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.

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.

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, 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

“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.

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.

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.

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 →

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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:

1. Before searching: Suggested Places in the search screen will feature an ad.
2. 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.

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.

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.)

Not to be overshadowed by the new Mac mini and Mac Studio, Apple today has also released an updated version of its Polishing Cloth. In an age of everything getting more expensive, the new Polishing Cloth is cheaper than before at $9 (down from $19). [...]

Apple released the Polishing Cloth in October 2021 and sold out almost instantly. While it has become a meme, it is genuinely a good polishing cloth for your Apple gear.

Moore’s Law comes for everything eventually.

Apple has officially announced its next product event, where it will unveil the iPhone 18 Pro lineup and its first foldable iPhone. The event will take place on September 9 at 10 am, PT. The tagline reads “Surprise and shine,” and the invitation features a glowing Apple logo with a sun shining through.

Apple generally prefers Tuesdays, but on years when Labor Day falls in the second week of September, they move it to Wednesday.

On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel.

The service XCancel is stopped until further notice.

We are seeking legal advice and won’t share more details for now.

Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel.

I didn’t want to jinx them, but this obvious threat hanging over their head was the main reason I never linked only to XCancel rather than directly to tweets on x.com. This sucks not just because some people don’t want to visit x.com, but because XCancel was a faster-loading website with no bullshit.

Update: Nitter, the open source project that XCancel was an instance of, got the same cease and desist and also shut down.

Her death was announced in a video posted on social media by her nephew Bryan Seaver. No cause was provided. Concerns about Ms. Parton’s health were raised last year as she postponed and later canceled a Las Vegas residency, and intensified to the point that she took to social media in October to announce, “I ain’t dead yet.” This May, she said that she had responded well to treatment after her immune and digestive systems had, as she put it, “got all out of whack” in recent years.

From her hardscrabble beginnings to glittering stardom, Ms. Parton’s life was the stuff of make-believe. With her voluptuous figure, sparkly stage costumes and blond bouffant wigs, she was likened by the writer Chet Flippo to the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the Depression-era symbol of abundance. Her songs spoke to millions, confronting privation and loss even as they radiated possibility and hope.

She was, quintessentially, a uniter of people. In 2019, The New York Times ran a story with the headline “Is There Anything We Can All Agree On? Yes: Dolly Parton.”

Hillary Clinton, on Threads:

Dolly Parton did all the good she could, for all the people she could, for as long as ever she could.

From her legendary songwriting to the Imagination Library — which sent 1 million books a month to children across the country — she was the best of America.

Dolly, we’ll miss your great heart.

Parton accomplished so many great things, but man, the Imagination Library is just hard to believe. They’ve distributed over 330 million books to children — and counting. In lieu of flowers or anything else, her family is requesting that any money you might want to contribute to show your appreciation be donated to the library. Count me in.

Both of the available M5 Max SoCs have 18-core CPUs, but the entry model (that starts at $2,500) has a 32-core GPU, and the upgraded chip has a 40-core GPU. That upgrade is labeled “+ $300”, which makes it look as though the starting price for the 18/40-core model is $2,800. That’s the price I put in the original version of my chart.

But if you select that option, you’ll notice that the actual starting price jumps from $2,500 to $3,100 — a $600 difference, not $300. The reason is that the $2500 18/32-core version only comes with one option for RAM: 36 GB. The 18/40-core chip has three tiers for RAM: 48, 64, and 128 GB. So when you switch from the 18/32-core chip to the 18/40-core chip, you don’t just get 8 extra GPU cores (which Apple is saying costs $300), but the base RAM jumps from 36 to 48 GB, and that costs you an additional $300.

Apple does show a blue notification stripe when you change chips here, which states “Based on your new selection, other parts of your configuration have been updated. Please review the changes.” But because the RAM options are mutually exclusive between the two M5 Max variants, it’s easy to make the mistake I did, and think the base price for the 18/40-core M5 Max Studio is $2,500 + $300 = $2,800, when in fact it’s $2,500 + $300 + $300 = $3,100.

