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Jill Lepore, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State:

This book is an inquiry into what humans mean and intend in abandoning constitutional democracy, the liberal nation-state, and even humanity itself for rule by automation, government by machine, and replacement by artificial intelligence. Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of what I call the Artificial State. Yet little seems to me more inevitable than its eventual fall, the exhale that follows every inhale, the day that follows night, Icarus’s plunge to the ocean after flying too close to the sun. The Artificial State is a fantasy about humans, machines, and the earth. This book is an archaeology of that fantasy.

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Endgame for the Open Web - Anil Dash: Now, the hectobillionaires have begun their final assault on the last, best parts of what's still open, and likely won't rest until they've either brought all of the independent and noncommercial parts of the Internet under their contro...

A tech story that I think has been underplayed: Google’s collapse into incompetence. There’s been widespread frustration with the worsening quality of web searches, but in addition: 

• Search in Gmail often fails utterly, turning up no results even when I am looking right at an email containing the string that I’m searching for; 
• On recent trips, Google Maps has failed to find prominent destinations and has sent me on strange detours (I’ve had to delete it from my phone); 
• Gemini is still offering the kinds of comically inaccurate, hallucinatory answers to questions that Claude and ChatGPT overcame two years ago. 

Some services are still functional — as far as I can tell, Docs still works — but the company overall is starting to look like a dumpster fire. 

It’s the best version of the most successful product ever made. And yet by nature of *how* the iPhone 18 Pro improved in the last year, it’s not exciting at all.

Showed up in class today and found on the desk flowers, chocolate and a consolation card signed by all my students. That is so sweet. 

My old friend Carlos Eire: Ever since 2013, this class [The Catholic Intellectual Tradition, at Yale] has attracted highly motivated students who are eager to explore a dimension of thought previously hidden from them, simply because the texts we read and discuss have not b...

Rodrigo Ghedin on the Audio Intelligence features in the new Apple Watch models: And… it doesn’t matter. The message that sticks in people’s minds is that the Apple Watch has become a constantly listening device. And although the new feature only works on the just-announced watches (Series 12 and Ultra 4), the distrust extends to […]⌥ Permalink

After agreeing in August with Germany’s competition authority to make changes to the App Tracking Transparency prompt, Apple has now announced the options available to developers. Unfortunately, the post on its Developer News page is terribly brief; here it is in its entirety: As part of agreements with select European competition authorities, Apple is introducing […]⌥ Permalink

San Francisco, March 2026.

From the video One adventure a day keeps burnout away.

One of my students in last semester’s Great Texts in Fantasy class gave me a copy of Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? and added some highly appropriate notes to the title page.

Milestone in Atlantis development, the new version of Frontier that runs on modern OSes. I'm going to start showing what's going on in the development of the product. To kick off, here's a screen shot of my blogroll displaying the latest new part. The updates flow through an RSS 2.0 feed, which is new for Frontier. It used to require a server that managed updates and responded to XML-RPC calls. But once RSS was part of the web, it was a better protocol for releasing code parts. Truly a milestone. There will be lots more little things we can do now that we couldn't do before. But under it all -- it's Frontier.

Joe Rossignol at MacRumors over the weekend: Apple now says the iPhone 18 Pro has a C2 modem worldwide, while the iPhone 18 Pro Max uses the chip in every country except for the U.S. [...] Apple has yet to provide an explanation for this modem difference, so we can only...

When you’re writing a historical narrative, you can’t explain everything — you have to assume that your audience has a certain level of knowledge. But it’s tricky to establish just what that baseline should be. You don’t want to insult your readers’ intelligence by overexpla...

Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors): Our solution hinges on splitting the Apple Reference Image process into two phases: creating a secure digital negative, and developing that negative into a reference image. Each phase receives our strongest protections. […] Apple Reference Image provides both a lower bound and an upper bound on capture time from Apple’s cryptographic […]

Jonathan M. Gitlin: GM made the decision to drop Apple CarPlay and Android Auto phone casting from its newer EVs, and it’s one we’ve been pretty critical of. Although the automaker told us it made that decision in order to offer a better, more unified experience to its customers, that may well have changed: here, […]

David Smith: Here’s the 17 family data as a percentage of overall usage for Widgetsmith. Generally they followed the usual adoption pattern, and overall did very well ending at around 20% of total usage. With the exception of the Air really struggling to find market share. For comparison the 16 Plus ended its first year […]

Amber Neely: A new section in the iOS 27 privacy policy shows that Apple has reversed its stance on using customers’ data to train its AI models. Previously, the company assured customers that it had no need for customer data, and would figure out how to make Siri AI work well without it. Apple maintains […]

Apple (xip, downloads): Xcode 27 includes Swift 6.4 and SDKs for iOS 27, iPadOS 27, tvOS 27, watchOS 27, macOS 27, and visionOS 27. Xcode 27 supports on-device debugging in iOS 17 and later, tvOS 17 and later, watchOS 10 and later, and visionOS. Xcode 27 requires a Mac running macOS Tahoe 26.6 or later. […]

Apple (security, no enterprise, no developer, full installer): This update provides important security fixes and is recommended for all users. Apple (security, full installer): This update provides important security fixes and is recommended for all users. See also: MacRumors, Mr. Macintosh, and Howard Oakley. Previously: macOS 27 Golden Gate macOS 26.6.2 macOS 15.7.9 and 14.8.9

Juli Clover (iOS/iPadOS release notes, security, no enterprise, no developer): According to Apple’s release notes, iOS 26.7 includes security fixes, but it does not have any other features. Apple will eventually show iOS 27 as the main update for the iPhone, but that likely won’t happen for a few weeks. Users who want to stay […]