2025-12-27 05:52:26
Today I learned something amazing: Safari supports higher than 60Hz refresh. It's the only mainstream web browser that doesn't, and I have never understood why, but apparently as of the end of 2025 in Safari version 26.3 (and maybe earlier) you can enable it. Here's how to do it.
Disclaimer that this may cause issues, but I can't imagine what. The entire web has already run at higher refresh rates for years, so unless this breaks something in Safari specifically, you should be fine.
Go to Safari's Settings (via the menu or with Command + ,.
Make sure developer mode is enabled (this won't break things, it just exposes some more UI, such as the very basic ability to inspect HTML, like every other browser).
Go to Feature Flags on the far right.
Search for "60fps"
Turn off the "Prefer Page Rendering Updates near 60fps" feature.
Restart Safari. When you reopen it, website should render at up to your display's max refresh rate.
This is very similar to the Mac flow, except you don't need to enable developer mode.
2025-12-26 21:49:05
Andru Marino writing for The Verge: It’s finally time to retire the word ‘podcast’
In 2026, instead of trying to define what a podcast is, I think we need to stop using the word altogether. “Podcast” is becoming an outdated or even a potentially cringe internet relic, similar to how the phrase “web series” faded from use online.
Honestly, I don't disagree with this. I've found the "actually, if it's not audio-only and available via RSS for free, it's not a podcast" argument exhausting for as long as it's been happening. Marino posits that "shows" is a better way to describe these things, and I agree. It's a more broad term, but I think it better captures what is happening in the space.
Here's an example of how annoying I find the current "podcast" argument. Every week, Niléane, Chris, and I sit down and talk for about 90 minutes, cameras and microphones recording every moment. Chris edits it, and exports it twice: once as a video file and once as an audio file. The audio file gets uploaded to our podcast host and the video file gets uploaded to YouTube. We unquestionably recorded one piece of "content" and Chris edited one "show" but what were we doing when we recorded? Were we podcasting? Were we doing something else? To me, we'e making a show, and that show can be enjoyed (or hate-listened to, if you're nasty) in podcast apps, in video on YouTube, or even in audio on YouTube…it's all fluid.
I'm fine with it staying "podcast" as well. After all, we all have a "phone" in our pocket, even though that's a pretty old fashioned way to describe the function of that product as well.
2025-12-21 00:00:45
In which I calmly explain what I think caused all of the problems with the Star Wars sequel trilogy.
2025-12-20 01:00:00
From the Anthropic blog: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size
It remains unclear how far this trend will hold as we keep scaling up models. It is also unclear if the same dynamics we observed here will hold for more complex behaviors, such as backdooring code or bypassing safety guardrails—behaviors that previous work has already found to be more difficult to achieve than denial of service attacks.
I'm sharing this because I've seen it posted a few times on social as proof that LLMs are fundamentally flawed, but reading past the headline reveals a much more nuanced finding. Basically, this is something to be aware of if you're building LLMs and to protect against, but it's not exactly a deal-breaker.
2025-12-19 23:00:00
Mitchell Hashimoto: Ghostty Is Now Non-Profit
I believe infrastructure of this kind should be stewarded by a mission-driven, non-commercial entity that prioritizes public benefit over private profit. That structure increases trust, encourages adoption, and creates the conditions for Ghostty to grow into a widely used and impactful piece of open-source infrastructure.
I love Ghostty, it's my favorite terminal emulator by a mile, and I'm happy to see Hashimoto commit to it being a net good for the world.
2025-12-19 23:00:00
Last Friday, Paris Buttfield-Addison posted 20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple, which kind of blew up.
A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I have no recourse.
Yeah, effectively, they got a $500 Apple gift card, tried to add it to their account, and this triggered a high enough severity fraud alert in Apple's system that it automatically locked their Apple account. Not good.
The post is a good reminder of how tied to these large companies we really are. I assume most people reading this post have an Apple account, and it's a good exercise to consider how much of your digital life would become inaccessible if you suddenly lost access to that account. Would you lose all your photos? All of your contacts? All of your files? Obviously, the odds of you losing access to your Apple account are exceptionally low, and Buttfield-Addison's experience is the exception, but I think it is a good reminder that completely benign behavior can occasionally lead to serious consequences you would not see coming.
This leads me to three main thoughts on the topic.
First, companies like Apple and Google have over 1 billion users, and their automated systems are likely correct far more often than they are wrong, and I don't think they need to go away. However, a good appeals process is necessary to have, and what happened in this person's case is not ideal. How would someone without a blog and ability to reach an audience have gotten this solved?
Second, when you're locked out of your Apple ID, you should be able to download effectively everything from your account. This would mean that if I was locked out of my Apple ID, maybe I wouldn't be able to use it or add new data to that account. But if I still was able to authenticate, I should be able to download my photos, my files, and other relevant information that I may want to get out. This would make it so that even if I wasn't able to get the attention that this person did and resolve the issue, at least I could still get a backup of my information.
And third, I strongly think that everyone should have some level of redundancy in as much of their digital life as they can. Photos are the big one that I think everyone should be considering. A lot of the things on my computer can be replaced or recreated if they're lost, but not my photos; I can never recreate those moments that I've captured. I personally treat Apple Photos as my de facto photo library, and it works great, but for many years, I had Google Photos also backing up those images, which gave me a second online backup. In the event that my Apple ID was locked, I would still have all of my photos in Google. Since getting a Synology NAS last year, I've actually switched that to having the Synology Photos app automatically back up my photo library to the NAS so that I have local access to all of my photos. Now those photos aren't tied to any online account, they're literally on a hard drive in my house. Consider what's important to you and figure out a solution that works for you.
This story has a happy ending, with Buttfield-Addison posting an update yesterday:
We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card tampering), and my account was caught by that. Obviously it’s unacceptable that this can happen, and I’m still trying to get more information out of him, but at least things are now mostly working.
Great news, but again, would someone without a blog and a few thousand social media followers have been able to get here? I don't know…