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John Gruber

★ Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing

It’s unacceptable for a tool to sacrifice an iota of clarity, coherence, meaning, quality, etc. for the purpose of embedding hidden clues within the text to suggest its provenance. The idea that anything other than *my* needs should factor into the generation of text *for me* is patently offensive.

blog - aows Valid
• Adrian Vila

The cemetery, II

Galicia, August 2026.

From the video Why I work on multiple photography projects at once.

blog - aows Valid
• Adrian Vila

Why you need several long-term photography projects

In this video I talk about why I keep several long-term photography projects going at once; some built around a place, some around an idea, some I can't even fully explain yet. I get into how I structure them around the places I keep coming back to, what changes when you return to the same spot over months, and why a project might not ever be totally finished.

In the end, the project might not even be the point, but to pay attention.

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

The Information Profiles Cami Clark — Dario Amodei’s Wife, Ivanka Trump’s Friend, One-Time Would-Be Pornographer, and Anthropic’s ‘First Lady’

theinformation.com/articles/anthropics-first-lady-took-winding-road-top?rc=jfy0lk

Cory Weinberg, Jemima McEvoy, Jessica E. Lessin, and Stephanie Palazzolo, writing for the paywalled-without-gift-links The Information: As Amodei has hopscotched the globe to preach about the potential and risks of AI — from New Delhi to Davos to Sun Valley — Clark has a...

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

‘Anthropic’s Weak Watermarks Appease a Weak Law’

blog.j11y.io/2026-08-12_Anthropics-weak-watermarks-appease-a-weak-law/

James Padolsey, on the Claude-text-watermarking-to-comply-with-an-EU-regulation imbroglio: The same thought that led to this law could have applied to calculators at the time of their inception, had their outputs revealed themselves through artefacts. Thankfully, a sum b...

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

Trump Administration ‘Not in Favor’ of Apple Using Chinese RAM

wsj.com/tech/apple-china-memory-chip-plan-57773a83?st=vfe1SA

The Wall Street Journal (gift link): To help alleviate the supply crunch, Apple is looking to Chinese manufacturers. “The Trump administration is not in favor of that,” Lutnick said in an interview after touring an Apple manufacturing facility in Houston. There have to ...

Scripting News Valid

Brent Simmons posted a note in RSS.chat about how to connect with NNW. I have a fairly detailed response, that says dynamic OPML is the way to go, in both directions. I know serving it publicly will be a problem, that's why we're going to move FeedLand into position to solve that. FreshRSS, InoReader and my own FeedLand already support it. It feels like this is getting established. I still want a podcast client to work here. I've pitched a few of them.

Molly White's activity feed Supports Webmention

Finished reading The Palace Job

Finished reading: Rogues of the Republic series, book 1. The Palace Job by Patrick Weekes. Published 2012. 438 pages. Started July 17, 2026; completed August 16, 2026. Posted: August 16, 2026 at 3:13 PM UTC. Tagged: fantasy, heist, humor.

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

XCancel — An Unofficial Twitter/X Mirror

xcancel.com/about

XCancel: XCancel is an instance of Nitter. Nitter is a free and open source alternative Twitter front-end focused on privacy and performance. The source is available on GitHub at https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [...] Using an instance of Nitter (hosted on a VPS for ex...

Scripting News Valid

Sometimes I need to use a Google-style search engine to find something on a reference site. That no longer works in Google. This is a major feature pullback. So far all we've heard in journalism is how it hurts their bottom line, but nothing about the world's information architecture. This is something like every bridge in the world being blown up at the same time, and I don't think that's an exaggeration.

Sven Dahlstrand Supports Webmention Valid

Lorde, suspended. Live at Way Out West, August 15, 2026.

A dark, moody shot of Lorde on a suspended stage, with a beam of light cutting through the haze and silhouetting her.

Jonathan Hays Supports Webmention Valid

Finished reading: Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose 📚

Alan Jacobs Supports Webmention Valid

How much would you pay for a smarter baby? — I can imagine the lawsuits later: “We paid for a smarter baby but instead we got a child who’s compassionate and generous! We’ve been screwed!” 

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

Drata

drata.com/daring

My thanks to Drata for sponsoring last week at DF. Their message is short and sweet: Leverage autonomous AI agents to automate compliance, manage internal and third-party risk, and continuously prove your security posture.

 ★ 

Scripting News Valid

Thinking out loud on a Saturday morning

Tech is very competitive, I learned, even when you give your work away, which I have been doing for a couple of decades. Maybe even especially when you give it away. I want to work with other people, and am always making invitations. When I see a product that fits in with wh...

Alan Jacobs Supports Webmention Valid

Via Ian Leslie, a beautifully designed page on ordinary abundance.

Sven Dahlstrand Supports Webmention Valid

Standing in line for two hours and a concert starting at 01:30 is a bit of a stretch for this old geezer, but fuck yes, it was so worth it!!1! (⁠╥⁠﹏⁠╥⁠)

Nina’s first gig in Sweden & first time playing her brand-new song (50 seconds in).

Ninajirachi live at Pustervik, Göteborg, on August 14, 2026. 🎵

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

TabControl Scam and the App Review Queue

Jeff Johnson: Despite my history of uncovering App Store frauds, I rarely go looking for these things intentionally! They’re just so pervasive and obvious, they jump out at me. In this case, I was looking at the list of top paid Safari extensions in the Mac App Store, because two of my own extensions are […]

Michael Tsai
• Michael Tsai

SQLite WAL-Reset Bug

Alex Chan (Hacker News): Many of these outages were caused by a single bug, deep in SQLite. It took months of intense forensics to track it down. […] This lack of reliable trigger conditions meant we couldn’t reproduce the bug synthetically. Instead, we had to rely on deploying passive, forensic telemetry in our live environment […]

blog - aows Valid
• Adrian Vila

Forest Magic

Galicia, May 2026.