Trackables:

There are plenty of health tracking apps. Surprisingly, nearly all of them are bloated, subscription-gated, or blatantly harvesting our data; often all three. We wanted something simpler, less annoying and more fun, that’s where it started.

Trackables turns the data your Apple Watch already collects — activity, sleep, steps, heart rate — into a clear, friendly, transparent interface.

Totally free of charge, totally private, made by a small team of ex-Apple folks. (They might add a paid tier in the future, but core functionality will remain free.) I’ve been using Trackables for months and it’s just a better dashboard to the stats I care about than the Health app itself.

(One interesting detail: HealthKit only makes raw data available to apps. Apple Health’s “sleep score” isn’t part of that data — only the raw input, like how many hours you slept, and how much time was spent in each sleep stage. So Trackables computes its own sleep score. When I bother to compare, Trackable’s score is almost always similar to Apple’s, but seldom exactly the same. But I personally find that Trackable’s sleep score corresponds better to how I feel I slept. Which, admittedly, is usually pretty good.)

The Onion’s Exclusive Interview With Larry Ellison ★

The Onion:

The Onion: How did you get into the entertainment industry?

Ellison: I remember going to the movies as a kid, and when the houselights went down and that hush fell over the crowd, I’d think to myself: I’d like to build a massive propaganda apparatus one day.

McKinley 1.0 ★

Crackerjack new Mac app for creating and editing custom SF Symbols, from developer Amy Worrall:

McKinley is an all-in-one studio for drawing and annotating SF Symbols. It bundles vector tools with knowledge of the SF Symbols structure, so you can edit one set of objects across multiple weights, sizes and colours. Import SVG or start from scratch, live preview your work using Apple’s own renderer, and export directly to Xcode, so you never need touch the SF Symbols app again!

McKinley is Mac-assed out the wazoo:

Rich AppleScript support, including a library of practically useful example scripts.
Quick Look previews and thumbnails for documents.
A well-written comprehensive user manual. (Me, a few months ago: “There exist good products with bad or no documentation, but there are very few poor products with great documentation.”)

I mean just look at McKinley. It’s both beautiful and quite obviously a serious professional tool. McKinley is a $60 one-time purchase, and there’s a 15 percent launch discount this week only (taking the price to just $51). What a remarkable 1.0.

See also: Michael Tsai; Worrall on Mastodon.

Matt Birchler’s Folding iPhone Predictions ★

Matt Birchler:

So, yeah, I do think that, especially this year, unit sales will far lag behind the 18 Pro models, the normal iPhone 18, and probably the Air 2 and 18e. I think they will lag next year as well for similar reasons. I don’t know if this will ever become the most popular iPhone, but I do not think it will fail, and I think it will sell more units every year for it’s first few years on the market (especially if they can get the price down over that time as well).

My evidence for this is the increasing market share folding phones have in the Android world, as well as my personal experience using something very similar to what Apple is about to announce and having my own aha moment, where it really clicked with me.

Birchler has been using a Samsung Galaxy Fold8 — the new one that preemptively copied the folding iPhone’s aspect ratio — for the last month or so. So I’m intrigued by his firsthand experience with the same general form factor. But I have no idea what he’s talking about regarding “the increasing market share folding phones have in the Android world”. For 2025, Counterpoint and TrendForce both pegged foldable phones at 1.6% of the global market. Just today Counterpoint released a report that says “Foldables still account for only about 2% of the overall smartphone market, leaving plenty of room for the category to grow.”

Anecdotally I find it hard to believe the 2 percent number. It’s my nature to take notice of the phones people use, and there’s no way that 1 in 50 people I see have foldable phones. I don’t even think it’s 1 in 100. On a recent vacation, I didn’t see a single foldable at the airport nor at the resort hotel where we stayed. Obviously my own anecdata could be all wet, but I think “2 percent” is generous — and presumably, if it’s accurate, it’s almost entirely from outside the U.S. It’s like saying “touchscreen phones” had “increasing market share” before the iPhone. Going from 0.1% to 0.2% is a doubling of share, but the share is still tiny.

Regarding the name, Birchler spitballs a decent suggestion:

Finally, there’s the name. Everyone seems to think it’s going to be the iPhone Ultra, and I guess if I were putting money down, that’s what I’d bet on as well.

But I just don’t like it. I don’t like it because it’s not “ultra” in many ways, and I don’t like it because what do you call the bigger version of it in a year or two? The Ultra Max? Maybe you do…

I personally think it should be called the iPhone Folio. I think there’s a 99% chance I’m wrong, but hey, won’t it be amazing if I’m right?

The problem with “Folio” is that it’s too descriptive only of the form factor. Not the feeling it’s supposed to convey. I’m betting on “Ultra”, but I’m still rooting for “Duo”, which has some history and sounds like a nice companion adjective to “Neo”.

And It’s True That I Stole Your Lighter, and It’s Also True That I Lost the Map

Monday, 7 September 2026

Last week both Google and Apple updated their maps to accommodate Trump changing the United States Geological Survey’s recognized name for Lake Ontario to “Lake America”. Just as with Trump’s fiat renaming of the Gulf of Mexico back in the first days of his 2.0 administration, Google and Apple are showing the same names to the same people, by region. Here are the names you now see for Lake Ontario, based on what region your device is set to:

United States: “Lake America”
Canada: “Lake Ontario”
Everywhere else in the world: “Lake Ontario (Lake America)”

This is exactly the same as their joint solution to the Gulf of Mexico renaming — the U.S. sees “Gulf of America”, Mexico sees “Gulf of Mexico”, and the rest of the world sees “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)”.

Here is the solution I strongly believe Google and Apple should follow:

United States: “Lake America (Lake Ontario)” and “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)”
Everywhere else in the world: “Lake Ontario” and “Gulf of Mexico”

There is no reason to show these new Trump-dictated names anywhere outside the U.S., even putting them in parentheses. There is no reason to show only the actual traditional names exclusively for users in Canada (for Lake Ontario) and Mexico (for the Gulf). Treating Canada and Mexico as special cases only makes sense if they’re part of some sort of dispute over the names. They’re not. The names of these two bodies of water are not contentious. There is no long-simmering debate about them, like there is with Denali/Mount McKinley in Alaska. The one and only country on the planet with a crackpot kook-ridden government that claims these bodies of water have new names is the United States; the only country that should see the new names is the United States.¹

So, I disagree with how Google and Apple have chosen to handle these re-namings. But it is correct that users in the United States do see the new names.

Here’s Andy Ihnatko, at his eponymous website:

We all have every right to be upset. Google’s receiving plenty of flak over this move (as is Apple; Apple Maps now shows “Lake America,” reportedly after being pressured directly by Trump). I dislike Google’s and Apple’s choices, but I can’t personally fault them.

That said, Trump’s move is clearly meant to antagonize Canada during a volatile period in our relations. He’s throwing gasoline on a tariff fight that’s already creating uncertainty and suffering among vulnerable businesses and consumers on both sides of what was once an impeccably peaceful border. Google and Apple didn’t need to move so damned quickly. I wish they’d deferred the name change long enough for things to cool down a little. Doing so would have avoided creating the perception of handing one side a swift, validating victory.

I doubt a cooling-off period would help. Wounds don’t feel better when they’re reopened after healing. It’s best to get it over with. Applying the change to Google and Apple Maps while the GNIS database ink is still wet at least serves to remind who made this change and why. And whose change it rightfully is to make.

