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  • βœ‡: The Day's Most Fascinating News
  • Class Dismissed
    1. Class DismissedThe House always wins. The same is not true for the Frat House. Founders of prediction markets—or gambling sites that have recently added sports gambling to the mix—know how to place a smart bet. That’s why they’re headed to college. While these sites are susceptible to insider trading and market manipulation, neither of those strategies was required for Kalshi and Polymarket to identify a valuable target market. There was already a gambling scourge spr
     

Class Dismissed

1. Class Dismissed

The House always wins. The same is not true for the Frat House. Founders of prediction markets—or gambling sites that have recently added sports gambling to the mix—know how to place a smart bet. That’s why they’re headed to college. While these sites are susceptible to insider trading and market manipulation, neither of those strategies was required for Kalshi and Polymarket to identify a valuable target market. There was already a gambling scourge spreading across college campuses, particularly among males who have adopted sports betting as a normal part of university life. Some non-profits say that as many as 10% of college students could be classified as pathological gamblers. And those numbers were added up before prediction markets took off. So, given the profits over ethics vibe of our current classless cultural moment, it would be safe to bet that prediction markets are coming to a fraternity near you. WSJ (Gift Article): The Prediction Market Bets Driving a Campus Frenzy. “Both companies have begun splashing cash on campuses. Polymarket has offered to pay fraternities, in exchange for signing up users, money that can be spent on throwing ‘epic parties’—one frat raised $30,510 over a two-week period. Both platforms have been paying student influencers to promote them as ways to raise fun money, enlisting student athletes as brand representatives and supporting student clubs … Polymarket also reached out to fraternities and social clubs across the University of California, Berkeley, last fall, according to students there, offering company-branded beer pong cups and up to $1,000 for parties.” The targeting of youth, many of whom are too young to participate in regular gambling, isn’t stopping orgs like AP, Google, CNN, and the NHL (and the platform I’m sending this newsletter out on) from partnering with the prediction markets, because of a distorted belief that they provide some kind of wisdom of the crowds version of truth. But throwing the fuel of legalized gambling on the fire already engulfing college campuses is a bad bet. Especially if it pays off.

+ Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic (Gift Article): A Technology for a Low-Trust Society. “This is the central lie of prediction markets: They claim to get us closer to the truth but, in the end, they make us less certain about the world. But this erosion of trust is a feature, not a bug, for these platforms. A world where people are suspicious of every motive is a world where the cold logic of gambling feels more rational. A zero-trust society is one where the prediction markets’ dubious ‘wisdom of crowds’ marketing seems extra appealing. In this way, prediction markets are a system that justifies its own existence—a well-oiled machine chipping away at societal trust while offering a convenient solution to its own problem.”

+ Think I’m making Kalshi and Polymarket seem too hateable? Well, consider this: They hate each other, too.

2. The Moral of the Story

America needs group therapy. In a 25-country survey by Pew, Americans were especially likely to view fellow citizens as morally bad. “In nearly all countries surveyed, more people say that others in their country have somewhat or very good morals than say their compatriots display somewhat or very bad levels of morality. The United States is the only place we surveyed where more adults (ages 18 and older) describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad (53%) than as good (47%).” We don’t just disagree. We dislike our fellow Americans and view each other as bad people. This divisiveness, sadly, is a dream scenario for those with anti-democratic leanings (which is one reason why they spend so much time spewing hate and dividing us).

3. The Fog of Foggy Bottom

“We are aware that stuff is happening that we should care about, but the fog of bullshit surrounding this stuff is so thick that we can barely make out its shape or heft. Less than six weeks have passed since Alex Pretti was shot dead by C.B.P. agents in Minneapolis, and yet that, too, already feels like yesterday’s problem.” In The New Yorker, Jay Caspian Kang tries to explain how it sort of makes sense that we could have A No-Explanation War.

+ “Hegseth tries so hard—too hard—to project a tough-guy persona, as if a lot of unresolved issues, a lot of brokenness, are playing themselves out in his life. He seems to be trying to prove a great deal, to himself and to others. There’s a certain poignancy in that. But there’s a danger in that, too, when the person in question happens to be the secretary of defense.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): Pete Hegseth’s Troubled Soul.

+ There’s no doubt that America’s air power has been a dominant force. But there’s something sick about talking about it the way Hegseth does. Especially because we know that war kills innocent victims, not just evil regime members. Analysis Suggests School Was Hit Amid U.S. Strikes on Iranian Naval Base.

+ Trump Demands Iran Surrender as War Upends Global Markets. That may be hard for the surviving members of the regime to do, since it’s essentially signing a death certificate. But they are under extreme pressure, and they don’t have many friends left. Reuters: Iran spent years fostering proxies in Iraq. Now, many aren’t eager to join the war. The weakness Iran showed during the 12-day war was a strong negative signal to their proxies.

+ Meanwhile, maybe someone can turn this into a really exciting TV show or internet meme and get it in front of Trump. WaPo (Gift Article): Russia is providing Iran intelligence to target U.S. forces, officials say. Enemy’s gonna enemy.

4. Weekend Whats

What to Rock: It turns out that the best way to get an especially great performance out of a musician is to put them on a stage in an arena filled with music legends. That’s one reason why the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremonies always make for great shows. And the most recent one honoring Soundgarden, OutKast, Warren Zevon, Bad Company, and others was no exception. I teared up during Letterman’s tribute to Zevon and got the chills during Brandi Carlile’s note-hitting during Black Hole Sun. The 2025 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony is on Hulu and Disney Plus.

