Pixel Envy

Casey Newton, Platformer: “The centerpiece of our vision for what we’re building is Muse,” Zuckerberg said, promoting the app to a central place in the company’s family of apps only a few days after most people first heard of it.

There are some curious subplots in the data centre boom happening now in Alberta that I think go a long way toward explaining why people hate these things.

I think Meta is a perversely interesting company which means this week I watched, as I do every year, its Connect presentation.

If you are uninterested in Apple Intelligence features, Apple has documentation on how to turn them off for Golden Gate, Tahoe, and Sequoia — kind of.

One of the things I was most looking forward to when Apple announced it was moving to a new connector in the iPhone was the prospect of faster data transfers.

Rodrigo Ghedin on the Audio Intelligence features in the new Apple Watch models: And… it doesn’t matter.

After agreeing in August with Germany’s competition authority to make changes to the App Tracking Transparency prompt, Apple has now announced the options available to developers.

Apple is very excited about all its software updates, naturally, but I am particularly appreciative of MacOS 27.

Karl Bode: Earlier this month a 27-year-old who had been employed at Anthropic for all of four months declared he was quitting the software company because he believed that software automation poses an existential risk to humankind. […] The problem is – a…

Marcus Werner, of the Breach, put together a video illustrating the persuasion tactics Canadian politicians are using as they argue for greater A.I. data centre development.

Last month, within a day of each other, two writers published contrasting takes regarding the backlash to artificial intelligence and its infrastructure.

David Smith on Mastodon: The eve of iPhone 18 Pro pre-orders seems a good time to look back at the iPhone 17 family’s adoption.

Brian X.

Apple held its annual September major product rollout today announcing, among other things, updated Apple Watch models with “Audio Intelligence” features.

Michael Crider, PCWorld: […] So somebody at LG decided that, in addition to the basic monitor driver and management app delivered to its users via Windows Update, it would slip in an additional program, “LG Monitor App Installer.”

Heather Burns: I cannot tell you how much it disgusts me that so much of the archival footage from September 11 has now been age-gated and restricted as “mature” or “sensitive or adult” content, as in this example from this Reddit film archive.

Aaron Vegh and Ben Rice McCarthy have been steadily updating Indigo since they launched it in May.

Brian Krebs: A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada.

Dan Luu, after finding one wrong prediction after another made by Ed Zitron, comparing him to mediocre futurists, and exploring his writing style: That last sentence really sums up Zitron’s position.

William Bishop of Pew Research: Between scrolling, notifications, and messages, smartphones can be hard to put down.

Kalley Huang, New York Times (gift link) John Ternus became Apple’s chief executive on Tuesday, succeeding Tim Cook, the company’s leader for the last 15 years.

Joel Dryden, in a CBC News article with the headline “On the Road With Pro-Independence Albertans, One Small Town at a Time”: The restaurant owner, who gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, has hit the road this summer to talk independence, trav…

Here is a list of headlines; perhaps you will spot a theme: “Six new Apple products will launch early this year, here’s what’s coming” “Apple has five all-new products launching this year, here’s what’s coming” “Apple will launch 20+ new products this yea…

Alex Skopic, at Current Affairs, wrote about the functional use and abuse of stimulants by people who are overworked.

An un-bylined Canadian Press report: U.S.

Apple, after previously saying it would move Hide My Email to the private.icloud.com subdomain: After further consideration and reviewing community feedback, iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com.

In September, the European Commission began pondering how to correct its 2009 privacy law that resulted in cookie permission banners littering the web, with the resulting proposal announced in November.

Felix Kent, Defector (gift link): […] I believed then and still believe that operating a car is too difficult for human beings.

“zedeus”: On 24 August 2026 cease and desist letters have been sent by X Corp. demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the project’s repository.

Jeffrey Kopp, of CNBC, wrote a short profile of Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, whose name you may have heard even if you do not live in her district of Northern California.

Now that it has been a couple of years since Apple began requiring administrators to sign in to the News Publisher dashboard or risk their accounts losing their role, there are a few things we have learned: These notifications arrive on an approximately f…

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac: The new Meta AI desktop app is version 1.0 beta at launch and weighs just 16MB once installed.

Maggie Harrison Dupré, in a Guardian article about Meta Glasses: […] Smartglasses bring the functionality of smartphones, cameras included, into every moment.