Daring Fireball
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Muse, Instagram, and VLC Lookalike Rip-Offs in the Mac App Store
Jeff Johnson: In other words, Muse AI is a blatant copy of Muse from Meta, the latter of which is currently the #1 iOS App Store download in the United States. I don’t know where Muse AI ranks in the iOS App Store, but I do know that it’s currently the #20 Mac App Store download in the US. It wasn’t languishing in obscurity — it had risen to #20 in the Mac…
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Duo-Man
Vidit Bhargava (developer of LookUp and Movie Buzz ): Duo-Man offers the complete walkman experience on the iPhone Duo. Open the Duo to pick and “insert” the cassette, Close the Duo to start listening. Yes, I actually recorded the button clicks and static noise from a real Walkman! More like this, please. ★
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Mux: Turn Your Video Into Context
My thanks to Mux for sponsoring last week at DF. Video isn’t just something to stream; it’s structured data you build with. Mux Robots — hosted AI workflows — turns video into context. Generate chapters, find key moments, translate audio, and more, through one API call, with no model hosting to maintain. Each workflow is evaluated against real video, not…
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Katie Notopoulos on Alexandr Wang’s ‘Faux-Hallmark Pap’
Katie Notopoulos, in a short tweet thread regarding Alexandr Wang’s “Why We’re Building Muse” essay: This makes me feel insane! This is faux-hallmark pap and if you believe for 1 sec that he cares about helping people “spending more time with family” or “opening a bakery” you don’t need to wait for AI to kill us; you’re stupid enough to drown from looking…
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Reelizer Returns
Back in 2011 I linked to Reelizer, a splendid archive of movie posters curated by Roger Erik Tinch . Reelizer went away for a few years, but Tinch has brought it back, seemingly better than ever. Huzzah. ★
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Alexandr Wang: ‘Why I’m Building Muse’
Alexandr Wang, blogging on X: Now imagine every person on earth with a second mind beyond their own. A general manager whose whole job is to find out what you want and make sure it happens. Someone that hears the half-sentence, “I feel like there’s something more I could be doing,” and helps fill in the blanks. This might not be a genie in a bottle, but it…
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Apple’s Other Recent ‘Duo’
I keep mentioning Apple’s 1992 groundbreaking PowerBook Duo series as a precedent for the iPhone Duo’s name. But of course in 2020, Apple released the MagSafe Duo Charger, a wonderful Lightning peripheral for charging an iPhone and Apple Watch at the same time. It even folded. A brief note on the PowerBook Duo, while I’m at it. I got an email this month…
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International Standard Paper Sizes
Markus Kuhn: In the ISO paper size system, the height-to-width ratio of all pages is the square root of two (1.4142 : 1). In other words, the width and the height of a page relate to each other like the side and the diagonal of a square. This aspect ratio is especially convenient for a paper size. If you put two such pages next to each other, or…
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Microsoft Took the ‘Copilot+ PC’ Brand Out Behind the Shed
Zac Bowden, Windows Central: In 2024, Microsoft and Qualcomm kicked off a new category of Windows hardware it called “Copilot+ PCs” that set the baseline for a new wave of AI-first computers, and launched with exclusive features that would not be made available on PCs that didn’t meet a new set of system requirements. The launch didn’t go smoothly. [...]…
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The Talk Show: ‘I’m Thinking X, Not X’
Andru Edwards returns to the show to discuss Apple’s big September event and their new products: the iPhones 18 Pro and Duo, AirPods 5, and Apple Watch Series 12/Ultra 4. Sponsored by: Factor : Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off and one free breakfast item per box for one year, while supplies last, with code talkshow50off . Notion : The collaborative AI…
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Mr. Choyka Is Apparently Doing Well
A reader asked if this Gary Choyka who hit two holes-in-one in the same round of golf back in 2020 is the same Gary Choyka who was my history teacher 30+ years ago. Indeed it is. He looks good. (He was a hell of a basketball player too.) ★
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Stock UI in MacOS 27 Eschews Clarity
“Thibault”, in post on Mastodon responding to Brent Simmons’s “stock Mac UI” post that I just linked to : It reminded me of my own explorations with the macOS design language, especially the modern title/toolbar which I believe is one of the most foundational design regression on the platform. I played with the idea of redesigning the Finder with the…
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Brent Simmons on ‘Stock’ Mac UI
Brent Simmons: To recap: the reasons for using stock Mac UI are 1) user familiarity, which we’ve known for a while just isn’t a thing, and 2) hoping to be able to expend less developer effort, which we’ve seen can work against you. But there’s another reason: the stock Mac UI is designed by Apple, the best designers in the world, and do you really think you…
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★ I’ll Wait
I wouldn’t grant a stranger access to my email. So why would I grant a robot?
