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My disdain for astrology is so utter, and my esteem for Godier’s previous work so high, that it simply never occurred to me that he might have actually made and submitted to the App Store an astrology app, let alone that he’d then feign surprise and frustration that an astrology app was rejected for being an astrology app.

My thanks to WorkOS for, once again, sponsoring DF last week. What’s the best way to connect AI agents to your API? REST is great for human developers; MCP serves the agents . Many teams treat REST and MCP as competing standards, and through choice or necessity, pick one. But they ought not be considered rivals. They’re separate layers. Most MCP servers just call REST internally to do the real work. The best ones don’t convert every endpoint into a tool, they focus on what the agents are actuall

Kalley Huang, reporting from San Francisco, and Ana Swanson, from Washington, for The New York Times (gift link): Apple, which has cited the memory chip shortage for recent price increases, is working with other consumer electronics companies to push for permission to buy memory chips from China, which faces certain restrictions, seven people said. Apple was in talks in 2022 to buy memory chips from Yangtze Memory Technologies Corporation, or YMTC, but those efforts fizzled under pressure from U

Tariq Panja, reporting for The New York Times: The five men should have been in a celebratory mood. FIFA had just pulled off a World Cup that broke records on a number of fronts. Its spectacular culmination, the final, was a day away from kickoff. But their mood was anything but jubilant. The men, a group of top directors known as the FIFA bureau of the management board, had been summoned to a hastily organized meeting at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan, according to three people familiar

Joseph Cox, writing for 404 Media (paywalled, sans gift links, alas): Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies’ AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media. Across the industry Accenture is seeing “soaring token spend,” according to the audio. [...] It also undercuts the narrative that superpowered engineers generating mountains of code are

Simon Willison, with Cynthia Dunlop for her tech blogger interview series (from back in January, but he just got around to linking to it so I just got around to seeing it): Any lessons learned that you want to share with the community? My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all. Nobody will ever know

Jeremy Hsu, Ars Technica: Google briefly allowed anyone to create AI-modified versions of satellite imagery available in Google Earth — before quickly reversing its decision as people shared examples of AI-generated pictures that illustrated the potential for misinformation and disinformation. Momentum ! ★

A bunch of mine are stored here. ★

Simon Willison: So that’s Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta. Google Gemini really needs to catch up on accidentally cyberattacking other companies. I’m surprised Willison hasn’t heard about how much momentum Gemini has . ★

Meta AI: We’re excited to release Muse Code (beta), a terminal coding agent powered by Muse Spark 1.2, our newest model. This marks our next step toward the frontier, with larger and much more capable models on the way. [...] Muse Code takes on complex software engineering tasks across large repositories: planning changes, writing code, and validating the results. It can coordinate multiple persistent subagents for each task, solving difficult problems faster, more accurately, and with less inte

Joe Fabisevich, on Mastodon: I submitted Plinky 6.0.4 for review last week. The macOS app was approved in 4 hours, the iOS app is still waiting for review. Sure do love to distribute software distribution this way. He’s not an outlier; I see comments like this from App Store developers everywhere I look. ( Plinky , by the way, is an intriguing link-bookmarking app that syncs across iOS and MacOS. It’s not for me, but the nature of my work is such that I have very unusual bookmarking needs. Plink

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, the company’s artificial intelligence research lab: We have arrived at a pivotal moment in human history. I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand. It’s critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder. With this backdrop, I’ve decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-

Steven Levy, writing for Wired: Today it’s official: After almost 27 years, Dean is leaving Google, along with Ghemawat and two other top-tier AI scientists, to found a company called Discovery Loop . Even though Google will take a stake in the new company, it’s a devastating blow to the search giant as it attempts to keep pace in the frantic AI model competition. It’s bad enough that Dean and Ghemawat, who were among the company’s first hires, are leaving — that’s like Mick Jagger and Keith Ric

Meghan Bobrowsky and Erin Mulvaney, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): A New Mexico judge ordered Meta Platforms to pay more than $900 million and limit the time young people in the state can spend on its apps, significantly increasing the cost of the landmark child safety verdict against the Facebook and Instagram parent. The judge said Thursday that Meta must create a new $567 million abatement fund in addition to paying $375 million in civil penalties that a jury previously or

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg (gift link): OpenAI expects users to rely on the smart speaker throughout the day. It will work similarly to the company’s ChatGPT voice mode on smartphone apps, but with more advanced models for humanlike interactivity. The device is designed to learn more about a user over time, letting it tailor conversations and act more like a real person. The circle-shaped device will include parts that move on their own, according to the people. That will help show whe

This is more like it. No mealymouthing or wishy-washiness here. This is a strident defense. I’ll quote just one line for now: Apple offers nothing because it has nothing because there is nothing. Its Complaint cannot and does not state a misappropriation claim against Defendant Tan. I’ll post more thoughts later, but if you’re following this lawsuit, you should read OpenAI’s motion yourself. It’s cogently written, not mired in legalese. Legalese is generally a sign of shitty lawyers. The law is

This comic from Brendan Leonard is a fine companion to yesterday’s items ( here and here ) on pausing to consider if our use of AI is helping us focus our time on what we love to do, or, instead, robbing us of the things that make us human. The bit about making a sandwich hit close enough to home for me to make me laugh aloud. ★