+ What to Watch: Scrubs has made its return to TV. And it serves up the same goofy, feel-good comedy as it did the first time around (only we may need that a little more now).

+ What to Binge: The Peaky Blinders movie is hitting theaters this weekend. That doesn’t give me much time to binge all six seasons on Netflix. Gonna be a busy weekend…

5. Extra, Extra

Off the Job:The US economy lost 92,000 jobs in February, Labor Department data released Friday showed, sharply missing economists’ expectations and stalling the nascent hiring growth that started the year.” (On Truth Social, I’m guessing this is Biden’s fault. Job growth was so good under his administration that it had to go down under Trump!)

+ Noem on the Range: It’s worth noting that Kristi Noem was not fired for overseeing the murder of American citizens or sending untried men to overseas terror prisons, she was fired for a poor TV performance when being questioned by Congress, building her own image, and grifting without permission. Why Trump Changed His Mind on Kristi Noem. “It wasn’t the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year that finally cost Noem her job … it was her self-promotion.

+ Get Out of Jail Cardholders: Pardons are for sale these days. You just have to make sure you pay the right person. Or pay enough people that someone in the group can get the job done. NYT (Gift Article): Pardon Industry Offers Rich Offenders a Path to Trump.

+ Six Figures: Not everyone had to pay for their pardon. The Jan 6 rioters got theirs for free. Society’s deal has been less good. A Jan. 6 rioter pardoned by Trump was sentenced to life in prison for child sex abuse.

+ Rubio’s Résumé: Trump tells CNN Cuba is soon going to fall: “I’m going to put Marco over there.”

+ In Pod We Trust: When the iPhone first came out, I predicted (luckily, only inside my own mind) that people wouldn’t want to mix their music with all the distractions featured on a smartphone. It’s still unclear if the iPhone is really going to catch on, but a handful of young people are tired of the distractions and are reaching for old-school iPods. Bring On Defunct: The iPod Enthralls Young Music Listeners. (Just as I predicted!)

6. Feel Good Friday

“Hill is part of a small group of creative types who have found healthy demand for analog subscription services in a world of digital screens. They create or curate packets of art prints, stickers, letters and commentary covering topics from architecture to food to their daily routines. They often use social media to find and market to fans but the real connection happens offline.” WSJ (Gift Article): The Crossing Guard Making $14,000 a Month Mailing Out Her Musings From the Job.

+ His opera career stalled. Now he’s a car salesman, and his ads are viral.

+ If you’re going to lose your money, lose it in Japan. Someone will probably give it back. Record 4.5 billion yen in lost cash turned in to Tokyo police in 2025.

+ A wholesome, affirming forum for bald people.

+ If you missed it, everyone seems to love, A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator. “What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine, and I make them worse. More specifically, I make it shitty.”

  • βœ‡512 Pixels
  • Apple is on TikTok, Posting Unhinged Videos About the MacBook Neo
    There are a handful of fun videos on Apple’s page, but these citrus ones are fun: @apple i love limes ♬ original sound – apple @apple pop pop pop pop ♬ original sound – apple @apple hello? ♬ original sound – apple Then there’s this little Finder character, as pointed out by Basic Apple Guy: I can’t find any information about him beyond the fact that he appeared in Apple’s “Matcha Break with MacBook Neo&rdqu
     

Apple is on TikTok, Posting Unhinged Videos About the MacBook Neo

6 March 2026 at 21:17

There are a handful of fun videos on Apple’s page, but these citrus ones are fun:

@apple i love limes

♬ original sound – apple

@apple

pop pop pop pop

♬ original sound – apple

@apple

hello?

♬ original sound – apple

Then there’s this little Finder character, as pointed out by Basic Apple Guy:

I can’t find any information about him beyond the fact that he appeared in Apple’s “Matcha Break with MacBook Neo” livestream on TikTok on Wednesday. I also haven’t been able to track down the video itself. The first post I found mentioning it came from user m2macmini on Twitter.

WHO IS THISSSSSSS???

Just think, I probably saved this little Finder person from a lifetime of bullying.

  • βœ‡Daring Fireball
  • β€˜The Window Chrome of Our Discontent’
    Nick Heer, writing at Pixel Envy, uses Pages (from 2009 through today) to illustrate Apple’s march toward putting “greater focus on your content” by making window chrome, and toolbar icons, more and more invisible: Perhaps Apple has some user studies that suggest otherwise, but I cannot see how dialling back the lines between interface and document is supposed to be beneficial for the user. It does not, in my use, result in less distraction while I am working in these apps
     

β€˜The Window Chrome of Our Discontent’

6 March 2026 at 20:21

Nick Heer, writing at Pixel Envy, uses Pages (from 2009 through today) to illustrate Apple’s march toward putting “greater focus on your content” by making window chrome, and toolbar icons, more and more invisible:

Perhaps Apple has some user studies that suggest otherwise, but I cannot see how dialling back the lines between interface and document is supposed to be beneficial for the user. It does not, in my use, result in less distraction while I am working in these apps. In fact, it often does the opposite. I do not think the prescription is rolling back to a decade-old design language. However, I think Apple should consider exploring the wealth of variables it can change to differentiate tools within toolbars, and to more clearly delineate window chrome from document.