This is a bitter pill for some to swallow. What a lot of people want is for Google and Apple to just ignore the U.S. government’s official new names. E.g., to pick just one high-profile pundit, here’s Kara Swisher regarding Google (“quislings”) and Apple (“craven”, “pathetic”). But I suspect, quite strongly, that the people who profess to be the most angry at Apple and Google for going along with this change are the same people who would argue most strongly that Goliath tech companies and mega-billionaires wield too much anti-democratic power and influence.

It’s not coherent to argue that Google and Apple should decide which names to put on their maps only when you want them to ignore the names from the official government database. Neither Google nor Apple are going to sell their maps apps, but it’s not outlandish to think that in some alternative universe, one or more of the leading maps app might be owned by, say, Elon Musk or Larry Ellison. Would the people who want Apple and Google to ignore the official names from the GNIS support the same stance if the two leading maps apps were owned by SpaceX and Oracle instead? Obviously they would not.

What we want is a system where geographic names are determined democratically, by voting. And that is the system we in fact have. Trump won. The Department of the Interior has the power to change these names. If you’re angry that their official names in the United States are now Lake America and Gulf of America, stay angry that Trump won the 2024 election. Stay angry that our president continues to debase his office and embarrass our nation. Directing your anger at Google and Apple for reflecting that change is shooting the messengers.

But this is why I find it embarrassing that both Google and Apple are foisting these absurd names on the rest of the world, even if only between parentheses. These names are nonsense, and they are Americans’ nonsense to deal with.

China is another country with ridiculous geographic dogma. China demands that Taiwan, which is an independent free nation, be falsely labelled as a province of China. Apple Maps reflects that policy — within China. It doesn’t label Taiwan as “(Province of China)” on maps outside China. Bullshit inside parentheses is still bullshit. Less seriously but more preposterously, the Chinese government also insists that the obscure Diaoyu Islands, subject of a long-running territorial dispute with Japan, be drawn larger than they actually are on maps. Apple Maps dutifully renders those inflated false island sizes to users in China. It doesn’t show them to users anywhere else in the world — not even as dotted outlines. Chinese users see Chinese government dogmatic nonsense; no one else does.

So too it should be for U.S. government dogmatic nonsense. Spreading the nonsense to the rest of the world only makes it more embarrassing.

Neither Google nor Apple claim to be cartographic editorial authorities. I do not think we should want them to be. Other non-governmental institutions do claim to be independent authorities. The Associated Press has stuck to their guns even in the face of losing its White House press pool seat over their refusal to adopt the “Gulf of America” name. And then there’s Wikipedia, whose reputation, integrity, popularity, and independence haunt the right wing. From Politico, last week:

Other platforms will soon follow, a senior administration official told Politico on Tuesday. “We got Lake America changed on Google Maps, and many other maps are changing in a couple days. And Wikipedia is going to change as well,” said the official, who was granted anonymity to speak frankly.

As of Wednesday, Wikipedia was still using the original names of both the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario, while noting that Trump had signed orders to rename them.

Regarding this, Molly White noted:

A Wikipedia editor put it well: “You almost want to pat them on the head and say ‘Yes, of course it will’ in the same way you’d tell a small child that Santa Claus will be delivering their presents.” ★

And, I feel strongly, the traditional names should remain visible, in parentheses, even for users in the U.S. for a period of, say, five years. What is someone who doesn’t follow current events — god bless them — to think if they go looking for Lake Ontario on Google Maps or Apple Maps and don’t see it? ↩︎

Sunday, 6 September 2026

Meta AI Has a Native Mac App Now, and It Seems Decent ★

Zac Hall, writing for 9to5Mac on August 19:

The new Meta AI desktop app is version 1.0 beta at launch and weighs just 16MB once installed. Based on initial inspection, it runs natively on Apple silicon Macs with macOS 15 or later, using an AppKit and SwiftUI shell with WebKit for richer chat content. In other words, this is not an Electron app or a repackaged iPad release.

It includes Mac-specific hooks, making the desktop experience more robust than the Meta AI mobile app. Quick Invoke uses Option-Space to place a compact Meta AI composer over whatever you are doing. A separate dictation feature lets you hold a shortcut, speak, and have the resulting words typed into any app, from Mail and documents to code editors.

Meta AI can also attach another Mac window to a conversation. With Screen Recording and Accessibility permission, the app reads the window’s visible text and captures a screenshot for the next question. This is context gathering rather than computer control for now.

Passes the Settings window sniff test too — it actually has a Settings window. Meta, institutionally, seems more keen on native Mac apps than they are native Windows apps.

Update: The Mac app is not available in the App Store. You need to download it directly from Meta’s web page, using the “Download for Mac (Beta)” link. The ChatGPT and Claude Mac apps aren’t in the Mac App Store either — they do too many things outside the App Store’s mandatory sandbox (and probably use APIs require special entitlements in the App Store too).

WorkOS: How to Give an Agent a Task Instead of a Token ★

My thanks to WorkOS for once again sponsoring Daring Fireball. Give an agent an access token and it spreads: into the context window, into tool call logs, into notes it keeps between steps. Each copy works from anywhere, long after the fact.

Relay keeps the credential at WorkOS. Your agent names the user, WorkOS attaches that token, refreshes it, and releases it only to allowlisted hosts. A hijacked agent session is a live process you can kill.

Learn how it works at WorkOS’s blog.

Matt Haughey: ‘The Car Industry A/B Tested Selling a Car With and Without CarPlay and the Results Are Not Shocking’ ★

Matt Haughey:

One case in point is the Honda Prologue EV. It’s a partnership between Honda and Chevrolet, where the Prologue is basically a Chevy Blazer EV with Honda badges, slight visual differences in the sheetmetal and interior, but all the underpinnings are straight up Chevy. Even though the keys say Honda on a Prologue, it’s a General Motors key design with a Honda logo over it.

But one big difference the Prologue has from the Blazer it is based on is this: it includes Apple CarPlay and Android Auto integration. [...]

For the years these cars were sold together, the Honda outsold the Blazer by 43%, 73%, and 166% in each time period. Today in 2026, people are buying a Honda Prologue over one and a half times more often than the Chevy Blazer EV the Prologue is based on.

It’s not a perfect test. It’s reasonable to argue that Honda has a better brand and reputation than Chevrolet, and is just plain better at selling cars. But the trendline over the last three years is pretty stark.

Trump Administration Launches Rip-Off Video Games at Arcade.gov ★

A handful of Temu-style knockoffs of games like Flappy Bird, Snake (that’s the one where you round up border-crossing migrants), and, most notably, Tetris (the one where you “build a wall” to keep border-crossing migrants out) — the copyright to which is held by the notoriously litigious The Tetris Company, which tweeted:

At Tetris we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them. To our fans everywhere: we love you, we see you, and we’re grateful to have you in our community.

P.S. The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall’.

P.P.S. We take copyright infringement very seriously.

Whatever you think of these games, just like with the rebranding of Lake Ontario, Trump Arcade shows American voters that this administration is focused on their problems and concerns.

Gurman on Schiller’s Departure and Ternus’s Goals for the App Store ★

Mark Gurman, in his weekend Power On column at Bloomberg (gift link):

The Schiller exit is a bit more notable. Unlike Maestri, he still had a real job: The veteran executive ran the App Store and Apple Events. The App Store portion alone is no joke. It generates an estimated $30 billion a year and can be very challenging to manage. Apple’s app marketplace is loved by many consumers, but often criticized by developers and subjected to increasingly onerous regulations. It was a busy, all-encompassing gig and nowhere near a semiretirement. Apple Events, meanwhile, is how the company communicates its new product launches to customers. It’s also nothing close to fun and games.

