FeedCity

The third installment of my Dispatch series on the meaning of the Second World War today.

Craig Mod:

Back in Tokyo, after the fireworks spectacular, I went to Yoyogi Park. An announcement was playing: “Rollerblading is dangerous, make sure you don’t do it! And be sure to not play catch! And stay off the bike paths! And don’t run in the non-running areas!” I was barely ten feet into the park when I heard those broadcast rules in both Japanese and English. As the rules were sermonized overhead, people moved with heat-stroke torpidity, smartphones cradled near their faces. Last fall, while walking through Yoyogi, I counted: 97 out of 100 people were looking at their phones. Nobody was doing anything that looked particularly fun. Never have I felt it more acutely: The world doesn’t need a park that bans rollerblading. It needs one that bans smartphones. 

Glenn Reynolds: As Nachman said, [Sullivan] lost because they changed the law. And, I think it’s fair to say that they changed the law because the Court — and in particular Justice Brennan — favored the role of the institutional press in American society and wanted to creat...

Katie Baker, the Ringer: Look, there’s maybe nothing less cool than waxing nostalgic about Google of all things. It’s like mourning the Astor Place Starbucks (or getting sentimental about any Blockbuster Video — although most people aren’t ready for that conversation). But I don’t think I’m really missing Google Search as much as I’m missing […]⌥ Permalink

Leverage autonomous AI agents to automate compliance, manage internal and third-party risk, and continuously prove your security posture.

Zac Hall at 9to5Mac has a good rundown of new features and changes in beta 5. Some app icons got tweaks (the Siri app in particular looks much cooler now), and a bunch of the existing American and British Siri speaking voices now have the Pace and Expressivity adjustment sli...

Apple Newsroom: For the first time, baseball fans can take in all the action of “Friday Night Baseball” live in Apple Immersive on Apple Vision Pro, leveraging 3D video recorded in 8K with a 180-degree field of view. On August 28, viewers with Vision Pro will experience ...

Michael Tsai:

I’m really unhappy about this, both for my role in spreading a false story and because I think it will hurt the cause of reforming App Review. I know there are many crazy rejections and have experienced some first-hand. This story was believable because of that well-known history and because Godier didn’t seem like a nobody trying to get attention — he was the developer of another highly regarded app. But now people are going to point to true developer stories and accuse them of being fakes, too.

Same.

Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk (Mastodon, Hacker News, MacRumors, Mac Power Users): WebKit-based browsers on iOS and macOS can be configured to route all web traffic through proxy servers, which is how Tor browsers on iOS and our own Psylo work. We found three WebKit features — DNS prefetching, WebAuthn Related Origin Requests, and […]

Michael Kan: US satellite internet provider Hughesnet has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after running low on cash and losing subscribers to Starlink. Hughes Network Systems filed in a US bankruptcy court on Sunday, but the company notes it’ll continue serving its satellite internet customers during the restructuring period. I used Hughesnet before DSL was […]

Ernie Smith at Tedium:

I’m seeing email after email suggesting these users built a thing they’re truly passionate about. But if we can’t trust that this passion is real, legit, and from the heart, we’re in trouble.

Take a step back. Is this thing you built a reflection of you?

I think it’s fun and exciting that I’m getting a lot more emails about a lot more new apps. But a fair chunk of those emails are themselves clearly written by an AI chatbot. It’s so obvious. Those go straight in the trash.

Kalley Huang, reporting from San Francisco, and Ana Swanson, from Washington, for The New York Times (gift link): Apple, which has cited the memory chip shortage for recent price increases, is working with other consumer electronics companies to push for permission to bu...

Manton: "The way I think about RSS.chat is that it’s a bootstrap for getting lots of RSS feeds to play well together, for both posts and replies. Can the web be the social network? Yes. And Micro.blog should be part of anything working toward that goal."

I have Claude update me on all posts on both RSS.chat sites when we start for a day. I read them all when they're posted, but one was in German, which Claude automatically translated for me, and it's an interesting question. Which I have answered.

I have Spectrum cable and they recently started unbundling the cable services they provide. So I have a bunch of streaming services that I never decided to follow, and haven't gotten in the habit of checking them. Not sure if I like this, but I certainly understand why the bill is so high and seems to always be going higher? Not sure why that is. But it's hard to get through to them.

Anyway, one of those streaming services I get now is Paramount+ which is owned by the Ellisons, which I don't like, but they have a show that is really excellent esp if you like British crime stories, which I most definitely do, even if most of the actors are American, and it probably was recorded in Vancouver or in Queens. It's called, unimaginatively, The Agency, as in the Central Intelligence Agency. The story is fine, but what really sets it apart is the quality of the acting and production. Beautifully filmed, better to watch it on a nice big screen set with good audio. Two seasons only, but if you want to know the kind of TV I like, this is it.

I seen the new Game of Thrones just completed their third season. I tried getting into it, and couldn't. But then I didn't get going in the original series for the first few attempts. People this show is good, so I will give it another try.

Cal Newport:

He told me that features he generated using Claude Code ended up crashing their product on two different occasions. His boss told him that if it happened one more time, he’d be fired. “I’ve never had quality issues like this before in my career.”

The problem is that code produced by an AI agent looks reasonable, but can contain ‘hard-to-spot bugs’ that end up causing major problems. As a result, you should carefully review your agent’s output, but this is difficult. As the engineer told me, it’s “famously hard” to understand code you didn’t write yourself, so this extra step becomes “easy to just blow it off (especially when we are all trying to ‘10x’ our velocity).” Soon, systems start to break. 

When you start to lose the coders….

At Cosmos Malick: New Worlds and Old.

A very small part of the supermassive datacenter being built on the shores of Lake Whitney. The companies who build these things always deny that they use a lot of water, and yet they always build them on lakes and rivers. What an odd coincidence.