This entire idea that application window chrome should disappear is madness. Some people — at Apple, quite obviously — think it looks better, in the abstract, but I can’t see how it makes actually using these apps more productive. Artists don’t want to use invisible tools. Artists crave tools that look and feel distinctive and cool.

Clean lines between content and application chrome are clarifying, not distracting. It’s also useful to be able to tell, at a glance, which application is which. I look at Heer’s screenshot of the new version of Pages running on MacOS 26 Tahoe and not only can I not tell at a glance that it’s Pages, I can’t even tell at a glance that it’s a document word processor, especially with the formatting sidebar hidden. One of the worst aspects of Liquid Glass, across all platforms, but exemplified by MacOS 26, is that all apps look exactly the same. Not just different apps that are in the same category, but different apps from entirely different categories. Safari looks like Mail looks like Pages looks like the Finder — even though web browsers, email clients, word processors, and file browsers aren’t anything alike.

  • βœ‡Daring Fireball
  • Google’s Threat Intelligence Group on Coruna, a Powerful iOS Exploit Kit of Mysterious Origin
    Google Threat Intelligence Group, earlier this week: Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has identified a new and powerful exploit kit targeting Apple iPhone models running iOS version 13.0 (released in September 2019) up to version 17.2.1 (released in December 2023). The exploit kit, named “Coruna” by its developers, contained five full iOS exploit chains and a total of 23 exploits. The core technical value of this exploit kit lies in its comprehensive collection of iOS exp
     

Google’s Threat Intelligence Group on Coruna, a Powerful iOS Exploit Kit of Mysterious Origin

6 March 2026 at 20:32

Google Threat Intelligence Group, earlier this week:

Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has identified a new and powerful exploit kit targeting Apple iPhone models running iOS version 13.0 (released in September 2019) up to version 17.2.1 (released in December 2023). The exploit kit, named “Coruna” by its developers, contained five full iOS exploit chains and a total of 23 exploits. The core technical value of this exploit kit lies in its comprehensive collection of iOS exploits, with the most advanced ones using non-public exploitation techniques and mitigation bypasses.

The Coruna exploit kit provides another example of how sophisticated capabilities proliferate. Over the course of 2025, GTIG tracked its use in highly targeted operations initially conducted by a customer of a surveillance vendor, then observed its deployment in watering hole attacks targeting Ukrainian users by UNC6353, a suspected Russian espionage group. We then retrieved the complete exploit kit when it was later used in broad-scale campaigns by UNC6691, a financially motivated threat actor operating from China. How this proliferation occurred is unclear, but suggests an active market for “second hand” zero-day exploits. Beyond these identified exploits, multiple threat actors have now acquired advanced exploitation techniques that can be re-used and modified with newly identified vulnerabilities.

  • βœ‡Daring Fireball
  • Daring Fireball Weekly Sponsorship Openings
    Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing ab
     

Daring Fireball Weekly Sponsorship Openings

6 March 2026 at 21:59

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results.

Sponsorships have been selling briskly, of late. There are only three weeks open between now and the end of June. But one of those open weeks is next week, starting this coming Monday:

  • March 9–15 (Update: Sold)
  • April 20–26 (Update: Sold)
  • May 25–31

I’m also booking sponsorships for Q3 2026, and roughly half of those weeks are already sold.

If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch — especially if you can act quick for next week’s opening.

  • βœ‡Seth's Blog
  • If they knew…
    Some organizations and marketers thrive on the uninformed consumer. They seek out people who don’t know, and who aren’t particularly good at decision making. Others do their best work when the customer knows what’s up and is making an informed choice. Are you closing the sale or opening it? If your prospects knew everything you know, would they choose you? When marketers sign up for the iterative process of education and sophistication, our path is clear. And if
     

If they knew…

7 March 2026 at 10:03

Some organizations and marketers thrive on the uninformed consumer. They seek out people who don’t know, and who aren’t particularly good at decision making.

Others do their best work when the customer knows what’s up and is making an informed choice.

Are you closing the sale or opening it?

If your prospects knew everything you know, would they choose you?

When marketers sign up for the iterative process of education and sophistication, our path is clear.

And if we sign up to confuse and manipulate, that path is clear as well.

  • βœ‡ongoing by Tim Bray
  • Because Algospeak
    Recently I read Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch and Algospeak by Adam Aleksic. The language we speak (and text) to each other is at the core of who and what we are, and the Internet is the strongest among the forces that channel and fertilize its growth. So there’s scope for plenty of books on the subject. Both books educated and entertained, one made me angry. Because Internet (2019) Its approach is historical and its voice fairly uninflected.
     

Because Algospeak

5 March 2026 at 20:00

Recently I read Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch and Algospeak by Adam Aleksic. The language we speak (and text) to each other is at the core of who and what we are, and the Internet is the strongest among the forces that channel and fertilize its growth. So there’s scope for plenty of books on the subject. Both books educated and entertained, one made me angry.

The covers of “Because Internet” and “Algospeak”

Because Internet (2019)

Its approach is historical and its voice fairly uninflected. It smiles and argues, but it doesn’t ROFL nor does it YELL AT YOU. The history is longer, perhaps, than most people reading this have been online (or even alive). Ms McCulloch goes back to the days of BBSes (“bulletin-board systems”) and ListServs and IRC. Some of the jargon and formulations of those days live on; you’d be surprised.

