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Obsession and Backrooms are moving the needle
David Chen: 'Obsession' and 'Backrooms' Are Destroying Our Assumptions About the Box Office
But both films are also directed by filmmakers who found viral fame on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, and neither film is based on legacy IP (e.g. Marvel, Star Wars, etc.). Their audiences are skewing young.
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We are not ourselves on social media
Jason Toney: I Hate The Way We Talk Online
What I got instead were weirdly defensive or hostile replies that seemed to take my innocuous question as an invitation to debate the merits of charts including conspiracy theories about their purpose. Others merely wanted to pat themselves on the back for having edgy tastes.
100%
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Validate those AI answers, people
Ana Maria Constantin: AI advice made people three times less accurate but twice as confident, researchers found
Researchers from three French and Italian universities found that access to AI advice collapsed people’s willingness to say “ I don’t know ” from 44% to 3%. Accuracy dropped from 27% to 9%. Confidence, meanwhile, rose from 30%
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2026 is on pace for more than 1 million new app on the App Store. Just like 2016 all over again.
Kalley Huang: ‘Vibecoded’ Apps Are Flooding the App Store. Is That Good for Apple?
Last year, the number of new apps released in the App Store grew 30 percent to about 600,000, according to estimates by Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm. In the first half of this year, new apps doubled to about
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X is a platform built for combat (they say they’re fixing it)
Stevie Bonifield: X admits its broken algorithm made the site feel like a ‘battleground’
X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, admitted in a post on Monday that X’s algorithm was “missing” data about surfacing posts from people who you’ve followed back. Now, he says a tweak will “boost visibility of your posts
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Upcoming iPad mini likely to get OLED, retain 60Hz, and probably get more expensive
Tim Hardwick: Upcoming OLED iPad Mini Allegedly Uses 60Hz 8.4-Inch Display Panel
Apple is allegedly using a 60Hz 8.4-inch display panel in the upcoming OLED iPad mini, which is expected to be released later this year.
I obviously don’t love that they’re sticking with 60Hz for this device, but
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Netflix can't keep viewers for season 2, even of their good shows
Lucas Shaw: Netflix Viewers Are Abandoning Shows After One Season
One Piece, one of Netflix’s most-watched shows of 2023, lost more than 30% of its audience for the second season. Season two of Beef suffered a drop of more than 70%. The Night Agent shed 50% of its audience for the second season
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Xbox had a terrible strategy, and now they're laying off 3,200 people and ditching 5 studios
From Asha Sharma's letter to Xbox employees earlier this week (via IGN):
To grow, we bet on Game Pass, multi-platform, and a broader portfolio of content. While those businesses have created meaningful value, they did not grow at the pace we expected. As that happened, our core business weakened, and we added
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What "reasonable concerns" around trans people really means
Parker Molloy wrote what I think is a must read article that has too many quotes I'd like to make, so just go read it: Reasonable Concerns.
Terry Schilling runs the American Principles Project, one of the outfits that spent years writing and bankrolling bills like the ones the court just upheld. In
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Code is easy, writing is hard (for a robot)
Robin Sloan: Fable is very good
Yet even the funkiest JavaScript function carries within it many fewer choices than a paragraph of prose. (How’s that for a sentence?) Fable can’t match my writing style yet — honestly, I think that’s beyond the reach of these models, because it’s just
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Sony is leaving physical games behind in 2028
Sony had a double-whammy of press releases yesterday. First, they announced that they were ditching physical game discs in 2028:
As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January
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A blown up iPhone, not the next Mac
Federico Viticci: Headless Macs and Hamstrung iPads
In a funny twist of fate, Apple spent years trying to make iPadOS catch up to macOS on the surface, only for macOS’ underlying nature to unlock a new generation of apps that are rewriting the rules of modern software. No amount of windowing and menu bars can
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An update from the study that said devs were actually slower with coding agents
METR: We are Changing our Developer Productivity Experiment Design
Based on conversations with study participants, we believe it is likely that developers are more sped up from AI tools now — in early 2026 — compared to our estimates from early 2025. However, because of the selection effects in our experiment, our data is only very weak
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May 2026 was the worst sales month for Xbox consoles *ever*
Mat Piscatella: Hardware - PlayStation hardware unit sales fell to…
PlayStation hardware unit sales fell to their lowest May total since May 2000, while Xbox hardware unit sales were the lowest ever recorded for a May month.
The data goes back to 1995, and May was the worst month for hardware unit sales for Sony in
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Xbox prices jump again, and Microsoft warns they my again next year
Joe Skrebels on XBOX Wire, Micirosft's official Xbox (ahem…XBOX) blog (emphasis mine): Updated XBOX Console Prices
Last October, we increased XBOX console price by $20-$70 in the U.S. We hoped another price increase would not be necessary, and we have spent the last several months working with suppliers on options.
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Notion Mail is shutting down September 22
Notion on X:
We’re winding down the Notion Mail inbox across web, desktop, and iOS on September 22.
It's a bit of a bummer, but truth be told, this didn't quite hit the mark. It was kind of like "Superhuman, but for cheap" when it launched, but once
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Apple raises prices, and it's gonna hurt
Stephen Nellis and Aditya Soni quoting a statement they got from Apple: Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads as memory costs skyrocket
"We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly," Apple said in a statement. "We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have
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Fairly priced and too expensive
User cantrip in a comment on The Verge:
The Steam Machine is both fairly-priced and too expensive. It's priced at cost, it's just that not many people are going to be willing to pay it.
This is such a simple way to put it, and it's true. Looking