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What gave Tim Cook’s privacy letter heft in 2014 wasn’t just the clarity of its plain language, but the fact that you didn’t have to take his word for it that the ads Apple showed you respected your privacy, because Apple didn’t show you ads in 2014.

Finished reading: Wasteland Warlords 3 by James A. Hunter and Eden Hudson. Published 2024. 141 pages. Started July 9, 2026; completed July 9, 2026. Posted: July 9, 2026 at 7:20 PM UTC. Tagged: fantasy, humor, litRPG, post-apocalyptic.

Finished reading: Wasteland Warlords series, book 2. Wasteland Warlords 2 by James A. Hunter and Eden Hudson. Published 2023. 159 pages. Started July 7, 2026; completed July 8, 2026. Posted: July 9, 2026 at 7:19 PM UTC. Tagged: fantasy, humor, litRPG, post-apocalyptic.

Howard Oakley: Spotlight doesn’t currently appear able to search Time Machine backups reliably, at least not in Sequoia or Tahoe, although this may not be universal. […] If I now step back through my backups to reach one that I know contains that file, I can restore it. But if I type anything into the […]

Tim Hardwick: Apple’s challenge against the EU’s designation of its App Stores and iOS platform as “gatekeepers” was dismissed by Europe’s top court on Wednesday, reports Reuters. […] The company also disputed the classification of iMessage as a number-independent interpersonal communications service, or NIICS, which would subject the app to EU telecoms rules. But the […]

Tomas Kafka: Pressure is now much easier to read. A new Pro trend strip under the chart shows whether pressure is holding steady, rising, or falling. Fast changes stand out with stronger marks and colour, so you can spot a front moving in sooner - useful for hiking, sailing, flying, fishing, or weather-sensitive heads and […]

Back in 2022 I wrote a bit called textcasting. I felt it was so important it deserved its own domain. Textcasting summarized the wrong turn we took when Twitter took over discourse, basically stripping all the features the web needed to be a great writing environment. Textc...

Eli Tan, reporting for The New York Times (gift link): The company’s new A.I. image generator has a surprising twist: It allows people to use images from public Instagram accounts. When Meta unveiled an artificial intelligence image generator called Muse Image on Tuesda...

Freddie on “Our Poptimist Dystopia":

Aesthetic hierarchy of any kind has become the last obscenity, the one judgment we’re no longer permitted to make, because to say that one thing is better than another is to admit that better exists. And if better exists out there, in the world of songs and books and movies, then it exists out here for us too, in the world of our lives, and that way lies the intolerable thought that we might have gone too easy on ourselves. Anti-elitism is the snobbery of those who have decided that the glory of great art is not worth bearing the thought that someone else might have better taste than we do. So we haven’t democratized taste; we abolished it so no one ever has to come in second, so that no one ever must face the implied judgment of other people’s preferences.

Meta: Once complete, our Sturgeon County data center will represent an investment of more than CAD $13 billion. We anticipate approximately 3,000 construction workers will be onsite at the peak of construction, and the data center will support more than 300 operational jobs. […] As with all of our data centers, this data center’s electricity […]⌥ Permalink

Tim Cushing, Techdirt: Even if you truly believe the company you work for is capable of doing this, perhaps read the room a bit before offering up this sort of insane assertion to a journalist: Langley offers a prediction: In less than 10 years, Flock’s cameras, airborne and fixed, will eradicate almost all crime in […]⌥ Permalink

App icons in MacOS are not mere buttons. You can drag them, move them, and drop things on them. You click them to select, and double-click to launch. They are richer objects that deserve a richer visual vocabulary.

Wednesday waves. 🌊👋 Video + photo.

Shot from up above on a sand dune. The audio is meh because of 15 mph winds. You can hear the dune grass crackling.

“Aamir F.”, on behalf of the Google Earth Team: We’re continuing to make Google Earth on web and mobile (Android | iOS) the best place for people to get helpful geospatial insights. While you can continue using the legacy Google Earth Pro desktop app, it will no longer be available for new downloads beginning on […]⌥ Permalink

Back in the primordial days of AI, Parry was an ELIZA-style chatbot created by psychiatrist Kenneth Colby to simulate the words of a paranoid schizophrenic. Someone had the genius idea to connect it to Eliza (a.k.a. “Doctor”). Vint Cerf published the transcript as an RFC in 1973, and I laughed my ass off reading it. A taste:

Do you know anything about bookies?

What makes you think I know anything about bookies?

A bookie didn’t pay me off once.

What does that suggest to you?

I beat up the bookie who did not pay off, and I thought he might use his friends in the underworld to get even with me.

What else would you like to discuss?

What do you know about racketeers?

Thanks to Bob Peterson for the link.

Vint Cerf, by the way, retired from Google last week at the spry age of 83.

Tyler Hall:

We all know about macOS Tahoe’s terrible app icons and how 3rd party developers have been confined to squircle jail.

If you’re lucky enough to distribute an app outside the Mac App Store, you can break free of squircle jail using NSDockTilePlugIn. It’s not strictly the intended use-case of that API. And it’s not allowed in the Mac App Store, either. But it can solve the problem.

So today’s release of Iris adds three additional app icons to choose from in the app’s Special Preferences Settings pane. And since they use the NSDockTilePlugIn API, the custom icon remains even when you quit the app.

Iris is far from the only app using this or other techniques to sort-of escape squircle jail. All the apps I’m aware of doing something like this are Mac-assed apps. It’s a good litmus test.

Here’s a new mixtape, which was really inspired by me being depressed and watching Deerhunter do “Nothing Ever Happened” live in 2011 and getting really obsessed with the late Josh Fauver’s short scale bass. (The title comes from one of my favorite Bob Pollard lyrics: “I climb up on the house / weep to water […]

After reading my posts earlier today about Eliza, the first “hit” chatbot from the 1960s, DF reader AP sent me a link to the Kickstarter page for Searching for SmarterChild, a project from documentary filmmakers Lindsey Sitz and Zan Gillies to make a movie about SmarterChild, an AOL Instant Messenger chatbot that once had 30 million “friends” (a.k.a. users). I don’t recall ever hearing of SmarterChild before, let alone using it. (I think I was on a very different level of the Internet back then.)

But this looks like a great indie nerd documentary. The Kickstarter campaign has just one week left and they’re a wee bit short of their primary goal, and quite a bit short of their stretch goals. I just chipped in.

Asturias, June 2026.

From the video You don't need much to go on a mini photography adventure.

Mike Bombich: The USB device drivers report that they are destroying the “Rocket XTRM Q” device due to a “link change interrupt” APFS filesystem drivers report a “dangling mount”, failures to finish transactions before unmount, and dozens of “media is not present” errors.[…] storagekit collects a report of the “disappeared” devices and notices that one […]