Here’s her table of contents.

Table of Contents from “Because Internet”

The analysis is grounded in the formalisms of the author’s profession, academic linguistics. Nothing wrong with that.

Let’s look at a couple of her ideas, beginning with Chapter 1’s “Informal Writing”. A few of us, back in the late Eighties, noticed that computers in general and the then-nascent Internet in particular were driving a writing renaissance.

Before computers, a knowledge worker who had laboriously constructed essays in college quite likely wrote almost nothing for the rest of their working life. People talked face-to-face or on the phone, and dictated to secretaries. Written communication was seen as necessarily formal and disjoint from the way we spoke, or that we wrote in personal correspondence. Then, suddenly, everyone was sitting at a keyboard only seconds away from everyone else’s screen. McCulloch goes deep on this:

In the future, the era of writing between the invention of the printing press and the internet may come to be seen as an anomaly—an era when there arose a significant gap between how easy it was to be a writer versus a reader. An era when we collectively stopped paying attention to the informal, unedited side of writing and let typography become static and disembodied.

The internet didn’t create informal writing, but it did make it more common, changing some of our previously spoken interactions into near-real-time text exchanges.

From which all of this follows. It feels like a central insight. I suppose you could argue that centrality of informal text is fading in the face of short-form video. Maybe, it’s too soon to tell.

Then consider chapter 5, about emojis. Linguists obviously need to think about them because now they’re an integral part of written language. McCulloch’s insight is that they correspond almost exactly to gestures, the way we use our hands to add force to our speech. Obviously, for example, “👍”. Or when you’re talking about something completely loopy and you twirl your index finger by your ear? You meant “🤪”.

I offer the emoji story for flavor, an example of a linguist’s approach to what we’re doing to our language with our networks.

McCulloch has lots more of this stuff. I enjoyed Because Internet a lot, partly because I’m old and my memories stretch back to those BBS and IRC days and I had a front-row seat for the decades of linguistic seething and heaving. And also because I’m a Unicode geek.

Algospeak (2025)

The subtitle is “How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language”. OK, but… Social media is a fertile field for language evolution. Thing is, corporate social media discourse lives in the dire grip of the proprietors’ algorithms. And that’s where Adam Aleksic focuses. He treats all of them as a single opaque object, “The Algorithm”, which I think is fair because they all are designed with one goal: To maximize the effectiveness of human conversation at generating advertising revenue.

First, the Table of Contents.

Table of Contents from “Algospeak

Aleksic knows whereof he speaks: As “Etymology Nerd”, his aggregate following across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube is over three million. He’s all about cool bits and pieces of linguistics, often Internet-specific usages. If I had the patience for podcasts I suppose his would be near the top of my list.

He really enjoys his work and has fun talking about some of Social Media’s more colorful linguistic extrusions; check that Table of Contents. I’m kind of old and I learned a lot about the words and emojis younger folk emit, and I think most folks, even those just out of their teens, would too. I’m on a Discord for a Major League Soccer team’s fans, and while it’s totally all-ages, I can say I am regularly less mystified than I was before I read Algospeak. For example, now I know what it means when someone tosses “💀” into a chat. Do you?

Aleksic isn’t averse to a little history himself. Looking back over the successive online-jargon volcanoes, he argues convincingly that two stand out as extra productive. First of all, the short-lived (but hot stuff at the time) Vine video platform. Second, the incel cesspool; sad but (apparently) true.

The Algorithm

Remember, it’s all about what advertisers want. And wow, do they ever want a lot of things. I’ll just touch on a few of Aleksic’s points.

First of all, they don’t want to find themselves next to downers. So if you want to talk about death or suicide or rape or racism or rage, you need to fool The Algorithm. Thus “unalive” and many other dodges. Of course, The Algorithm learns about them so you have to keep dodging. Neither side of this struggle can stay ahead for long.

Here’s another thing I didn’t know: Apparently written Chinese is particularly rich in techniques for euphemizing, making it easier for users of that language to evade, for a time, The Algorithm.

Partitioning people

Another big thing The Algorithm likes is grouping people into smaller and smaller baskets based on interests, generations, and many other criteria. This is because advertisers can aim very specific campaigns at just exactly the right cohort of people who are likely to buy what they’re selling. Here’s a quote; See how the language fills in behind advertisers’ pressure?

It doesn’t matter how much I label myself. If I’m a demisexual goblincore Gen Z Swiftie, I guarantee there are still others like me. The only thing these labels really change about me is that they make me easier to classify and market to. Ironically, true individuality may come out of a lack of labels and stories, because there’s greater freedom of expression with a blank slate. If everybody’s the “main character,” then nobody is.

Algospeak, unlike Because Internet, doesn’t limit itself to written language. One of its most compelling studies concerns the vocal techniques of podcasters and YouTubers. The finding is simple: It’s hard to build and hold an audience for your show unless you sound like MrBeast. No, really.

Anyhow, they’re both good books. Because Internet educated and entertained me. Algospeak is way more intense, intentionally more like the subject it addresses. Also it made me angry. I am a lover of human language and of its patterns of growth and mutation and simplification and complexification. Linguistics is one of the disciplines I regret not having chosen.

Aleksic makes it clear that there’s an amusing narrative about how the people living and speaking in the shade of the Algorithm can never defeat it, but they can still manage to get their messages across. But they shouldn’t have to struggle!

