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Sofia Schwarzwalder, reporting for The Seattle Times:

Since turning 50, the Mariners legend has been inducted into the Hall of Fame, launched eight homers at the Mariners Alumni Home Run Derby this summer and, most recently, tossed a 127-pitch shutout with 17 strikeouts during an annual All-Star Game against the best high-school girls in Japan. [...]

The All-Star Game took place Sunday at the Tokyo Dome in front of a reported 25,000 fans. The game also featured former New York Yankees All-Star outfielder Hideki Matsui. In addition to his dazzling performance on the mound, Ichiro led off the game and had a pair of hits.

Speaking to reporters in Japanese, Ichiro said, “I wanted to see what my current limits were, and this gave me confidence in myself.”

Trung Phan, on X, posted a short video of clips. Ichiro was tossing some nasty stuff.

Glenn Fleishman: Recent protectionist changes by the European Union further effectively exclude U.S. small businesses like mine from selling to EU customers. It’s a little complicated, but it has to do with how tax and customs fees are collected and extracted from low-va...

David Pogue: The hardest part will be getting out of the habit of opening apps, and remembering that you have Siri. Give it a few tries. Learn to trust it. You’ll save incredible amounts of time and fumbling. I used the beta-test version all summer, growing more and mor...

Die deutsprachigen Blogwochen sind wieder gestartet. Eine Initiative von Robert Lender, Benedikt Müller und Dirk Deimeke, deren Blogs sich schon lange in meinem Feedreader befinden. Die Idee ist: Blogger schreiben während 3 Monate über eine kleine Liste von Themen, und werden so gegenseitig sichtbarer. So verknüpfen sich die Blogger, entstehen neue Gespräche, und bereichert man […]

Matthew Butterick:

So let’s not take the bait. Nor overcomplicate. We needn’t spin our collective wheels spitballing answers to big-picture, long-term Al-policy questions. We don’t know enough yet. The best next steps are the concrete ones: Big Al needs to follow all current laws — just like everyone else. So far — they haven’t. When Big Al breaks those laws, they must face prosecution and penalties — just like everyone else. So far — they haven’t. The state and federal agencies tasked with enforcing those laws need to apply them to Big Al — just like everyone else. So far — they haven’t. In short, we have to attend to the basic features of the rule of law. So far — we haven’t. If we can’t or won’t insist on that now, then we shouldn’t expect to be able to later.

Seth Godin back in 2014:

You can’t tell if a book is any good by the number of words it contains, even though it’s quite easy and direct to measure this.

(Vis-à-vis my sidenote over the weekend about Apple refusing to publish mAh battery specs for iPhones.)

South Pole of Mars. Bigger version here. 

Robin Sloan:

The con­sensus vision seems to involve AI working for you day-to-day, a con­stant ambient presence, sparkles in every­thing; even cau­tious Apple has succumbed. I’m not inter­ested in that.

My alter­na­tive: get your wish, then stuff the genie back into the lamp.

Nellie Andreeva, reporting for Deadline: The release of The Savant is back on. A year after Apple TV put the thriller starring Jessica Chastain on hold three days before it was slated to premiere on Sept. 26, 2025, the streamer has rescheduled it for spring, 2027. The ex...

I genuinely enjoyed that Sara Eisen laughed a little when introducing me as having written a 5,000-word review of the iPhone 18 Pro.

Major Firewatch vibes from our overnight in the ranger’s cabin. Sanna got a bunch of photos up on her blog.

Galicia, August 2026.

From the video A lovely foggy morning of photography.

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring this last week — a big week — at DF.

SSO is table stakes for enterprise deals, but building it into your app yourself means writing SAML controllers, parsing XML assertions, and handling IdP-specific quirks for each provider. Learn how SAML flows work, the tradeoffs between building or buying, and best practices for security, routing, and UX.

Or, skip the hassle and add SSO with WorkOS. Read their developer’s guide to learn more.

Natalie Neff, Autoweek: General Motors is reversing course after having begun to remove Apple CarPlay from its vehicles, showing off instead a redesigned infotainment interface for the 2027 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups that melds the smartphone apps with th...

Here's a screen shot of a new verb we just added, to facilitate nightly backups. I want to save off a fresh copy of frontier.root every night, as well as my guest databases. This is how that will work.

Frontier news. I have been working on a repo for Frontier pioneers, I started with a few friends, including Brent and Jake who were both on the UserLand team, and have added people very slowly. This is a good time to start showing progress in the project. Still very early for a public release of the software. And I want to do even better than we did with rss.chat a few months ago. And Frontier is a huge thing, all kinds of docs, and archives, and example stuff. It really was 15 years of work done by as many as 5 people.

New verb: string.addressToString. This is how I'm releasing examples.

Chigurgh: "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" Frontier must've lived by a good rule. The Atlantis version has tons of bugs but it works. It defied death. I just spent a session updating my nightly backup code, and there were awkard moments. The debugger isn't in yet. The Find command doesn't work. But I have hobbled my way to working code, and I have help debugging with Claude, and it is amazing at that. Frontier didn't know that Claude was going to save its life. More proof that you never know what is just around the corner.

He takes the same “this is pretty much exactly what Apple used to label an ‘S’ year” angle I did, so, unsurprisingly, I think his review is spot-on. Brownlee emphasizes one point that I should have, but didn’t: according to Apple’s published specs, the regular iPhone 18 Pro ...

If you want to get an idea of the kind of user interface you can create using Claude Code, with a driver (me) who has ample experience developing such things, have a look at demo.rss.chat. The UI was entirely done by Claude with me directing, very fine-tuning stuff. Claude can't really grok user interfaces because it is not visual and it is not a user. It might be able to test them, to some extent. Anyone can create an account on the demo server, that's what it's there for. And if something interesting breaks out there, that would be even better. I even tolerate a small amount of spam, and testing is definitely allowed (that's why it's there). ;-)