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Oops.

I want the answers that I read to be cogent, lucid, accurate, blessedly terse — and ideally to strike a consistent tone that is pleasant to my reading ear. The genie is not going back in the bottle.

Here is a thought that must have occurred to someone on the MacOS user interface team: if Liquid Glass supports colour, why not use it to give more dimension to window controls? So Apple did just that in the latest Golden Gate beta, and it looks good. ⌥ Permalink⌥ Permalink

The Savant is a political thriller series starring Jessica Chastain that was supposed to debut a year ago. Apple “postponed” it, apparently out of fear of upsetting extremist right-wing nut jobs because the show is about an undercover investigator (Chastain) hunting down extremist right-wing nut jobs. Chastain was not happy about the show being delayed.

Last we heard about the show was back in April, when Marc Malkin reported this for Variety:

“Before it was like, ‘I don’t know if we’re going to see it,’ but now I can say, ‘We’re going to see it,’” Chastain told me exclusively on Saturday at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony in Santa Monica.

As for when, sources tell me that Apple is planning for a July release.

Given that it’s now the middle of August, I think that a July release is looking less and less likely by the day.

The Financial Times, back on July 1, with the transcontinental byline “Michael Acton in San Francisco and Barbara Moens in Brussels” (non-paywalled summaries from 9to5Mac and MacRumors): Apple chief executive Tim Cook and EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen held “constructive”...

Another busy day programming with Claude on Frontier. I still have to come up with a codename. But we got to a milestone today. I was able to create, edit, publish and revise a web app using the new version of the app still running on the old machine. When it's done I will get to retire this old Mac, keep it around so we can test the new code to make sure it does what the old code does, incredibly important when porting a development and runtime environment. Claude works on its stuff at night. The workload it's going to do tonight is the equivalent of several months time for a skilled human developer who manages their time well. As people get used to working this way, I imagine the AIs will learn how to better work with humans, if that is their destiny. I still can't believe we're doing what we're doing.

Natasha of “Team YouTube: Last year, we updated how we count public views for Shorts to better capture how viewers watch on YouTube. Now, we’re aligning all other video formats to this same standard for consistency across the platform. Beginning on 8/24/2026, a view will be counted the moment a video begins to play—from the […]⌥ Permalink

WSJ:

AI is trained in part on what people like, and people prefer the brown-nosing, says Myra Cheng, a computer-science Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University and lead author of a March study on agreeable AI. Participants rated sycophantic AI responses significantly higher in quality and, after interacting with a more obsequious model, said they were more likely to return to the AI.

This bodes ill.

Moby, hitting them congas. Live at Way Out West, August 13, 2026.

I today replaced the last handful of embedded Flickr images with self hosted copies, that merely link back to the source at Flickr. This way I am certain that no tracking by Flickr is possible when you visit this site. Five years ago, I stopped embedding Flickr images for new posts. I also started to […]

Twenty-five years ago, I bought the Gorillaz debut album. But it took me until the day before yesterday to finally see (and hear) them live for the first time… and I was not disappointed!

Gorillaz closing out Way Out West on August 15, 2026. 🎵

The home of The Victorian Society was well chosen. 

Kit Wilson:

In 1968, [Kołakowski] was fired from Warsaw University for “forming the views of the youth in a manner contrary to the official tendency of the country,” banned from teaching and publishing entirely, and placed under constant police surveillance. 

As I come to the end of my teaching career, I am bitterly disappointed in myself: I have never been formally charged with “forming the views of the youth in a manner contrary to the official tendency of the country.” 

Gespot in Maastricht afgelopen weekend. Is zoervleisj een soort rendang? Enquiring minds want to know. Wel zoervleisj gegeten vrijdagavond, maar geheel niet aan rendang gedacht tijdens de maaltijd. Misschien vandaag dan maar rendang?

My friend John Gruber is incensed by the idea that AI watermarking schemes adjust the output of a given LLM so that the output can later be assessed as likely coming from it in particular: They say “imperceptible” and “doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability”. Their words. Not almost imperceptible. Not slightly changes the meaning, quality, […]

Angus taking a break from playing in the garden hose, which is his favorite thing to do that does not involve eating.

For my Buy Me a Coffee supporters I wrote a report from Mission Control. 

It’s unacceptable for a tool to sacrifice an iota of clarity, coherence, meaning, quality, etc. for the purpose of embedding hidden clues within the text to suggest its provenance. The idea that anything other than *my* needs should factor into the generation of text *for me* is patently offensive.

Galicia, August 2026.

From the video Why I work on multiple photography projects at once.

In this video I talk about why I keep several long-term photography projects going at once; some built around a place, some around an idea, some I can't even fully explain yet. I get into how I structure them around the places I keep coming back to, what changes when you return to the same spot over months, and why a project might not ever be totally finished.

In the end, the project might not even be the point, but to pay attention.