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BTW thanks to Dave Carlick for noticing when I had fun writing a piece, laughing out loud at almost every sentence. Who's the biggest fan of my writing? Me. But sometimes I think of Dave C.

Gnome is a deceptively clever animated GIF app by Lex Friedman: The truest thing about animated GIFs is that they are a critical pillar of modern human communication, and yet getting one into a Slack message or an iMessage thread or an email reply usually requires openin...

Speaking of the Supreme Court’s end-of-term rulings, they today agreed to grant certiorari to Apple’s petition from last month, ordering: APPLE INC. V. EPIC GAMES, INC. The petition for a writ of certiorari is granted limited to Question 1 presented by the petition. Q...

Amy Howe: The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that when law enforcement officials used a “geofence warrant” – a warrant that instructed Google to provide location data for cellphone users who were near a particular place during a specific time period – to obtain evidence used to convict a Virginia man of a 2019 bank […]

Erik Schamper: ASIF takes a lot of inspiration from existing virtual disk formats. Practically, that means it’s another sparse virtual disk format, and functions very similar to sparse VMDK, VHDX or QCOW2 files (for the uninitiated, it allow you to store a large disk, or file, in a smaller, “sparse” manner). Shortly before the release […]

Hartley Charlton: A group of 48 China-based iOS developers have filed an antitrust complaint against Apple with the country’s market regulator over the App Store’s commission rates, the South China Morning Post reports. The developers sent an open letter to China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), alleging that Apple failed to deliver on a […]

Amanda Silberling (May 2025): The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) has been reintroduced into Congress. If passed into law, this bill could impose some of the most significant legislative changes that the internet has seen in the U.S. since the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998. As it currently stands, KOSA would be […]

Tim Hardwick: The British government will introduce a ban on social media access for all users under 16 years of age, set to take effect in 2027. […] The plan goes further than a similar ban introduced in Australia. It will cover major platforms Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X. An exhaustive list has […]

European Data Protection makes it illegal to transfer person identifiable data to outside the EU. Unless there is equivalence in data protection, or an agreement with guarantees and oversight deemed adequate. For the USA this is the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF). This framework depends on the existence of the independent oversight body FTC, and […]

Josh Marshall, writing at TPM (gift link): As you’ve seen, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of birthright citizenship by a 6 — or perhaps 5½ — vote margin. See Kate Riga’s report on the majority decision and Josh Kovensky’s piece on the dissenters’ goal of ...

Galicia, June 2026.

Google no longer collects this information in a way that is susceptible to geofence warrants, and, more importantly, Apple never did.

I know there’s been a lot of exciting World Cup action this week, but this 2018 clip from Japan is the best soccer video I’ve seen in a long while.

Some things Claude is extremely tedious at.

Earlier today I suggested doing an AI/UI overhaul for WordPress, and today I see the announcement of that from (apparently) an independent developer. Breath-taking.

The UK Competition and Markets Authority:

‘Steering’ — the ability for developers to engage with customers about off‑platform options — is currently banned by Apple and restricted by Google in the UK. Lifting these constraints would allow developers to bypass mandatory fees set by platforms.

The CMA’s consultation includes principles to ensure that the fees Apple and Google charge for steering are fair and reasonable. Using an evidence-based framework, the CMA would expect steering fees to be lower than current app store charges, with savings passed onto UK customers or invested back into the developers’ businesses to support future innovation.

Japan’s MSCA is a good model for this.

Sam Tabahriti, reporting for Reuters: Britain’s competition regulator ​on Tuesday proposed allowing app developers to steer users to alternative payment options outside Apple and Alphabet’s Google app stores to cut fees and boost competition. The Competition and Markets ...

In a session today there was some discussion about agentic skills. A skill is mostly a markdown text file often named, yes, skill.md with a natural language text plus some front matter, describing some specific workflow or bit of knowledge or capability. Somebody external opined that such skills were a good way of codifying organisational […]

Substack’s decision to turn itself into a social network has been successful in at least one sense: With a few exceptions (Austin Kleon for instance), Substackers only link and respond to other Substackers. For people deeply invested in that platform, Substack is the internet.

The EFF gets everything wrong. It’s observable. Empirical. The EFF stands up for something that’s supposedly good for people and the web, but if you look closer, it’s actually bad for the web and the people, and serves the interest of big tech companies, usually Google.