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I want the answers that I read to be cogent, lucid, accurate, blessedly terse — and ideally to strike a consistent tone that is pleasant to my reading ear. The genie is not going back in the bottle.

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 almost always been near his side. Several people who know the couple describe Clark as Amodei’s emotional ballast, someone he has sought counsel from during the turbulence of Anthropic’s growth and clashes with Washington over the

The Savant is a political thriller series starring Jessica Chastain that was supposed to debut a year ago . Apple “postponed” it, apparently out of fear of upsetting extremist right-wing nut jobs because the show is about an undercover investigator (Chastain) hunting down extremist right-wing nut jobs. Chastain was not happy about the show being delayed. Last we heard about the show was back in April, when Marc Malkin reported this for Variety : “Before it was like, ‘I don’t know if we’re going

Oops. ★

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac: macOS 27 Golden Gate beta 6 introduces redesigned traffic light window controls. The new look resembles older Mac OS X systems with more detail in each button. Nice. But these changes can’t improve fast enough for me — I am impatient. The MacOS user interface had been in a slow, steady, sad, no-fun decline for years, and then, a year ago, the bottom fell out with the disaster of 26 Tahoe. But all the changes in 27 Golden Gate are in the right direction. Golden Gate is not a mi

Thibault Sottiaux, the OpenAI genius in charge of Codex and the new ChatGPT Homer Simpson car, on Twitter/X: I don’t come often to GMail [ sic ] (OpenAI is a Slack company), but I swear, every time I do open it, there is a new button somewhere around the top right corner. I mean, he’s right about Google’s zero-taste just-keep-cramming-shit-in approach to Gmail, but it’s almost hard to believe he could post this without any self-awareness that it’s the exact same approach his Codex team has appli

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.

The Financial Times, back on July 1, with the transcontinental byline “Michael Acton in San Francisco and Barbara Moens in Brussels” (non-paywalled summaries from 9to5Mac and MacRumors ): Apple chief executive Tim Cook and EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen held “constructive” talks on Tuesday as the two sides aim to lower the temperature in a bitter dispute over the iPhone maker’s new “Siri AI.” An EU spokesperson said the virtual meeting had involved a “constructive exchange on topics of common int

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 borne of the brain is treated no differently from one produced by a calculator. Likewise with spellcheckers. To make assistance suspect only once the tool becomes capable enough to compose a whole sentence is not a principled boun

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 be “other solutions to the memory issue, but it’s not great American companies using Chinese memory.” Asked if he has relayed that message to Apple, Lutnick said “plainly.” But: U.S. government rules require American companies to

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 example), you can browse Twitter without JavaScript while retaining your privacy. In addition to respecting your privacy, Nitter is on average around 15 times lighter than Twitter, and in most cases serves pages faster (eg. timelines

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. ★

The exposed lens covers are made of sapphire, not glass, and are thus incredibly scratch resistant. And even if, somehow, do you pick up a scratch on a lens cover, it almost certainly won’t affect image quality at all.

This page from Google Design on their “Material 3” UI language came to my attention after my snarky post about the ungainly new to-do app they bizarrely bragged about on Twitter/X this week. I don’t think this “Material 3” page is new — I think it’s a few years old — but I’d never seen it before. First, it’s crazy that (in desktop browsers with a mouse cursor) they change the I-beam cursor for text selection to ... a circle. I guess it looks kind of fun but the whole point of the I-beam cursor i

Philip Michaels, writing last September for Tom’s Guide: iPhone 17 torture test videos done by JerryRigEverything indicate that Ceramic Shield 2 certainly resists scratching, with scratch testing leaving only light scratches at level 7 on the Mohs scale of hardness. Scratches typically show up on glass at levels 5 or 6 on that scale. “Ceramic Shield 2 is indeed the best we’ve ever seen,” JerryRigEverything remarks in the iPhone 17 Pro testing video . That backs up Apple’s own Ceramic Shield 2 vi

A few years ago I’d have looked at this post and maybe leaned toward the idea that a precocious 8th grader somewhere hacked into the @GoogleDesign Twitter account and tried to pass off their little to-do app as having come from Google’s design team. But this is apparently real. I almost hope it’s AI slop and that there aren’t any human designers there who think anything in this app has appropriate proportions or is aesthetically pleasing. ( Here’s an XCancel link for the x.com averse. You can ju

Joanna Stern, writing at The New Things (gift link): I used to love the blinking notification light on my BlackBerry, and later my Droid 2. It was a simple way to know I had a message without actually looking at my messages. Then BlackBerry let you customize the color, and it was a rainbow dream. Google’s HiLight takes it a step further by letting you assign different colors to VIP contacts. So when your phone is face down, you can tell who’s trying to reach you without picking it up. It looks c

David Imel, The Verge: But in our current moment, the photos people are drawn to are not flawless — and that’s created a real problem for the people making smartphone cameras. “The gap between what two random people want from their camera is growing dramatically,” says Isaac Reynolds, who leads the Pixel camera team at Google. Some people want a perfectly optimized photo, Reynolds says. “But there’s a growing number of people who want something that they feel is more authentic or traditional, by

Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch: With this year’s Pixel 11 series launch, Google is thinking more agentic AI to complete your tasks. With Gemini, U.S.-based users will be able to order groceries, book rides, or get coffee, for instance. Plus, Gemini can call businesses on users’ behalf for table reservations or appointments. Google said that users can take over or stop tasks at any point in time and also review transcripts for AI-operated calls. Over the next few weeks, a new slate of connected apps will

Sam Rutherford, writing for Engadget: Granted, the P11 Pro Fold still includes IP68 dust and water resistance, which is better than what you get on the Z Fold 8 line (IP48). But after making an absolute tank of a foldable phone with last year’s model, I said Google really needed to cut weight and thickness this generation, and it just hasn’t. Instead, it seems like Google has leaned even more into the Pro Fold’s sturdiness with a new glass fibre material for its rear panel that the company says

Victoria Song, The Verge: The $399 Google Pixel Watch 5 isn’t about the hardware. Sure, there’s a new satin pyrite case finish, a few new strap colors, and a Steph Curry Special Edition. Under the hood, there’s a slightly faster Qualcomm processor and an itty-bitty battery bump. There’s a $50 price hike from last year, too, because the Pixel Watch 5 isn’t immune to RAMageddon — none of us are. Otherwise, no one would blame you for looking at this watch and thinking absolutely nothing’s changed.

Mia Sato, The Verge: Earlier this summer, Amazon customers began noticing that emails related to their online orders looked sparse: Order confirmation emails didn’t name specific items anymore, and instead listed only item categories. “Your Beauty item is confirmed!” an email about my retainer cleaning tablets read. Shoppers have posted other iterations of the redacted emails as well: “ Ordered: 1 Hardware item ,” “ Your Drugstore, Shoes, and other items are here! ” and “ 1 Nutrition & Wellness,

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

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

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. ★

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 link 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

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

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. ★

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

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

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

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

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

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

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