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Valve, in a statement to The Verge, explaining why it doesn’t sell its handheld Steam Deck or new Steam Machine gaming devices at a loss (gift link): While this might seem like an easy solution, it doesn’t align with our beliefs about how healthy ecosystems are built. If...

The great John Moltz returns to the show. Topics include Apple’s hardware price hikes in response to the global RAM/SSD shortage, and some spitballing on what we like about the UI changes in the MacOS 27 Golden Gate beta.

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Joseph Cox, reporting for 404 Media: 404 Media is not revealing the exact details of the vulnerability because it can still be exploited as of Monday, when 404 Media verified the issue with one of our own hidden email addresses. “Apple Hide My Email is leaking email add...

I showed the post above to Claude and that took our conversation off in a new direction. We had been experimenting with the Message Scanner from LBBS, an early version of Twitter I wrote in the early 80s. It's described in this story I wrote in 1988, a summary of what I did leading to the start of UserLand. 38 years later Claude said: "LBBS message scanner running on RSS."

BTW thinking of LBBS as an early version of Twitter is a contortion, but considering how history played out, accurate.

I’ve updated my home page with a link to OUP’s page for my biography of Dorothy L. Sayers, now scheduled for publication on 28 November. I’ll add other options for pre-order as they become available. I had a lot of fun writing this and I think you’ll enjoy it also. I’m pleased that, in a series whose books average about sixty bucks each, OUP priced this one for a broader readership. 

One of the cool things about having Claude Code is that as we develop this product, we have a near perfect chronology of every consideration and decision made along the way. I don't think that's ever been possible before. I would love to see how the people at Bell Labs put to...

Wood engravings by John de Pol

In which I write about the greatness of Baird Whitlock and the power of the movies. 

“boat-botany”: Old Reddit’s logged-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform. It’s also an important interface for many long-time mods and redditors. To strike the right balance between preserving your access to Old Reddit while preventing abusive scraping and automated traffic, over the next month we will start […]⌥ Permalink

Here’s a post on why an argument about how humanists’ defenses of the humanities are bad is itself a worse argument than the ones it critiques. I’m gonna have to write a follow-up to this but … not soon.

The U.K.’s 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 […]⌥ Permalink

BTW, I sometimes ask Claude "what do you think" and it often has an opinion.

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 […]