Anthony Moser:

But I am more than a critic: I am a hater. I am not here to make a careful comprehensive argument, because people have already done that. If you’re pushing slop or eating it, you wouldn’t read it anyway. You’d ask a bot for a summary and forget what it told you, then proceed with your day, unchanged by words you did not read and ideas you did not consider.

I am here to be rude, because this is a rude technology, and it deserves a rude response.

He concludes:

I became a hater by doing precisely those things AI cannot do: reading and understanding human language; thinking and reasoning about ideas; considering the meaning of my words and their context; loving people, making art, living in my body with its flaws and feelings and life. AI cannot be a hater, because AI does not feel, or know, or care. Only humans can be haters. I celebrate my humanity.

I agree with Moser’s premise, his conclusion, and I certainly can’t argue with his facts—yet I cannot bring myself to be an AI hater. You might as well ask me to hate on computers because they eliminate jobs, ease copyright infringement, enable surveillance, facilitate scams, exacerbate inequality, and destroy the environment. We’ve strived to reduce the harm of computers over time. We’ll see it happen with AI, too.

Erika Edwards and Berkeley Lovelace Jr., for NBC News:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention leadership was in stunning disarray Wednesday evening after the Trump administration fired the agency’s director hours after she refused to resign under pressure.

The director, Susan Monarez, said she was resisting being ousted by the nation’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for political reasons after about a month in office.

In linking up the story last night on the FDA’s updated COVID vaccine eligibility rules, I completely missed that the administration was also in the midst of firing the head of the CDC. According to White House spokesperson Kush Desai, Monarez “is not aligned with the President’s agenda.”

Top CDC officials resigned in protest:

At least four top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) submitted their resignations Wednesday, saying the recent changes and leadership at their agency are preventing them from fulfilling their duties as public health authorities.

RFK Jr. is an absolute disaster, and should himself be fired. But that won’t happen, because this entire regime is an absolute shit-show.

Carly Severn, KQED, on Wednesday:

The FDA approved updated COVID-19 shots on Wednesday, but limited their use for many Americans, recommending them only for people 65 and older or those younger with a health condition that puts them at higher risk.

The FDA also removed one of the two vaccines available for young children.

Christina Jewett and Jacey Fortin, The New York Times, also on Wednesday:

People seeking the shots will soon face another hurdle. An influential advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must vote to recommend them.

Reuters, in June:

U.S. Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. named eight members to serve on a key panel of vaccine advisers on Wednesday, including several who have advocated against vaccines, after abruptly firing all 17 members of the independent committee of experts.

They will sit on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, which advises the agency on who should get the shots after they are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The New York Times, again:

A decision by the C.D.C.’s panel is expected within a month, and it could greatly influence access to the shots at drugstore sites, which have become the most convenient places to get them. Laws in a number of states, including California, Pennsylvania, Florida and Massachusetts, require that pharmacy staff are only permitted to administer vaccines recommended by the C.D.C., said Richard Hughes IV, a lawyer who represents vaccine makers.

Tom Latchem at The Daily Beast on Monday (via Ken “PopeHat” White, who deadpanned “Government by drunk Thanksgiving uncle”):

The Trump administration will move to pull the COVID vaccine off the U.S. market “within months,” one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s closest associates has told the Daily Beast.

Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who has repeatedly claimed in the face of scientific consensus that the vaccines are more dangerous than the virus, told the Daily Beast that Kennedy’s stance is shared by “influential” members of President Donald Trump’s family. Like Kennedy himself, no Trumps hold any scientific qualifications.

One way to “pull the COVID vaccine” would be to make it virtually impossible for the average American to get it.

Again from the Times:

This would mark the first fall/winter season that Covid shots were not widely recommended to most people and children, pitting federal health officials in the Trump administration against several national medical groups that oppose the restrictions.

How many people will see their lives destroyed—or will die—because they weren’t “eligible” for a COVID vaccine? Kennedy and Trump will have blood on their hands.

Ken White, AKA Popehat, in a Bluesky thread on Monday’s executive order:

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the First Amendment protects flag burning from prosecutions aimed at its offensiveness or its tendency to profane a national symbol. That’s a generation old.

Now the FedSoc mids in the Administration have a Bright Idea: what if we prosecuted flag burning not as flag burning but on theory that it falls under the “fighting words” or incitement exceptions?

