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Why Am I Left-Handed? | Natalie Wolchover: Being left-handed is mostly no big deal. It is annoying how ink smudges under my hand. And I did once have to jump out of the way of a circular saw that I was holding backward; indeed, left-handers have more accidents while operati...

A lovely novella and the 2022 debut by francophone Swiss author Fanny Desarzens (1993). I read the German translation, titled Berghütte (mountain cabin), Galel (the name of one of the characters) is the French title. Three men, with few words between them, share a deep friendship which unfolds every summer against the backdrop of the […]

It’s been a while since my last post in the Books category early February, 32 fiction books further by my count. Recently Cory Doctorow pointed to the work of Welsh / Canadian author Jo Walton on the occasion of the publication of her latest novel Everybody’s Perfect, and I read some of her work these […]

Zoey Forbes, a U.K.-based attorney, in the Dial: One hundred and forty years on from the Berne Convention, the basic principles of copyright remain the same, but GenAI poses a threat to authors different from anything that has existed before. Its novel technology is not only destabilizing what it means to reproduce works, but what […]⌥ Permalink

I think maybe John Ternus is more of a “*Hey, what* would *Steve have done here?*” kind of guy. What would Steve Jobs do with this OpenAI situation? He’d go to war.

Jason Koebler, 404 Media: 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 […]⌥ Permalink

My hope for the World Cup final: that it also ends 6-4, with four goals for Messi and goals by six different Spaniards. ⚽️ 🇦🇷 🇪🇸

Michael Acton, reporting for the Financial Times from San Francisco:

About 40 former employees now working at OpenAI have been sent letters directing them to preserve documents and communications and demanding meetings with Apple’s lawyers, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. Apple and OpenAI declined to comment.

The decision to hit employees with personal legal letters highlights Apple’s aggressive tactics after it last week launched a blockbuster lawsuit accusing OpenAI and two employees of stealing secret hardware plans.

I just listened to the second episode of a podcast about General Magic. It was an interview with the great Scott Knaster, who worked at Apple, Microsoft, Google, in addition to General Magic.

An experiment, RSS rendered in JSON.

We have a firehose in rss.chat. Instant updates from the server. No polling. Docs and examples.

Wrote this in 2018: "I know this is like pissing in the wind, but here's an idea for a demonstration that might impress the Repubs in Congress. In every one of their home districts, people march to their polling place, next Saturday or the Saturday after that. Carrying signs that say We Know How To Vote, with the name of their congressperson on it. Go out of the way to recruit Republican-looking voters. Make sure the TV cameras are there." An even better idea in 2026. Give the reporters something to talk about. And it's all in your neighborhood. You can have a picnic, do it every week. Only in good weather.

In this project I think of Claude as a full contributor. Pronouns it/its. It's both an very fast, capable developer, and a machine. I will refer to it as if it were a valued contributor, nothing less. We have a division of labor. Docs and examples come exclusively from Clau...

Dear Me, England - by Ian Leslie:

To be a longstanding England supporter is to glimpse life inside Nietzche’s concept of eternal recurrence: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.”

The pattern with which we’re most familiar, having seen it in tournament after tournament, is the siege defence. It’s as if our players are unconsciously drawing on collective memories of Mafeking and Dunkirk; on stories of an island people repelling invaders. The wonder is that each generation of players seems to absorb the English script and to perform it convincingly.

Finished reading: The Locked Tomb series, book 1. Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Published 2019. 448 pages. Started July 16, 2026; completed July 17, 2026. Posted: July 18, 2026 at 2:00 AM UTC. Tagged: fantasy, LGBT, science fiction.

About five years ago I stopped using Overcast as my podcast player because it would not play more than one show at a time. I could set up a queue, but it would not play the queue. (Many users were complaining about this at the time.) I just downloaded it again to give it a try and… It will only play one show at a time. (Many users are still complaining about this.) I really don’t want to use Apple Podcasts because it defaults to promoting crappy shows it likes rather than just letting me see my own library… but I may be stuck with it.

Joanna Stern at New Things, last month: Last month, just days after my book went on sale, AI knockoffs of the ebook version flooded Apple Books. There was Joanna Stern On I Am Not A Robot by Sophie Mercer. I AM NOT A ROBOT by Finn Tech. I AM NOT A ROBOT by Joana Stern — ...

Arjun Kharpal, reporting for CNBC, back on July 2: Europe’s top court on Thursday upheld Google’s fine of around 4.1 billion euros ($4.67 billion) over alleged anti-competitive practices. In 2018, the European Commission slapped Google with the record-breaking penalty o...

Dr. Drang: A couple of days ago, Casey Liss took a break from arguing about temperature scales to tweak me about the recent passage of the Sunshine Protection Act by the House. The Act would make Daylight Saving Time permanent, something Casey knows I disapprove of. A similar bill passed the Senate a few years […]⌥ Permalink

Revised this post to point out that the most crucial difference between Thomas Pynchon and Terrence Malick is that the former has been on The Simpsons while the latter hasn’t — but hey, Terry, it’s not too late!