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Regarding the Provenance of Charm Within Meta
Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg Wednesday, after Meta’s 2026 Connect keynote (gift link): Meta Platforms Inc. unveiled a palm-sized, dedicated gadget for using Muse, the company’s popular new artificial intelligence assistant, pushing deeper into the AI devices market with a surprise announcement. The product, unveiled on stage by Meta Chief Executive…
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Muse Looks Cute, but Looks Are Deceiving
Jason Aten, in a good follow-up to his previous column at Inc. ( the one where he described how Muse, running on his Mac, read his Messages database): The entire reason Muse is interesting is that it isn’t just a chatbot, but can actually do things for you. But that promise also comes with a pretty high bar of responsibility. If your goal is to put a…
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I Was Not Blown Away by Eli Tan’s ‘I Was Blown Away’ Review of Meta Muse
Eli Tan, writing for The New York Times, “I Gave My Life Over to Meta’s A.I. Agent and Was Blown Away” (gift link): For one final task, I asked Wren for a good way to spend that $44.99 it had saved me. At this point, it knew my life pretty well. I thought it might suggest something altruistic, like donating the money to charity or buying flowers for my…
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Victoria Song on Meta Muse’s Cuteness
Victoria Song, in her Optimizer column/newsletter for The Verge: I’ve been aggressively avoiding Muse since it launched a few weeks ago. Sure, some of that is because I was busy testing other devices. But the number-one reason why is that I am horribly vulnerable when faced with extreme cuteness. Alas, at Meta Connect, I couldn’t escape this pink-cheeked…
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Joanna Stern Interviews Mark Zuckerberg
Great interview from Stern, as usual, seemingly conducted on the old set of Three’s Company . She opened by asking if AI is going to wipe out humanity, and I think Zuck whiffed by not simply laughing and saying no. She also directly asked his thoughts on people calling Meta Glasses “pervert glasses”. Regarding the shift from “the metaverse” to AI…
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Meta Connect Keynote 2026
Meta’s annual keynote yesterday was a tight 55-minute live event held on their campus in Menlo Park. I watched the whole thing this morning, before recording tomorrow’s episode of Dithering . (Which you should subscribe to.) It was a good keynote. Consumer products announced: Third-generation Meta Glasses with cameras. A new glasses product: Ray-Ban Meta…
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‘Apple Opens Apple Music Hall, a State-of-the-Art Live Music Venue in London’
Apple Newsroom: Apple today announced the opening of Apple Music Hall, a brand-new state-of-the-art live music venue in London’s storied Battersea Power Station, designed to connect artists and fans through bespoke, intimate performances unlike anywhere else. Apple might be the most interesting architecture company in the world this century. They have a…
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Ed Zitron’s AI Prediction Track Record
Dan Luu serves up some copiously documented claim chowder: After this point, most further predictions that I saw were either non-falsifiable or resolve in the future. Note that I didn’t attempt to catalogue statements that are nonsensical or were simply factually incorrect statements at the time, such as his December 2024 claim that “Generative AI’s…
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Copland D11E4, Emulated in Your Browser
Michael Steil: Apple’s ill-fated Copland operating system is notoriously hard to run on real hardware, and has not previously been available in emulation. Here is the last build, D11E4 from June 1996, in an improved DingusPPC. Playing around with the GXSlidemaster app, I found a bug. The keyboard shortcut for File → Print One is ⌥⌘P, but the menu manager…
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Changes to App Tracking Transparency in the E.U.
Apple Developer: As part of agreements with select European competition authorities, Apple is introducing changes to its App Tracking Transparency framework in the European Union. Beginning with iOS 27.2 and iPadOS 27.2, developers will have the option to use an alternative version of the App Tracking Transparency system prompt in the EU. The requirements…
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★ The iPhone 4 ‘Antennagate’ Press Conference Q&A — Finally
I don’t know what truck this video fell off the back of, why it took 16 years, or how it came into the hands of “Sir Mix-A-Lot Rare Music”, but I’m sure glad it did.
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‘Prepare to Ship’ Is a Clever Software Solution That Allows iPhone 18 Pro Max to Ship With a Battery That Would Otherwise Exceed International Shipping Regulations
Apple Support: iPhone 18 Pro Max offers a huge increase in battery life, in part due to increasing the battery capacity to over 20 watt-hours (Wh). Devices with a single-cell battery over 20 Wh have additional shipping requirements in most countries and regions. To address these requirements, iPhone 18 Pro Max uses an innovative battery-firmware solution…
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App Store Scam of the Week: ‘Update My Phone & Apps: Guide’ by Tair Olzhasev
“Update My Phone & Apps: Guide” is an iOS app from developer Tair Olzhasev. By default, the only thing it does for free is give you a “Check for Updates” button that launches the system Settings app. It doesn’t even take you to the General → Software Update screen. It just takes you to the root level of Settings. Everything else it purports to do requires a…
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★ AppZapper 3000
Is it absolutely ridiculous and unnecessary to make an uninstall utility with an exquisitely detailed 3D laser gun as its UI? Fuckin’-A right it is.
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Super Intelligence, Indeed
President Donald Trump, in a prepared speech before the United Nations General Assembly yesterday (one-minute video clip from Aaron Rupar, posted on Bluesky): The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence — being spoken of so much, now — here and after officially called “super…
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Meta’s Muse Logomark, Designed by Jessica Hische
Bill McCool, writing at Dieline: This past Wednesday, lettering artist, designer, and author Jessica Hische took to Threads to announce that she had worked alongside Meta’s team to create the icon and logotype for their agentic AI, Muse. Acknowledging that people would be “mad because it’s AI and Meta,” Hische sought to explain at least why she had taken…