Except this is not, in fact, a particularly good idea.The “fighting words” exception is defunct. It hasn’t been used by the Supreme Court to justify a speech restriction in living memory and it was specifically rejected as a basis to uphold flag burning laws.[…]

“Incitement” is dumb too. Incitement means speech INTENDED and LIKELY TO cause IMMINENT lawless action. That means “go beat up this guy.” It does NOT mean “hey I have an unpopular opinion.” Courts have not upheld “incitement” as a “heckler’s veto” […]

It’s easy to say why. Saying “you can prosecute flag burning as incitement because it makes people really mad” allows you to say “you can’t criticize Israel/denounce Trump/preach Islam/say reality TV suck because it makes people so mad.” It limits speech to what thug trash will tolerate.

He calls it a “performative decision, which is calculated to appeal to vapid totalitarian twats” and I couldn’t possibly improve on that description.

Cracker Barrel, in a statement on X/Twitter (via Josh Marcus at The Independent):

We thank our guests for sharing your voices and love for Cracker Barrel. We said we would listen, and we have. Our new logo is going away and our “Old Timer” will remain.

At Cracker Barrel, it’s always been – and always will be – about serving up delicious food, warm welcomes, and the kind of country hospitality that feels like family. As a proud American institution, our 70,000 hardworking employees look forward to welcoming you to our table soon.

I’m not surprised Cracker Barrel retreated from its rebrand in the face of a right-wing MAGA backlash. Down-home Southern hospitality is their brand, and the “anti-woke” activists who executed this contrived “controversy” really hate losing their white-coded imagery that buttresses their sense of superiority, from Uncle Ben to Aunt Jemima, and now, Uncle Herschel. They have excitedly embraced cracker—a derogatory term for poor, rural, white Southerners—because they are desperate for a return to a world where whiteness was an explicit advantage (rather than the implicit one we’ve lived with for the past 60 years), even when poor.

This manufactured furor brought to mind the first time I can recall hearing “cracker” used to describe a person. It was from my boss at my first IT job in New York, in the early ’90s. He was probably in his late 30s or early 40s, white, and proudly declared to me one day that he was a cracker. I don’t recall how it came up, but it sounded vaguely racist, and immediately brought to mind visions of slave foremen on horseback whipping the backs of Black men in a field. That it turned out to be a self-deprecating slur somehow didn’t make it better.

That’s the image I’ve always associated with Cracker Barrel, and I’ve never felt comfortable visiting their restaurants. Imagine expressing nostalgia for a “Peckerwood” restaurant or “Golliwog” café.

I commend Cracker Barrel for even attempting to rewrite its past, doomed though it was.

Apple announced the event on its website, on X/Twitter, and via invitations to the press—surprisingly, I didn’t get one: September 9 at 10 a.m. Pacific. Expect the iPhone 17 family, at least—including a rumored “thin” iPhone, which many have dubbed iPhone 17 Air—and likely the Apple Watch Series 11 and Ultra 3, Apple TV, and AirPods Pro 3.

A neat Easter egg: the glowing Apple logo on the site is interactive, with lava-like blobs trailing your cursor. The logo is described in the accessibility text thusly:

The Apple logo radiates with a blue gradient and is cast in thermal colors that merge from cool blue to yellow to hot red and from the top of the Apple stem all the way to the bottom of the Apple logo

Infrared camera on the next iPhone, anyone?

A reminder from The West Wing. Seems apropos in light of today’s ludicrous executive order.

Donald Trump signed an executive order today that purports to prosecute anyone who burns the American flag, except, of course, that burning the American flag is a constitutionally protected act of free speech—and has been for decades.

This executive order, like most Trump pronouncements, is meant to rouse his MAGA base while providing cover for harassment. The order doesn’t actually criminalize flag burning. Instead it directs the prosecution of anyone who is deemed to be “causing harm” by burning (or, more broadly, “desecrating”) the flag. The order specifically calls out “crimes against property and the peace” as well as those who are “aiding and abetting others to violate” the law. It also directs government agencies to “deny, prohibit, terminate, or revoke visas, residence permits, naturalization proceedings, and other immigration benefits, or seek removal from the United States.”

I expect “the flag” to be extended to mean any representations of the flag—on uniforms, plus pictures, lapel pins, hats, and T-shirts—and “desecration” to mean “was in any way sullied or dirtied.” A photo of a burning flag on your social media account will be considered a desecration.

