Faisal’s Web Site
Tuesday, 28 July 2026
The Ads on Apple News Continue to Suck, but at Least There Are a Lot of Them
John Gruber: “When streaming services like Netflix let you pay more money for ad-free tiers, it’s an explicit acknowledgement that the experience with ads is worse. Apple doesn’t offer ad-free tiers for the App Store or (soon) Apple Maps because, I think, they can’t bring themselves to admit that by adding ads to these services they have made them worse.”
The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction
Kyla Scanlon: “We’ve stopped expecting the real world to work. We assume it will be slow, broken, or possibly on fire. That’s just the baseline.”
Friday, 24 July 2026
Scenarios For Ending The Russo-Ukraine War
Phillips P. Obrien: “International Relations theories have had only limited value over the last decades because they often downplay the material differences of different leaderships (let alone political systems).”
Tuesday, 21 July 2026
Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster
Alex Reisner, The Atlantic: “The problem with generative AI, in the industry’s own jargon, is that it does not scale.”
Security incident disclosure — July 2026
Hugging Face: “… it was driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system - and we detected and dissected it largely with AI of our own.”
Google, AI, Oligarchy and the End of the ‘Open Web’
Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo: “ When I searched for details about this, Google’s AI summary started with this sentence: ‘News websites are experiencing a severe, structural collapse in organic search traffic, primarily driven by search engines transforming into self-contained answer platforms via Artificial Intelligence (AI).’ (The source link for that statement links to this.)”
Monday, 20 July 2026
Why all-in and why all are in
Horace Dediu: “The graph above shows that Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle decided to transfer their shareholders’ wealth to the shareholders of Nvidia, Micron, Broadcom and Applied materials.”
Also: The Second Derivative: Why No One Understands the AI Boom – “National home-price appreciation did not crash in 2006. It decelerated.”
Thursday, 16 July 2026
Built to converge / Designed to isolate
Malcolm Crawford: “Stripping away walls didn’t produce more spontaneous conversation. It made people more self-conscious about being watched, and they responded by putting on headphones and retreating into text. There’s a specific irony in citing this study for a piece about Apple Park: the same research literature that documents open-plan’s failure mode has, more than once, used a photo of Apple’s own campus as the go-to illustration of the design philosophy it’s debunking.”
Electron
Tuesday, 7 July 2026
‘Uncharted territory’ as brewing El Niño, roasting oceans, heat bring risk for California, planet
Rong-Gong Lin II, Los Angeles Times: “Between June 2025 and April, Labe said, global average surface temperatures were about 1.8 to 2.7 degrees above pre-Industrial Revolution levels. But an average of forecast models suggests global average surface temperatures could be even higher in the winter — perhaps hitting 3.24 to 3.42 degrees above the pre-Industrial Revolution era.”