I regret the error, and we all regret how expensive all of this has gotten.

The GDPR went into effect 10 years ago. By their inaction, they obviously think it’s working just fine. I think they look at the situation and realize, with satisfaction, that every time any website presents a cookie-permission dickover, that dickover effectively has a “Brought to you by the European Commission” badge on it. They were here, they did something, and everyone around the world sees the fruits of the GDPR cookie regulations every time they open their web browser. Job well done.

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”.

Apple today debuted M6 in the new Mac mini and M5 Ultra in the new Mac Studio, providing an extraordinary leap in performance and AI capabilities. M6, Apple’s first state-of-the-art 2-nanometer chip, advances every compute block, delivering gains across every dimension of performance. The chip features a larger 12-core CPU complex with the world’s fastest CPU core, a larger 12-core GPU with Neural Accelerators, a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, and up to 170GB/s of unified memory bandwidth. M5 Ultra, the ultimate powerhouse for pro and AI workloads, uses next-generation UltraFusion technology to form a quad-die architecture for the first time in an M-series system on a chip (SoC). The chip includes an up-to-36-core CPU and up-to-80-core GPU with a massive 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth, 50 percent more than M3 Ultra.

The new Mac Mini (M6 and M5 Pro) and Mac Studio (M5 Max and M5 Ultra) are available for preorder today, but none of them ship until September 22.

All are slated to ship with MacOS 27 Golden Gate. On a background briefing for these new desktops yesterday, I asked if that implied that MacOS 27 would be released to the public on or before September 22, and the folks from Apple just sort of smiled and said they had no comment on anything other than the new hardware.

The 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.

Starting later this year, new Sign in with Apple addresses, previously issued on privaterelay.appleid.com, will be issued on private.icloud.com. Existing addresses on privaterelay.appleid.com will continue to work and forward mail to users without interruption.

After further consideration and reviewing community feedback, iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com.

Back in June, Apple announced plans to merge both systems onto the new private.icloud.com domain. The objection to this plan was rather obvious: it’s fine for Sign In With Apple to use an easily distinguishable domain name, because the only sites that see such email addresses are those that support Sign In With Apple (SIWA). The problem with moving Hide My Email (HME) addresses to a distinguishable domain name is that we often want to use such hidden email addresses on sites that would prefer to block those addresses and try to force us to use our “real” addresses. A little birdie suggested to me after I wrote about it in June that there were strong objections to the merger internally all along, from the HME side. Seems like those objections have won out.

A report from Irish Independent detailed the European Commission’s response to Apple’s new business terms for the EU. They share that they welcome the changes and will monitor Apple’s implementation of the terms.

Here is the EC’s full statement:

“The Commission welcomes Apple’s changes to their business terms, which follow a close dialogue between the Commission and Apple after the Commission issued a non-compliance decision related to Apple’s steering terms as well as preliminary findings related to alternative app distribution, both in April 2025,” the spokesperson said.

“Following today’s announcement, the Commission will monitor Apple’s effective implementation of the new terms. Under the DMA, users in the EU have a right to full and effective choice of alternative app distribution channels.”

The point of the DMA was to open up competition and choice for developers, which the EC seems to believe Apple’s terms have accomplished.

I don’t think that was ever the point of the DMA. It’s what a lot of developers who themselves wanted more competition and choice — and freedom — on iOS presumed to be the point of the DMA. The European Commission paid lip service to these ideals, which encouraged people to think these ideals were the point of the DMA. But what I’ve consistently argued is that the only actual point of the DMA is for the European Commission to impose unnecessary bureaucracy and inconvenience on major markets where it previously had no footprint. They had no noble goal. They just wanted to erect a bureaucratic structure that clearly shows “The European Commission was here and did something.” Impose copious fines on Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta; inconvenience those companies and their users in the EU; all to show that something has been done. (And to cash the checks from the fines they eventually collect.)

