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Watching Stray Dog, the chief experience I have is a feeling of immense gratitude for air-conditioning. The film takes place during a brutal Tokyo heatwave (indeed it was filmed in those conditions) and everyone sweats rivers throughout. 🍿

Issue 107 – An unserious offer

AP (Hacker News): A federal judge has approved a $1.5 billion copyright settlement in which artificial intelligence company Anthropic will pay thousands of authors about $3,000 per book after using pirated copies of their works to train its Claude chatbot. […] Bestselling thriller novelist Andrea Bartz first brought the suit with two other authors in […]

Tim Hardwick (Wired): Google was today fined €890 million ($1 billion) by the European Union for breaching antitrust rules with regard to its search and Google Play store services. The European Commission found that Google had broken the Digital Markets Act (DMA) by using its dominant position in the search market to favour its own […]

Ryan Whitwam (PDF, Reddit): Back in 2018, Google was handed a record-setting 4.34 billion-euro ($4.9 billion) fine in Europe for abusing its monopoly on Android. The company has spent the intervening years challenging that decision, but the continent’s highest court has put a stop to that. The Court of Justice of the European Union has […]

Marcus Mendes: Apple’s requests to overturn a $634 million patent verdict and secure a new trial in its long-running legal battle with Masimo were denied. Wesley Hilliard: There doesn’t appear to be any other path for appeal or recourse, as the judge rejected both requests for either a new judgement or trial. […] In the […]

“From a Bond fan to Bond fans worldwide.” Nice work.

The obvious truth is that Apple’s ads just plain suck. They are not good at advertising-based services. And it shouldn’t be surprising that they’re not good at advertising-based services, because the incentives for advertising-based services are in direct opposition to the incentives for everything Apple actually is good at.

North Dakota, March 2026.

From the video This is a photographer's most important asset.

I returned from a lovely summer vacation (family, beach) to find that iOS 27 beta has fucked up the transition between split view and compact — I’ve got a boatload of crashes, mostly on Pro Max devices and a few on iPad. Here’s a representative crash log. The feedback in Te...

Dvorak is best known for all the takes he was jacktastically wrong about, but what gave his schtick staying power is that he was technically savvy. His take here on the PS/2 was actually spot-on: that it was technically impressive in many ways, especially the way it was assembled without any cables, but that it was doomed in the market against ugly mess-of-cables commodity PCs.

“Computer Chronicles” was the real show from the 1980s that Adam Lisagor so lovingly and spectacularly spoofed with “Computer Show” a decade ago.

William Gallagher, AppleInsider: Legendary technology columnist, pundit, author and podcast host John C. Dvorak has died, age 80. He is survived by his wife Mimi Dvorak. Today Dvorak is best known for co-hosting the “No Agenda” podcast with Adam Curry, where he would cr...

At the end of Tarkovsky’s Solaris we see Kris returning to his father’s house — the place where we had first seen him in the opening seconds of the movie. Shortly after that opening we had heard Kris’s father tell a friend that he had built that house in imitation of another house he liked; and now, at the end, the camera pulls back from Kris and his father to show that the concluding events of the story are not taking place in a Russian dacha but rather on a tiny island in the great ocean of the planet Solaris. We might also reflect that the house being filmed is a set in a movie. So what we’re seeing as the film concludes is a simulacrum of a simulacrum of an imitation of a fictional house. 🍿

The Atlantic: 

By dominating the digital world, Silicon Valley has already exerted indirect control over the physical one. Today’s data-center build-out is a whole new beast. From the most concrete aspects — cooling, power, land — to the most abstract financial instruments, AI has morphed into a heavy industry. 

And needs to be regulated as such. 

The second entry in my series of essays on the ongoing interest in the Second World War is now up.

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: Flighty’s new Connection Assistant feature includes step-by-step information for your specific connection. This includes things like terminal changes, security checkpoints, passport control, and more. Connection Assistant also gives you estimates ...

A new feature on RSS.chat, images. Up to 2MB per. User interface couldn't be simpler, get the image on your clipboard, start editing your post, put the cursor where you want the image to appear, paste. Prior art was GitHub and Slack. It was driving me crazy not having this feature, sometimes to explain something you need a picture. I think perhaps I should add this to textcasting. It's a feature I needed to be reminded is essential. The first browser to support inline images came from Univ of Illinois in 1993, NCSA Mosaic, it didn't come from TBL, but it is most definitely a standard feature of the web.

Amyloo, a longtime friend from the early days of podcasting, has made an appearance on demo.rss.chat. So happy to see her. Here's one of the bits we did, back then in the very early days of podcasting in 2005. A duet of Green Acres. Ten seconds of dead air at the beginning, it was pretty common in those days. But I think the spirit of it is lovely. BTW fwiw I cracked my voice on purpose. 😄

Early this morning we got a report of a security issue in the rss.chat server, quickly fixed and tested the new version. So, if you're running your own instance of rss.chat, you please follow the instructions and do the update asap.

Something to keep in mind in press reports with AI apps breaking out of their sandbox, it works the other way too. If you give a big piece of code to Claude and ask if it to find any security issues, it not only finds (at least some of) them, but it also suggests fixes. Quickly. I've done it the other way, where you have a small team, and someone discovers a hack, and you have to find the right answer and implement it, asap.