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This morning I had a difficult conversation with Claude.
Bending Spoons to Buy Airtable for $1.3 Billion
techcrunch.com/2026/08/04/bending-spoons-to-buy-airtable-for-1-28b/

Looks like this could be a complicated story
How to create a standard, 2026 addition
Last week along with a lot of other stuff, we shipped a validator for lists and feeds that want to be compatible with RSS.chat. It works best for standards to stay strong and a validator helps that. So here are a few examples, validating one user's feed, validating the everyone feed for RSS.chat, which is interesting because this feed starts a lot of threads, so we navigate through that tree and check those feeds too. And validating the user list on RSS.chat, which is an OPML file. And a simple feed with a few interop isses.
Finished reading: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. I haven’t read this in many years, and it’s just fabulous. The mastery with which Collins organizes and deploys his many threads of plot is something to behold. I’m tempted to to start over! 📚
Interdependent Thoughts
• Ton Zijlstra
Thessaly / Philosopher Kings Trilogy by Jo Walton
I came across a recommendation by Cory Doctorow of Jo Walton‘s work, on July 1st. I bought a range of her works then, and in the past month read what I bought. Among them the Thessaly trilogy which I read in the last 2 weeks, consisting of three books, The Just City, The Philosopher Kings […]
TerminalWidget 1.0
New app from Brett Terpstra:
TerminalWidget lets you send output from commands, scripts, APIs, and Shortcuts directly to widgets across macOS, iOS, and iPadOS with rich formatting, progress bars, sparklines, and image support. It is available as a universal app on the App Store for $19.99.
I don’t know what I’m going to use this for, but I know I want to use it.
Pixel Envy
• Nick Heer
F.T.: Apple Filed a Legal Complaint in the U.K. Over Revised iCloud Backdoor Demand
Tim Bradshaw, Financial Times: Apple has launched a new legal challenge against the UK’s latest attempt to create a “backdoor” to access encrypted customer data, a year after the Home Office agreed to drop a previous order after a row with Washington. As a reminder, this is different from the order made in February last […]⌥ Permalink
Daring Fireball
• Daring Fireball Department of Commerce
[Sponsor] MCP vs. REST: The Right Way to Connect Agents to Your API
workos.com/blog/mcp-vs-rest?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=q32026
REST serves the developers building against your API. MCP serves the agents now trying to use it. Most teams treat these as competing standards and have to pick one.
They’re not rivals, they’re layers: most MCP servers just call REST internally to do the real work. The best ones don’t convert every endpoint into a tool, they design around what the agent’s trying to accomplish.
Shipping that server also means shipping OAuth 2.1 with scoped tokens. WorkOS AuthKit already speaks that spec, so you skip building an auth provider on top.
John Ternus Has Rehired Former Hardware VP Laura Legros
macrumors.com/2026/08/03/apple-john-ternus-hiring-retired-vp/
The Information on Apple’s Unusual Use of iCloud for Confidential Work
theinformation.com/articles/apple-icloud-policy-fueled-employee-leaks-ahead-openai-suit?rc=jfy0lk
Om Malik’s Final Essay: ‘The Myth, the Mythos and the Man’
Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai
Pasting Quoted Paths and Escaped Terminal Text
Anthony Reimer: When you are shell scripting or working in Terminal, sometimes you want a quicker way to enter the path to a file or folder, particularly if you have already navigated to it in the Finder. One way that works in Terminal is to drag the file or folder from the Finder onto the […]
Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai
NSPasteboard Crashes When Handling File Promises
Wade Tregaskis: NSPasteboard mutates itself simultaneously from the main thread and the global concurrent Dispatch pool, w.r.t. to its internal type cache. This is surprisingly trivial to reproduce (sample code below) by just dropping, e.g. a file promise (such as by opening a PNG in Preview, revealing the thumbnails sidebar, and then dragging the thumbnail […]
blog - aows
• Adrian Vila
Umbrella and Lighthouse
★ Why Apple Requires a Cellular Account Through a Big Three Carrier to Lease an iPhone
For many years now, part of the co-marketing agreements between Apple and the Big Three is Apple agreeing to require a postpaid account with a Big Three carrier for all “special” iPhone financing deals, including the old iPhone Upgrade Program and the new Apple Upgrade leasing.
Ulysses S. Grant on the Future Dividing Line
Ulysses S. Grant, in 1875:
Where the citizen is sovereign and the official the servant, where no power is exercised except by the will of the people, it is important that the sovereign — the people — should possess intelligence.
The free school is the promoter of that intelligence which is to preserve us as a free nation. If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.
Not sure if the 2020s count as “the near future”, but holy hell is that a spot-on synopsis of our current moment.
Truth Social Launches Paid Early Access to Trump Posts
npr.org/2026/08/01/nx-s1-5912219/trump-truth-social-access-insider-trading