FeedCity

Victoria Song, The Verge: The $399 Google Pixel Watch 5 isn’t about the hardware. Sure, there’s a new satin pyrite case finish, a few new strap colors, and a Steph Curry Special Edition. Under the hood, there’s a slightly faster Qualcomm processor and an itty-bitty batte...

Mia Sato, The Verge: Earlier this summer, Amazon customers began noticing that emails related to their online orders looked sparse: Order confirmation emails didn’t name specific items anymore, and instead listed only item categories. “Your Beauty item is confirmed!” an...

Book/magazine cover art by Kenneth Romney Towndrow

Jeff Johnson: These purported reviews, all but one of which is 5 stars, are all in English. Yet none of them is in the US App Store. I also looked at other English-speaking countries such as Australia and Canada but found no reviews. Also suspicious is that the name of e...

Watch this. No words needed, everyone can feel it. Genes are a hell of a thing.

Basic Apple Guy:

Apple just dropped the hardest icon glow-up for the new Chess icon in macOS 27 Beta 5.

This is not just a tweak or small improvement. This is the difference between total shit and a really nice icon.

I just went through hell trying to respond to a message that came to me through the gateway between WordPress and Mastodon. I get an email from WordPress saying someone talked about me. I clicked the link, it took me to a WordPress dialog, very confusing, but there was a link...

If you run a tech company I hope you didn't lay off most of your programmers last year when that was the hype. Don't wait too long before you fire your human developers. I'm now doing my second big project with Claude Code, not an experiment, and we're going through the same mess we went through last time. I know what I want, I can show it what I want, give it docs for what I want, and it keeps leading me into different corners that have nothing to do with it. When it clicks, it can go faster than a thousand programmers and it's a miracle, and when we can harness it to the job we want to do it's incredibly economical. $100 for $1 million of work. That's why you see me full of gusto for that mode. What I haven't written about how when you slow to nothing, back and forth, and you get no closer. I hate this kind of work, esp the role I have to play in it.

A remarkable intaglio from the Getty Museum: Aeneas and his family escaping Troy. The museum dates this around 20 B.C., which was around the time of Virgil’s death, with his poem unfinished — and surely this is a depiction of the scene specifically as described by Virgil, with Aeneas carrying Anchises on his back and leading Ascanius by the hand. Does this mean that the artist had read the in-progress Aeneid? Or that Virgil was borrowing the details from some earlier history? 

Vass Bednar, the Walrus: […] the point has been made: looking after the information economy can no longer be a side project for underfunded institutions. Wikipedia is as miraculous as the Wayback Machine is indispensable. Still, we need to stop pretending volunteerism alone can hold up the public internet. We understand this duty more clearly […]⌥ Permalink

Sarah Perez, in a TechCrunch story about monthly active user numbers for Bluesky, Threads, and X, using data provided by Similarweb: Instead, the data shows that X’s worldwide monthly active users on mobile were down around 3% year-over-year in June, and X’s mobile daily active users dropped 7% in July to 123.7 million. (Of course, […]⌥ Permalink

Issue 108 – In a word, applesauce

The Economist (‘twas a gift link, but alas, I guess gift views have been used up — here’s an archive link in case the gift link is vexing you): You can discover AI’s hallmarks by comparing the writing of man and machine. To do this you need a baseline that is distinctive...

Here’s a text with the power to melt an uncle’s heart:

Wanna go see The Weeknd with me next summer?

Yesterday was the day! I took a road trip with my niece to Stockholm for her very first concert.

Sing-along with Abel at Strawberry Arena. 🎵

Thomas Claburn: Anthropic will embed watermarks in the text and files generated by future models it launches in the EU, as part of its effort to comply with content and transparency rules in the bloc’s AI Act. […] The move may further amplify the appeal of open weight models and alienate Claude customers, who don’t […]

Jay Peters: An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening didn’t just cause issues for people trying to play digital games — it blocked people from playing their disc-based games, too. Xbox’s status page initially reported the outage on Sunday at about 11PM ET, and it also prevented people from logging in, launching apps, or […]

Cindy Harper (Hacker News, ArsTechnica): Sony plans to wipe 551 movies and TV shows from the PlayStation Store libraries of customers who paid full price for them. The deletion is coming on September 1 and so far the company has said nothing about giving anyone their money back. […] Anyone who hit “buy” on one […]

Joshua Khane (Hacker News): Microsoft DELETED my account AND OneDrive!!?? After ACKNOWLEDGING that I’m the owner of the account and that it was compromised??? 25 fucking years of data, thousands of euros spended on games?? My son’s baby pictures? GONE! Scott: This is EXACTLY why cloud providers should be building (and might need to FORCED […]

Alex Micek:

In the future, I will feel angry if my car strands me on the side of the road.
I will feel angry if the motor brushes fail expectedly.
I will feel angry if it leaks water.

By contrast, I don’t feel anger when the car tricks me into seeing an advertisement. Instead, I feel a deep, smothering, let-down at the promise of futurism. Bottomless despair is probably inappropriate; a symptom of the misanthropy I should grow out of. But. In the meantime, I feel helpless, discouraged, deeply sad.

Such a good take. I should not let 19 years pass again between linking to his writing.