Now, Schiller is 66 and clearly wanted to have some semblance of retirement. He can focus on philanthropy and spend more time with family. But there’s a bit more to the story, I’m told. Ternus and services chief Eddy Cue want to make even more money from the App Store and figure out ways to raise margins and squeeze additional recurring revenue from the platform. Schiller, on the other hand, seems to believe that such moves will only further irk developers and governments. While there was no internal blowup or anything like that, it’s something he wanted no part of.

I sure hope that’s not true, because that would be awful — making a bad situation worse — and pretty much the exact opposite of what Apple ought to do.

From the archive: Schiller, in a 2011 email to Cue and Steve Jobs:

Just as one thought, once we are making over $1B a year in profit from the App Store, is that enough to then think about a model where we ratchet down from 70/30 to 75/25 or even 80/20 if we can maintain a $1B a year run rate? I know that is controversial, I just tee it up as another way to look at the size of the business, what we want to achieve, and how we stay competitive. Again, just food for thought.

Dickover of the Week: Slashdot Put One in Their RSS Feed ★

How does this even happen? Who is this for? What possible purpose could by served by injecting a “We value your privacy” dickover into an RSS feed via iframes in the entry bodies?

Litterbox: Safari Extension for Viewing X Tweets ★

In the wake of Nitter/XCancel’s demise, here’s a delightful new Safari extension from Zhenyi Tan (of And a Dinosaur fame):

But sometimes people still post X content. Maybe you want to see Gruber roast Google Design. Maybe you want to see posts by Federico Viticci who recently returned to X. So I made Litterbox, a Safari extension that opens x.com links in a popup. The idea is you open it, take a look, gag a little, then close the lid. [...]

Litterbox doesn’t send your cookies when you open those popups, because of course. It uses the same API X uses for its website embeds. I don’t think they’ll kill the website embed feature. But if they do, it will be very funny.

I love it. I’ve got it installed even though I don’t avoid visiting X.com. It’s just faster and nicer to view tweets in Litterbox’s popup. And if I do want to proceed to X.com, there’s a link at the bottom of the popup. Perfect.

Saturday, 5 September 2026

Gloria Steinem’s Final Essay ★: Gloria Steinem, in a posthumous essay for The New Yorker:

For me, saying that I am a feminist has always meant that I believe in the social, economic, and political equality of all males and females of all races and groups. I know this sounds too simple to need a word, but equality is still the exception, not the rule.

Maybe we should call it egalitarianism, or even humanism. The problem with humanism is that it is often interpreted as being anti-religion, so I don’t think it’s inclusive enough. Regardless of what we call it, it just means treating each of us as uniquely human. The experiences of race and gender and class are very real and important, but they are also constructed and changeable. Our humanity is consistent and sacred.

Still, for some, it remains a mystery why women need a movement to distinguish our efforts toward equality. For me, it seems quite obvious.
‘Bob and Van’ ★: Marco Arment:

And I can’t help but feel that maybe we were better off before we knew everyone’s hot takes on everything.

The town coffee shop was just a coffee shop. We weren’t publicly shamed for going there because one of the owners was an ass. It was just a place to hang out with our friends.

Friday, 4 September 2026

Adobe Names Anil Chakravarthy as CEO, Replacing Shantanu Narayen ★

Annie Palmer, CNBC:

Adobe on Thursday named Anil Chakravarthy as its next president and CEO, succeeding Shantanu Narayen, who announced he would step down earlier this year. Chakravarthy, who most recently served as president of Adobe’s customer experience orchestration and worldwide field operations, will take the helm Dec. 1, the company said. He will also join Adobe’s board.

I’m sure promoting the head of “customer experience orchestration” to CEO will restore Adobe’s focus on creating great tools for artists and designers.

NBA Brings the Hammer on the Clippers — $30 Million Fine, 5 First-Round Draft Picks, and Steve Ballmer Is Banned for a Year ★

Mike Vorkunov, reporting for The Athletic (gift link):

The NBA levied the largest punishment in league history on the LA Clippers and owner Steve Ballmer on Wednesday after a year-long investigation determined that they circumvented the league’s salary cap rules to help funnel millions to Kawhi Leonard. The Clippers will lose five first-round picks — selections in 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032 and 2033 — and are being fined $30 million, the league announced.

Ballmer has been suspended for one year, the NBA said, “for knowingly seeking to help Mr. Leonard obtain off-court income opportunities.” The NBA said Ballmer approved a Clippers deal with Aspiration because he knew it was a precondition for the company to enter into a sponsorship deal with Leonard.

The Clippers, according to NBA investigators, tried to evade NBA rules on circumvention by creating a “novel theory” that it was OK to introduce business partners to players if the player or their representative asked for introductions. The NBA did not find that persuasive.

Basically Steve Ballmer invested over $50 million in a now-bankrupt startup named Aspiration. Aspiration was the jersey-patch sponsor for the Clippers, and after Leonard signed with the Clippers, Aspiration signed Leonard to a $28 million no-show “endorsement” deal. Leonard asked for, and then received, more money than his on-the-books salary.

It’s a classic Microsoft dirty-tricks move to circumvent the NBA’s player salary cap. There’s nothing illegal about what Ballmer and the Clippers did. They violated league rules, not the law. The difference is that the NBA is a league with a strong commissioner’s office that can investigate cheating and impose serious penalties. If tech companies were teams in a similar league, Microsoft would have been fined dozens of times throughout the ’80s and ’90s and ’00s. Ballmer would have been suspended multiple times and Bill Gates would have been suspended so many times he probably would have been kicked out of the league. If there was anything underhanded Microsoft could do to get ahead — or to stick the knife in a competitor — they did it.

That worked out fabulously well for Microsoft. It doesn’t work in the NBA. The Clippers remain a loser franchise that not only has never won a title, but has never even appeared in the Finals. Losing a first-round draft pick each year from 2029–2033 (inclusive) certainly won’t help get them off the schneid.

Apple Fixed ‎TestFlight’s Screwy Sort Order ★

I wrote two weeks ago about how the v4.3.0 update to TestFlight (released on July 21) broke the sort order for apps in the sidebar. Apple yesterday released v4.3.1, with these helpful release notes:

This update includes stability improvements and bug fixes.

One of the weirdest parts about this sort-order bug is that it only affected some people. I was obviously one of them; so was John Siracusa. For both of us, yesterday’s v4.3.1 update fixes the bug.

Vinted ★

Remarking on MapQuest taking the #1 spot in the App Store (in the wake of their decision to ignore President Trump’s fiat renaming of Lake Ontario to “Lake America”), I mentioned yesterday that I’d never heard of Vinted, the #3 app. (A day later and MapQuest is still #1, by the way.)

Vinted, it turns out, is an eBay-like market for buying and selling used clothing. From a Lithuanian startup and the whole thing has been popular in Europe for a while, and obviously now is gaining popularity in the U.S.

Writing With Unnatural Constraints

Friday, 4 September 2026

Marcin Wichary, writing at Unsung, regarding a rather subtly astonishing FAQ for the game Super Metroid, written in the late 1990s by “rs1n”. It’s over 17,000 words long, and the whole thing is full-justified when viewed with a monospaced font, using no trickery with extra spaces or hyphenation to achieve the layout:

The author lightly covers in the FAQ at the bottom:

What program did you use to justify the text?

None. I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up on the right hand side. Everything was done with an ASCII editor.

I’m sharing this mostly as a curiosity; some rewrites for physical books are par for the course to avoid widows and orphans, but you don’t see them as much in onscreen writing.

