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Leverage autonomous AI agents to automate compliance, manage internal and third-party risk, and continuously prove your security posture. ★

Anthropic support page: Anthropic has signed the EU AI Act’s Article 50(2) Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content, as a provider of both generative AI models and generative AI systems. This article describes how we’re planning to put those commitments into practice, how marking works, and what its limitations are. We’ll update this article and publish more detailed technical guidance as it becomes available. Regarding generated plain text output: When a supported Claude model g

Chance Miller returns to the show. Topics include iOS 27’s progress over summer, live baseball in Vision Pro, the RAM crisis, Apple’s trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI and io, and the EU/DMA situation. Sponsored by: Squarespace : Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code TALKSHOW . Factor : Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off and one free breakfast item per box for one year, with code talkshow50off . Notion : The collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents wor

This didn’t occur to me but should have — BMW paid Sony to place BMWs throughout the new Spider-Man: Brand New Day movie. They’re not just in the movie but part of the story. So it’s probably the case not that Sony paid BMW to put Spider-Man animations in the dashboards of every late model BMW on the road, but that BMW offered to do it as part of the promotional deal they paid Sony. So BMW probably paid Sony for something that ultimately infuriated a bunch of BMW’s own customers. Geniuses. ★

Alex Micek: In the future, I will feel angry if my car strands me on the side of the road. I will feel angry if the motor brushes fail expectedly. I will feel angry if it leaks water. By contrast, I don’t feel anger when the car tricks me into seeing an advertisement. Instead, I feel a deep, smothering, let-down at the promise of futurism. Bottomless despair is probably inappropriate; a symptom of the misanthropy I should grow out of. But. In the meantime, I feel helpless, discouraged, deeply sa

The Economist (‘twas a gift link, but alas, I guess gift views have been used up — here’s an archive link in case the gift links is vexing you): You can discover AI’s hallmarks by comparing the writing of man and machine. To do this you need a baseline that is distinctive and familiar. The Economist turned to prose that we’re sure is human and that readers will recognise: our own. We designed a study to ask top LLMs — OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok-to write

Basic Apple Guy: Apple just dropped the hardest icon glow-up for the new Chess icon in macOS 27 Beta 5. This is not just a tweak or small improvement. This is the difference between total shit and a really nice icon. ★

Watch this. No words needed, everyone can feel it. Genes are a hell of a thing. ★

Jeff Johnson: These purported reviews, all but one of which is 5 stars, are all in English. Yet none of them is in the US App Store. I also looked at other English-speaking countries such as Australia and Canada but found no reviews. Also suspicious is that the name of every reviewer was a first name followed by an initial for the last name. If you’ve ever looked through App Store user reviews, it’s unusual to find this naming format. In most cases, the name on App Store user reviews is a unique

Zac Hall at 9to5Mac has a good rundown of new features and changes in beta 5. Some app icons got tweaks (the Siri app in particular looks much cooler now), and a bunch of the existing American and British Siri speaking voices now have the Pace and Expressivity adjustment sliders. Also interesting: the OS 27 releases were stuck at beta 4 for 22 days. That’s a week longer than usual. Will Hains ( my Kotoba friend ) maintains a wonderful single-page website tracking iOS version release date history

Andrew Sharp, writing at Sharp Text last month after Netflix’s earnings, asking “ Is Netflix Washed Now? ”: I offer this observation as a swirl of heightened anxiety surrounds the company, so let me clarify one thing up front: I’m not predicting imminent doom. Netflix content reaches a staggering 85% of American viewers and has 325 million subscribers globally . Growth is slowing , but that’s the law of large numbers. If practically everyone in America and much of the world is already subscribed

Two weeks ago Zuckerberg published a 1,000-word essay, “ The AI Future Is for Everyone ”. This week he published an expanded 6,500-word version of the essay on Meta’s website. Somehow it almost says nothing more than the original. This tidbit, however, struck me as notable: For example, in Richland Parish, Louisiana, where Meta is building a large data center, teachers received a $50,000 bonus this year because of the increased tax revenue from our investment. The superintendent told us that tea

Apple Newsroom: For the first time, baseball fans can take in all the action of “Friday Night Baseball” live in Apple Immersive on Apple Vision Pro, leveraging 3D video recorded in 8K with a 180-degree field of view. On August 28, viewers with Vision Pro will experience the iconic Red Sox vs. Yankees rivalry from unique camera angles that place viewers right in the game, immersed in the drama of each at-bat, the celebrations in the dugout after a big hit, close plays at the outfield wall, and mo

Michael Tsai: I’m really unhappy about this, both for my role in spreading a false story and because I think it will hurt the cause of reforming App Review. I know there are many crazy rejections and have experienced some first-hand. This story was believable because of that well-known history and because Godier didn’t seem like a nobody trying to get attention — he was the developer of another highly regarded app. But now people are going to point to true developer stories and accuse them of be

Ernie Smith at Tedium: I’m seeing email after email suggesting these users built a thing they’re truly passionate about. But if we can’t trust that this passion is real, legit, and from the heart, we’re in trouble. Take a step back. Is this thing you built a reflection of you? I think it’s fun and exciting that I’m getting a lot more emails about a lot more new apps. But a fair chunk of those emails are themselves clearly written by an AI chatbot. It’s so obvious. Those go straight in the trash.

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

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

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.

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 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. Plinky offers a bu

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