In fact, a few million of us have found a place to talk to each other that isn’t in The Algorithm’s shadow: Decentralized social media. Specifically the Fediverse (what people mean when they say “Mastodon”) and maybe the ATmosphere (same for “Bluesky”).

I want to see how language grows in a place where new forms arrive when they’re needed, to say new things that need to be said. Not to either serve or resist The Algorithm.

  • βœ‡512 Pixels
  • What’s in a (Super) Name
    In the midst of the whirlwind of news this week, Apple renamed its CPU cores. At Six Colors, Jason Snell has the details: Here’s what happened: Apple renamed its most powerful CPU cores, which had previously been called performance cores. As of the M5 Pro and Max, those cores are now called “super cores.” Surprise! Since those cores also shipped in the M5 MacBook Pro, M5 iPad Pro, and M5 Vision Pro, they have all been retroactively renamed as super cores. I am writing t
     

What’s in a (Super) Name

7 March 2026 at 22:22

In the midst of the whirlwind of news this week, Apple renamed its CPU cores. At Six Colors, Jason Snell has the details:

Here’s what happened:

  • Apple renamed its most powerful CPU cores, which had previously been called performance cores. As of the M5 Pro and Max, those cores are now called “super cores.”

  • Surprise! Since those cores also shipped in the M5 MacBook Pro, M5 iPad Pro, and M5 Vision Pro, they have all been retroactively renamed as super cores. I am writing this very story on a device that sports four super cores, but I didn’t even know that until I heard the news early Tuesday morning.

  • The M5 Pro and M5 Max chips also feature the debut of a brand-new core design derived from the super core design. (I assume the efficiency cores in the base M5 were probably the same cores that Apple used in the M4.) This new core design is still power efficient, but it can offer high performance in multithreaded tasks. In the past, the second-tier core was referred to as an efficiency core, but Apple has decided that these new ones are better described as performance cores. In other words, Batman has become Superman and Robin (or is it Supergirl?) has become Batman.

  • βœ‡Doc Searls Weblog
  • Sat Enough Day
    Questions Are Company Contacts as useful as I hope they are?  HT: Recommendo, which I recommend. Is Conditional Consent compatible with MyTerms? This—_Instead of "accept all" or "reject all" per site, users define rules across three dimensions: cookie purpose, website category, and third-party processor. Allow analytics on shopping sites but deny tracking on news sites — your preferences, your logic._—suggests the answer is yes. Or at least maybe. When your intentions are
     

Sat Enough Day

7 March 2026 at 21:26

Questions

Are Company Contacts as useful as I hope they are?  HT: Recommendo, which I recommend.

Is Conditional Consent compatible with MyTerms? This—_Instead of "accept all" or "reject all" per site, users define rules across three dimensions: cookie purpose, website category, and third-party processor. Allow analytics on shopping sites but deny tracking on news sites — your preferences, your logic._—suggests the answer is yes. Or at least maybe.

When your intentions are inferred by surveillance and AI guesswork, are they really your intentions? This is the question raised for me by MasterCard, with this:  When AI starts buying for you, trust becomes the product—Mastercard introduces Verifiable Intent – a new, standards-based trust paradigm for agentic commerce, co-developed with Google. My answer is, No, it's not.

Is Sam Altman going to sink OpenAI/ChatGPT? Links:

Casey NewtonWhat is OpenAI going to do when the truth comes out? Sam Altman’s deal with the Pentagon seems too good to be true. What happens when the public realizes that?

Gary MarcusBREAKING: Sam Altman’s greed and dishonesty are finally catching up to him

Keith Teare: Missing in Action: Real Leadership

Why not to "verify" your Linkedin identity

RogiI Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here's What I Actually Handed Over.

  • βœ‡Seth's Blog
  • Confused about donations
    A suite at a New York Knicks game costs more than $30,000. Is that a donation to the team? Why do we differentiate between the money spent on a Super Bowl ticket and the check we write for a worthy cause? Does calling it a “donation” make it more valuable or less valuable to us? Fundraisers can fall into the trap of believing that they’re asking for a favor or begging for a donation. But human beings, like all creatures, exchange time, money or risk in return for some
     

Confused about donations

8 March 2026 at 09:03

A suite at a New York Knicks game costs more than $30,000. Is that a donation to the team?

Why do we differentiate between the money spent on a Super Bowl ticket and the check we write for a worthy cause?

Does calling it a “donation” make it more valuable or less valuable to us?

Fundraisers can fall into the trap of believing that they’re asking for a favor or begging for a donation. But human beings, like all creatures, exchange time, money or risk in return for something. When that exchange is insufficient to cause action, we don’t do it.

The anonymous donor gets something. Something priceless, memorable and worthwhile: peace of mind.

The public donor, whether it’s the neighbor buying a raffle ticket for the scout fundraiser or the bigwig on the board of a museum, they get something as well. The status and connection they buy is a bargain, worth more than it costs. In fact, if it wasn’t worth more than it costs, they wouldn’t buy it.

The fundraiser isn’t asking for a favor. They’re offering an opportunity.

