FeedCity

How writing a blog about Terrence Malick makes me pretty much exactly like Terrence Malick. 

Karl Bode: So prepare for a year of breathless and evidence-optional claims that Chinese AI is a dire threat to U.S. consumer privacy and national security, followed by an elaborate bipartisan train of bad policy and shitty new laws crafted by a clumsy coalition of technofascists, extremists, and competition-averse chickenshits. A bit rant-ish for my […]⌥ Permalink

Joe Flint, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Walt Disney’s ABC has sued the Federal Communications Commission alleging the agency’s efforts to challenge its broadcast licenses and regulate its talk show “The View” are illegal and an effort to quash speec...

Marcus Mendes at 9to5Mac has a fun update on U.S. v. Apple, the ill-considered antitrust case started by the Biden administration. A bunch of what the DOJ argues are anticompetitive features in Apple’s platforms, Apple argues are in fact privacy and security related. Back i...

Now that I live in central Texas, when I return to my native Alabama I am always thinking: Dang, the trees here are tall.

Apple (developer, details, Hacker News, TechCrunch, The Verge, 9To5Mac): These changes resolve Apple’s disagreements with the Commission over business terms and alternative distribution. They also reduce complexity by moving every developer that distributes apps in the EU to a single set of business terms. […] The Core Technology Fee, a per-install fee for developers that […]

Joe Rossignol (release notes, security, no enterprise, no developer, full installer, IPSW): macOS 26.6.2 delivers security fixes that were first made available in the macOS Golden Gate 27 beta. Howard Oakley: There don’t appear to any matching security updates to Sequoia or Sonoma, though. See also: Mr. Macintosh. Previously: iOS 26.6.1 and iPadOS 26.6.1 macOS […]

Joe Rossignol (iOS/iPadOS release notes, security, no enterprise, no developer): Apple today released iOS 26.6.1, iPadOS 26.6.1, visionOS 26.6.1, and macOS 26.6.2, with all of the updates containing security fixes. Apple also released iOS 18.7.10 and iPadOS 18.7.10 with security fixes. The version numbers are now out of sync with macOS because macOS 26.6.1 fixed […]

I'm thinking about writing my blog over in RSS.chat. It has most of the features I like, titles are optional, no character limit, links are supported, because it's the web. It supports discourse the way I like it, where every comment is a post, no difference, and you can anchor threads in different places, not just the place it was born. It's got a simple structure, without being complex. Small parts loosely joined, every part replaceable. Much more than open source. And naturally distributed.

Why do people care if Claude puts watermarks on text it wrote. It's screwing with its writing, not yours. As a person who publishes their own writing, and carefully labels it when it's written by an AI bot (docs, change notes, podcast show notes, quotable things it said), I want people to be able to tell that I wrote it, this is what I thought, I'm not just shoveling random written sludge to people, sloshing around, devaluing every bit of real writing in its midst. I bet teachers love the idea. Why does everyone have to have an opinion about every damned thing? And of course I have even more to say on the subject.

Paresh Dave and Aarian Marshall, reporting for Wired (News+ link in case Wired hits you with their paywall): The incidents involved two different shipments of high-value technology traveling from Silicon Valley to Southern California, according to Pachuca, who says he le...

Galicia, August 2026.

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

Meanwhile Claude wrote test files in many of our S3 buckets last night, one of which knocked FeedLand off the air. It did a scan to see what other damage it had done, and there was a lot. It went through specific orders that said it can't do those things. So I have no idea how useful these things could be if it destroys stuff in deployed projects with real users. FeedLand was down for over an hour, and stressed me out no end. Really fucked up.

Stuart Heritage, writing for The Guardian, under the splendid headline “Dickovers, Baggravation and Botiquette: 18 New Words to Describe Our Tech Hellscape”: The “dickover” is the scourge of the modern age. Coined in May by John Gruber, a tech writer, it is defined as “a...

As I've been writing test scripts for the Frontier project, I was finding omissions or mistakes one at a time. Finally I asked Claude to research this. Where are the holes you didn't fill as we were going along? The list is surprisingly long. Then I asked it to look at other...

Thibault Sottiaux, the OpenAI genius in charge of Codex and the new ChatGPT Homer Simpson car, on Twitter/X: I don’t come often to GMail [sic] (OpenAI is a Slack company), but I swear, every time I do open it, there is a new button somewhere around the top right corner. ...

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

macOS 27 Golden Gate beta 6 introduces redesigned traffic light window controls. The new look resembles older Mac OS X systems with more detail in each button.

Nice. But these changes can’t improve fast enough for me — I am impatient. The MacOS user interface had been in a slow, steady, sad, no-fun decline for years, and then, a year ago, the bottom fell out with the disaster of 26 Tahoe.

But all the changes in 27 Golden Gate are in the right direction. Golden Gate is not a mixed bag. Designers with taste and talent are clearly back at the helm. And I love that they’re still pushing UI and icon changes in mid-August, entering the home stretch of the .0 beta cycle.

Juli Clover (AppleInsider): Apple has again failed to earn a stay for fee calculations in its ongoing legal fight with Epic Games. Apple's case will be heard by the Supreme Court in the term that begins in October, and Apple asked the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to pause proceedings until […]

Lily Hay Newman (via Ben Lovejoy): As AI models gain advanced capabilities to find vulnerabilities in software, develop ways to exploit them, and even carry out autonomous hacking sprees, researchers offered a sobering new example on Tuesday, disclosing vulnerabilities in the video conferencing platform Zoom that could have been exploited to take over targets’ devices. […]

From the Bundeskartellamt’s press release: Under the commitments that have now been declared binding, Apple will align the consent prompts for its own offerings and for third-party apps much more closely. This involves removing possibly discouraging symbols and wording in Apple’s predefined requests for third-party providers. The design of the consent prompts will be neutral […]⌥ Permalink