FeedCity

Our feeds can work with any feed reader. Examples, the feed of all posts on rss.chat, and a feed containing just mine. We just made a change in the feeds. There will be loose-ends like this. Still diggin! ;-)

Roblox executives Nick Tornow and Vlad Loktev, on the Roblox blog: Twenty years ago, Roblox launched with a simple idea: “You make the game.” At the time, that was a radical proposition — most games were made by studios and professionals, and the idea that anyone could b...

Matt Burgess (MacRumors, ArsTechnica): On Thursday, San Francisco city attorney David Chiu sent legal notices to Apple and Google demanding that they remove from their app stores 13 face-swapping apps, which allow users to create AI-generated nonconsensual nude images. The letters say the Silicon Valley giants should stop “aiding and abetting” the sale of explicit […]

Hartley Charlton: The European Commission yesterday adopted new exemptions to its Batteries Regulation that free the Apple Watch and AirPods from having to offer user-removable and replaceable batteries. […] The reasoning largely mirrors why devices like electric toothbrushes were already exempt: Opening a compact, sealed enclosure and failing to reseal it properly could let water […]

Hartley Charlton: Reuters reports that China’s Cyberspace Administration registered Apple’s on-device generative AI service this week, putting it on a list of newly cleared providers that also includes homegrown systems from Chinese phone makers. An unnamed source told the outlet that Apple’s AI features in the country will draw on models from both Baidu and […]

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

Here are the new monthly prices for Apple Music and Apple One as of today:

Apple Music:

• Individual: $11.99 (up from $10.99)
• Family: $19.99 (up from $16.99)
• Student: $6.99 (up from $5.99)

Apple One:

• Individual: $19.95 (unchanged)
• Family: $27.95 (up from $25.95)
• Premier: $39.95 (up from $37.95)

Wired, back on May 15: OpenAI says it’s folding ChatGPT, its AI coding agent Codex, and its developer-facing API into one core product team. The company says that Codex is increasingly powering its consumer and enterprise offerings, which are gaining the ability to perfo...

MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass: In that light, we can see the dilemma. But there were also probably about a dozen better ways to do this roll-out — as highlighted by how fast they’re fixing these things — and they just missed the mark. While they undoubtedly knew there ...

Thibault “Tibo” Sottiaux, the OpenAI engineering lead who’s taking the most public credit for this and thus probably deserves the most blame, on Twitter/X: Evening! We’ve gotten lots of great feedback on the new ChatGPT desktop app (which we didn’t get totally quite righ...

Linus Torvalds:

I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I’m willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer.

Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.

Or just walk away.

AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one.

It may not have been that “clearly” even just a year ago, but it’s no longer in question today.

There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but “is it useful” is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn’t actually used it.

Speaking of BBEdit, version 16 dropped just before WWDC, and adds a slew of nifty improvements, headlined by vastly expanded support for Shortcuts. You can also search for text in images, use the W3C HTML syntax checker, and of all things, use vi keyboard emulation. There’s a lot more, of course — and as always the changes, improvements, and additions are copiously documented in the release notes.

New licenses are $60, upgrades from v15 cost $30, and upgrades from older versions are $40. In the Mac App Store it’s a $5/month or $50/year subscription.

See also: Jason Snell at Six Colors and Adam Engst at TidBITs.

Sean Malseed — “Action Retro” on YouTube — created a Markdown editor for the original Macintosh. Source code on GitHub; intro video on YouTube. It’s written in C, not Pascal, and uses the modern Retro68 GCC-derived compiler. I absolutely love that this exists. I don’t like ...

Joanna Stern explains why this emoji is correct today: 📅. (This one too: 📆)

WSJ:

Vibe slop happens when coders replace the hard work of designing and testing a system with the shortcut of prompting AI to whip it up … and the resulting software won’t stand the test of time. It’s become a big enough problem that the world’s main repository of open-source code — GitHub — has instituted new policies and features to combat it. […] 

These systems are supposed to make senior engineers so productive that companies can lay off junior engineers, but in reality, many companies are trading near-term productivity for long-term woes. Not only does the pipeline of junior talent dry up, but residual effects include buggy software, service outages, security vulnerabilities and mounting technical debt.

Sean Hollister, reporting for The Verge (gift link): Here’s Google’s full statement on withdrawing its proposed modifications to Judge Donato’s permanent injunction, via Google spokesperson Dan Jackson: We’ve agreed with Epic to withdraw our motion to modify the US C...

New rss.chat feature: It now supports feed discovery, so you can subscribe to any html page on the site in a compatible feed reader. I tested it in FeedLand and NetNewsWire and it works. Works on any instance, not just ours.

Indiana, January 2026.

I mentioned the previous post on rss.chat, and it developed into an interesting thread, something that I've never had the option to discuss. AT Proto makes a similar offer to developers that we do. The difference is our world is wide open, it's just already burned-in web prot...

Terrence Malick has a strange double.

Finished reading (for the first time in 30 years): Encounters with the Archdruid by John McPhee. If you’re new to McPhee, this might be the ideal place to start. It’s the book in which he perfects the narrative method he would follow for the rest of his career, and the first one in which he explores the geological themes that would later become his obsession. Nobody is better than McPhee at illuminating difficult questions by showing how real peropla engage those questions, and engage each other. 📚