Daring Fireball

The European Commission, last week : Today, the European Commission has issued two sets of binding specification measures to Google under the Digital Markets Act. The aim of the first specification measures is to ensure that competitors’ Artificial Intelligence (AI) services can compete with Google’s own AI services, such as Gemini, by having equal access to features on Google’s Android devices. The aim of the second specification measures is to rebalance the playing field by giving third-party search engines access to search data that only Google Search can collect at scale. They provide sepa

Ben Thompson, on the hype regarding Kimi K3, at Stratechery: This is a point that bears repeating: because U.S. open weight model makers must follow the frontier labs’ terms of service, they (1) are worse than Chinese alternatives and (2) end up distilling the distillation, just with a detour through Chinese labs. Wouldn’t it be better if western open weight model makers could go to the source? To that end, here’s an even more interesting question around distillation: why exactly is it bad? After all, what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Inter

My thanks to Paper for sponsoring last week at DF. Paper is a new professional design tool where every layer is real HTML and CSS. Your design is already code, which means fewer handoffs, translations, and layers of abstraction between what you design and what you actually ship. Paper works both ways: code to design, and design to code. Connect any AI agent through MCP and the agent can read and edit your designs. Or use Paper Snapshot to capture your live site as editable layers and make new iterations. Agents handle the tedious work so you can focus on your craft and the decisions that matte

9to5Mac: Brazilian users browsing the App Store rankings in categories such as Navigation, Travel, and Weather have noticed a growing number of poorly made games appearing among the top results, many of them featuring AI-generated illustrations of animals as their app icons. As it turns out, these are so-called jacket apps, which are just a front for hidden betting and gambling apps. A 9to5Mac investigation has uncovered more than 60 apps that behave exactly as depicted in their App Store screenshots when accessed from virtually anywhere in the world, except Brazil. When opened from a Brazilia

iPhone maker steps up aggressive tactics in trade secrets dispute with AI lab

‘It Seems You Have a Different Policy’ Ben Thompson, in a subscriber-only Stratechery update Tuesday : I got a fun email from former Apple executive, Nest founder, and one-time Stratechery Interview subject Tony Fadell in response to yesterday’s Update about Apple suing OpenAI (published with permission): Good article as always… This is Apple’s typical tactic to scare Apple employees — either former or current. I heard this lawsuit was driven by the Apple board. Steve threatened to file a lawsuit against Nest for poaching 80-100 Apple employees. He called me, screamed for a while with lots of

Apple has raised the price of Apple Music today in the United States and other countries. Starting today, Apple Music’s...

Wired, back on May 15: OpenAI says it’s folding ChatGPT, its AI coding agent Codex, and its developer-facing API into one core product team. The company says that Codex is increasingly powering its consumer and enterprise offerings, which are gaining the ability to perform digital tasks autonomously on behalf of users. Other OpenAI leaders are also taking on larger roles at the company as part of the changes. OpenAI’s head of Codex, Thibault Sottiaux, has been tapped to lead the company’s core product and platform teams. Sottiaux was a key leader in building Codex into one of the company’s fas

Joanna Stern at New Things, last month : Last month, just days after my book went on sale, AI knockoffs of the ebook version flooded Apple Books. There was Joanna Stern On I Am Not A Robot by Sophie Mercer. I AM NOT A ROBOT by Finn Tech. I AM NOT A ROBOT by Joana Stern — with one “n.” ( Watch our latest video showing all these titles and more.) In total, I found ten AI-generated ebooks clearly riding on mine, with AI-generated covers mimicking the style of my real one — the same blue, yellow and red color palette. Most were priced at $9.99, but some have gone as high as $20.99. [...] After I c

Thibault “Tibo” Sottiaux, the OpenAI engineering lead who’s taking the most public credit for this and thus probably deserves the most blame, on Twitter/X: Evening! We’ve gotten lots of great feedback on the new ChatGPT desktop app (which we didn’t get totally quite right on the first try), and as a result, we’ve made some changes. 1/ ChatGPT conversation history and projects are now visible in the sidebar. Also, your Chat and Work history now sync across web, mobile, and desktop. Local tasks still stay on your computer. How in the world did they ship this without sync? 2/ You can now easily s

Roblox executives Nick Tornow and Vlad Loktev, on the Roblox blog: Twenty years ago, Roblox launched with a simple idea: “You make the game.” At the time, that was a radical proposition — most games were made by studios and professionals, and the idea that anyone could be a creator was far from obvious. But we believed it. And the millions of creators who built on Roblox proved it. As we look to a future where any one of Roblox’s 132 million daily active users could come up with the next hit game, we’re taking that original idea further than we ever have. Over the coming months, we’ll share a

MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass: In that light, we can see the dilemma. But there were also probably about a dozen better ways to do this roll-out — as highlighted by how fast they’re fixing these things — and they just missed the mark. While they undoubtedly knew there would be some backlash, they probably didn’t realize there would be this much . Again. All that points to perhaps a disturbing trend where OpenAI doesn’t really understand their user base. Which you almost can understand given how they clearly stumbled into ChatGPT in the first place. Still, here they are with those billion use

Arjun Kharpal, reporting for CNBC, back on July 2: Europe’s top court on Thursday upheld Google’s fine of around 4.1 billion euros ($4.67 billion) over alleged anti-competitive practices. In 2018, the European Commission slapped Google with the record-breaking penalty on the grounds that it abused Android’s mobile dominance to give unfair advantage to its own apps via pre-installation deals with smartphone makers. Google has been appealing the ruling through the EU court system. But the European Court of Justice (ECJ), Europe’s top court, dismissed Google’s appeal. Google has no further right

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Linus Torvalds: I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I’m willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer. Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away. AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one. It may not have been that “clearly” even just a year ago, but it’s no longer in question today. There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but “is it useful”

Why is it always July 17 on the calendar emoji? 📅 (Hint: MacWorld Expo 2002.)

Sean Hollister, reporting for The Verge (gift link): Here’s Google’s full statement on withdrawing its proposed modifications to Judge Donato’s permanent injunction, via Google spokesperson Dan Jackson: We’ve agreed with Epic to withdraw our motion to modify the US Court’s injunction rather than prolonging this process which creates uncertainty for the ecosystem. This allows us to focus on executing our recently announced global business model evolution to deliver greater app store choice, lower prices, and more opportunities for developers and users. We remain committed to maintaining Android

Tuesday’s episode of Dithering was a good one, especially for the DF audience, so we’ve moved it outside the paywall and made it free-to-listen on the web . (We don’t (yet?) have an RSS feed that you can put in your podcast player for these occasional free episodes, alas.) I have a slightly different take on Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI than I’ve seen expressed elsewhere. If you don’t subscribe to Dithering, you probably should. Two episodes per week, 15 minutes per episode. Not a minute less, not a minute more. $7/month or $70/year — or, get it included with the Stratechery Plus bundle. ★

David Ingram, reporting for NBC News (which recently added a paywall without gift links, alas): Apple alleged in a lawsuit last week that OpenAI “never responded” to its concerns this year about what Apple believed was trade secret theft. But emails reviewed by NBC News show that’s not the full story: OpenAI did respond in February to Apple’s initial outreach. The communications became bogged down and, according to OpenAI, abruptly stopped after an outside attorney representing Apple mixed up the names and email addresses of two OpenAI employees who had the last names Wang and Chang. The email

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Louie Mantia, with a thoughtful essay on app icon design and the squircle-jail controversy on the Parakeet blog: It’s worth noting that some of the platform’s best icons look worse, while some of the platform’s worst icons look better. Ultimately this is what I object to with the squircle mandate. It favors the bottom of the heap by restricting the top. It makes bad icons mediocre but pushes great icons toward mediocrity too. That’s not The Macintosh Way . Masking all of these app icons to a squircle, and even applying Liquid Glass effects to them, aims to solve this problem. And this follows

Apple has published the policies governing its upcoming Maps advertising business, revealing a strategy that differs from Google’s. The new rules prohibit home services businesses like plumbers, electricians, locksmiths, and roofers from advertising on Apple Maps, along with several other sensitive categories, suggesting Apple is taking a more curated approach to these ads.

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg: OpenAI believes the product’s defining feature will be its personality and ability to connect on a humanlike level with users. The speaker incorporates mechanical elements that can move on their own, creating a sense that it is alive and not just an object responding to commands. The machine also will draw on personal information such as emails to better understand its owner. The goal is for the device to feel like a companion and become a physical manifestation of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Still, the exact plans could change as the company works through the devel

Ben Jiang, reporting from Beijing for the South China Morning Post: Chinese regulators have granted Apple a long-awaited licence to roll out its artificial intelligence service on iPhones in the country, with Alibaba Group Holding and Baidu serving as technical partners. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country’s internet watchdog, published a notice on Wednesday confirming the licence for Apple Intelligence — the AI feature used to summarise emails, draft reports, edit images and perform other tasks. It was granted alongside six other smartphone-based AI services, including t