That’s why the text of the DMA itself is so hard to read and understand. There is no clear intent of “opening up competition and choice” hidden in the murky, impenetrable prose of the DMA. The murky impenetrableness of the law is a reflection of its actual intent: murky impenetrable bureaucracy.¹

Here’s a commenter on Hacker News (via Michael Tsai’s roundup) who can’t believe it:

This is bonkers, I can’t believe the EU Commission agreed to it. The main issue that the DMA was about still remains: Apple retains ultimate control over app developers’ dealings with users.

The status quo that the EU should have pushed for, and which Article 6(7) of the DMA requires, is one where a developer can distribute iOS apps to users without ever entering into any contractual relationship with Apple. The OS APIs that most apps use are already paid-for by the user when they buy the device. Apple wants to double-dip and charge developers for the value that the users already have by virtue of owning their iDevices with all the necessary iOS paraphernalia in them.

If you believed that the point of the DMA was to open up competition, choice, and freedom for developers, yeah, I bet it does seem bonkers that the European Commission has signed off on compliance where Apple charges 15 percent commissions on links to the web from apps distributed on the App Store, and that Apple will collect a 5 percent Core Technology Commission even for apps distributed on third-party app marketplaces, using third-party payment processing. But if you believe, as I do, that the point of the DMA is to impose obvious regulatory burdens and bureaucracy upon Apple (and Google, and Microsoft) — and upon the EU citizens who use those companies’ “gatekeeping” platforms — then it is completely unsurprising that the European Commission “welcomed” these changes. The Commission has gotten everything it wanted from Apple:

• Third-party app marketplaces (no matter if almost no one uses them).
• A growing list of features withheld from the EU, like iPhone Mirroring and Siri AI (this shows that the DMA “works” and they’ve done something).
• A bunch of fines.

I’m sure some of you think I’m all wet in my argument that the point of the DMA was merely to impose ongoing bureaucratic complexity. But my view jibes with the reality of how it’s worked out. Compare and contrast with the Mobile Software Competition Act in Japan. Apple complied with the clearly stated requirements of the MSCA with no drama, Japanese users aren’t missing out on features like iPhone Mirroring, and the only delay for Siri AI in Japan is language support. Japanese iOS users get all the “good parts” of Apple’s regulatory compliance that EU users do, with none of the rather severe hindrances.

Gorgeous, unbelievably faithful one-bit camera app for iPhone done in the style of the original Mac. A lovely tribute to Bill Atkinson’s remarkable dithering algorithm. “Catnip for old-school Mac users,” says John Siracusa. Check out the fun recent-hire-at-Apple Chris Espinosa is having with it.

Originally a creation of The Iconfactory, BitCam is now in the good hands of Héliographe (coiners of the best icon-design zinger ever). Version 2.0 has everything great about BitCam 1, and so much more. Just a wonderful ode to the original Mac, with so much extraordinary attention to detail. Great fun on the iPhone (especially as a camera), and great fun on the Mac (especially to explore the details of its OG-style UI). Free to download on the App Store, and a one-time purchase of just $10 to unlock the full feature set.

If BitCam doesn’t speak to you, you’re not hooked up right.

The weird thing is, back on August 13, the iPhone version of TestFlight started showing my lists in recency-of-last-update order once again. There was no update to the TestFlight app itself. I just started seeing the list in the correct order once again. It was only on my iPhone though — on my Macs and iPad, TestFlight continued to sort apps alphabetically. Then, two days later, my iPhone went back to alphabetical order, and it’s been stuck there ever since.

When the list is sorted by recency, there’s also a “Currently Testing” header at the top of the list, and there are other (disclosable) categories like “Incompatible” and “Previously Tested” at the bottom of the list. When the list is sorted alphabetically, none of these category headers are visible.

Update: The bug was seemingly fixed in v4.3.1 on September 3.

This week Anthropic announced that in order to identify AI from human-generated content it would be watermarking all text it generates by subtly altering the randomness at which its models picked the next word. While this might seem a perfectly cromulent means of accomplishing a worthy goal, it really rubbed John Gruber the wrong way, as if someone suggested putting autocomplete Swiss on his Philly cheesesteak AI.

Cooper Sharp cheese is the way to go. The best new cheesesteak joint in town — Uncle Gus’s — only offers Cooper Sharp, in fact.

