FeedCity

In my experience in software development, it's good to start small with something useful, learn how it works before adding big new features. That's the basic principle of bootstrapping. I thought that Mastodon, for example, took on too big a job. Same thing for the protocol ...

If you cannot get enough squircle talk, Michael Tsai has a whole roundup of different takes, some of which you may not have seen already. Here is another thing: robbing icons of a variable for creative excellence and flexibility is just another form of context flattening. You know how Instagram and YouTube are host to […]⌥ Permalink

Finished reading: The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut 📚

The European Commission: The European Commission adopted a delegated act today (14 July) introducing new rules that exempt additional products from EU requirements on the removability and replaceability of portable batteries. Under the EU’s Batteries Regulation, portabl...

Wednesday waves (a day late) 🌊👋

Super low tide morning.

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.