  • βœ‡512 Pixels
  • More on Lil Finder Guy
    Basic Apple Guy: All I know about Lil Finder Guy is that it’s freakin’ adorable, assuming it means me no harm. And instead of doing literally anything productive or tending to my adult responsibilities like bills, taxes, or work, I have spent my weekend tumbling down the rabbit hole trying to build a life for this mysterious little creature despite knowing next to nothing about it. Google Gemini (aka the next Siri) has been helpful in modeling out the rest of its body from the
     

More on Lil Finder Guy

8 March 2026 at 18:20

Basic Apple Guy:

All I know about Lil Finder Guy is that it’s freakin’ adorable, assuming it means me no harm. And instead of doing literally anything productive or tending to my adult responsibilities like bills, taxes, or work, I have spent my weekend tumbling down the rabbit hole trying to build a life for this mysterious little creature despite knowing next to nothing about it.

Google Gemini (aka the next Siri) has been helpful in modeling out the rest of its body from the single TikTok post. From there, I started generating what Lil Finder Guy might look like working, angry, running, jumping, laughing, and more. Of course, this is all abstraction stacked on abstraction at this point. I do not know if Lil Finder Guy can laugh, what it finds funny, or whether its short, knee-less legs are even capable of jumping.

His results from Gemini are the best use of generative AI I’ve ever seen:

Lil Finder Guy

If Apple doesn’t go all-in on this, it’s time for a new CEO.

  • βœ‡Daring Fireball
  • Donald Knuth on Claude Opus Solving a Computer Science Problem
    Donald Knuth, who, adorably, effectively blogs by posting TeX-typeset PDFs: Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 — Anthropic’s hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice sol
     

Donald Knuth on Claude Opus Solving a Computer Science Problem

8 March 2026 at 17:49

Donald Knuth, who, adorably, effectively blogs by posting TeX-typeset PDFs:

Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 — Anthropic’s hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving. I’ll try to tell the story briefly in this note.

(Via Simon Willison.)

  • βœ‡Daring Fireball
  • Can Coding Agents Relicense Open Source Through a β€˜Clean Room’ Implementation of Code?
    Simon Willison: There are a lot of open questions about this, both ethically and legally. These appear to be coming to a head in the venerable chardet Python library. chardet was created by Mark Pilgrim back in 2006 and released under the LGPL. Mark retired from public internet life in 2011 and chardet’s maintenance was taken over by others, most notably Dan Blanchard who has been responsible for every release since 1.1 in July 2012. Two days ago Dan released chardet 7.0.0 with the f
     

Can Coding Agents Relicense Open Source Through a β€˜Clean Room’ Implementation of Code?

8 March 2026 at 17:59

Simon Willison:

There are a lot of open questions about this, both ethically and legally. These appear to be coming to a head in the venerable chardet Python library. chardet was created by Mark Pilgrim back in 2006 and released under the LGPL. Mark retired from public internet life in 2011 and chardet’s maintenance was taken over by others, most notably Dan Blanchard who has been responsible for every release since 1.1 in July 2012.

Two days ago Dan released chardet 7.0.0 with the following note in the release notes:

Ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet. Same package name, same public API — drop-in replacement for chardet 5.x/6.x. Just way faster and more accurate!

Yesterday Mark Pilgrim opened #327: No right to relicense this project.

A fascinating dispute, and the first public post from Pilgrim that I’ve seen in quite a while.

  • βœ‡Doc Searls Weblog
  • Stun Day
    I don’t know either. I have almost 100,000 better photos on Flickr. But their work has not My photos on Flickr (here and here) have had more than 20 million views. The photo with the most views is this one (above) with 83,000+ so far. It was shot with a camcorder to accompany a conversation I was having with somebody about gold crowns and inlays, of which I have many, all installed more than fifty years ago by students at the University of North Carolina Dental School, for $25 apiece. One
     

Stun Day

9 March 2026 at 04:21

I don’t know either. I have almost 100,000 better photos on Flickr.

But their work has not

My photos on Flickr (here and here) have had more than 20 million views. The photo with the most views is this one (above) with 83,000+ so far. It was shot with a camcorder to accompany a conversation I was having with somebody about gold crowns and inlays, of which I have many, all installed more than fifty years ago by students at the University of North Carolina Dental School, for $25 apiece. One student was John Berry, who practices (or practiced) in Durham. The other was Steve Herring, who practices (or practiced) in Fayetteville. Both studied primarily under Dr. Clifford Sturdivant, who passed in 2008. John and Steve were both younger than me, but not by much, so I’m guessing they’ve both retired.

Preach!

Luke Kornet is not a saint. Not yet. But he was my favorite Knick before becoming my favorite Celtic, and he is now my favorite Spur. He is also my favorite blogging pro player in any sport. Here’s his blog.

Luke hardly mentions that his claim to fame in college was shooting more threes than any player seven feet or taller (I think he’s 7’3″, though he’s listed two inches shy of that) something he rarely does in the pros, because his main role is blocking shots, which he does a lot. (One game-winning example.)

Last week, Luke stretched his blogging game by throwing a block against the Atlanta Hawks. Dig:

This week, the Atlanta Hawks “announced a special one-night collaboration to celebrate the city’s iconic cultural institution Magic City” during the team’s home game against Orlando on Monday, March 16. In its press release, the Hawks failed to acknowledge that this place is, as the business itself boasts, “Atlanta’s premier strip club.” Given this fact, I would like to respectfully ask that the Atlanta Hawks cancel this promotional night with Magic City.

His reason:

The NBA should desire to protect and esteem women, many of whom work diligently every day to make this the best basketball league in the world. We should promote an atmosphere that is protective and respectful of the daughters, wives, sisters, mothers, and partners that we know and love.

