★ A Request Regarding ‘Magic Link’ Sign-Ins and Apple’s Passwords App
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/a_request_regarding_magic_link_sign-ins_and_apples_passwords_app

First they came for the graphics cards
And I did not speak out
Because I was not using a discrete card

Then they came for the hard drives
And I did not speak out
Because I have unused storage

Then they came for the RAM
And now—
The kernel oom protection has killed this process.

@ianRobinson I loved that book.

Are Apple Gift Cards Safe to Redeem?
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/17/are-apple-gift-cards-safe-to-redeem

I think, as an industry, we are not giving enough credit to agent harnesses as where the innovation is happening for programming agents. I suspect the big pop for Opus 4.5 is slightly more about (1) increased availability and (2) big upgrades to Claude Code. This means we are liable to apparent regressions in behavior without model changes.

It’s an interesting business: selling tokens and providing software that increasingly ratchets up its use of tokens while also becoming more capable.

📢 Claude Code fixed the flickering, and they did it the right way. Here's me hoping codex follows their lead instead of going the alt-mode route. https://steipete.me/posts/2025/signature-flicker

SOCIAL MEDIA MONOPOLIST vs ADVOCATE OF TOTAL SURVEILLANCE

Vote now: https://twsu.forms.app/wpit2025-qf

Every time I get in my car I say, “Siri, shuffle my inbox playlist.” I have organized all new-to-me music into an inbox playlist for a decade. Now, Siri says, “Sorry, but Mail can’t do that yet.”

I use Siri for two things. Now one of them doesn’t work, and it wasn’t sacrificed for anything in particular.

For the last two years the trajectory of LLMs made it seem like React Native was guaranteed to become entrenched through many accelerating advantages. But programming agents have come along far enough and have changed the cost of code so thoroughly that React Native might not have a good value proposition anymore. Programming agents offer an even higher abstraction, commodify labor even more cleanly, and dramatically reduce the overhead of maintaining multiple codebases.

The most interesting thing I recently learned about Rob Reiner was that he paused his career for most of the 1990s to lead a team that built a bunch of early childhood services for the state of California: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVB6pnzYRoE

🚨 THE BATTLE BEGINS 🚨

Your favorite year-end contest is back. It’s time to choose who will be this year’s Worst Person In Tech for 2025!

Each day of this week new matchups will drop until we choose the winner on Friday.

🗳️ Cast your ballot: https://twsu.forms.app/worst-person-tech-2025-round-one

https://unherd.com/2025/12/beware-tech-bro-economics/

Computers were better when I was a kid.

This should probably be a blog post, but I'm crotchety as hell, and this old man just wants to yell/vent and shake his fist at the clouds.

Declan has really been enjoying making slide decks on Google Slides. He's been doing this through his school-issued Google account. He is convinced that during the summer, this account will get cleared. I haven't a clue if he's right or not.

He’d like to have a different Google account to use. Fair enough.

[1/3]

#Iceland #crime #books

Trump has shattered the limits of executive authority by ordering summary executions of individuals he deems members of designated terrorist organizations. He has tested presidential powers, creating a secret list of domestic terrorist organisations under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7
https://theintercept.com/2025/12/12/trump-nspm-7-domestic-terrorist-executions-antifa-boat-strikes/

Great interview with Louis Vincent Gave.

After receiving his bachelor's degree from Duke University and studying Mandarin at Nanjing University, Louis joined the French Army where he served as a second lieutenant in a mountain infantry battalion. After a couple of years, Louis left the army and joined Paribas where he worked as a financial analyst—first in Paris, then in Hong Kong.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=NBMDICxYAxQ&si=G_r06K29qzaQmcGU

Is it me or are major internet platform outages getting more frequent? I used to instinctively reboot my router, now I just assume it's the platform. GitHub broke for me this morning, now LinkedIn is offline. Reddit and Twitter feel like they go down twice a week. Meanwhile all these companies are bragging about layoffs because they've "become more efficient with AI". Like, dawg, you can't even keep your website online.

As you may know if you're going to measure economic growth in GDP terms it only makes sense to use a per capita measure (and even then it misses a lot of the impact of inequality).... so here's Visual Capitalist's visualisation of the latest International Monetary Fund data.

The good news is there has been some growth in the UK's (real, inflation adjusted) per-capita GDP in the last 25 years, the not so good news is that it has only grown by 22%

The comparisons I'll leave to you

#economics

Anthropic donated the MCP protocol standard and associated items to The Linux Foundation.

35-minute video that outlines what MCP is, what it does, and other topics about why they are relinquishing control.

https://youtu.be/PLyCki2K0Lg

#Anthropic #MCP #LLM

New Migration Advisory Committee data suggest that many migrants on skilled work visas (especially high-skilled, high paid workers), will make a positive fiscal contribution (if they stay long-term) that outstrips the life-time net contribution of many of the native population.

So making things harder for such immigrants (including constraining families joining them) will be deliver a negative fiscal effect (if they decide to leave early).

Migrants are an economic bonus!

#workers
h/t FT