The FAQ reads pretty well, but to my ear, there’s something obviously off about it. The justification gimmick is very fun and the fact that the prose reads as well as it does is quite the feather in rs1n’s cap. He tried something very difficult and pulled it off with aplomb. And I’m sure many people have read the FAQ without even noticing the accomplishment, or considering just how difficult it is to write with such an unyielding constraint. There were many FAQs and other documents from the plain-text era that were full-justified, using extra spaces between words and paragraphs and occasional hyphenation to achieve the effect. rs1n’s FAQ achieves the effect with no trickery, and the result looks so natural that it doesn’t call attention to itself. It just looks nice.

But it doesn’t read entirely naturally. It’s stilted, as though written by someone for whom English is their second language. Which, for all I know, is true for rs1n, but I doubt it — I think the ESL-like stiltedness is just the result of making word choices to fit the line length, not simply for meaning and tone.

The line-length constraint brings to mind lipograms, “writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided”. Ernest Vincent Wright published an entire novel in 1939, Gadsby, without using the letter e. The Wikipedia page for lipograms lists more examples. That’s a hell of a trick, but there’s a reason why Gadsby is almost unheard-of, and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby remains famous. Gadsby is miserable to read. Wright was obviously a fine writer. Gadsby’s “Introduction” is written without the no-e’s constraint — and largely about the no-e’s constraint — and it reads just fine. But the text of the novel is a goddamn laborious slog. I couldn’t get through more than two paragraphs before deciding that my point was proven. It’s a fun challenge to compose lipograms but it’s no way to actually write. The gimmick necessarily becomes the highest priority of your word choices, not clarity or meaning.

So too, goes my thinking, regarding the “watermarking” of AI-generated text through word choices alone. Fitting words into the watermarking pattern surely results in prose far less stilted than omitting the letter e, and surely also less stilted than rs1n’s hard-wrapped-at-75-characters-per-line Super Metroid FAQ, but it’s necessarily stilted to some degree. It’s sophistry to argue that one can write within a constraint without the constraint affecting the quality of the writing.

Bonus Quibble

Wichary opens his post with the following:

I don’t think anyone particularly enjoys typesetting in monospace.

I disagree! I think typesetting in monospace is fun — or at least satisfying. I think it’s part of the appeal of Markdown that you can make a document look just right. What you see reading Markdown is what I saw writing it. And just look at the fun people still have printing “large type” banners using ASCII punctuation characters or fancier box-drawing Unicode glyphs. When you format something in plain text, you know exactly how it’s going to look everywhere. ★

Friday, 4 September 2026

FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses ★

Brian Krebs, reporting at KrebsOnSecurity:

On Monday, Aug. 31, a source alerted KrebsOnSecurity to a service advertised by a new user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more than 170 million people in North America. The source brought it to my attention because the proprietor of this identity theft service offered my Virginia drivers license as a free sample in their initial sales thread on Exploit.

The service, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 million drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada, as well as more than 10 million identification cards; more than three million travel documents and/or international IDs; and at least 579,000 medical cards.

A quick look around Nexus finds they are likely not exaggerating about that 153 million number: Running a blank search in Nexus (with no search parameters entered) returns approximately 11.5 million pages of results, with roughly 15 results displayed per page. It includes documents from people in both Canada and the United States, but the bulk of these records are on Americans: searching for just Canadian drivers licenses returns approximately 1.1 million results, with the largest concentration from Ontario (473,673 records).

Krebs seemingly tracked down the source: IDScan.net, an outfit that is used by car rental agencies like Hertz (seemingly where they got Krebs’s own drivers license) and marijuana dispensaries. They kept over 150 million ID card scans and lost them all in a data breach. Unreal.

Thursday, 3 September 2026

OpenAI Soft-Releases GPT‑6 Astra ★

Simon Willison:

GPT-6 Astra is “rolling out today to a limited set of organizations and over the coming days will become available to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, as well as through the OpenAI API and AWS” — I’ve not tried it yet myself, so I don’t have a great deal to say about it yet.

It’s going to be API priced at the same rate as Claude Fable 5 and 5.1: $10/million input and $50/million output. This is clearly OpenAI’s Fable competitor, and appears to score higher than Fable on most of OpenAI’s self-reported benchmarks.

Phil Schiller Steps Down From Running App Store and Product Events ★

Mark Gurman:

Apple Inc.’s Phil Schiller, one of the most visible and influential executives across both the Steve Jobs and Tim Cook eras, has stepped down from his role leading the App Store and product events.

The 66-year-old executive, who was Apple’s senior vice president of marketing until leaving that job in 2020, made the latest change in recent days, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

This is true, I’ve confirmed. Seems natural for this to coincide with the CEO transition. What a run for Schiller.

MapQuest Refuses to Relabel Lake Ontario, Rewarded With Surge in Popularity ★

Finya Swai, reporting for The Hill two days ago:

MapQuest has surged in popularity on the app charts after the mapping service said it would not rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America” after President Trump signed an executive order changing its name.

The company said its mobile app received hundreds of thousands of downloads after it announced Thursday that the name Lake Ontario would remain on its apps, despite Trump directing the Interior Department to update the lake’s name in the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS).

By Monday morning, MapQuest had climbed to No. 1 among navigation apps in Apple’s U.S. app store and No. 4 in non-gaming apps. In Canada, which shares the lake with the U.S., the app reached No. 2 overall over the weekend. The app’s usage also jumped to roughly 50 times its normal level, according to MapQuest.

Here we are on Thursday and MapQuest still holds the #1 spot, ahead of ChatGPT, Vinted (never heard of it), “TikTok Pro - Events” (a confusing new app, apart from the main TikTok client), ESPN Fantasy Sports (the NFL season is about to start), Claude, and Gemini.

When opportunity knocks, you need to open the door. The political corner that both Apple and Google get painted into when Donald Trump asserts a new name for an established geographic feature is a huge opportunity for an underdog like MapQuest. Good for them.

Wednesday, 2 September 2026

iOS 27 Introduces New ‘iPhone Handoff’ Feature ★

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

“iPhone Handoff” can be set up from the Settings app, under the Cellular menu. During the setup process, you can choose which iPhone you want to be the main device that you use most often and which one you want to be the companion device.

Apple says a user’s main eSIM will remain on the main iPhone, while the companion iPhone will receive a companion eSIM, and this will enable you to switch between the devices back and forth while using the same phone number.

All cellular settings are managed on the main iPhone, and location sharing is based on whichever iPhone is actively using the phone number.

This sounds amazing for those of us who use multiple iPhones. It’s not a common use case but it’s not that unusual. Developers come to mind, as do, ahem, new-phone reviewers. I presume there are a lot of people in Cupertino who use multiple iPhones, too.

The only downside is that it requires carrier support. Hopefully they’ll all adopt it as quickly as they did for, say, cellular Apple Watches.

Tuesday, 1 September 2026

Tim Cook’s Departure Memo on His Last Day as CEO ★

Tim Cook:

There is something truly special about Apple. I am most proud of what an annual report could never capture. This place is proof that culture triumphs over everything. We share a belief that what we build matters, and that we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to leave the world better than we found it. That purpose is part of what makes this place extraordinary. Apple helps nurture it, but I believe it lived within each of you long before you arrived here. It is what brought you to this company and what continues to drive the work you do every day. Together, we have created something far greater than any one of us could have imagined or accomplished alone. And that’s the secret to our success. We bring out the best in each other. We lift each other up. We have made it possible to leave our “dent in the universe,” as Steve once described it, because of who we are and what we believe, because of what we value and how we see the world. How fortunate we are. How fortunate I am.

That’s the best paragraph of the memo. I like those last two “fortunate” lines, and I think they’re the most open Cook gets. But on the whole the memo reads to me like the classic Far Side cartoon about the dog listening to its owner: “Blah blah Apple, blah blah blah blah Apple. Blah blah....”

