Daring Fireball

Following up on the previous item today, re: content blockers and ad-blocking , I ran into a weird situation a few weeks ago with my column “ John Ternus Should Reverse Apple’s Slide Down the Advertising Slippery Slope ”. That article contains this sentence, in Markdown: And -- at this writing, still "coming soon" -- Apple is launching [ads on Apple Maps][🗺️]. [🗺️]: https://ads.apple.com/maps The problem is that anyone reading that article in NetNewsWire saw it rendered like this, with the words “ads on Apple Maps” 1 omitted: It looks like I forgot to finish writing that sentence. But I did.

Speaking of dickovers , here’s Cory Doctorow, writing this week at Pluralistic: Seizing the means of computation isn’t theft, it’s bargaining . Commercial surveillance companies will tell you that by spying on you, they are simply engaged in a marketplace exchange in which you swap your privacy for access to online services. But they are running a very curious sort of market: it’s a “market” where as soon as you stop to browse someone’s wares, the stallholder gets to reach into your pocket and clean out your wallet. In “markets,” prices are announced and bargained over, not set unilaterally an

James, a future Hall of Famer and the NBA's all-time leading scorer, has made his decision: He's coming to Philly.

Here’s a real gem that a reader sent me. Tomtoc is a maker of laptop bags and sleeves. Visit their homepage and, of course, you’ll get a dickover asking you to join their mailing list “for exclusive updates and get a chance to win a free tech pouch every month.” But here’s the gem. If you do subscribe, and you decide later to unsubscribe, you get this: ★


Explore six decades of cinematic espionage locations—from remote island lairs to the tailors of Savile Row.

Kirk McElhearn, back in February : I use Apple News to keep up on topics that I don’t find in sources I pay for (The Guardian and The New York Times). But there’s no way I’m going to pay the exorbitant price Apple wants for Apple News+ — £13 — because, while you get more publications, you still get ads. And those ads have gotten worse recently. Many if not most of them look like and probably are scams. Here are a few examples from Apple News today. One of the ads he examined was, supposedly, from a small company going out of business because the proprietor — supposedly a straight-out-of-Centra

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

Legendary technology columnist, pundit, author and podcast host John C. Dvorak has died, age 80. He is survived by his wife Mimi Dvorak.

The European Commission, last week : Today, the European Commission has issued two sets of binding specification measures to Google under the Digital Markets Act. The aim of the first specification measures is to ensure that competitors’ Artificial Intelligence (AI) services can compete with Google’s own AI services, such as Gemini, by having equal access to features on Google’s Android devices. The aim of the second specification measures is to rebalance the playing field by giving third-party search engines access to search data that only Google Search can collect at scale. They provide sepa

Ben Thompson, on the hype regarding Kimi K3, at Stratechery: This is a point that bears repeating: because U.S. open weight model makers must follow the frontier labs’ terms of service, they (1) are worse than Chinese alternatives and (2) end up distilling the distillation, just with a detour through Chinese labs. Wouldn’t it be better if western open weight model makers could go to the source? To that end, here’s an even more interesting question around distillation: why exactly is it bad? After all, what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Inter

My thanks to Paper for sponsoring last week at DF. Paper is a new professional design tool where every layer is real HTML and CSS. Your design is already code, which means fewer handoffs, translations, and layers of abstraction between what you design and what you actually ship. Paper works both ways: code to design, and design to code. Connect any AI agent through MCP and the agent can read and edit your designs. Or use Paper Snapshot to capture your live site as editable layers and make new iterations. Agents handle the tedious work so you can focus on your craft and the decisions that matte