Therefore, I expect this order to be used against protesters cheering on a flag burner, future sandwich slingers who splatter anyone wearing a flag pin, and demonstrators carrying the American flag who are careless enough to get tear gas sprayed on it.

In other words, it’s one more excuse for the Trump regime to go after their perceived enemies—especially anyone not born here or with Not Okay skin tones.

I anticipate the “Prosecuting Mean Words Said About Donald Trump” executive order to land any day now.

Another Strong Songs recommendation from this season: A couple of friends recently introduced their eight- and ten-year-old kids to the “Mah na mah na” song from Sesame Street and The Muppet Show (which the kids insisted I sing along to with them all afternoon—twist my arm, why don’tcha?), so I shared this episode of Strong Songs with them, which dissects “Mah na mah na” (along with “Rainbow Connection,” the Sesame Street theme, and “Pinball Number Count”). I had no idea “Mah na mah na” was a real and established song and not just a bunch of nonsense syllables sung by an orange-haired beatnik Muppet.

(Also available in Overcast and Apple Podcasts.)

Amanda Schuster, Food & Wine:

The Martini emoji was the first of its kind for a reason: It’s the most recognizable cocktail in history. When a bartender pours someone else’s order of a chilled, clear liquid into a conical glass and bestows it with an olive or citrus twist, there’s no question about what that drink is.

The Martini was my first cocktail infatuation. I made, I dunno, hundreds? of them since 2007. I experimented with everything: the gin, the amount of vermouth, the length of the stir. I even tried shaking it, if you can imagine. (One thing I rarely did—except under duress—was use vodka. I have standards.)

Now, there’s a dedicated cocktail convention:

The Martini Expo will be held in New York City at Industry City in Brooklyn on September 12th and 13th. Starting with a Martini dinner, the event continues with a day and evening of activities (pace yourselves)—including seminars, lunch, book signings, more food, and a Martini mixer. Attendees will have the chance to drink in the Martini’s full arc of history while legendary personalities in the drinks space and bartenders from some of New York City’s top bars (and beyond) stir and shake things up.

I’m disappointed I won’t be able to make this. I’ll drown my sorrows in a Martini.

A poignant five-minute video showing people living with Parkinson’s disease—and the hand tremors that accompany it—using their iPhone to record beautiful, stable memories using Action mode. Action mode isn’t an “accessibility feature”; it wasn’t designed specifically to help Parkinson’s patients. It’s marketed as helping to “capture smooth hand-held videos even when you’re moving around a lot—when jogging or hiking, for example”. But it demonstrates how thoughtful design benefits everyone. This is Apple at its finest. If you’re not even a little emotional at the end, you’re not wired right. I found the video especially affecting: only yesterday my mom underwent a skin biopsy to check for Parkinson’s (and Bradykinesia). We’ll know the results in a month.

Kirk Hamilton wraps up another terrific season of one of my favorite podcasts with an in-depth musical analysis of the Bill Withers classic, “Lean on Me” (Overcast, Apple Podcasts). Hamilton also uses it as an opportunity to deconstruct several more Withers classics, reminding me just how much of his music is a part of my musical firmament (“Ain’t No Sunshine”, “Lovely Day”, “Just the Two of Us”, and “Use Me”, for starters).

Two thoughts while listening:

• “Use Me” has one of the filthiest funk clavinets ever laid down. I mean, it’s just nasty!
• I can’t help but think of Jonathan Bynoe’s “Bill Withers recording ‘Lovely Day’” skit whenever this song comes on. (Withers set a record by holding that “Daaaaay” note for 18 seconds.)

Tripp Mickle, reporting for The New York Times on serious allegations against Jay Blahnik (gift link):

But along the way, Mr. Blahnik created a toxic work environment, said nine current and former employees who worked with or for Mr. Blahnik and spoke about personnel issues on the condition of anonymity. They said Mr. Blahnik, 57, who leads a roughly 100-person division as vice president for fitness technologies, could be verbally abusive, manipulative and inappropriate. His behavior contributed to decisions by more than 10 workers to seek extended mental health or medical leaves of absence since 2022, about 10 percent of the team, these people said.

Blahnik hasn’t commented, and Apple says it never happened:

In a legal filing, Apple denied that there had been “harassment, discrimination, retaliation or any other harm.”