The truth is he was CEO for 15 years and he revealed very little of his true self to the public. That’s fine. In a meta sense, remaining so private was revealing. I think that’s who Tim Cook is — an intensely private man who took on a high-profile public role. The more revealing stories about the real Cook aren’t his public performances or memos. There’s the 2009 “Why are you still here?” one with Sabih Khan. And then there’s a remark I came upon recently, re-reading chapter 35 of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, regarding Jobs’s 2009 medical leave of absence:

Cook had done a good job running the company during Jobs’s absence. He kept Apple’s temperamental actors performing well, and he avoided stepping into the limelight. Jobs liked strong personalities, up to a point, but he had never truly empowered a deputy or shared the stage. It was hard to be his understudy. You were damned if you shone, and damned if you didn’t. Cook had managed to navigate those shoals. He was calm and decisive when in command, but he didn’t seek any notice or acclaim for himself. “Some people resent the fact that Steve gets credit for everything, but I’ve never given a rat’s ass about that,” said Cook. “Frankly speaking, I’d prefer my name never be in the paper.”

That’s Tim Cook. He clearly feels the same way now as he did when he told that to Isaacson before he took the CEO job.

Apple Reveals Forensic Evidence From Chang Liu’s MacBook in OpenAI Lawsuit ★

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

In today’s filing, Apple says that Liu’s lawyers recently handed over his MacBook that he used after leaving Apple. According to Apple, an “initial forensic analysis” of that MacBook revealed four things, quoted from Apple’s filing:

Mr. Liu not only downloaded a confidential Apple circuit schematic but also used it in his work at OpenAI;

Far from his unauthorized access to Apple’s third-party cloud storage being unknown to him, Mr. Liu and others at OpenAI were well-aware of that access;

Mr. Liu, upon learning of Apple’s internal investigation of him, sent instructions for destroying evidence to an OpenAI colleague who confirmed she would comply; and

Mr. Liu used a tool in his work at OpenAI that has the same name as an internal Apple engineering application used for Apple development work.

9to5Mac is hosting a copy of the original filing from Apple’s lawyers.

The first point seems really bad for OpenAI. On the fourth point, I’m not sure what Apple is alleging here — I think they’re alleging that Liu took an Apple internal engineering app with him over to OpenAI? This is the entirety of that allegation from Apple’s filing:

D. New evidence shows previously unknown use of a tool at OpenAI that has the same name as an Apple internal engineering tool.

The MacBook also reveals additional acts of potential trade secret misappropriation previously unknown to Apple. While working at OpenAI, Mr. Liu referred to using a tool and related software packages with names identical to proprietary internal engineering tools used at Apple.

It sounds like the MacBook Apple examined didn’t have the proprietary app on it — just emails or messages where Liu referenced using it.

Sunday, 30 August 2026

Finalist 4 ★

My thanks to Finalist for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. Finalist is a remarkable, ambitious, and novel app for iPhone, iPad, and the Mac from indie developer Slaven Radic. It’s a planner inspired by paper day planners. I wrote quite a bit about Finalist when it first sponsored DF back in December — you should read that post. I’ve been using Finalist ever since. It’s a really good app. I’ll just reiterate from the first post that what really resonates for me is the idea of adding tasks to days, not assigning dates to tasks. If you add some tasks and then never actually do them, they’re still there, but they’re in the past, not harassing you in an ever-growing list of undone stuff today.

Finalist 4, which just came out a few weeks ago, is the biggest update yet. The headline new feature is notes, in the app or as a folder of Markdown files that round-trips with Obsidian. Tasks in those files land on the right day, next to your reminders and events, even inside the Mac menu bar app. Finalist’s rebuilt Timeline lets you pencil tasks into your day, and Apple Pencil gets special powers to sketch the plan in seconds.

There’s tons more, brewed over four months with 1,000 beta testers. Try it free on the App Store — for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and now Apple Watch.

Thoughts and Observations on Apple’s First Immersive MLB Broadcast, a Yankees 1-0 Win Over the Red Sox

Saturday, 29 August 2026

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors, has an exemplary review of the experience:

I didn’t mind the reduced pace of the NBA broadcast, which toggled between cameras under each basket, but Stratechery’s Ben Thompson felt strongly that the best option would’ve been a single camera at mid-court, to completely eliminate the disorienting cuts and replicate being at the game in person.

Apple’s approach with baseball, at least based on Friday’s game, seems to lean toward Thompson’s preferred approach — and it does benefit from it. Each half inning was shown from a single camera on the dugout rail next to the on-deck circle, giving a great view of pitcher and hitter and the infield, as well as the goings on right in front of the dugout in foul territory. The camera switched between innings, so you were always viewing from the perspective of the at-bat team’s dugout.

Making it all work better was Apple’s addition of a “virtual jumbotron” floating in the sky, a scoreboard with graphics and a video feed of the standard 16:9 telecast on Apple TV. It was easy to look up and catch a replay or even get a better view of something happening in the far-off outfield, without getting in the way of my view of the game itself.

I concur with Snell’s review. The camera placement was terrific. You watched each team bat from the perspective of its own dugout. Perfect. A few other thoughts:

The whole thing was legit exciting. Vision Pro continues to get a bad rap because Apple hasn’t sold many of them, and isn’t going to sell many of them until they come out with new models that are cheaper and lighter and less fussy. But there’s no denying that these immersive experiences are fucking cool. And an immersive live experience adds something else. It’s ineffable. Hard to say why, but feeling like you’re at another place watching something happen live is magic. Just a few years ago it would have required literal magic. It wasn’t possible. Now it is.
The immersive audio was terrific. It really sounded like being at Yankee Stadium, and truly added to the you-are-there feel of the experience. It seems corny to say this, but I really had the urge to stand during the national anthem, and it felt slightly wrong not to take the “hat” off my head (where the “hat” was the Vision Pro). It’s exciting to feel 43,000 fans roar around you. Baseball is a slow game but when the crowd roars, it erupts. That never comes across on regular TV broadcasts. It did here.
Like Snell though, I felt Apple’s commentators were too chatty. I’d love an option to toggle the commentary on and off, to just experience the natural audio of the ballpark.¹
The only thing missing was aroma. Cement, grass, dirt, sweat, beer, peanuts, hot dogs with the works. Ballparks smell like fun. (Even Fenway.) But the you-are-there experience was so visceral I swear I could almost smell it. It’s like my brain was filling in the missing sensation. It didn’t feel like watching a 3D TV broadcast. It didn’t feel like a better version of TV broadcasting. It felt like something new and different. Something at least as different from watching on TV as watching on TV is different from merely listening on radio. It’s profound. TVs are small — laptops, tablets, and phones are even smaller. Yankee Stadium is huge. Watching this game immersively felt huge. Awesome, in the literal sense.
I love how you could look around and see how filthy everything really is in baseball: the on-deck mats, the interior of the dugouts, the tiny bits of schmutz on the warning track. It’s a lot of dirt and quite a bit of spit. That’s baseball, Suzyn.
There’s a resolution and/or depth of field limitation with the cameras, exacerbated by the fact that Vision Pro’s displays are, compared to reality, low resolution. They’re the highest-resolution VR displays on the market but I still couldn’t see the ball once it left the infield. When balls were hit to the outfield you just kind of had to judge what was happening by what the infielders and baserunners were doing. Ben Rice hit a double in the first inning and I thought the Sox outfielder caught it and I was confused why Rice was running to second base. Turns out the outfielder stopped running because Rice hit the ball over his head and he was waiting to play the carom off the left field wall. I was happy to be wrong. A few years from now, with better cameras and better Vision headset displays, these problems will be solved. But in the meantime, the outfield is fuzzy.
The best part about the immersive perspective compared to a traditional broadcast is watching how complex infield play really is. It’s fun to quickly look around the whole infield right before the pitch. You really see how much more stressful it is for the pitcher once there’s a runner on base — let alone more than one. It’s what I love about going to the ballpark — so much more complexity and intricacy is revealed — and watching this immersive broadcast enables the same thing. You can see the whole game, at all times, not just the pitcher, catcher, and batter.
The virtual “jumbotron” is a fine idea but I wish you could move it a bit higher, and it would be even better if you could configure it with the stats you want to see. But positioning it higher is my big request.
I have to admit I hadn’t used my Vision Pro in quite a few weeks before last night’s game. One thing that really struck me, almost certainly because baseball is a long game, is how heavy it is. My chin wants to droop and my face wants to look down when I’m wearing it. It’s the weight more than the isolation that makes it tiresome for anything other than short-form content, for me at least.

