Daring Fireball: Touch and Glow:
Someone else in my briefing group asked why Apple would bother doing that. “Because it’s awesome,” was the answer, which I’m quoting exactly and fully. That was the entire answer. Because it’s awesome.
Fantastic article, well worth the read. Strangely high number of em dash characters for some reason.
Good job America, I knew you had it in you. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
Blocking Identity Resolution Infrastructure | WebKit:
In our iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS 27 releases, Safari and WebKit block network access to identity resolution infrastructure to prevent cross-site tracking. This stops them from sending your email address to their servers and all the downstream effects of that. The blocking is done on the domain level, meaning they can’t just change the structure of the network request to work around the protection.
Well done Apple. Keep up the good work. I don’t have a problem with advertising, per se, but I do have a problem with privacy-invasive tracking techniques used to build these dossiers on individuals.
“I’m Embarrassed on Behalf of the Tech Industry” - Jim Nielsen’s Blog:
I hear this a lot from family and friends who sit outside tech.“Nothing works.”
“Everything is hard to use.”
“I can’t make sense of this.”
And to them I am a representative, a connection, to this pain in their lives.
And I, too, am embarrassed on behalf of the tech industry — by our collective failure.
I agree, wholeheartedly. We used to know how to make things that worked, but the industry got so obsessed with rebuilding things in ever more complicated ways that they lost sight of simplicity.
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Mike Monteiro’s recent writing. Heartfelt, honest, and sometimes raw. I don’t know him personally, but I feel like we could be friends if we were geographically close. I read through almost all of his latest post, How to dance through the apocalypse, nodding my head, with the exception of one paragraph.
The Friday after the boombox showed up I took it to the dogpark. And I gotta say, I felt a little ridiculous carrying this very large anachronism in public, almost like I had a fresh Ed Hardy tattoo on my forehead. However, you can’t walk through the dogpark with a three-foot long bright yellow boombox and claim that you were hoping not to be perceived, so I owned it. I got to the bench, fished a tape out of my pocket that I’d found tucked away in a corner of our apartment—Purple Rain—and hit play. Which is when I realized that a forty year old tape sounds like a forty year old tape. With no other option, I switched it to Bluetooth (annoying) and created a playlist of 80s hits on my phone to play through the boombox. Within a few minutes we had a dance party going in the dogpark. By the end of the night, we had a Total Eclipse of the Heart singalong going. (A few weeks later we had a Dolly Parton memorial playlist.)
I can imagine no reality where this happens here in Iowa. I would love it! But honestly all I can think of is how annoyed everyone else in the park would be, and how embarrassed I would be trying to do it. The entire scenario sounds like a scene from a John Hughes movie. Must be a California thing.
The IndieWeb Is Punk Manifesto:
You don't need a deal with a label. You don't need a platform's blessing. All you need is an out of tune guitar you can barely play, or a free text editor and a hosting bill. That's it. That's the whole scene.
Here we go.
BMW Owners Angry 'Spider-Man: Brand New Day' Ads Are in Their Cars:
via: Daring Fireball
A banner touting the film first appears when the car is started, though owners have to click on the ad to see the full video. Still, one owner claimed BMW has been pushing increasingly intrusive videos onto its dashboard space.
We need an open source movement for cars. I think about this for my Subaru all the time. Not sure what it would take just yet, but a linux disto I could load on my Outback would be fantastic.
AI Economics for Dummies - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:
1. Acquiring one grape costs Alex $2 billion. Alex offers to sell Mike one grape a month for the next 12 months for $1 billion per grape. Alex asks for the full $12 billion up front and provides Mike with one grape for the first month. Alex makes a $10 billion profit this month; his ARR is $120 billion, and his profits are trending up at an infinite rate. The Wall Street Journal’s business editor moves into Alex’s house, having accepted a part-time position as Alex’s human footstool. He never asks to see the books.
This is the best explanation of how the AI bubble works that I've read.
One approach, proposed by Google Research, is what you might call a “token auction.” In this model, advertisers don’t buy ad slots on a page. Instead, they bid, token by token, on the actual text the model generates. Each advertiser brings their own LLM, and an auction mechanism decides whose model gets to influence the next word. The output is a weighted blend of competing interests, shaped by who’s willing to pay more.Another approach – also from Google researchers – fits the new “Search” much more precisely. It’s called “prominence allocation.” Here, when a user submits a query with commercial intent, the system runs an auction that doesn’t just decide which ads appear, but how prominently the LLM writes about each one. The auction outputs a prominence score for each advertiser, essentially telling the model: give this product 35 words, that one 20, and this one zero. The ad isn’t next to the answer. The ad is the answer. Or rather, it shapes how much space and enthusiasm each product gets within the answer.
This is terrible. I’m glad I signed up for Kagi a while back.
