FeedCity

Kashmir Hill, of the New York Times (gift link), learned about an A.I.-generated biography of her for sale on Amazon for $27. It is just one of many wholly-generated books available there: Amazon does not mind if people hawk A.I.-generated books on its platform, unless they are truly and deeply terrible. “Charlie Kirk: An Inspiring […]⌥ Permalink

Quiche Industries (Greg de J.): Starting today, Quiche Browser disables AI overviews in search results by default, out of the box. Compare how much space and time they waste. I love the web too much to let that nonsense bury links to real websites made by humans. This ...

Tuesday’s episode of Dithering was a good one, especially for the DF audience, so we’ve moved it outside the paywall and made it free-to-listen on the web. (We don’t (yet?) have an RSS feed that you can put in your podcast player for these occasional free episodes, alas.) I have a slightly different take on Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI than I’ve seen expressed elsewhere.

If you don’t subscribe to Dithering, you probably should. Two episodes per week, 15 minutes per episode. Not a minute less, not a minute more. $7/month or $70/year — or, get it included with the Stratechery Plus bundle.

Added a layer to the Docs menu, the blog posts I've written here and elsewhere, and a podcast, in the Blog posts section.

OpenAI, in a statement to Bloomberg this week:

“While we take these allegations seriously, we’re not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit. We believe in fair competition and allowing people the freedom to work wherever they choose, and we’re focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.”

“We’re not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit” is very different from, say, “This complaint has no merit.” Again, a curious response.

Paul Kafasis: With last year’s release of MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple made a mess of app icons. In the first betas of MacOS 27 (Golden Gate), however, there are signs of a turnaround. We’re urging Apple to continue making improvements, by restoring the ability for MacOS app icons to have distinct shapes. […] After decades […]

Adam Engst: Of the TidBITS readers who chose to respond to the poll, only 1% said they use clear icons on the Mac, and no one admitted to using tinted icons. On the iPhone, clear icons were twice as popular—a whopping 2%—and just 1% of respondents said they use tinted icons. Dark icons, which retain […]

Jason Koebler (tweet, Reddit): The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared data […]

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.