š The People Holding Up the Internet
Sheets.works:
People post this comic whenever something breaks. The tower is labelled "all modern digital infrastructure" and it stands on one small block, "a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003".
We wanted to know how close to true it is. We downloaded the full history of 23 pieces of software that phones, browsers and servers depend on, and counted everyone who made ten or more changes to each one between October 2025 and October 2026. Then we listed what is actually installed on an Android phone, an iPhone and a Windows PC.
It's great to see the people doing this work called out in this piece. It's less great to see how little they're appreciated or compensated for it.
Knowing how much of the digital world is held together by people who do many years of hard work for little to no rewardābeyond the satisfaction of doing the work itself, of courseāmakes me hopeful that the moneyless future utopia depicted in Star Trek is, in fact, possible.
šŖ¦ The Job Trail
Bryan Mamaril built an Oregon Trail style web game called The Job Trail:
It is 2026. You have been laid off. Somewhere there is a job.
I made it 12 weeks in before I ran out of money. Maybe a little too on the nose, a little too real.
šŗ Dark Matter: Love and Be Loved
As a fan of science fiction, I've been watching Dark Matter since it premiered. It's a good show with solid execution, but nothing exceptional.
Until now.
I just watched the latest episode, Love and Be Loved (season two, episode eight), and I'm here to tell you that episode is a masterpiece. I haven't seen anything on television that good in years. The writing, acting, cinematography, tone, pacing... everything was exquisite.
Even if you're lukewarm on every prior episode, it's still worth it to watch the entire show to get the backstory, nuance, and framing that leads up to this single episode.
Highly recommended.
š Dropout
I want to blog more about the good stuff, so let's talk about the streaming service Dropout. (This isn't a sponsored post or anything, I'm just a big fan.)
Dropout is fairly unique in both the type of content they produce and in how the business itself is run. They treat everyone they work with quite well (they pay residuals to writers, actors, and crew members, do profit sharing, pay people to audition, and more). The positive energy this brings aboutāboth in front of and behind the cameraāis palpable and tangibly elevates the content in ways that can't be faked. If want to learn more about this side of things, check out the Dropout Wikipedia page.
Some of my favorite Dropout shows are Game Changer, Make Some Noise, and Crowd Control. More than once I've had to pause an episode because I was laughing too hard and needed to recover before continuing. Game Changer, in particular, has a special place in my heart due to the unique brand of effervescent chaos it employs.
There's also a lot of top-notch fan-made content, like DeepBlueInk's animations that use the audio from Game Changer and Make Some Noise. Two of the best ones: A Knight's Concerning Oath and Kermit the Frog Represents Himself on a Murder Charge (if you visit only two links in this entire post, please make it these two).
If you're curious about Dropout but don't want to jump straight into a subscription, check out the Dropout YouTube channel for a lot of clips and other tidbits.
š Attention is All You Have
Alice Girard Guittard:
Before recommendation algorithms were a thing, you had to decide what you would be doing on the computer.
You didnāt really have one big app that you could open and order it to entertain you. Instead, you had a few dozen of bookmarks to websites, each with a specific idea in mind. A site for video game news, that one website with lots of tutorials, a blog about anime that didnāt update often enough, a wiki about a TV show from the 90sā¦
Of course awful things existed on the web. We had Encyclopedia Dramatica and Rotten.com, but you actually had to put the effort to go there if you wanted. Nobody was going to put pictures of dead kids and far-right propaganda as a suggestion after a pancake recipe or a cat video.
The good thing is that this intentional internet is still around. It has just been a bit buried below the corporate web, but itās not very hard to find. After all youāre on this blog, so you probably already have a good idea about it.
I was lucky enough to grow up alongside the Internet. RFC 791āthe one that defines IPv4āwas published the same month I was born. When I was growing up, the only option was to be intentional when using the computer, so that's what I learned to do. I loved it.
By the time big and popular social media came around it was so different from my tried-and-true approach that it never really stuck. Sure, I've dabbled with social media over the years, but my use and engagement have always been low.
I prefer things like RSS feeds, newsletters, and Tumblr (which is, I guess, technically social media in its own unique way) over anything with an algorithmic feed. To put it another way, I prefer to select who has access to my time and attention instead of letting an algorithmic feed wash over me.
To be clear, I don't think algorithmic feeds are all bad. They can be quite useful for discovering new and interesting things, but you have to be careful about the algorithms you trust (which are few and far between these days) and use them in moderation. Given when and how I grew upāspending a lot of time on the computerāthat's easy for me, but it's not easy for a lot of people with different experience, like a lot of people younger than me. I mean, hell, a lot of those folks probably don't even realize there are other options.