Here is Luke’s first post, which lays out his mission, so to speak. Like my wife and I, Luke seeks out interesting Catholic churches as he travels about with his team. There are, as Luke and we both know, a huge variety of those. It’s a big old church. Lots of choices.

Here is a graphic Luke added to this blog post. Says a lot about him.

  • βœ‡Seth's Blog
  • Considering infinity
    Endless, unlimited and more. These are building blocks of capitalism. Starbucks knows that they can’t get you to drink three coffees every morning, but their stock price is built on the idea that they can continue to get more customers and make more money from each one. The Wedding-Industrial complex is built on the simple idea that your wedding should cost the same as your best friend’s wedding did (plus a little more). The status ratchet is real, and it’s easy to be
     

Considering infinity

9 March 2026 at 09:03

Endless, unlimited and more. These are building blocks of capitalism.

Starbucks knows that they can’t get you to drink three coffees every morning, but their stock price is built on the idea that they can continue to get more customers and make more money from each one.

The Wedding-Industrial complex is built on the simple idea that your wedding should cost the same as your best friend’s wedding did (plus a little more).

The status ratchet is real, and it’s easy to be seduced by it. “Compared to what” is a fundamental component of marketing.

One reason this works is that a little progress gets you positive feedback, which makes you eager to find a little more, a cycle that doesn’t end. Infinity, all the way up.

And, for those seeking social change, the opposite is worth noting:

When asking for penance, self-control and good behavior, infinity is not a useful tool. When someone shows up and tries to do better, “that’s not good enough,” is not a particularly useful motivator.

The useful process begins by earning enrollment in the journey toward better, but it’s not amplified by our criticism of each action being imperfect.

Go-up infinity is about ‘more.’ But too often, social-good infinity is about ‘pure’. And pure is difficult to embrace, because anything less than pure feels like failure.

  • βœ‡Read Write Respond
  • REVIEW: Surrounded by Idiots (Thomas Erikson)
    Surrounded by Idiots: The Four Types of Human Behaviour and How to Effectively Communicate with Each in Business (and in Life) by Thomas Erikson presents a model of four behaviour types - Red (dominant, driven), Yellow (optimistic, social), Green (calm, supportive), and Blue (analytical, detail‑oriented) - to explain why people misunderstand each other. Erikson shows how each type thinks, communicates, and reacts under stress, then offers practical tips for adapting your style so you can
     

REVIEW: Surrounded by Idiots (Thomas Erikson)

9 March 2026 at 11:52

No matter who you are—Red, Yellow, Green, or Blue, or a combination of multiple colors—you will always be in the minority. Most of the people you encounter will be different from you. No matter how well balanced you are, you can’t be all the types at the same time. So you have to adapt to the people you meet. Good communication is often a matter of adapting to others. Thomas Erikson ‘Surrounded by Idiots’

Surrounded by Idiots: The Four Types of Human Behaviour and How to Effectively Communicate with Each in Business (and in Life) by Thomas Erikson presents a model of four behaviour types - Red (dominant, driven), Yellow (optimistic, social), Green (calm, supportive), and Blue (analytical, detail‑oriented) - to explain why people misunderstand each other. Erikson shows how each type thinks, communicates, and reacts under stress, then offers practical tips for adapting your style so you can reduce conflict, collaborate better, and recognise that “idiots” are usually just people different from you.

This model comes from William Moulton Marston’s 1928 book Emotions of Normal People, where he mapped four behaviour patterns (Dominance, Inspiration, Submission, Compliance) that later became DISC. Subsequent practitioners, such as TTI Success Insights, has since operationalised it into assessment tools and corporate profiling systems. However, Erikson also makes the case for the universality of the patterns with comparisons with Hippocrates’s four temperaments (choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic) and the Aztecs fourfold categorising via the elements fire, air, earth, water, mapping them to leader‑types, easygoing “air” people, community‑minded “earth” people, and quiet, powerful “water” people.


Although I appreciated the way in which this book captures the way that we are all different, I am left wondering if there is a danger of prioritising nature over nurture, as if our own identity and difference is static. Although it is fine to say that I am a ‘Red’, I wonder if this is something that can be worked on? To become a little more ‘Blue’ say? Alternatively, I wonder if we are different colours in different situations, with little evidence to help differentiate between what is the ‘true’ and ‘false’ self. This is something that Erikson touches on:

Consciously or subconsciously, surrounding factors cause me to choose a particular course of action.
And this is how we act. Look at this formula:

BEHAVIOR = f (P × Sf)
Behavior is a function of Personality and Surrounding factors.
Behavior is that which we can observe.
Personality is what we try to figure out.
Surrounding factors are things that we have an influence on.

Conclusion: We continually affect one another in some form or other. The trick is to try to figure out what’s there, under the surface. And this book is all about behavior.

Source: Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson

With this discussion of difference I am left thinking about Todd Rose’s discussion of the end of average.

If you want to design something for an individual, then the average is completely useless.

Source: End of Average by Todd Rose

For Rose, people vary across multiple dimensions, aggregating to a single score or type distorts that reality. Used lightly, colour models therefore can serve like a transport map, good enough to navigate some conversations. However, taken too literally, they risk flattening the very individuality Rose is arguing to preserve.


