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Native app propaganda is working
No One's Happy: Native Apps Should Be Avoided Whenever Possible
Most native apps collect far more data than their website equivalents ever could. They request permissions to hardware, sensors, and background processes that browsers deliberately restrict. The third-party software embedded in these apps frequently transmits your location, device identifiers, and behavioral data
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Not all "vibe coding" is created equal
Sean Goedecke: LLMs reward expertise
the idea here — that domain knowledge makes you better at using LLMs — is something I’ve also experienced in my own work. If you have a good theory of your codebase, you can push the LLM much harder than if you have no familiarity. Because you have your own sense
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Linus Torvalds lays into anti-AI developers
Linus Torvalds (the creator or Linux) was spitting fire in a post to the Linux kernel mailing list just a few weeks ago:
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.
And:
There are other questions around
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The best watch band for the Apple Watch Ultra
Josh Ginter: The Titanium Milanese Loop Apple Watch Band Review: The Best Apple Watch Band Ever Made
At $200 USD it's expensive for a band, but it's a buy-once purchase that kills any desire to own another. Best Apple Watch band ever made.
This is my watch band as well,
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The rules change when you become top dog
M.G. Siegler: What if Anthropic is Right?
Certainly part of it is just the shift from underdog to presumed leader in AI. But a lot of it has to do with the way Anthropic carries itself as a company. Whereas the strong stances and rhetoric were once seen as almost endearing, now they'
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PC gamers just don't want to buy games from Xbox, even to play on their Xbox handhelds
At the end of last year, I bought the ROG Xbox Ally X because I wanted a high-performance portable gaming PC, and that seemed like the best option of the bunch. We also happened to be on the verge of 2026, which looked like it was going to bring increased costs across the board
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Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc.
Jay Peters: Xbox’s huge outage even blocked games on disc
An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening hasn’t just caused issues for people trying to play digital games — it blocked people from playing their disc-based games, too.
When Sony announced that they were discontinuing physical discs for PlayStation, I was less
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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