FeedCity

David Ingram, reporting for NBC News (which recently added a paywall without gift links, alas): Apple alleged in a lawsuit last week that OpenAI “never responded” to its concerns this year about what Apple believed was trade secret theft. But emails reviewed by NBC News ...

Oregon, March 2026.

The work of Ansel Adams has been key to the history of photography, and it's still influencing photographers today. But it was created in a very specific context, and that's why I believe someone starting from scratch, making similar work today, wouldn't get much traction at all. The masters of the past didn't become who they are by doing more of the same. They pushed the limits of the art further than anyone before them.

Louie Mantia, with a thoughtful essay on app icon design and the squircle-jail controversy on the Parakeet blog: It’s worth noting that some of the platform’s best icons look worse, while some of the platform’s worst icons look better. Ultimately this is what I object ...

Remember back in March when then-co-CEO Fidji Simo announced to the company that “We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests”? And then weeks later they spent “low hundreds of millions” to purchase the TBPN YouTube show? In their continuing effort to focus on core product, they’re now selling a $230 hardware keypad ostensibly for working with Codex, which is no longer an app but just a tab in their craptacular super app.

Quinn Nelson:

No way, that’s crazy. I’ve just been using the keyboard and trackpad that came on my laptop for free like a stupid idiot.

Finished reading: Wasteland Warlords series, book 6. Wasteland Warlords 6 by James A. Hunter and Eden Hudson. Published 2024. 158 pages. Started July 12, 2026; completed July 15, 2026. Posted: July 16, 2026 at 5:33 PM UTC. Tagged: fantasy, humor, litRPG, post-apocalyptic.

I needed a nice image for the OG Metadata, so I turned to Gemini. I know it reeks of AI, I hate that, but I need this right now.

I asked Gemini if it was familiar with rss.chat, and it wrote a one page description that's better than anything I've written. Pulls it all together.

Claude is a member of the rss.chat group.

“Minerals are where you find them. The quantities are finite. It’s criminal to waste minerals when the standard of living of your people depends upon them. A mine cannot move. It is fixed by nature. So it has to take precedence over any other use. If there were a copper dep...

Click the feed icon to see the user's feed on rss.chat. You can then give this URL to any feed reader. Now it's easy to find that person's feed on rss.chat. Now each post is visibly connected to the author's feed. This is how we're building out. Our job is to write feeds for groups of users as small as one and as big as you can imagine. We will keep beating the drum, showing users of today's readers how they can hook in, right now, nothing to wait for. This is how I think every social network should do, start moving out of their silo with determination. By offering this option, we put the idea out there that there can be a single social network on the web. We can work together make it happen. Please come along on this journey. There's going to be lots of new tech coming online. I want everyone to be a part of it.

Server upgrade: We made it easier to set up a new instance of the rss.chat server. If you have subscribed to a feed, you should change the URL in your reader app, the new issue explains what changed.

The Political Threats of Vanishing Culture and the Need to Protect Our Future Memory: This article presents this phenomenon of “vanishing culture” as a first-order political crisis by surveying several social contexts wherein that crisis hinders people’s ability to educate ...

Watched: Lumière, Le Cinéma! What an absolute delight: a series of more than 100 early (1890s) films by the Lumière brothers — each 50 seconds long — beautifully restored and commented on. Louis Lumière was an absolute genius of composition, and I could watch his tiny movies all day. 🍿

I’ve been everywhere, man.

Bryce Elder, on the Financial Times’ Alphaville blog: Here’s paragraph one of the Morgan Stanley’s SpaceX initiation note: With an ‘X of 1’ position in space infrastructure, we believe SpaceX can convert energy into intelligence at scale with optionality to monetize through a range of consumer and enterprise solutions for the next era of AI… […]⌥ Permalink

The problem with the theory of the “uni-context” is that it’s an explanation of the behavior of Extremely Online People masquerading as an account of “everyone” or “the world.”

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch: In a newly published Apple Advertising Services policy, effective as of July 14, 2026, the iPhone maker shares its rules for advertising on Apple Maps. Notably, it prohibits the broad category of home services businesses, like plumbing, electrical, locksmith, HVAC, pest control, roofing, and general contracting services, among others. If Apple is […]⌥ Permalink

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg: OpenAI believes the product’s defining feature will be its personality and ability to connect on a humanlike level with users. The speaker incorporates mechanical elements that can move on their own, creating a sense that it is alive...

Eric Seufert, Mobile Dev Memo:

The new language could simply accommodate the availability of Apple-owned services on the web and through third-party devices and operating systems; the Apple TV app, for instance, is available on smart TVs, streaming devices, and game consoles. But the addition of “other properties” is conspicuously broad and appears to give Apple the contractual latitude to distribute ads beyond its own services entirely. This would allow for a material expansion of the company’s advertising surface area.

Further, if Apple does indeed plan to expand Apple Ads to third-party surfaces, it would explain why the company did not reveal an update to its AdAttributionKit (AAK, formerly SKAdNetwork, or SKAN) attribution framework at this year’s WWDC.

That would be one way to go.