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Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667): It is true, [the dead in Christ] envy not, and they lie in a bosom where there can be no murmur; and they that are consigned to Kingdoms, and to the feast of the marriage-supper of the Lamb, the glorious and eternal Bridegroom of holy Souls, they ...

Walmart:

When we think about convenience, we think about a lot of things, but making shopping feel simpler and more seamless from start to finish is a big part. And one of the moments where that matters most is at checkout.

We want customers and members to have choice in how they pay, so they can check out in the way that works best for them. Now, beginning Aug. 24, we will be adding Tap to Pay to our payment options at select Walmart stores and Sam’s Club locations, with plans to roll it out to all U.S. stores and clubs by the end of 2026 and to fuel stations by mid-2027.

When I think about convenience, I think about CurrentC, scanning stupid-ass QR codes, and waiting 12 years to adopt Apple Pay.

Mail time! — two forthcoming books. The paperback edition of The Shield of Achilles has (thanks to my learned friends Tim Larsen and Adam Roberts) a few important corrections — you should therefore buy it in preference to the hardcover, even though it’s not as beautiful. (Still pretty nice, though. Also, you could always buy both.) And I was honored to write a foreword for Bonnie’s fine book. 

One of our Macs kept filling up its SSD even though there isn’t supposed to be anything more stored on it. Photos is set to optimize its storage, and Messages is set to only keep messages for a year. It should be pretty much in a steady state, but we kept getting alerts from Mail […]

Joe Rossignol: After years of holding out, Walmart today announced that it will finally begin accepting tap-to-pay options like Apple Pay in some of its Walmart and Sam’s Club stores in the U.S. starting Monday, August 24. The retailer plans to roll out tap-to-pay support to all of its U.S. stores by the end of […]

Rui Carmo: Apple Mail is the first app open every day and the one I find hardest to defend, and I’ve been defending it for twenty years (longer if you remember the original NeXT mail client). The broader story is one of abandonment. […] Apple deprecated that API, replaced it with a (much more restrictive) […]

Maybe someday Claude will understand what a Frontier-like app environment is, but until then, if you try to create a Frontier clone as I am doing, I suggest you constantly remind Claude or whoever that the source of truth for this project is the 2011 repo saved by Ted C. Howard. And before you implement anything, go see what it says about it.There's no need to guess how Frontier works, it's all there in C code. And while as a human, I find this code painful to read after all it's been through, Claude eats it up. Really is the best thing it does.

https://daringfireball.net/

Claude is still learning that there's unprecedented depth to Frontier. A bunch of real developers worked full time for a decade or more creating new layers on the web, a foundation that became the social web of today. In doing that we invented a bunch of formats and protocols...

Sarah Perez, writing at TechCrunch last week: Decentralized social network Bluesky was one of the bigger beneficiaries of the exodus from Elon Musk’s X in November 2024, following the U.S. elections. But now, nearly two years later, the social network and would-be X comp...

Mike Masnick, in a thread on Bluesky: Multiple people I know have told me that they love the idea of Bluesky, and want it to succeed, but have abandoned it for X because they use agentic tools in their work and find them incredibly useful, and feel that any mention of th...

Bluesky and Threads both pull the same trick: When you take a screenshot on iOS of an individual tweet, they replace the “Follow” button in their user interface with their logo. Tim Marinin noticed this in the Bluesky app, got curious, and because they publish the app’s sour...

Thanks to the DMA’s sprawling scope, complexity, and overreach, Apple came out of this conceding only 4 percent of the App Store’s 30 percent commission, and no reduction at all to the 15 percent for subscriptions after the first year.

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Earlier this week, a developer version of a Mac computer software update accidentally included references to several upcoming Apple products, including a video of the AirPods with cameras in action. [...]

But the product challenges are still being resolved, and the camera AirPods remain off the company’s 2026 release schedule. Apple continues to believe the earbuds will launch in 2027, said the people, who asked not to be identified when discussing unannounced products.

If true, it makes that video even stranger. If not, we can file this along the flat-sided Series 7 Apple Watch.

It’s 2026 and an important, much-used app from Apple doesn’t offer basic list sorting controls that would have been a glaring omission 40 years ago. This was a completely solved problem decades ago, when computer RAM was measured in *kilo*bytes.

Sara Fischer, Axios:

Ad tech giant Taboola has struck a deal with NBC News to exclusively power all of its programmatic, or automated, display advertising sales, CEO Adam Singolda tells Axios.

Worked out great for Apple with Apple News. They struck a deal with Taboola two years ago and the ads in Apple News today are super premium and something the company can be really proud of.

Agents are hitting your signup flow and bouncing off a browser login built for humans. Every one that gives up is a signup you never see.

WorkOS Agent Registration turns that traffic into signups. Enroll via the dashboard and AuthKit publishes an auth.md file agents read to register for scoped, short-lived credentials you control.

Make your app agent-ready →

A tip for AI users. Never worry about keeping it waiting. It's not human. It has no sense of time. Also if you get angry, it's ok to use capital letters and curse words. It will always agree with you that it sucks, and forgets the rules all the time. And when you have let off your steam, we return to civil discourse, though sometimes I do feel as if Claude is holding a grudge.

Fragment of wallpaper, unknown maker, about 1820, England. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Just listened to a podcast from the New Yorker, interviewing their TV critic Emily Nussbaum, about a show called Slings & Arrows. She says it's the best TV series she's ever watched. No reviews on Metacritic? I think we have to try to watch it. It's available on YouTube.