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Pixel Envy Valid
Text • Nick Heer

World’s Most Powerful Person Does a Stupid Thing About a Lake

An un-bylined Canadian Press report: U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” as tensions with Canada worsen. Elect stupid people and get stupid policies. This report contains a good explanation of the name’s history, and also has a deliciously petty map illustrating […]⌥ Permalink

Jason Fried Valid
Text • Jason Fried

$5300 in $100s: The verdict

Yesterday I wrote about a free event we were throwing which cost $100 to attend, but the full $100 was refunded at the door if you showed up. I said I'd share the results.Ok, so the event was this morning. It went incredibly well.Here are those results:55 people paid $100 ...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

U.S. Judge Blocks Trump Defense Department’s Anthropic Blacklisting

reuters.com/legal/government/us-judge-blocks-pentagons-anthropic-blacklisting-2026-08-28/

Jack Queen, Reuters: A U.S. judge on Thursday blocked the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic, ​the latest turn in the Claude maker’s high-stakes fight with the military over AI safety on the battlefield. Anthropic’s lawsuit in California federal court alleges that Def...

Scripting News Valid
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Heard an interview with Bill Gates on an Atlantic podcast, he relies on a few years of programming he did when he was in his teens and twenties, yet he is the most prominent person who knows anything about programming. This is a societal mistake. We have to have public discourse about tech that's as informed as Krugman is on economics, and Heather Cox Richardson is on American history.

Alan Jacobs Supports Webmention Valid
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Undermining Babylon System.

Alan Jacobs Supports Webmention Valid
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Freston Tower Feb 2026.

Just learned about Freston Tower from a friend who stayed there. 

Michael Tsai
Text • Michael Tsai

Testing Tip: Make Your Keyboard Fast

Marcin Wichary: By default, on a Mac, the initial delay is 500ms, and the key repeat rate 1000ms. […] My suggestion is to make them both as short as possible for testing. […] First, it’s good to test whether your keystrokes behave well when repeated. Occasionally you might want your interface to suppress repeating, or […]

Michael Tsai
Text • Michael Tsai

Magic Keyboard 2026

Hartley Charlton: On the new keyboards, the tab, caps lock, shift, return, and delete keycaps are labeled with glyphs rather than edge text. On the full-size models with a numeric keypad, the change goes further, with the home, page up, page down, end, clear, and enter keys also swapping their text labels for symbols. Four […]

Michael Tsai
Text • Michael Tsai

Apple Polishing Cloth 2026

Joe Rossignol (Hacker News): Apple today released a new version of its Polishing Cloth on its online store. In the U.S., pricing is now set at $9, down from $19 for the previous version of the cloth. Starry Horizon (via Hartley Charlton): new polishing cloth and comparison with the old one, dimensions are pretty much […]

Alan Jacobs Supports Webmention Valid
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“Pencil Magazine is a themed print publication featuring work created entirely with graphite pencil and paper.” 

Alan Jacobs Supports Webmention Valid
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Teapot, Christopher Dresser, about 1879 (1879??) 

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Afterglow — Classic After Dark Screen Savers on Today’s MacOS

morphing.cloud/afterglow/

Jeff Halter has done it again: after bringing back the single greatest After Dark module (Ben Haller’s Lunatic Fringe game, via a modern runtime named Lunacy), he’s now released Afterglow: Running After Dark modules in the present day has involved fussy configuration of ...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

The Load-Bearing Vocabulary of Claude

louisabraham.github.io/load-bearing/

Fun (but depressing?) data analysis project from Louis Abraham, showing how repetitive Claude is in the words it chooses when submitting GitHub pull requests. Abraham, in the project’s readme: GitHub pull request descriptions, grouped by the words they are written with r...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Elizabeth Warren’s Incoherent Outrage Regarding Apple’s Tariff Refund

warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren-pushes-giant-corporations-to-give-billions-in-tariff-refunds-back-to-consumers/

Speaking of tariff refunds, here’s an official statement from Senator Elizabeth Warren from a few weeks ago: U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote to Target, Apple, Amazon, Nike, Motorola, Walmart, and Energizer pushing these companies — each of which have or are...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Panic Is Refunding Tariff Fees to Playdate Buyers

gamedeveloper.com/business/playdate-maker-is-refunding-tariff-fees-to-customers

Nicole Carpenter and Diego Argüello, reporting for Game Developer: “There was a specific window of time this year where we charged tariffs to customers,” Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser explained in an e-mail to Game Developer confirming the news. “We tried absorbing the c...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Ads in Apple Maps Have Now Launched

9to5mac.com/2026/08/25/apple-maps-launches-ads-on-iphone-heres-whats-new/

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac: Apple confirmed to 9to5Mac that the ads rollout in Maps began in the last few days. And it will continue ramping in the weeks ahead to all users. There are two places you’ll find ads in the Maps app: Before searching: Suggested Places in the...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

‘How Europe Is Killing Makers and Micro-Entrepreneurs’

lectronz.com/u/lectronz/articles/how-europe-is-killing-makers-and-micro-entrepreneurs

Alain Pannetrat, founder of Lectronz: Lectronz is a marketplace for open-source hardware makers and DIY electronics. Most of our sellers are not factories or well-funded start-ups. They are engineers, independent designers, and hardware enthusiasts working from spare roo...

Alan Jacobs Supports Webmention Valid
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I’ve been locked out of my Baylor accounts — I changed my password and now neither the new one nor the old one works — and I’m trying to decide whether that’s a bad or a good thing.

Scripting News Valid
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FeedLand Rivers for WordPress: I've noticed that people are setting up news reader sites with FeedLand that are getting considerable flow. We thought they'd use News Products, a feature that was supposed to make it easy to create standalone sites like the one I did for WordP...

Alan Jacobs Supports Webmention Valid
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The fourth and last post in my series for the Dispatch on the Second World War is up.