The whole thing was a great success. I’m writing these notes on Saturday afternoon while watching the old flat broadcast of game 2 of this 4-game series, and it feels ... well, boring. And small. Bodes well for the future of sports. ★

Even better would be an option to swap in the local radio broadcasts, like bringing a portable radio to the ballpark. Go skeuomorphic with the UI and make it look like an old handheld Sony or Panasonic transistor radio, and make the toggle “click” on and off. Go skeuomorphic with the audio too — make it sound like it’s coming out of a little speaker or a little earpiece and have the tuner play static as you switch between home/away (and English/Spanish) stations. That’d be so fun. And the regular old flat Friday Night Baseball telecast already supports swapping in local radio broadcasts — they’ve already got the rights. Bring that to these immersive games! ↩︎

Friday, 28 August 2026

Apple Announces Price Increase for Apple TV and Apple One Subscriptions ★

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

Here are the full details on the price increases:

Apple TV (monthly): $14.99 (up from $12.99)

Apple TV (annual): $119 (up from $99)

Apple One Individual: $21.95 (up from $19.95)

Prices for other Apple One plans are unchanged. When Apple increased the price of Apple Music last month, it also raised the Apple One Family and Apple One Premier plans, but not the Individual plan.

The higher prices go into effect today for new subscribers. Apple says existing subscribers will be notified of the price increase about a month before they are charged the new price.

Seems poetic that Tim Cook’s last action as CEO is a goose to services revenue.

‘I’m the Guy Who Destroys Antique Books After We Scan Them Into Our Company’s Insatiable AI Platform’ ★

Jack Loftus, writing at McSweeney’s:

People assume scanning is the exciting part. And, sure, it is impressive. They shear off the spine, separate the pages, and run everything through these enormous machines so the computer can absorb every sentence ever written and use it to create some fairly compelling LinkedIn posts. But then, boy oh boy, the wheeled cart carrying those decimated remains comes to me. That is where the human touch enters the process, assuming you count industrial shredders and a giant burn pit out back as an extension of the hand, which I certainly do.

(Via Michael Sippey.)

‘How Americans See E.U. Tech’ ★

I think at least half a dozen people have sent me a link to this video and now that I’ve watched it, I understand why. Perfect.

We Certainly Have Made a Hames Out of This ★

I mentioned earlier that for anyone going along with the ruse that Lake Ontario is now named Lake America, the HOMES mnemonic no longer holds, the only two valid words in English with the new five letters are hames and shame, and that hames is rather too obscure.

But it’s not so obscure in Ireland, where they use it in an idiom: to make a hames of something is to make a mess of it. With that in mind, it’s hard to say which is more apt for this embarrassment, hames or shame.

(The other longstanding Great Lakes mnemonic is the phrase “Super Man Helps Every One”, which I don’t love because neither Superman nor everyone ought to be treated as two words, but it does have the advantage of sorting the lakes geographically from west to east.)

‘Not Sure How You Own Canada by Deleting Your Own History’ ★

Matt Walsh, described by Wikipedia as “an American far-right political commentator and podcast host” (a description that sounds harsh, but I’d say is describing him euphemistically), on Twitter/X (retweeting the official White House account’s announcement of the name change):

This will be an unpopular opinion on the Right but I think this is kind of dumb, even as a troll. Lake Ontario was given that name on maps by European explorers long before the Canadian province of Ontario was named. There are several cities in America called Ontario — at least one of them predating the Canadian province by like 100 years — because the word originates with native tribes in North America. It’s not a Canadian invention. Canadians never uniquely owned the lake or the name. So in effect all you’re doing here is actually giving them credit for a thing that wasn’t theirs to begin with. Yeah it’s funny when Canadians are upset I guess or whatever, but Lake Ontario, the name itself, is American history dating back many centuries. Not sure how you own Canada by deleting your own history.

Politically this is also stupid because the number one challenge Republicans will face in the midterms is the charge that they haven’t used their time in power to advance the interests of everyday Americans. This kind of thing will be used as evidence to make that case. That might not be fair. Sure technically you can advance the interests of everyday Americans and also do dumb shit like this. But the fact is that far from “making liberal heads explore [sic],” you’re actually handing them a political gift. It helps their case much more than it helps ours. And, like I said, the historical logic here is totally confused. Lake Ontario was not named after the Canadian province of Ontario. It’s the other way around.

Good sign that the whole mad-king thing is running on fumes when even Daily Wire commentators agree that this is stupid and isn’t even an effective troll. Every deluded fool runs into reality eventually. (Via Oliver Darcy’s Status.)

Also: Applying a new name to the Gulf of Mexico is equally ahistorical — Mexico only achieved independence from Spain in 1821; the Gulf’s name is twice as old as Mexico as a nation and 150 years older than the United States.

From the DF Archive: ‘Golfo Del Gringo Loco’ ★

Yours truly back in February 2025:

The motivation behind the name change is simple as well. Trump didn’t change the US’s officially recognized name of, say, the Atlantic Ocean or the continent of Africa. He just as easily could, but he won’t.

I’m starting to worry how well that’s going to hold up.

And it’s not like “Gulf of Mexico” was on a list of “debatable or controversial names” until he created this controversy out of thin air. It’s just the one name on the globe that a president of the United States can change to stick it to Mexico, a country Donald Trump has objectively racist feelings toward. Trump never campaigned on building a wall at our northern border with Canada, nor has he (yet?) attempted to rename Lake Ontario.

That “(yet?)” held up very well, alas. The rest of my essay holds up very well too, I think, especially pertaining to how Google and Apple present the change in their respective maps apps:

So whether Google and Apple should show the new name at all shouldn’t be the question we’re asking. The right question is necessarily more nuanced: Who should see which names, where? And Google and Apple’s answers to that question are, alas, disappointing and worrisome. I’ll repeat the seemingly identical policy both companies are actually presenting today, by region:

United States: “Gulf of America”.

Mexico: “Gulf of Mexico”.

Everywhere else in the world: “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)”.

The best politically realistic option they could have chosen would be (I’ll use italics to emphasize that these are my own suggestions):

United States: “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)”.

Everywhere else in the world: “Gulf of Mexico”.

There’s no good reason to even show “Gulf of America” in parentheses outside the US. We’re the ones with the stupid name change on the books, so we’re the ones who should get stuck seeing the stupid name. No one else should suffer the consequences of our political lunacy. But it is correct to show us, in America, the new dumb “Gulf of America” name. Again, if it were up to me, American users would see “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)”, and everyone else would just see “Gulf of Mexico”. But that’s surely the best we in the reality-based community could hope for.

