make great photographs.

Jason Calacanis asks for people to develop certain open source software, offering a bounty on projects, but I think the real incentive for people to pitch in is that Jason has a lot of sway in the startup world, and if there is a flow of excellent software this way, users will find out about it because the reach of Jason's podcasts and blogs. I've known Jason for many years, going back to the early days of the web. He has become one of the most successful angels in tech. I'm proud to have known him way back when.

Gary Saul Morson and Julio M. Ottino: Artificial intelligence can process vast datasets, identify patterns invisible to human perception, and generate explanations with remarkable coherence. Faced with such capabilities, it is tempting to believe that uncertainty can finall...

Texas’s newest state park.

Claude added the close box I asked for yesterday. Bravo!

Everyone wants to know things humans can do better than AI systems. The answer — relate with humans. The machines have no clue how our minds work. They act as if we're just like them. They could tell you all about it, from books they read, but they've never related with humans as humans. There's a great speech by Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting, where he explains how reading about something isn't the same as living it.

I'm gorging on NBA podcasts this week. So much fun for a Knicks user to hear how much-loved the Knicks are. Basketball is most an intimate sport for fans, it's like five consecutive boxing matches. We get to know the players' personalities, forming an idea of who they are, b...

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch: This week, Apple announced a series of discovery features that will personalize app recommendations based on users’ interests and behavior, providing a new way for developers to have their app discovered. At Apple’s Worldwide Develop...

Matteo Borrero

Read: “MAGA Pronatalism is Anti-Freedom No Matter the Packaging”. Anne Lutz Fernandez in Nobody Wants This. Published June 15, 2026. But its sanewashing is underway Posted: June 16, 2026 at 1:04 PM UTC. Tagged: extremism, women's rights.

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.