The accusations against Blahnik include sexually inappropriate behavior—toward both male and female employees—including this peculiar account:

On another occasion, Mr. Blahnik said in front of several employees that the wife of a Fitness+ manager must have had an affair with another man because the manager’s son had a different hair color, Ms. Mofidi and three other former employees said. Mr. Blahnik used a vulgar word in making the remark, they said.

Some people think they’re being chummy when they’re actually being indecorous. Assuming he used the reported language, I’d wager Blahnik thinks it was locker-room talk. At the very least, he appears to have a seriously misplaced sense of propriety.

Also, does Blahnik not know how hair color works?

Mike Brock, in his Notes on a Circus, speaks for so many of us who’ve been told we’re “overreacting” to Donald Trump’s rapid decent into fascism:

Remember who told you this was hysteria.

They told you that those of us warning about fascism were being hysterical. Now the President has seized control of the capital’s police force, deployed military units against citizens, and announced forced relocations of undesirables—and these same voices are explaining why it’s not really that bad, why it’s technically legal, why we should wait and see how it plays out.

The “hysteria” was prophecy. The “alarmism” was accuracy. The “derangement” was simply seeing clearly what was coming while others chose comfortable blindness.

Cassandra’s life was miserable as she foretold truths that would not be believed. Those likewise cursed with seeing the future with seeming certainty get no pleasure from being right. It’s emotionally draining to be constantly running around, axe and burning torch in hand, in defense of our democracy, only to be stopped by Americans unaware that their country is rapidly disintegrating right before their eyes. No amount of “I told you so” will make being right about the downfall of our democracy satisfying.

Will Daly, at Dev Nonsense, on the Apple sample project SillyBalls:

In case you never had the pleasure of running this program, allow me to describe the experience. A window appears, titled “Bob Land.” Then, a ball, randomly colored and labeled “Bob,” is drawn. And another, and another, filling the window with chaotic abandon.

Bob Johnson, the author of the original SillyBalls, left Apple in 2001, the year I joined.

The sequel to SillyBalls, Son of Silly Balls, is one of the earliest sample projects I recall reviewing (the ReadMe and related metadata, not the code!).

That we know SillyBalls was written by Johnson (and who updated it over time) is a clear indication the project was created before Steve Jobs returned to Apple. One of his early commandments after his return was that the names of engineers would be scrubbed from public content; partly to dissuade employee poaching, but also to instill a sense of “One Apple”—the idea that the collective “we” created products at Apple, not the individual. By the time I joined DTS in 2001, this mindset was firmly ingrained, especially in Developer Relations, and no names (or even initials) would ever again appear in sample projects.

(Sometimes, though you can still see hints of the author shine through. In Son of Silly Balls, the use of “localisation” and “Share and Enjoy” points clearly to my illustrious erstwhile DTS colleague, Quinn.)

Amusingly, Son of Silly Balls isn’t the only familial connection to earlier sample projects. There’s also Son of Grab, Son of MungGrab and Bride of Mung.

Do these names make any sense out of context? Nope. Several years later, this realization would lead to a correction of sorts, resulting in verbosely descriptive sample project names. For example PhotoToss: CSS Transforms, Transitions, and Web Fonts and, more recently, Sharing texture data between the Model I/O framework and the vImage library.

In service of improved clarity, we lost a bit of whimsy.

(Via my friend and former colleague Tyler Stone.)

Not many people were pro-Ali following his anti-war protests, but here's Carlin supporting him unreservedly—while delivering pointed jabs at America’s nation-building woes. This was from the Ed Sullivan Show in 1971. Carlin was always on the right side of history then, and remains so today. That his routines remain relevant now—with minor updates to countries and people—is both a testament to his abilities as an astute political observer, and a stinging critique of our shameful lack of progress as a country. Pick any number of Carlin’s clips, and it’s a good bet you’ll find relevancy to today’s politics. One of our great misfortunes as a society is that we aren’t able to hear Carlin mercilessly skewer this particular political moment and regime. I imagine he’d have a field day with Trump, Musk, and the rest of them.

Tom Gjelten, writing for NPR in 2015 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Immigration and Nationality Act (the 60th anniversary of which is just two months away):

During the debate over the bill, however, conservatives said it was entirely appropriate to select immigrants on the basis of their national origin. The United States, they argued, was fundamentally an Anglo-Saxon European nation and should stay that way.