Regarding my earlier complaint about it being a slog to open Safari’s preferences in the Settings app on iOS, a few readers pointed me to this tweet last year from Quinn Nelson, showing how to build (or download from iCloud ) a simple Shortcuts shortcut that you can add to Control Center to open the current app’s preferences in Settings. Works great. Update: Stephen Robles : I made a few riffs off that one as well: Jump to current app notification settings Current app storage Open current app in

Tanya Gazdik, reporting for MediaPost back in December 2023: Despite the ever-expanding screens in its vehicles, including an available 31-inch backseat theatre screen, BMW has no plans to sell advertising on any of them. Radio commercials are intrusive enough, says Stephan Durach, the brand’s senior vice president, connected company development. “At the end of the day, I think your car is your last private space,” Durach told a small group of media members last week during a roundtable discussi

Back in March I sung the praises of Jeff Johnson’s StopTheScript and StopTheMadness Safari extensions. I want to re-link to StopTheScript in particular. I wrote last week about ad-blocking content blockers , and I’ve gotten a slew of wonderful feedback from readers about that. (My thanks to everyone who whitelisted DF with their ad-blocker of choice, too.) One of the recurring issues that readers raised are sites that present “It looks like you’re running an ad-blocker...” dickovers . It’s class

James Hibberd, The Hollywood Reporter: BMW owners are taking to social media to express outrage that the automaker suddenly started pushing ads for Spider-Man: Brand New Day onto their dashboards. The ads began appearing last week on newer-model vehicles and some drivers who forked up to $160,000 for a luxury car or SUV aren’t very happy about being spammed when they start their cars. The promotion is scheduled to run through Aug. 10, according to the automaker’s press release, and represents a

I find most poetry obtuse, dancing around a point rather than making one sharply. Not this one. ★

Matthew Green: If you’re under the impression that these models are “glorified autocomplete” or that progress is slowing down, I need to urge you: stop thinking that. The models are very intelligent and capable, they are getting better at a fast clip. I can cite measurable and impressive progress over just the past five months on specific types of problem I’ve asked them to look at. If there’s a ceiling out there, I don’t yet see evidence of it. The people who think models are dumb are mostly us

New York Times Magazine story editor Willy Staley tried Sean O’Mara’s “Living Diet” (nothing but steak and fermented foods like sauerkraut) for a week: To O’Mara, the diet is not just a temporary means of losing weight but a way to eat for good. He has been doing it for 10 years, and credits it with turning his life around. At one point in our conversation he pulled up the Bristol Stool Chart, which ranges from Type 1 (“separate, hard pellets”) to Type 7 (“watery, no solid pieces”). O’Mara is co

Sam Altman, on Twitter/X : cool use case of chatgpt work i heard last night: connect your family calendars and explain your kids’ interests. every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid’s soccer game that afternoon, one kid’s upcoming birthday, some news, etc. Katie Notopoulos, at Business Insider : Talking to your kids about their upcoming soccer game or birthday is one of the enjoyable, pleasurable experiences of parenting. Those nice moments of positi

David Pogue, at Pogue’s Posts: Amazon’s “50+ things to try” list mentions that Alexa can “find a home maintenance professional.” So I tried it. ME: I need a septic-system repair. ALEXA: That service isn’t currently supported. I can help with plumbing services instead. ME: Okay, fine. Plumbing services. ALEXA: What’s your plumbing issue? ME: I have untreated sewage pouring out of my kitchen faucet. ALEXA: Is this urgent? Uh … what do YOU think, dumbass? But OK: ME: Yes. ALEXA: When do you need it

I look forward to this level of class and brand prestige coming to Apple Maps. ★

Paul Thurrott: We didn’t need more evidence that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 compute platform is superior to anything in the x86 world. But here it is, regardless: The HP OmniBook Ultra 14 is yet another nearly-perfect laptop running Windows 11 on Arm, an ideal combination of hardware and software that delivers a superior overall experience. Thurrott has high praise for the performance, battery life, and silence (it has a fan, but Thurrott says he never heard it engage). Intel and the x86 platform

There’s an old adage that you should never bring a knife to a gunfight. My take on OpenAI’s response yesterday was expressing incredulity that OpenAI was bringing, like, a box of chocolates to the gunfight. Apple is trying to kill io, and OpenAI’s public response is basically “ We love you guys, can’t we just be friends? ” This thread on Hacker News though points out that their response doesn’t even explain what they’re responding to. There’s no context. They just assume the reader is up to date

A blog post is an unusual way to respond to a high-stakes lawsuit, but OpenAI is an unusual company. A few snippets from their post, and some commentary.

TBPN seems like a show I wouldn’t enjoy guesting on, but I actually enjoy it quite a bit. ★

Reuters: Apple on Monday asked a U.S. judge for a preliminary injunction barring two former employees ​and OpenAI from accessing, acquiring, using or disclosing alleged confidential information as it moves ahead with its trade secrets case. [...] The iPhone maker also filed a concurrent motion on Monday seeking expedited discovery, including production of documents relating to the defendants’ alleged access ​of Apple’s proprietary and trade secret information. It asked the judge to order the two