That's a shame. A lot of people would benefit from being more intentional when using their computers, phones, and the Internet, but it's hard to demonstrate the benefits when the algorithms are so compelling. Sometimes you get lucky and the algorithm surfaces some great stuff, but those algorithms have their own agendas, and those agendas do not have your best interests at heart.
Being a passenger can be fun, but there's a lot of amazing stuff out there you'll never find if you don't spend some time in the driver's seat.
ā¢ļø US Military Had Close Call After Using AI for False Intelligence Report, Sources Say
Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen at CNN:
The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.
The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said.
It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) ā and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN was not able to learn what the misidentified cargo was.
The report, according to one of the sources, was āentirely false.ā But it also āalmost started a war,ā the source said. Any US operation against a Chinese vessel could have risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two nations.
This is fine.
š§ Human Brain is Two Separate Organs
Krista Conger at Stanford Medicine:
The new research finding shows that the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems cleverly packaged together ā a more primitive part that regulates our heartsā beating, our breathing and other functions, and another that makes us distinctly human, capable of poetry, mathematics and wondering about our own origins.
The discovery could help explain why scientists have struggled for decades to grow certain types of brain cells in the laboratory ā and it opens new avenues for studying devastating diseases that affect the brain stem, such as spinal muscular atrophy (also known as SMA) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrigās disease).
Fascinating.
This kind of discovery always serves to remind me about how much we don't know, and how much is still left to discover about the universe and ourselves.
āļø More on the iPhone Duo Pencil
In my previous post about the iPhone Duo I speculated that there was more to the Apple Pencil support story:
Regarding Apple Pencil support, I feel like we don't have the full story yet. Currently, Apple says iPhone Duo is compatible with only the USB-C Apple Pencil which has very few features compared to the Apple Pencil Pro. That's out of necessity; without the magnetic connection hardware, there's no way for the Apple Pencil Pro to pair or charge with iPhone Duo.
But why is Apple Pencil support for iPhone Duo coming later this year? And why weren't there any Apple Pencils at the hands-on event? Even if the feature is coming later this year, why not let at least some of the press use an early beta version?
Here's my wild theory: there's a new Apple Pencil coming in October alongside the rumored OLED iPad mini, and that new Apple Pencil will not just work with the iPhone Duo, but will clearly be the one best suited for it. What I'm hoping for is a slightly smaller (shorter, more pocketable) Apple Pencil with pressure sensitivity that works with some kind of inkwell-like USB-C charging/pairing base.
Wishful thinking? Maybe, but the iPhone Duo Apple Pencil vibes are off. This device would be a killer sketchbook with apps like Linea Sketch and Procreate, or even just Apple's Notes app, but it can only really excel with additional Pencil hardware features like pressure sensitivity. The USB-C Apple Pencil only supports tilt, and while that's better than nothing, but my gut tells me there's another shoe that hasn't dropped yet.
This morning Michael Burkhardt wrote this over at 9to5Mac:
[Apple] initially planned to build a new Apple Pencil for the Duo. It wouldāve been smaller and attached to the hinge side of the iPhone Duo.
According to Bloomberg, that pencil ran into ātechnical problemsā prior to mass production, so the company scrapped it and went with the traditional USB-C Apple Pencil.
After the keynote, you mightāve noticed on Appleās website that Apple Pencil support wonāt be available on iPhone Duo at launch. That delay is a result of the fact that the product wasnāt initially designed with the USB-C Apple Pencil in mind, and Apple still needs to test it thoroughly
If true, it sounds like my hopes and dreams of a new iPhone Duo-compatible Pencil dropping soon (alongside a new iPad mini) were, indeed, too optimistic.
It will be really interesting to see the iPhone Duo teardown and find out if there's any Pencil-related magnetic hardware inside.
āļø More on Live Rewind and Siri Recap
If you missed it, please read my previous post about these features before continuing.
John Gruber at Daring Fireball regarding Live Rewind and Siri Recap:
Some people are objecting to the very existence of these features as privacy intrusive. I think theyāre pretty reasonably thought out. There are surveillance cameras all over the place now. I was walking home from dinner here in Philadelphia a few weeks ago with a friend visiting from out of town, talking about this, and he stopped midway between the restaurant and my house and asked me to count how many cameras we were on at that spot. I think we counted seven or eight. Who knows how many we missed? Iām not saying thatās good or bad, itās just the world today. So too itās soon going to be with personal devices recording audio. This is inevitable. Iām glad to see Apple ship features like this early, with pretty limited scope, to provide good examples before other companies ship devices that record and save audio continuously throughout the day. I think itās better for Apple to lead with privacy-minded versions of ambient transcripts and AI-generated conversation summaries than to follow after other products have hit the market with all-day recordings and whole-life transcripts.