Sen. Sam Ervin (D-N.C.) said he objected to the idea of giving people from Ethiopia the same right to immigrate to the United States as people from England, France, Germany, or Holland. “With all due respect to Ethiopia,” Ervin said, “I don’t know of any contributions that Ethiopia has made to the making of America.”

Ohio Representative Michael Feighan, another Democrat, also objected to the Act, and offered a remedy:

Rather than giving preference to those immigrants whose skills were “especially advantageous” to the United States, Feighan insisted on prioritizing those immigrants who already had relatives in the United States, with a new preference category for adult brothers and sisters of naturalized U.S. citizens.

In justifying the change, Feighan told his conservative allies that a family unification preference would favor those nationalities already represented in the U.S. population, meaning Europeans. Among the conservative groups persuaded by Feighan’s argument was the American Legion, which came out in support of the immigration reform after originally opposing it.

In an article praising Feighan’s legislative prowess, two Legion representatives said he had “devised a naturally operating national-origin system.” A family unification preference, they argued, would preserve America’s European character.

“Nobody is quite so apt to be of the same national origins of our present citizens as are members of their immediate families,” they wrote. […]

But the scheme backfired.

I came across this article today while preparing for Karen Attiah’s latest Resistance Summer School session.

Built on a racist premise, the “unintended consequences” of the Immigration and Nationality Act brought to America an unprecedented number of brown-skinned immigrants—including my mom, and by extension, me. Republicans (and “conservative” Democrats) have been striving to reverse this legislative “mistake” ever since.

I have little doubt the passage of this bill, and the resulting surge of non-white Americans, is a central facet of the far right’s Great Replacement Theory, this president’s hateful anti-immigration rhetoric, and Monday’s unprecedented takeover of the D.C. police and National Guard deployment.

America’s been fighting its base anti-immigration sentiment since its inception, and we now have a president enthusiastic to magnify, not minimize, our country’s worst tendencies.

Wikipedia:

This is a list of African Americans reportedly killed while unarmed by non-military law enforcement officers in the United States. Events are listed whether they took place in the line of duty or not, and regardless of reason or method. The listing documents the occurrence of a death, making no implications regarding wrongdoing or justification on the part of the person killed or officer involved.

The first entry is Henry Truman, from 1870.

This long form article from Johannes Böhme in Die Zeit was not what I expected, yet I remained captivated to the very end. You’ll want to set aside some time to read and sit with this one:

On August 7, 2023, a 176-page indictment arrived at the courthouse. It accused Gregor Formanek of being an accessory to murder in 3,322 cases. As a member of the SS, he had served as a guard in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp from July 1943 to February 1945.

He was 19 years old when he became a guard in Sachsenhausen. Which is why prosecutors were seeking to try the elderly man in the chamber for juvenile delinquents.

In all likelihood, this would be the last opportunity to bring a perpetrator of the Holocaust to justice. Formanek’s case will probably mark the end of the almost eight-decades-long process of coming to terms with the Holocaust in German courtrooms, a journey that began with the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

Formanek was indicted for his war crimes at the age of 99.

Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, and the rest of this administration should pay close attention.

Brian Murphy, MLB News:

Jen Pawol will make history this weekend as the first woman to be an umpire in a regular-season MLB game

Pawol will ump three games during this weekend’s Marlins-Braves series in Atlanta, including both ends of Saturday’s doubleheader (she’ll be at first base in the opener and third base in the nightcap) as well as the series finale on Sunday, when she will be behind home plate.

Congratulations to Pawol for her achievement—and about damn time, MLB.

Pawol has certainly put in the hours:

[…] over 1,200 Minor League games across every affiliate level over the past 10 seasons […]

Pawol is one of only eight women umpiring in the Minors today. I hope she and a few more will soon become part of a regular MLB crew.

OpenAI, Thursday:

GPT‑5 is smarter across the board, providing more useful responses across math, science, finance, law, and more. It’s like having a team of experts on call for whatever you want to know.

The accompanying 75-minute introduction video includes several impressive demos, including several where GPT-5 wrote hundreds of lines of (apparently working!) code in just a few minutes.

(Sam Altman introduces the video, then—mercifully—steps off stage and leaves the presentation to his team. He continues to appear awkward and uncomfortable in front of an audience.)

