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Lex Friedman (Mastodon): Though allegedly focused on benefiting users (through better safety and compliance), App Store review in its current form mostly frustrates the people it claims to protect. […] Those are all scammy apps that got through. Apple’s review capacity isn’t infinite. Every hour a reviewer spends poring over a bug-fix update to an […]

Echo Wang, reporting for Reuters yesterday: Anthropic is making a massive bet that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than ​industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters. This is a strong clear lede, ...

Lake District, October 2023.

From the video Lake District.

Curators Jenny Robb and Caitlin McGurk took me on a 45-minute guided tour of one of my favorite places: the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum on the OSU campus in Columbus, Ohio. Really fun. Watch the video.

Yesterday I posted a note about the problem with the nightly email service. The problem was that Claude Code wrote over a code file that the app includes and needs. This is one of those things they're talking about in the press. Maybe it was a glitch, one of those "AI makes ...

As Cosmos Malick: More on the way Malick seeks life in his films. 

Robert Eickmann: A Go implementation of RSS Chat — distributed social networking over RSS feeds, with real-time WebSocket updates.

David Pogue sums up his experiences with Apple’s new Siri: As you can see by the Farmer’s Fridge food fail, the new Siri doesn’t always get it right. But overall, it’s an enormous leap in efficiency and precision. It’s a personal assistant, a second brain, a ChatGPT of your own life. You just have to […]⌥ Permalink

Programming note: Fixed a bug in our nightly email service. If you've had trouble subscribing or unsubscribing please try again.

Here are the relevant facts:  Oxford University Press USA is a “crossover” publisher, which means that they’re an academic press but they publish many books meant to have some trade success also, e.g. showing up in the local Barnes & Noble.  But OUP UK, with w...

My long-overdue review of Don't Look Up. I know people say it's a bad movie, but I love it so much and it's so incredibly watchable. I could watch the whole thing from beginning to end for the fifth time and still find it entertaining. So many good jokes, and it's got the best actors and acting and best of all Jennifer Lawrence is one of the stars, and she plays a very unlikely JL character, but then she can play any character. Here's she's a totally nerdy PhD student who gets a comet named after her. She has a boyfriend who dreams of being an influencer. They laugh at everything that's so stupid about our civilization, and its downfall, and near the end of the movie Leonardo gets the line that makes it so sad. We did have everything and we keep blowing it, over and over. We haven't evolved enough to use the greatness we inherited.

In last Friday’s newsletter, I wrote about helping my sixth grader with homework: I’ve been inspired lately by how many people I admire have moved to an analog notebook-based method of teaching. I really believe that in 2026 plain ol’ paper and pencil is the killer app. For example, my 6th grader needed to memorize […]

The latest typewriter interview is with artist Roman Muradov.

We are rewatching The Good Place, a sitcom that ran during the first Trump administration, this time with our tweens. It’s a show about moral philsophy and what it means to be a good person, but it’s also a show about the absurdity of quantifying and scoring systems. (It’s made me want to re-read my […]

Blake Brittain (PDF, patent 1, patent 2, Hacker News, 9To5Mac): A US jury ruled that Apple owes San Diego-based Taction ​more than $5.7 billion for using its patented technology to power the haptic feedback in iPhones and Apple Watches. Apple said it would ​appeal the country’s largest such verdict to ​date. […] Apple denied the […]

Nicolas Seriot: // "<a>" in UTF-16 LE + a single dangling byte const UInt8 bytes[] = {'<', 0, 'a', 0, '>', 0, 'X'}; […] The whole bug is a confusion between bytes left versus UTF-16 characters left. The result is repeated buffer doubling until allocation fails, and a local process crash if the exception is […]

Juli Clover (release notes, no security, enterprise, no developer, full installer, IPSW): Apple says macOS Golden Gate 27.0.1 fixes unspecified bugs. See also: Mr. Macintosh and Howard Oakley. Previously: macOS 27 Golden Gate

macOS 26.7.1 (security, no enterprise, no developer, full installer): This update provides bug fixes and security updates for your Mac. macOS 15.8.1 (security, no enterprise, no developer, full installer): This update provides bug fixes and security updates for your Mac. Though not called out in the release notes, macOS 15.8.1 fixes the regression with RAW […]

Juli Clover (iOS/iPadOS release notes, no security, iOS/iPadOS enterprise, no developer): According to Apple’s release notes, iOS 27.0.1 addresses an issue that could cause Face ID not to work properly on the iPhone 18 Pro. Some iPhone 18 Pro users have complained that authentication can fail to work for things like unlocking a locked app. […]

Regarding my post yesterday speculating on how Apple’s October — seemingly set to be a big one — might play out, a friend asked if any or all of the new stuff might be released through Apple Newsroom announcements only. Good question. Let’s run through the rumored new hardwa...