Surely a fair number of the hundreds and hundreds of bees that have nested in Gruber’s extremely fancy bonnet are a result of the fact that this is all ostensibly in response to a mandate from the EU. But, as James Thomson has suggested, Anthropic might actually want to watermark so that it doesn’t scoop up its own output to train its models, thereby degrading the results. In fact, the company would probably love to be able to figure out other companies’ watermarks and have them not be able to figure out its watermark.

For the record, my opposition to Claude’s plan to begin watermark-adulterating all generated text, worldwide, has nothing to do with it ostensibly being to comply with a regulation from the EU. I do think the EU regulation is deeply ill-considered (and, having been drafted in 2024, already technically out of date), but I’d have written everything I wrote (and will continue to write) about the matter even if the EU had no AI-related regulations in place. In fact, while writing my initial piece, I really wished this had nothing to do with the EU, because pointing out the folly of the regulation (and the ridiculousness of a company supposedly worth $2 trillion being technically unable to comply with an EU regulation without applying the changes globally) seemed a distraction from my point, regarding the ramifications of watermarking text by way of detectable word choices. Moltz’s aside here confirms that.

Also, more and more, I do think this has little to do with the EU regulation and everything to do with Anthropic and Google wanting to watermark the text that Claude and Gemini generate for their own purposes, to identify text to avoid training future models on to avoid model collapse/AI inbreeding. I suspect blaming the decision on the EU “Code of Practice” regulation is just scapegoating on Anthropic’s part.

(As a bonus, Moltz has a deliciously sharp (no cheese pun intended) take on the schadenfreude-rich saga of MacStories returning to Twitter/X.)

The morning after he pulled negotiators from trade talks in Washington and set off a new round of American tariffs, Prime Minister Mark Carney on Saturday explained to Canadians why he walked away, calling the U.S. proposal “a bad deal.”

“We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed,” Mr. Carney said. “We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.”

“We cannot accept what they offered and we will not give what they asked,” he added. “We were not prepared to compromise Canada’s sovereignty or undermine our key industries.”

If only Sharpie made pencils.

Carney is rising to the moment and showing the rest of the world how to deal with the Trump administration. Trump is erratic, emotionally unstable, ignorant, and dishonest. Carney is consistent, steadfast, knowledgeable, and honest. The only correct way to deal with a con man is to cut him off and call him out for what he is.

WorkOS Agent Registration turns that traffic into signups. Enroll via the dashboard and AuthKit publishes an auth.md file that agents read to register for scoped, short-lived credentials you control.

Make your app agent-ready today.

I noticed this morning that the bot that auto-posts new articles to the DF Mastodon account hadn’t posted since Tuesday night. But it wasn’t the Mastodon posting bot that was broken. It was a different automated task that updates the RSS and JSON feeds. That’s what broke sometime between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. The Mastodon posting bot reads the RSS feed, and if there’s nothing new in the RSS feed, there’s nothing for the bot to post. Still though, I thought it was weird that no one who follows DF from the feeds had emailed, texted, or @replied to me to complain that new articles on the website had stopped appearing in the feeds. No one.

Then, I remembered that the DF website home page is generated from ... the RSS feed.¹

So, yeah, pretty much no one but me realized that I’d written seven new posts after the last update Tuesday night. Oops. Needless to say, it no longer seems surprising at all that I haven’t heard anything from readers in a few days. My apologies for delivering most of this week’s output all at once. We can pretend today that DF is a weekly newsletter.

Apple today announced changes to its business terms for apps in the European Union, following close collaboration with the European Commission. These changes resolve Apple’s disagreements with the Commission over business terms and alternative distribution. They also reduce complexity by moving every developer that distributes apps in the EU to a single set of business terms. Developers can sign the new terms today, and changes will go into effect on October 1. [...] Under the new terms:

• For App Store apps using Apple In-App Purchase, the commission will be 26 percent. For the vast majority of developers, including those in the App Store Small Business Program, Mini Apps Partner Program, or Video Partner Program, and for auto-renewing subscriptions after their first year, it will be 15 percent.