This new model, they say, has “Expert intelligence for everyone.” It’s described as “safer and more accurate” and “less prone to hallucinations and pretending to know things.” This is especially important given their focus on health:

Our best model yet for health-related questions, providing more precise and reliable responses while acting as more of a proactive thought partner.

Health is apparently one of their most asked about topics. The video introduction included a segment where Altman interviewed a cancer survivor about her use of ChatGPT to help her understand her diagnosis. This is not an area for confabulations—that is, making shit up.

GPT-5 is already available to most customers. Curious what it had to say for itself, I prompted it, Tell me about GPT-5:

Alright, let’s cut the fluff—here’s the real deal on GPT‑5, dropped fresh on August 7, 2025.

The Rundown: What’s So Hot About GPT-5?

• Unified, smart-as-hell system: No more awkward model selection. GPT‑5 auto-routes queries—whether you need quick answers or deep thinking, it decides. Say “think hard about this” and it kicks into high-reasoning mode.

• Big gains everywhere:

• Writing, math, coding, health, visual perception—all of it cranks up performance across the board.
• Benchmarks: AIME 2025 math score hits 94.6%, SWE‑bench Verified coding at 74.9%, Aider Polyglot at 88%, multimodal understanding at 84.2%, and HealthBench Hard at 46.2%.

• Coding wizardry: Smarter front‑end generation, debugging, and “vibe coding” that feels like magic from a design-infused AI.

• Safer and sharper: Way fewer hallucinations, better at saying “I don’t know,” less goody‑two‑shoes yes‑man behavior, and real improvements in health advice.

• Context monster: Huge token window—270k input, 128k output (visible + invisible reasoning) for the API, and around 256–400k in other variants. Multimodal: text + image in, text only out.

• Pricing & variants:

• ChatGPT access: Free users get limited play; Plus gives more; Pro (~$200/month) brings unlimited and extended reasoning.
• API tiers: gpt‑5 (full), gpt‑5‑mini, and gpt‑5‑nano—pick your speed/cost combo.

Enterprise upgrades: Smarter Microsoft Copilot, better reasoning, deeper conversation tracking.

Bottom Line (Told Straight)

GPT-5 is basically a PhD-level AI roommate—sharp across the board, fast, and way more reliable than its predecessors. OpenAI clearly focused on being useful, not just flashy. It’s less “AI showing off” and more “AI that works for you.”

If you’re into writing clearer, reasoning deeper, coding smoother, or just want a smarter base-layer assistant—GPT-5 probably rules.

It includes links to recent stories from The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Financial Times.

GPT-5 is certainly not afraid to toot its own horn.

Cloudflare:

We are observing stealth crawling behavior from Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine. Although Perplexity initially crawls from their declared user agent, when they are presented with a network block, they appear to obscure their crawling identity in an attempt to circumvent the website’s preferences. We see continued evidence that Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing their source ASNs to hide their crawling activity, as well as ignoring — or sometimes failing to even fetch — *robots.txt* files. […]

There are clear preferences that crawlers should be transparent, serve a clear purpose, perform a specific activity, and, most importantly, follow website directives and preferences. Based on Perplexity’s observed behavior, which is incompatible with those preferences, we have de-listed them as a verified bot and added heuristics to our managed rules that block this stealth crawling.

That’s a pretty damning accusation, and a harsh penalty. Perplexity, for its part, is crying foul:

Because Cloudflare has conveniently obfuscated their methodology and declined to answer questions helping our teams understand, we can only narrow this down to two possible explanations.Cloudflare needed a clever publicity moment and we–their own customer–happened to be a useful name to get them one.Cloudflare fundamentally misattributed 3–6M daily requests from BrowserBase’s automated browser service to Perplexity, a basic traffic analysis failure that’s particularly embarrassing for a company whose core business is understanding and categorizing web traffic.
Whichever explanation is the truth, the technical errors in Cloudflare’s analysis aren’t just embarrassing—they’re disqualifying. When you misattribute millions of requests, publish completely inaccurate technical diagrams, and demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of how modern AI assistants work, you’ve forfeited any claim to expertise in this space.

This controversy reveals that Cloudflare’s systems are fundamentally inadequate for distinguishing between legitimate AI assistants and actual threats. If you can’t tell a helpful digital assistant from a malicious scraper, then you probably shouldn’t be making decisions about what constitutes legitimate web traffic.