I was left challenged about an organisation expectations and how they balance with people and their colours. If we are to follow Erikson guide, is there actually any point expecting people to create clear documentation or collect the appropriate information relating to an incident if they are not that way inclined? Or should we accept such perceived incompetence? Here I am reminded of Adam Fraser’s discussion of misalignment between behaviour and values. I guess one approach maybe to treat the various labels as a hypothesis about behaviour, not a justification why we can not do something.


If there is any action to come from Erikson’s book it might be to complete some sort of DISC assessment to get a better appreciation of my own strengths and weaknesses. I wonder if this would be useful in conjunction with some sort of coaching program with a focus on growth.

The real issue at hand is that often when people overlook DISC, it’s because they use it to set a firm expectation of understanding people and their behavior rather than using it as a guideline towards growth.

Source: Here’s What’s Wrong With The DISC Personality Assessment by Chad Brown

The post REVIEW: Surrounded by Idiots (Thomas Erikson) appeared first on Read Write Respond.

  • βœ‡One Foot Tsunami
  • Using A.I. To Get Dumber
    [Sounding smart is now suspicious.] Over at Techdirt, Mike Masnick writes about how the existence of A.I. detection tools is turning students into worse writers. The particular concern here is not students using A.I. to avoid writing things themselves. Instead, the problem is talented writers being forced to dumb down their writing as a defensive act. Masnick opens with this awful example: About a year and a half ago, I wrote about my kid’s experience with an AI checker tool that was pre
     

Using A.I. To Get Dumber

9 March 2026 at 13:51

[Sounding smart is now suspicious.]

Over at Techdirt, Mike Masnick writes about how the existence of A.I. detection tools is turning students into worse writers. The particular concern here is not students using A.I. to avoid writing things themselves. Instead, the problem is talented writers being forced to dumb down their writing as a defensive act. Masnick opens with this awful example:

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about my kid’s experience with an AI checker tool that was pre-installed on a school-issued Chromebook. The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces “equality” by handicapping anyone who excels—and the AI detection tool flagged the essay as “18% AI written.” The culprit? Using the word “devoid.” When the word was swapped out for “without,” the score magically dropped to 0%.

Revising writing to avoid false positives from A.I. detectors is just an outrageously poor use of time.

Link: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/06/were-training-students-to-write-worse-to-prove-theyre-not-robots-and-its-pushing-them-to-use-more-ai/

  • βœ‡Daring Fireball
  • Low-Wage Contractors in Kenya See What Users See While Using Meta’s AI Smart Glasses
    Naipanoi Lepapa, Ahmed Abdigadir, and Julia Lindblom, reporting for the Swedish publications Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten: It is stuffy at the top of the hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. The grey sky presses the heat against the windows. The man in front of us is nervous. If his employer finds out that he is here, he could lose everything. He is one of the people few even realise exist — a flesh-and-blood worker in the engine room of the data industry. What he has
     

Low-Wage Contractors in Kenya See What Users See While Using Meta’s AI Smart Glasses

9 March 2026 at 14:16

Naipanoi Lepapa, Ahmed Abdigadir, and Julia Lindblom, reporting for the Swedish publications Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten:

It is stuffy at the top of the hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. The grey sky presses the heat against the windows. The man in front of us is nervous. If his employer finds out that he is here, he could lose everything. He is one of the people few even realise exist — a flesh-and-blood worker in the engine room of the data industry. What he has to say is explosive.

“In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed. I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording.” [...]

The workers describe videos where people’s bank cards are visible by mistake, and people watching porn while wearing the glasses. Clips that could trigger “enormous scandals” if they were leaked.

“There are also sex scenes filmed with the smart glasses — someone is wearing them having sex. That is why this is so extremely sensitive. There are cameras everywhere in our office, and you are not allowed to bring your own phones or any device that can record”, an employee says.

Delightful. And what a brand move for Ray-Ban and Oakley.

  • βœ‡Doc Searls Weblog
  • Behind the Eye Ball
    This is the eye. Here’s not looking at you, kid Three and a half weeks after cataract surgery on my left eye, vision improvement seems to have plateaued. I’d say it’s 20/80. The new lens is fine, but the corneal edema persists, so it feels like it’s smeared with vaseline. My right eye, which had its cataract replaced with a new lens fifteen years ago, is 20/10, so I rely on it entirely, even though my left has always been the dominant eye and wants to take over, layering
     

Behind the Eye Ball

9 March 2026 at 15:09

This is the eye.

Here’s not looking at you, kid

Three and a half weeks after cataract surgery on my left eye, vision improvement seems to have plateaued. I’d say it’s 20/80. The new lens is fine, but the corneal edema persists, so it feels like it’s smeared with vaseline. My right eye, which had its cataract replaced with a new lens fifteen years ago, is 20/10, so I rely on it entirely, even though my left has always been the dominant eye and wants to take over, layering a blur over everything. It also has a lot of floating debris that looks like pepper grinds or small insects in the air. I’m going back to see the surgeon this afternoon, because there are other symptoms (irritation, headaches), and I’m leaving for two weeks on Wednesday (California, Hawaii). Anyway, that’s why a lot is going undone and unwritten.

A market of one, speaking

The new M5 MacBook Pros look appealing. I might buy one if Apple offered storage in excess of 8TB. I have that in this 3-year-old M2-based MacBook Pro. Why have they gone through three generations of CPUs without raising the maximum storage, when we’re generating more data all the time?

❌