Think back to Appleās announcement of AirTags. A lot of people had a perfectly reasonable āHey I donāt know if itās a good idea for a product like this to even existā initial reaction. But having Apple lead the way actually proved good. I suspect Live Rewind and Siri Recap will turn out like that.
"There are surveillance cameras all over the place now," and, "Iām not saying thatās good or bad, itās just the world today," line of thinking is a perfect example of why Apple shouldn't be helping to further normalize having surveillance devices everywhere.
I also sincerely hope that John is wrong about ubiquitous audio recording by personal devices being inevitable. There are a lot of ubiquitous bad things that once seemed inevitable or entrenched, but have nonetheless been greatly reduced or eliminated for the public good. Leaded gasoline, ozone-depleting chemicals, and smoking come to mind. We collectively decided we didn't want to all breathe tobacco smoke everywhere we went, and I hope we all collectively agree we don't want a bunch of watches listening to what we say everywhere, too. Just because we have to put up with something bad now doesn't mean we have to put up with it in the future. The world is what we make of it.
That said, like the examples above, we may have to live with the bad for a while until we decide to eliminate it. I would like to live in a world where Apple proudly and loudly refuses to create surveillance features like Live Rewind and Siri Recap, and then have the rest of the industry follow their example, but I recognize that's probably not the world we live in.
Apple building and releasing privacy- and security-focused versions of these featuresāas flawed as the specific implementations areāis the safe move. I agree with John that it may result in better implementations of similar features from other companies. A tangible release people can actually use, explore, and purchase is almost always going to be more compelling and persuasive (especially to competitors) than an ideological refusal to cross a line. If Apple tried to set a good example by refusing to build these features, the rest of the industry would probably ignore them and build (or, in some cases, continue to build) surveillance features that are privacy and security nightmares.
Probably, but not certainly.
At some point there will be a catalyst for change that nudges the industry in a better direction. Apple might be influential and powerful enough to be that catalyst. Yes, being the change you want to see in the world is a risk, and I see why Apple is choosing the safe path, but I'd rather see them draw on some of their courage and take a stand.
Back to the rest of John's thoughts on Live Rewind and Siri Recap:
Itās also interesting to think about why these two features are only on Apple Watch, not iPhone. I think itās because once an Apple Watch is on your wrist and unlocked, it remains a ātrusted deviceā until you take the watch off. An iPhone is only a trusted device while itās unlocked. Itās locked, and thus untrusted, while itās in your pocket or bag, or even just sitting on a desk. I leave my iPhone unattended in our kitchen all the time. Iām often not in the room for conversations that take place in the kitchen while my iPhone is there, sitting on the counter. I shouldnāt get summaries of those conversations. And, thinking more nefariously, I shouldnāt be able to hide my iPhone on or near someoneās desk, or in a conference room, or in a car, or anywhere else, to get Siri Recap summaries of conversations where Iām not present. Making this an Apple Watch exclusive feature avoids that. Thus, I think Apple Watch can be trusted to ālistenā ambiently, all the time while itās unlocked on the wearerās wrist, in ways that even an iPhone canāt.
That's a good callout, and something I didn't think about until now. If your iPhone could also listen that would indeed make Siri Recap far worse. Making the listening part of the puzzle exclusive to Apple Watch is another point in Apple's favor, but I still maintain that there shouldn't be a feature like this on any device in the first place.
š£ļø Write It Like You Told It
I'm really enjoying the stuff Mike Monteiro is writing lately:
[...] An LLM will never write it like you told it. It might give you a reasonable facsimile, and the most dangerous thing about a facsimile is that it will eventually convince you that itās the real thing. Itāll eventually convince you that its voice is your voice.
So while the temptation to use this shit is understandable, the price is too high.
Eventually your LLM will write your child a note and their LLM will write a reply and neither of you will actually know each otherās voices. Neither of you will know what is actually in each othersā hearts. And that is brutal.
The whole thing is well worth a read, as are many of the other things you'll find at Mike Monterio's Good News. His writing has a somewhat visceral quality (complementary) that's hard to find anywhere else.