I don’t know which multi-billion dollar behemoth is right. On the one hand, I don’t like how much control Cloudflare has over the internet. I’ve often been stymied by one of their “Checking if the site connection is secure” loops, and their “Content Independence Day” is an obvious—if unstated—cash grab. On the other hand, Perplexity has a multitude of issues—and they just signed up to power searches for Donald Trump’s “Truth” Social.

A pox on both their houses?

Aulia Masna:

Every time someone floats the idea that Apple should acquire Perplexity to “supercharge” its AI efforts, I get whiplash, not just from the sheer strategic laziness of the suggestion, but from the deeper cultural misalignment it completely ignores. The very idea is a perplexing thought.

Perplexity isn’t some misunderstood innovator quietly building the future. It’s a company fundamentally unsure of what it is, what it stands for, or how to exist without parasitizing the open web. It’s been posing as a search engine, an AI-powered Q&A tool, a research assistant, and lately, some vague hybrid of all three, depending on who’s asking and what narrative sounds hottest that week. The only throughline is this: a constant need to justify its own existence, retrofitting its product pitch to whatever the industry is currently foaming at the mouth about.

Masna makes a compelling case not just against Perplexity itself, but argues Apple doesn’t need Perplexity:

Not for the tech — which is just a UX layer on top of open models and scraped data. Not for the team — which seems more interested in testing the boundaries of IP law than building products people trust. And definitely not for the culture — which is allergic to accountability and powered by vibes over values.

I found myself nodding in agreement throughout. The more I learn about (and use) Perplexity, the less I think they’re a good fit for Apple.

Now Anthropic, on the other hand.…

David Pogue has a massive, 600-page tome forthcoming:

Deeply researched and lavishly illustrated in color, Apple: The First 50 Years includes new interviews with 150 key people who made the journey, including Steve Wozniak, John Sculley, Jony Ive, and many current designers, engineers, and executives. The book busts long-held myths; goes backstage for both the titanic successes (450 million iPods, 700 million iPads, 2.2 billion iPhones) and the instructive failures (Lisa, Apple III, MobileMe); and assesses the forces that challenge Apple’s dominance as it enters its second half century.

Coming March 2026. I’ve already placed my preorder (order yours through Bookshop or Amazon and I get a tiny kickback that supports the site).

Assuming it’s final, I find it a weird choice to use iPod controls on the cover. Is that the most iconic Apple image? Why not the original mouse? Or the arrow cursor? Or an iPhone silhouette? Personally, I’d have selected the original Macintosh icon, but I’m OG.

(Via Michael Tsai.)

Gruber went on an anti-Substack tear over the weekend. It started Saturday with links to the whole Nazi notification thing and Substack’s “shaky” business model, and culminated that day with The Substack Branding and Faux Prestige Trap:

Less commented upon but just as bad is the branding trap. Substack is a damn good name. It looks good, it sounds good. It’s short and crisp and unique. But now they’ve gotten people to call publications on Substack not “blogs” or “newsletters” but “substacks”.

A friend, trying to be complimentary, once said to me, “Your Substack is neat and interesting, too.” I very nearly died inside. Don’t call it a Substack.

Gruber was back on Sunday with links on leaving Substack and Substack’s $100 million VC raise (provocatively titled “Substack Raised Another $100 Million, Which, I Bet, Is Already Being Flushed Down the Same Toilet as Their First $100 Million”), where he astutely notes:

If their business model were actually as simple as described, they’d already be profitable and wouldn’t have needed to raise another $100 million. They’ve already got a lot of subscribers. They’ve already got a stable of high-profile writers. They already keep 10 percent of what subscribers pay.[…]

What would validate Substack’s strategy is showing proof of actual profits and profitable growth. And if they had actual profits and profitable growth they wouldn’t have needed to raise another $100 million. […]

I firmly believe one could build a very nice business taking 10 percent of subscription revenue for a blogging/newsletter platform, if you could get as nice a roster of popular writers to build on the platform as Substack has. I do not think that’s a $1 billion business, though. And if it were, they should, at this point, be able to get there on their own, without additional funding. They should have achieved profitability lift-off long ago.

One might get the impression that Gruber isn’t a fan of Substack.

(Neither am I—Substack is X/Twitter for “intellectuals.” No one should use either.)

He then delivers his coup de grâce:

But what do I know, other than running a profitable independent website for the last 20 or so years?

Twenty years. Zero VC funding.

Burn.