FeedCity

Today I concluded my four-post miniseries on religion and the movies — as seen through moments in Hail, Caesar!

• “If we had but faith”
• “The Bible of course is terrific”
• “With extreme taste”
• Reliable

Sally Sax, writing for the Association of Research Libraries: Twenty-five years after the US copyright office’s first DMCA review, libraries operate in an increasingly non-competitive digital information environment. A lack of digital ownership rights remains a critical barrier to libraries serving their missions as memory institutions. The closest libraries can get to ownership of commercial […]⌥ Permalink

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch: Under current U.S. hacking laws, a human can face criminal charges for breaking into someone else’s computer without permission. But when an AI agent autonomously hacks into a company’s computers, determining who is liable is much murkier. The surprise admissions by OpenAI and Anthropic that their unreleased AI models […]⌥ Permalink

David Bennett has a wonderful music-theory-ish overview of Revolver — released 60 years ago this week. 

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg (gift link): OpenAI expects users to rely on the smart speaker throughout the day. It will work similarly to the company’s ChatGPT voice mode on smartphone apps, but with more advanced models for humanlike interactivity. The device is...

This is more like it. No mealymouthing or wishy-washiness here. This is a strident defense. I’ll quote just one line for now: Apple offers nothing because it has nothing because there is nothing. Its Complaint cannot and does not state a misappropriation claim against De...

Robb Knight: I’m shutting down EchoFeed within the next 12 months when the final subscriptions expire. It will continue to run as it is until then so if you’ve already paid you have access until the end of your subscription. EchoFeed was launched just a couple of years ago and I have been using it […]⌥ Permalink

Galicia, July 2026.

From the video Photography on the Galician Coast.

This comic from Brendan Leonard is a fine companion to yesterday’s items (here and here) on pausing to consider if our use of AI is helping us focus our time on what we love to do, or, instead, robbing us of the things that make us human. The bit about making a sandwich hit close enough to home for me to make me laugh aloud.

Ruben Schade (Hacker News): This idea is so powerful—and so longed for—that it’s escaped containment among the Apple crowd. I’ve seen everything from Linux distro to phone updates referred to as Snow Leopard releases, when their vendors cite stability and bug fixes over new features. Likewise, people plead with their vendors for a Snow Leopard […]

Juli Clover: Apple is working on a new feature that will support cross-device copy and paste between iOS devices and Windows PCs. Microsoft asked for the feature using Apple’s EU interoperability request system for developers, which Apple implemented to comply with the Digital Markets Act. Apple began evaluating the request in March, and on June […]

Anurag Chawake: Apple faces a $32.5 billion lawsuit over how its Photos app scans and stores faces. A federal judge cleared the case to proceed as a class action late last month, allowing millions of Illinois iPhone owners to join. The case has been years in the making, and Apple has fought to shut it […]

Demis Hassanis:

As you've heard me say many times, I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health. It’s time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer. 

When I see any AI make any progress on the amelioration (not even the cure) of any disease, I’ll treat this as something other than the sales pitch of a con man. Not until. And I think that should be everyone’s attitude. The Big Tech companies have been so indifferent, or even hostile, to human well-being for so many years now that their promises are worth absolutely zero. Maybe they (or people using their products) will indeed cure some diseases; and if they do I will thank them and praise them. (h/t @manton for the quote) 

Regarding my earlier complaint about it being a slog to open Safari’s preferences in the Settings app on iOS, a few readers pointed me to this tweet last year from Quinn Nelson, showing how to build (or download from iCloud) a simple Shortcuts shortcut that you can add to Control Center to open the current app’s preferences in Settings. Works great.

Update: Stephen Robles:

I made a few riffs off that one as well:

• Jump to current app notification settings
• Current app storage
• Open current app in App Store

Tanya Gazdik, reporting for MediaPost back in December 2023: Despite the ever-expanding screens in its vehicles, including an available 31-inch backseat theatre screen, BMW has no plans to sell advertising on any of them. Radio commercials are intrusive enough, says Step...

Noah Millman:

What makes the Arday situation distinctive, and different from the Platner situation and from my former colleague who claimed she was chased by a rhinoceros once too often, is that the organization — Cambridge University — doesn’t seem to have responded with any recognition that the organization’s mission was in any way damaged or threatened, other than in a public relations sense, if the accusations against Arday were true. That raises the reasonable suspicion that the organization doesn’t recognize that it has a mission, or, alternatively, believes that whatever Arday was doing was unrelated to that mission. That suspicion, in turn, is a far, far greater threat to the organization than Arday’s hire was.

Back in March I sung the praises of Jeff Johnson’s StopTheScript and StopTheMadness Safari extensions. I want to re-link to StopTheScript in particular. I wrote last week about ad-blocking content blockers, and I’ve gotten a slew of wonderful feedback from readers about that...

James Hibberd, The Hollywood Reporter: BMW owners are taking to social media to express outrage that the automaker suddenly started pushing ads for Spider-Man: Brand New Day onto their dashboards. The ads began appearing last week on newer-model vehicles and some driver...

There's a new version of the FeedLand server.

If Claude Code were a human working for me as a human would, it would be fired several times every day. It forgets orders you gave it two minutes ago. It's always trying to take control. Again I'm backing out of the idea of it taking responsibility for doing simple persistent work on servers, the kind of thing that it would, in theory be perfect for. There are staggering moments of brilliance where it does something in an hour that took several devs a decade to do. But only if they have an exact authority on how it should work, ie when it was cloning software. It's getting better all the time, so there's hope that by 2027 it will be able to be trusted to remember the most basic rules.