9to5Mac: Brazilian users browsing the App Store rankings in categories such as Navigation, Travel, and Weather have noticed a growing number of poorly made games appearing among the top results, many of them featuring AI-generated illustrations of animals as their app icons. As it turns out, these are so-called jacket apps, which are just a front for hidden betting and gambling apps. A 9to5Mac investigation has uncovered more than 60 apps that behave exactly as depicted in their App Store screenshots when accessed from virtually anywhere in the world, except Brazil. When opened from a Brazilia

iPhone maker steps up aggressive tactics in trade secrets dispute with AI lab

‘It Seems You Have a Different Policy’ Ben Thompson, in a subscriber-only Stratechery update Tuesday : I got a fun email from former Apple executive, Nest founder, and one-time Stratechery Interview subject Tony Fadell in response to yesterday’s Update about Apple suing OpenAI (published with permission): Good article as always… This is Apple’s typical tactic to scare Apple employees — either former or current. I heard this lawsuit was driven by the Apple board. Steve threatened to file a lawsuit against Nest for poaching 80-100 Apple employees. He called me, screamed for a while with lots of

Apple has raised the price of Apple Music today in the United States and other countries. Starting today, Apple Music’s...

Wired, back on May 15: OpenAI says it’s folding ChatGPT, its AI coding agent Codex, and its developer-facing API into one core product team. The company says that Codex is increasingly powering its consumer and enterprise offerings, which are gaining the ability to perform digital tasks autonomously on behalf of users. Other OpenAI leaders are also taking on larger roles at the company as part of the changes. OpenAI’s head of Codex, Thibault Sottiaux, has been tapped to lead the company’s core product and platform teams. Sottiaux was a key leader in building Codex into one of the company’s fas

Joanna Stern at New Things, last month : Last month, just days after my book went on sale, AI knockoffs of the ebook version flooded Apple Books. There was Joanna Stern On I Am Not A Robot by Sophie Mercer. I AM NOT A ROBOT by Finn Tech. I AM NOT A ROBOT by Joana Stern — with one “n.” ( Watch our latest video showing all these titles and more.) In total, I found ten AI-generated ebooks clearly riding on mine, with AI-generated covers mimicking the style of my real one — the same blue, yellow and red color palette. Most were priced at $9.99, but some have gone as high as $20.99. [...] After I c

Thibault “Tibo” Sottiaux, the OpenAI engineering lead who’s taking the most public credit for this and thus probably deserves the most blame, on Twitter/X: Evening! We’ve gotten lots of great feedback on the new ChatGPT desktop app (which we didn’t get totally quite right on the first try), and as a result, we’ve made some changes. 1/ ChatGPT conversation history and projects are now visible in the sidebar. Also, your Chat and Work history now sync across web, mobile, and desktop. Local tasks still stay on your computer. How in the world did they ship this without sync? 2/ You can now easily s

Roblox executives Nick Tornow and Vlad Loktev, on the Roblox blog: Twenty years ago, Roblox launched with a simple idea: “You make the game.” At the time, that was a radical proposition — most games were made by studios and professionals, and the idea that anyone could be a creator was far from obvious. But we believed it. And the millions of creators who built on Roblox proved it. As we look to a future where any one of Roblox’s 132 million daily active users could come up with the next hit game, we’re taking that original idea further than we ever have. Over the coming months, we’ll share a

MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass: In that light, we can see the dilemma. But there were also probably about a dozen better ways to do this roll-out — as highlighted by how fast they’re fixing these things — and they just missed the mark. While they undoubtedly knew there would be some backlash, they probably didn’t realize there would be this much . Again. All that points to perhaps a disturbing trend where OpenAI doesn’t really understand their user base. Which you almost can understand given how they clearly stumbled into ChatGPT in the first place. Still, here they are with those billion use

Arjun Kharpal, reporting for CNBC, back on July 2: Europe’s top court on Thursday upheld Google’s fine of around 4.1 billion euros ($4.67 billion) over alleged anti-competitive practices. In 2018, the European Commission slapped Google with the record-breaking penalty on the grounds that it abused Android’s mobile dominance to give unfair advantage to its own apps via pre-installation deals with smartphone makers. Google has been appealing the ruling through the EU court system. But the European Court of Justice (ECJ), Europe’s top court, dismissed Google’s appeal. Google has no further right

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Linus Torvalds: I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I’m willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer. Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away. AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one. It may not have been that “clearly” even just a year ago, but it’s no longer in question today. There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but “is it useful”