• For App Store apps using alternative payment processing, the commission will be 20 percent. Developers in the programs mentioned above will pay a reduced rate of 10 percent.

• For App Store apps that link out of the app to complete purchases, the commission will be 15 percent. Developers in the programs mentioned above will pay a reduced rate of 10 percent.

• For apps distributed via alternative app marketplaces or the web, Apple will charge a 5 percent Core Technology Commission.

This is a near-total victory for Apple. The only real concession is that for apps in the App Store using Apple’s own payment system (the default), the main commission drops from 30 percent to 26 percent in the EU. That’s the deal the EU squeezed out of Apple for EU developers: going from 30 to 26 percent for purchases and the first year of subscriptions.

All apps have to pay at least the 5 percent Core Technology Commission, even if they’re distributed outside the App Store. I could collect a lot of claim chowder from people who told me that Apple’s CTC was never going to pass muster. Maybe it wouldn’t have under the old EC regime of the crusading hypocrite Margrethe Vestager and the buffoonish Thierry Breton, but the European Commission is under new, more temperate leadership.

Ben Thompson, in a subscriber-only Stratechery update, works out the implied values from these fees:

• The implied value of Apple’s APIs is 5% of an app’s revenue
• The implied value of App Store distribution is 10% of an app’s revenue
• The implied value of in-app payment APIs is 5% of an app’s revenue
• The implied value of in-app purchase using Apple’s payment processing is 6% of an app’s revenue

Now take these numbers with a grain of salt — given the fact the European Commission appears to have blessed these figures, they were almost certainly a matter of negotiation — but they do seem directionally correct: being in the App Store is the most valuable (thus 10%), and then 5% was ascribed to Apple’s APIs in their various forms; of these, the “Core Technology Commission” is obviously more valuable than the APIs used for in-app payment processing by third parties, but you can see how they landed at the same spot.

The interesting number is the implied 6% for Apple’s payment processing. The fully loaded cost for credit card fees — which have both a swipe fee and a percentage fee — refunds, disputes, etc. is pretty close to 6%; in other words, it appears that the European Commission has decided that Apple shouldn’t make anything for actually charging money. And again, I can see how they got there: anyone can charge money, but Apple did actually make the various APIs developers use, along with the App Store.

The 6 percent no-profit fee for payment processing is where the difference between the global 30% and the new EU 26% falls. Given its druthers, it seems clear Apple would charge 10%, not 6%, for payment processing, to give itself some margin on payment processing.

Don’t take my word that this agreement is a sweeping victory for Apple — with the company conceding only the reduction from 30 to 26 percent for App Store payments — and a capitulation by the EC. Here’s Epic Games, posting on Twitter/X:

Apple announced new junk fees in the EU that do nothing to open up the mobile app ecosystem to competition, as required by Digital Market Act. [sic] [...]

The law makes it clear that Apple must allow developers to offer link outs to the web for purchases “free of charge” and has to allow “effective use” of competing stores. Apple’s terms deliberately violate the Digital Markets Act. If the Commission accepts the terms and drops their ongoing enforcement actions, the law will become meaningless and consumers and developers will not experience the benefits it was designed to provide.

I don’t think Epic understands that the Commission has accepted these terms, and they’re a result of negotiations. It’s over.

Another way to see how clearly this is a win for Apple is to go back and imagine an entirely different DMA. Consider if the DMA had simply stated that 30 percent is too high a commission for app stores on “gatekeeping” platforms, and the one and only purpose of the DMA was to set a new, more reasonable maximum commission rate. If that had been the case, there’s no way the rate would have been 26 percent. It almost certainly would have been 20 percent at the most, perhaps something more like 15 percent. Thanks to the DMA’s sprawling scope, complexity, and overreach, Apple came out of this conceding only 4 percent of the App Store’s 30 percent commission, and no reduction at all to the 15 percent for subscriptions after the first year.

The very funniest thing Apple could do now would be to drop the baseline commission everywhere else in the world from 30 to 25 percent.