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Juli Clover (no release notes): HomePod Software 27 adds AirPlay improvements and support for AutoMix when listening to Apple Music. Ryan Christoffel: AirPlay improvements may sound like a minor change, but in practice they can make a big difference in connecting quicker than ever to your HomePod. Using the iOS 27 beta, I’ve been pleasantly […]

Galicia, August 2026.

From the video Great conditions, very little time.

Armin Briegel at Scripting OS X has compiled links for all the release notes for all of today’s OS updates (features, developer, security). In addition to the 27.0 updates, Apple also released 26.7 updates and MacOS 15.8 Sequoia. Big day.

The next milestone will be installing Atlantis on my new macbook, and hooking a monitor up to it, a really nice one, and move my work to that desk. then Berkeley, the name of the system I've been using for eight years, will be here as a backup and source of truth and prior art. That was the goal of the Atlantis project. I could probably do the switch right now. It's like moving out of an old house that you did good stuff in, into a replica, but built out of the latest bits. Honestly I never thought in a million years I'd get here.

I spent a great chunk of last week at SmashingConf Freiburg and it was lovely as usual. It was great to meet some people I've only ever seen online and see old friends. And I am not going to lie - it was pretty flattering to have people come over to me and challenge me to ad...

Miles Abbott:

Open x.com links in a popup so you can read the one post and leave. Port of the Litterbox Safari extension.

Litterbox is a cleverer name, but Dumpster Fire is funnier.

My longtime friend Jeff Jarvis says the press is covering the wrong story re AI. I agree, but I think Jeff is covering the wrong story too. This is really a discovery like electricity, or Newtonian physics, calculus, basically the technology of knowledge. I wish I were 22 years old now so I could plan out a long career working this way. I want people like Jeff to understand. They all stopped listening to me when my dreams of a web society were destroyed by the VCs. I'm even smarter and more experienced now than I was then, and I have better tools. Please, listen -- you're all missing the point. It should be a matter of great interest -- what can we do with this. All we hear about are fears, which aren't even informed by what the tech can do. Very typical of journalism. Let's do better this time.

It is probably the closest to First Contact with an intelligent alien life form that our species will ever have.

XCancel:

Unfortunately, due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings, we are required to suspend this service again until further notice. We can’t share more details.

Not surprised, and not sure what to make of the “can’t share more details” part. Again, if you want to avoid visiting X but want to see the content posted there linked from other sites (and, let’s admit it at this point: there’s not just a lot posted on X, it is outright resurgent in popularity), install a browser extension like Litterbox (Safari) or Post Peek (Chrome).

Man, it feels great to be doing all my online writing at micro.blog. What a fantastic service @manton has built — and is still building!

Saying goodbye to WordPress. I won’t stop writing longer posts, I’ll just be writing them here and at Cosmos Malick and at a new blog that I am calling, unimaginatively I suppose, Personal History. I’ve begun it by re-posting a few autobiographical pieces from the old WordPress blog, and I will be adding to those over time — largely for my own sake, as I’m trying to make sense of some of the odder things about my life. But since most of my readers are unlikely to be interested in all that, I’ll keep it siloed in its own blog.

It’s all part of the Ayjay Empire, though. As far as I can tell, most of my readers find out what I’m writing through the weekly newsletter/digest and don’t really care to what URL the links go. Nothing will change for you, if you’re one of those people, and little will change for anyone else. 

My thanks to Glyphs for sponsoring this last week at DF. Glyphs 4 is a truly native Mac app for creating fonts, lettering, icons, and pictograms. Glyphs lets you draw with flexible strokes and efficiently reuse shapes across huge sets of glyphs, and explore variable vector d...

On a good day working with Claude is like working with my old UW-Madison programmer friend Gary Sevitsky from the 70s.

I've been writing about Atlantis on various social media sites in the last few days. Published the long piece I wrote yesterday on Facebook and X, both of which allow long posts. Wasn't going to try that on Mastodon or Bluesky, which have character limits (I know Mastodon doesn't technically have a limit, but in practice it does). And I am reaching old school Frontier enthusiasts, and realize I need a feed they can follow to stay up on the news. For now the one place to follow is rss.xml on scripting.com. If your reader can't deal with http, let me know.

Claude has started asking me how Claude is doing. It's clear that the Claude I talk to knows nothing about this. I appreciate this, and hope if I said it wasn't working well with me, it would try to fix it? Not sure. Anyway this is what I just wrote, and felt it was worth blogging. "it's working with me the way i want to, and it appears to be learning and getting better at it, though i think that could be my imagination. also just as likely that i'm learning how to work the way it likes to work."

Brad East: One friend in particular reached out to express his shock that I was (at least rhetorically) siding with young earth creationists against Christians who believe in an old universe. I replied that I didn’t even know what he was talking about! He pointed to the art...

Matthew Butterick says that a key argument of the Big AI companies is

That Big AI compa­nies are the only ones who can protect us from the risks that their prod­ucts create. But this narra­tive isn’t believ­able unless the threat is believ­able. So Big AI has an incen­tive to talk up the risks their prod­ucts create, but no incen­tive to invest in secu­rity prac­tices commen­su­rate with those risks.

With Claude Code you don't have to write system scripts to get data about your data. Claude makes that fully transparent. For example, I just asked Claude to get me a list of all the parts I've changed since the last release of frontier.root. If Claude writes a script to get that info, it's invisible to me. All I know is it takes about a minute for me to get the list.

Earlier this week I read We Will Rise Again, a selection of short sf hopepunk stories and accompanying essays centered on civil disobedience, resistance, and protest. It was edited by Annalee Newitz, Malka Older, both authors whose work I have very much enjoyed, and Karen Lord, a name I didn’t remember coming across before. Based […]