Earlier in the essay, I wrote:

To ignore political reality is to court political controversy. It is not in the interests of large multinational corporations to court controversy. But it’s not possible to avoid controversy. What is reasonable is to minimize controversy.

Trump has delivered fresh “Lake America” shit sandwiches for Google and Apple to eat. I suggest that the path I recommended 18 months ago remains the path of eating the least shit, maintaining the most integrity, and courting the least collective controversy. Label it “Lake America (Lake Ontario)” to those of us here in the U.S., and keep it as “Lake Ontario” with no mention of Trump’s petulant fiat name anywhere else in the world.

Trump Declares That Lake Ontario Is Now ‘Lake America’ ★

Jackie Llanos and Jenna Monnin, reporting for NOTUS:

President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order meant to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” taking his apparent jab at Canada one step further as a trade war between the two countries escalates.

The president said the name change was “effective immediately” during a signing ceremony in the Oval Office. The executive order directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to update the Geographic Names Information Service to reflect the name change. When asked by reporters about the move, Trump said he was sending “no message” to Canada with the name change.

“Lake of America was something I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” the president said. “Actually, as you know, we took something called the Gulf of Mexico, we changed it, and now it’s very routinely the Gulf of America.”

Aaron Rupar has video clips of Trump declaring the change in an Oval Office press event, here and here. In the second clip Trump ruminates, “So if you think about it, we have a gulf, and we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean, so maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.” Those who deny that he’s a mad king slipping ever deeper into dementia might say, well, he’s obviously joking. But if I had told those same people just two years ago, in the run up to his reelection, that Trump was going to declare new names for the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario, they’d have said I was crazy because that would be nutty.

It is nutty. Renaming these large bodies of water is nuts. He’s nuts. This is not complicated. Crazy people do crazy things and this is obviously crazy. I often use the phrase jokingly but Donald Trump is not hooked up right, and the proof is right before our eyes on camera every day.

Factoid: HOMES is the longstanding mnemonic for recalling the five Great Lake names: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. “Hames”, technically, is a playable Scrabble/Wordle word (“a part of a horse collar”), but it’s far too obscure to serve as a mnemonic. That leaves one word in the English language consisting of the five necessary letters: SHAME.

Thursday, 27 August 2026

U.S. Judge Blocks Trump Defense Department’s Anthropic Blacklisting ★

Jack Queen, Reuters:

A U.S. judge on Thursday blocked the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic, the latest turn in the Claude maker’s high-stakes fight with the military over AI safety on the battlefield.

Anthropic’s lawsuit in California federal court alleges that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth overstepped his authority when he designated Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk, a label the government can apply to companies that expose military systems to potential infiltration or sabotage by adversaries. [...]

U.S. District Judge Rita Lin, an appointee of former Democratic President Joe Biden, made the ruling in a 59-page order where she found that the Pentagon’s decision was “illegal and baseless.”

“The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics,” she wrote.

The imperial aspects of Trump 2.0 are increasingly coming apart at the seams.

Afterglow — Classic After Dark Screen Savers on Today’s MacOS ★

Jeff Halter has done it again: after bringing back the single greatest After Dark module (Ben Haller’s Lunatic Fringe game, via a modern runtime named Lunacy), he’s now released Afterglow:

Running After Dark modules in the present day has involved fussy configuration of Mac OS emulators or vintage hardware. Even then, no single emulator or vintage computer can faithfully run every module: some animate too fast, some too slow.

Afterglow is an emulator built specifically for running After Dark modules — the original 68k module code, not a remake or port — with no dependencies on ROMs or classic Mac OS. Created in the spirit of software preservation, it makes After Dark easy to enjoy today and for years to come.

All this in the same summer during which Halter released Stacks, his beautiful native modern HyperCard player. And don’t even look at his reproduction of volume 68 of MacWarehouse from 1997.

The Load-Bearing Vocabulary of Claude ★

Fun (but depressing?) data analysis project from Louis Abraham, showing how repetitive Claude is in the words it chooses when submitting GitHub pull requests. Abraham, in the project’s readme:

GitHub pull request descriptions, grouped by the words they are written with rather than by anything they were told to look for: eight ways of writing, and every description belongs to one of them. One of the eight was 1.0% of the corpus at the start of 2025 and is 45% of it by the middle of 2026.

If you want to get a little more depressed, I’ve been doing deeper reading into AI watermarking research, and one of the admissions in Google’s white paper on SynthID-Text — the watermarking scheme Anthropic says Claude is going to start using — is that the technique incurs “some reduction to inter-response diversity”. That means different answers to the same prompt become more similar to each other — there’s less variety to watermarked text responses. That’s a load-bearing problem given that Claude clearly already struggles in this regard before watermarking its output.

Elizabeth Warren’s Incoherent Outrage Regarding Apple’s Tariff Refund ★

Speaking of tariff refunds, here’s an official statement from Senator Elizabeth Warren from a few weeks ago:

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote to Target, Apple, Amazon, Nike, Motorola, Walmart, and Energizer pushing these companies — each of which have or are expected to receive massive rebates from the Trump Administration for tariffs paid last year — to provide refunds to customers.

“I urge you to pass along any refund you may receive to the consumers who paid higher prices for your products while the tariffs were in place,” wrote Senator Warren.

On Twitter/X, she posted:

NEW: Apple reportedly got $2.2 BILLION back in tariff refunds. Amazon got $600 MILLION.

What’s their plan to give YOU your money back?

Warren published the letters she sent to the CEOs, including Tim Cook:

Reports indicate that Apple has applied for a refund of the roughly $3.3 billion in tariffs you paid in 2025, and as of July 30th, that you have received nearly $2.2 billion in refunds. This amounts to a multi-billion dollar windfall, which could still grow if more of your refund petitions are granted. You have claimed that you “plan to reinvest any amount we receive back into U.S. innovation and advanced manufacturing,” but this vague statement offers no clarity as to where this money will go: indeed, it implies that you will not be returning it to the millions of consumers who purchased Apple products last year and paid higher prices. [...]

You have received an astronomical cash infusion in the form of a tariff refund, and Apple customers who paid increased prices for your products, ostensibly due to tariffs, deserve to know how that money will be spent. Your vague statements about “reinvesting” the refund leave hardworking Americans who paid hundreds of dollars more to buy Apple products in the dark about why they paid those increased prices and where their money will go. To better understand the disposition of any tariff refund you might receive, I request that you respond to the following questions by August 21, 2026.

Amongst the 11 questions she asks, the only one that seems pertinent is #5:

(5) How much did Apple increase prices on products in 2025?
(a) For what products did Apple increase prices, and how many of these products were directly impacted by tariffs?

Unless I’m missing something, the answers are “$0” and “none”. Apple increased none of its prices on any of its products in response to tariffs in 2025. The iPhone 17 lineup, in fact, surprised many observers and made news by holding prices steady.

In May 2025, Warren co-signed a letter to the FTC encouraging them to discourage large profitable companies from raising prices due to tariffs. Apple — a large profitable company — didn’t raise prices at all, which seemingly was what Warren thought they should do. But now she’s expressing outrage that Apple got a refund for the tariffs whose costs the company covered, and her followers are left to believe that Apple did raise prices and is keeping the money.

Panic Is Refunding Tariff Fees to Playdate Buyers ★

Nicole Carpenter and Diego Argüello, reporting for Game Developer:

“There was a specific window of time this year where we charged tariffs to customers,” Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser explained in an e-mail to Game Developer confirming the news. “We tried absorbing the cost for a while, but that was financially difficult for a small company like ours. We made the tariff a very obvious and clearly labeled line item on checkout for any customer affected.”

