2026-06-02 04:05:17
Om Malik:
The Adventures of Pinocchio was published in serial form in 1881, aimed at Italian children in the way the 19th century aimed things at children, full of suffering, consequence, and moral instruction delivered through catastrophe. The puppet is hanged. He is swallowed by a giant fish. He watches companions degrade into beasts of burden. The world he moves through is predatory at every level, and the institutions that should protect him are either absent, corrupted, or actively hostile to his interests. [...]
Most people remember Pinocchio as a story about lying. The nose grows. You get caught. Lesson learned. But that reading misses almost everything Collodi was actually doing. The book is a close study of a society where deception has gone ambient, woven into every institution, every transaction. Courts punish victims. Authority figures perform competence without exercising it. Experts are decorative. Society holds together through spectacle and habit rather than accountability. Into this environment, a naive creature is released, constitutionally unable to resist a good story about easy reward.
The nose is the least interesting lie in the book. The interesting lies are the ones that work.
I’m not sure which sphere of interest this essay applies better to: post-AI tech, or post-Trump politics.
2026-06-02 00:41:51
Katie Notopoulos, a month ago at Business Insider:
Amazon has launched a new feature that uses AI to generate a short, podcast-like audio segment where two “hosts” discuss the merits and reviews of a specific product.
I think it could be one of the funniest, closest endpoints to human civilization we’ve seen yet in our new AI-enabled world. If this sounds a little confusing, here’s an example. I tried it out for diaper rash cream, and, voila! A podcast! (Sound on.)
I don’t know what’s worse: that anyone at Amazon thought actual people would really listen to these, or if actual people really are listening to them.
2026-06-01 09:59:00
Location: The California Theatre, San Jose
Showtime: Tuesday, 9 June 2026, 7pm PT (Doors open 6pm)
Special Guest(s): For sure
Price: $45
The annual live audience episode of The Talk Show during the week of WWDC. If you can make it, you should come. You’ll even enjoy the prelude, mingling with fellow DF readers and listeners.
Also: at least one sponsorship slot is still available. If you’ve got a product or service you’d like to see me promote at the start of the show, shoot me an email.
2026-06-01 09:55:40
My thanks to exe.dev for sponsoring last week at DF (with a very cool graphic ad — just love the way it looks). exe.dev is a cloud for the agent era — it gives you a pool of VMs with SSH, root, and web auth by default. Secrets injected at the network edge stay out of the LLM’s hands. Persistent servers, internal tools, vibe coding, disposable devboxes, whatever. You can share your web server as easily as you can share a Google Doc, and your VMs share CPU/RAM — you pay for underlying resources, not per VM.
It’s just a computer.
2026-06-01 08:15:44
Mark Gurman, on Twitter/X (XCancel link)
Kelsey Peterson, the Apple AI employee who introduced the never-launched Siri revamp in 2024, just started at OpenAI — so we’ll be getting someone new next month for Attempt 2 at WWDC.
Pretty sure we were going to get someone different for the second crack at a next-gen Siri introduction at WWDC no matter what. If they had made a Titanic II, they would have hired someone new to host the christening.
2026-05-30 23:34:02
Sarah Perez, reporting for TechCrunch:
Meta is doubling down on its subscription offerings. On Wednesday, the social networking giant announced it’s now rolling out its consumer subscription plans globally for its flagship apps, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, and beginning tests of new subscriptions for businesses, creators, and Meta AI users.
For a few dollars per month, consumers subscribing to Instagram Plus ($3.99/mo), Facebook Plus ($3.99/mo), or WhatsApp Plus ($2.99/mo) will gain access to extra features, like profile customization, super reactions, and story insights, among other things.
In an announcement, Meta’s head of product, Naomi Gleit, noted that “more fun features” will be added in the future.
My first question about this was whether Meta would be using IAP on iOS and Android. On the one hand, Zuckerberg really resents Meta’s subservient position to Apple and Google in the mobile ecosystem — that’s what drove him to make a big wrong bet on the “metaverse” as the Next Big Thing. But on the other hand, what else are they going to do? Most people only use Meta’s platforms via the phone apps, and if they’re going to allow subscriptions via the apps, they have to pay Apple and Google their commissions.
This point wasn’t addressed in Perez’s article, so I asked her on Mastodon, and she confirmed that they will be using IAP through both the App Store and Play Store. I’m curious how much they’ll try (and get away with) steering people to the web — both to avoid the store commissions and for direct control over the subscription relationship.
