From Ars Technica:
As for what interested Meta about the work done on Moltbook, there is a clue in the statement issued to press by a Meta spokesperson, who flagged the Moltbook founders’ “approach to connecting agents through an always-on directory,” saying it “is a novel step in a rapidly developing space.” They added, “We look forward to working together to bring innovative, secure agentic experiences to everyone.”
What a time to be alive.
From Sonos Blog:
Sonos Play doesn’t just sound good. It pushes the limits of what a portable speaker this size can deliver, thanks to an acoustic architecture similar to that of its larger sibling, Move 2. This innovative design is capable of generating deep, room-filling bass — on par with what you might expect from a home stereo system.
I have a Sonos Roam 2 and it’s a great portable speaker, although a bit underpowered in some environments. This seems like a great middle ground for folks who don’t want to lug a beast of a speaker out on a camping trip or to the beach but still might want a little more ooomph. Looks impressive, and I’m considering buying one.
I love all the little details that show Sonos is listening to their customers – replaceable battery, actual buttons, USB-C cable that can be used for charging, reverse charging or even as audio output. Is it beach-capable, though? I’ve been hanging onto a “cheap” JBL Charge 3 for the better part of a decade now.
The “Apple tax” isn’t gone. The XDR display exists, after all. But the ground floor has moved considerably, and Apple has managed to do it without reaching for cheap materials or cutting corners on what actually matters to everyday use.
Continue reading →From Hannah Aubury at Mastodon:
For now, we want to run some onboarding experiments to test our ideas and learn what can work for us and for everyone on the network. Our first experiment is Default Server Recommendations. (If you were at FOSDEM or following along at home, you may have seen Andy Piper and I announce this or post about it!). Practically, we will replace the “join mastodon.social” button with a button that recommends a server from an opt-in pool that we will be hand selecting to start.
Good to see.
The email analogy (“choosing a server is like choosing an email provider”) has always been a solid go-to explanation, and it works reasonably well if you already understand why you might want your own email domain. That works great for a certain kind of person and lands with a thud for everyone else. Federation is genuinely a foreign concept for most new users, and no amount of clever copy fixes that. The real question is whether Mastodon can make the choice feel low-stakes enough that people stop worrying about it entirely and just … join somewhere.
This experiment feels like a step in that direction. Hope it fuels additional growth.
From Stereogum:
Apple Music won't prevent you from streaming AI slop, but it'll at least let you know that you're streaming AI slop. According to the Music Business Worldwide newsletter, the biggest non-Spotify streaming service is launching a new feature that it calls Transparency Tags. It's a set of metadata disclosure requirements that'll flag music that used generative AI on a "material portion" of four elements: the track itself, the lyrics, the artwork, and the music video.
Glad to see Apple is doing this, but I wish it wasn’t “opt-in” for the labels. According to the article, Deezer has their own AI detection software that augments any self-reporting in an effort to be more comprehensive.
From The New York Times:
That Mr. Trump declared the Iranian nuclear program “obliterated” by the strike in June — a claim belied by both U.S. intelligence and this new attack — underscores how little regard Mr. Trump has for his duty to tell the truth when committing American armed forces to battle. It also shows how little faith American citizens should place in his assurances about the goals and results of his growing list of military adventures.
Two things can be true at once: Iran’s leadership is genuinely awful, and it is not the United States’ legal or moral prerogative to remove them by force. Sovereignty isn’t a courtesy we extend to governments we like. It’s the foundational principle of international law, and unilaterally deciding to bomb a country into regime change violates it regardless of how “evil” that regime is.
The case for this attack has never cleared that bar. The stated justifications – to the extent they exist at all – range from strategically dubious to shifting like sand to justify the argument of the day. Whether the bombing campaign succeeds or fails, the cascading consequences – regional destabilization, retaliatory escalation, a power vacuum with no clear successor – are problems the U.S. has neither the plan nor the capacity to manage. This is a war of choice, launched without legal authority, against a country that did not attack us.
Opposing it doesn’t require sympathy for the Iranian regime. It requires recognizing that “they’re bad” has never been a sufficient justification for war.
In which an old dog tries to learn some new tricks.
Continue reading →From Tom Wojcik:
Here’s what keeps me up at night. By every metric on every dashboard, AI-assisted human development and human-assisted AI development is improving. More PRs shipped. More features delivered. Faster cycle times. The charts go up and to the right. But metrics don’t capture what’s happening underneath. The mental fatigue of reviewing code you didn’t write all day. The boredom of babysitting an agent instead of solving problems. The slow, invisible erosion of the hard skills that made you good at this job in the first place. You stop holding the architecture in your head because the agent handles it. You stop thinking through edge cases because the tests pass. You stop wanting to dig deep because it’s easier to prompt and approve. There’s no spark in you anymore.
I really enjoyed this article – I found myself nodding along throughout. I’m not an AI skeptic, but I do worry about what the next decade looks like for my career, and even more so for the people coming up behind me.
We’re drifting toward a future where the only engineers truly qualified to review AI generated code are the seniors who earned that judgment by writing bad code themselves — before AI existed to do it for them. When that generation retires, we’ll be left with teams peer-reviewing AI output they don’t deeply understand, using other AI tools to validate it. The blind leading the blind, but with great dashboards.
That doesn’t mean we can’t build remarkable things in this new world. But the quiet erosion of institutional knowledge means that even as the metrics trend upward, our collective human capital is quietly atrophying. We’re getting extraordinarily efficient at constructing systems that nobody will actually know how to fix … right up until an agent hallucinates its way into a 3 AM production outage and the on-call rotation just stares blankly.
From The Verge:
Nearly two hours after President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he was banning Anthropic products from the federal government, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth took it one step further and announced that he was now designating the AI company as a “supply-chain risk”. The decision could immediately impact numerous major tech companies that use Claude in their line of work for the Pentagon, including Palantir and AWS. It is not immediately clear to what extent the Pentagon may blacklist companies that contract with Claude for other services outside of national security.
Good for Anthropic. It’s a shame that the other AI companies aren’t lining up behind them.
Makes me happy that I’m a subscriber to Claude, relatively speaking.
From Introducing Acme Weather:
Fifteen years ago, we started work on the Dark Sky weather app. Over the years it went through numerous iterations — including more than one major redesign — as we worked our way through the process of learning what makes a great weather app. Eventually, in time, it was acquired by Apple, where the forecast and some core features were incorporated into Apple Weather. We enjoyed our time at Apple. So why did we leave to start another weather company? It’s simple: when looking at the landscape of the countless weather apps out there, many of them lovely, we found ourselves feeling unsatisfied. The more we spoke to friends and family, the more we heard that many of them did too. And, of course, we missed those days as a small scrappy shop. So let’s try this again…
This is a really great looking app from the developers of Dark Sky before they were acquired by Apple. It’s super glancebale, has great typography, and nearly perfect information density.
I’ll likely give it a shot to see if it can dethrone Carrot Weather, the gold standard in my opinion.
The only downside I see thus far is the icon. As long as there’s a decent home screen widget it’s not a dealbreaker, though.