Panic also set up a website to explain the 19% tariff surcharge. [...] The refund amount a customer will get back depends on how much they purchased.

“It’s just not our money to keep, and it felt really good to give it back,” Sasser said. “That’s an easy way to know you made the right decision.”

He continued: “Still, it took a lot of work for us to file all the paperwork to get the refund from the government, and it took work to build a little system to process the refund, and sometimes it felt like, wait, why are we seemingly doing more work than even gigantic companies are on this issue? That felt weird. But I guess it makes sense in a way, because our small size means we’re far more directly affected by something like a tariff.”

Sasser said he hopes Panic never has to talk about tariffs again.

Cool story from a cool company, and amen to the day we never hear about tariffs again.

Ads in Apple Maps Have Now Launched ★

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac:

Apple confirmed to 9to5Mac that the ads rollout in Maps began in the last few days. And it will continue ramping in the weeks ahead to all users.

There are two places you’ll find ads in the Maps app:

Before searching: Suggested Places in the search screen will feature an ad.

After searching: Ads will appear in search results when relevant.

Before searching, I saw an ad for an HVAC contractor 12 miles away in “Suggested Places”. Knock on wood but I currently have no HVAC problems, and even if I did, I’d just call someone and have them come here. Then I waited a few minutes and looked again. This time I saw an ad for Tommy’s Express Car Wash (“Get your first month free”), 23 miles away in the middle of a suburban shopping mall. Apple Maps estimates it would take me 1 hour 8 minutes to drive there right now. I’ll get right on that.

The first organic (non-ad) suggested place is a coffee shop 300 feet away.

‘How Europe Is Killing Makers and Micro-Entrepreneurs’ ★

Alain Pannetrat, founder of Lectronz:

Lectronz is a marketplace for open-source hardware makers and DIY electronics. Most of our sellers are not factories or well-funded start-ups. They are engineers, independent designers, and hardware enthusiasts working from spare rooms, garages, and tiny workshops.

Some earn a living from their products. Some sell only a handful of boards each year. Others build ten units simply because they created something useful and want to share it with the community. Occasionally, one of those experiments grows into a real business. Every Arduino begins somewhere.

But the European Union’s new packaging rules now threaten to kill the world of makers and micro-entrepreneurs, putting jobs, livelihoods and an entire ecosystem of innovation at risk.

Pannetrat says these new regulations will require even one-person hobbyists to spend hundreds of euros per year (and file paperwork) for each country they ship to. The costs will far outstrip the money they make from selling a few dozen gadgets or circuit boards, and the hassles are probably worse than the costs. But these regulations are no big deal at all to big companies like Amazon — they only hurt smaller companies, and they’re effectively crushing to hobbyists.

A couple of years ago Philadelphia banned retailers from using plastic bags. It’s worked out great. More people bring reusable shopping bags with them, and if you need a bag from the store, you get paper bags that they charge you a nickel each for. A small price to encourage bag reuse, and the end result is no more plastic bags. Regulations can be very effective without adding any complexity or annoyance to daily life.

Wednesday, 26 August 2026

POSIWID: The Purpose of a System Is What It Does ★

Wikipedia:

The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a heuristic in systems thinking coined by the British management consultant Stafford Beer, who stated that there is “no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do”. It is used in systems theory, and is generally invoked to counter the notion that the purpose of a system can or should be read from the intentions of those who design, operate, or promote it. When a system’s side effects or unintended consequences reveal that its behaviour is poorly understood, then the POSIWID perspective can balance political understandings of system behaviour with a more straightforwardly descriptive view.

I don’t recall seeing POSIWID before, but I love the concept. A friend sent this to me, with the quip that I forgot to include a link to it in my “What Is the Point of the DMA?” piece this week. Indeed, it encapsulates my arguments about the DMA specifically and the European Commission generally. The purpose of the DMA is what it does, not what you imagine it is intended to do.

In the same vein, I have been thinking too about the famous anecdote reported by Adam Lashinsky for Fortune back in 2011:

Steve Jobs doesn’t tolerate duds. Shortly after the launch event, he summoned the MobileMe team, gathering them in the Town Hall auditorium in Building 4 of Apple’s campus, the venue the company uses for intimate product unveilings for journalists. According to a participant in the meeting, Jobs walked in, clad in his trademark black mock turtleneck and blue jeans, clasped his hands together, and asked a simple question:

“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”

You can argue all you want that the DMA is intended to give developers and users choice and freedom. My retort is “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” The DMA is what it does — and it isn’t that.

(Also, if you follow the link quoted above to Stafford Beer’s Wikipedia entry — man, put a hat on that guy and damned if he doesn’t look like Jim Dalrymple. It would be even more uncanny if his name had been Stafford Heineken.)

Memory and Storage Configurations and Pricing for the New Mac Minis (M6/M5 Pro) and Mac Studios (M5 Max/M5 Ultra)

Tuesday, 25 August 2026

Apple today announced an all new lineup of Mac Mini (M6 and M5 Pro) and Mac Studio (M5 Max and M5 Ultra) desktops. The Apple Newsroom announcements for Mac Mini and Mac Studio only note base model prices. Here’s my attempt to put all of the RAM/SSD configurations into condensed tables, so you can see which storage and memory options are available for each chip, and how much they cost.

Mac Mini M6

12-core CPU, 12-core GPU: $900
  RAM:
       16 GB      $0
       24 GB    $200
       32 GB    $400
  SSD:
      256 GB      $0
      512 GB    $200
        1 TB    $500
        2 TB   $1000

Mac Mini M5 Pro

15-core CPU, 16-core GPU: $1,700
18-core CPU, 20-core GPU: $1,900
  RAM:
       24 GB       $0
       48 GB     $600
       64 GB    $1000
  SSD:
      512 GB       $0
        1 TB     $300
        2 TB     $800
        4 TB    $1800
        8 TB    $3800

Mac Studio M5 Max

18-core CPU, 32-core GPU: $2,500
  RAM:
       36 GB       $0
18-core CPU, 40-core GPU: $3,100
  RAM:
       48 GB       $0
       64 GB     $400
      128 GB    $2000
  SSD:
      512 GB       $0
        1 TB     $300
        2 TB     $800
        4 TB    $1800
        8 TB    $3800

Mac Studio M5 Ultra

30-core CPU, 64-core GPU: $5,500
36-core CPU, 80-core GPU: $6,800
  RAM:
       96 GB       $0
      256 GB    $4000
      512 GB   “Coming late October”
  SSD:
        1 TB       $0
        2 TB     $500
        4 TB    $1500
        8 TB    $3500
       16 TB    $7500

Notes

Ethernet: Across all Mac Mini models, upgrading from 2.5 gigabit to 10 gigabit is $100. On Mac Studio, 10 gigabit is standard on all models.
If you configure an M6 Mac Mini with 2 TB of storage, the SSD upgrade ($1,000) costs more than the entire base model computer ($900). So too with the 4 TB SSD upgrade for the M5 Pro Mini ($1,800 upgrade for a $1,700 computer).
Both Mac Mini and Mac Studio are available in a wide array of cool color choices, including silver.
It kind of stinks that there are no RAM options for the M5 Ultra Studio between the 96 GB base and the $4,000 256 GB upgrade. There “should be” a 128 GB tier, but if you squint you can see why they did it this way.
The best currently-available-to-order Mac Studio (36/80 cores, 256 GB RAM, 16 TB SSD) costs $18,300. But if you’re OK with the base 30/64-core chip and just 8 TB storage, you can cut the price to a smooth $13,000.
“Coming late October” = “Bend over”. ★