Month: July 2025

The ‘Panama Playlists’ Reveal the Spotify Profiles of Public Figures ⇥ theverge.com

Elizabeth Lopatto, the Verge:

Have you ever wondered what bops powerful figures are listening to on Spotify? You’d be amazed what you can get with a profile search — but just in case you want them all in one place, there’s the Panama Playlists, a newly published collection of data on the musical listening habits of politicians, journalists, and tech figures, as curated by an anonymous figure.

Silly name aside, I am glad to finally have a privacy-related concern that is not actually so bad. Yes, some people confirmed to Lopatto that they were unaware they were sharing their playlists publicly, but at least it is not private data per se. And it gives us a relatively non-creepy peek into the lives of the rich and famous. For example, Marc Benioff has a terrible “High Energy Party” playlists into which he has dumped whole albums with seeming disregard to vibe consistency or quality — it is simply a massive amount of songs from the Black Eyed Peas, Metallica, and Beatles tribute bands, plus one lonely song by the Doors. The art of the playlist is dead.

The Tim Cook Era Is Fully Cemented ⇥ wolframalpha.com

On 16 September 1997, Steve Jobs became interim CEO of Apple. 5,090 days later, he handed the reins to Tim Cook, weeks before he died.

5,090 days after 24 August 2011 is today. The Cook era is now as long as the Jobs renaissance era.

Just as it is baffling to consider how much time Cook has officially led Apple — I have not included the two times when he temporarily took on the role for reasons of Jobs’ health — it is hard for me to believe the same amount of time has now passed which solidified so much of today’s Apple. You already know the highlights: the iMac, Mac OS X, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. All that and more happened between September 1997 and August 2011.

Apple was given new life under Jobs’ leadership. That relatively small group of people set the groundwork for it to become, under Cook, the giant it is today. I thought it was worth marking the day this era has overtaken the last.

The State of Design and the Iconfactory ⇥ mastodon.social

Sean Heber, on Mastodon:

ChatGPT and other AI services are basically killing @Iconfactory and I’m not exaggerating or being hyperbolical.

Ged Maheux, on the company’s blog:

Our apps deserve more love than we can currently give. We’re looking to find new homes for our side products – many of which have storied histories and loads of happy & loyal customers.

It does not sound like this includes Linea Sketch, Tapestry, Tot, or Wallaroo, but I am not sure it is limited to the smaller free apps like Clicker or Fontcase, either.

This sure is a worrisome sign for the Iconfactory. Unfortunately, the trends of the past many years have not been kind to studios like theirs, and a future of thoughtless generative design and enforced mediocrity is ominous. I wish them only the best.

Tiger Inspirat Is a Tribute to the Best Mac OS X Default Desktop Picture ⇥ keiransell.com

You all know I love the default Tiger desktop picture. It is a perfect shade of blue, and just the right balance of visual interest and neutrality. Sadly, it was only ever released at a maximum size of 2560 × 1600 pixels — slightly smaller, even, than the resolution of today’s 13-inch MacBook Air. I filed a radar many years ago asking Apple to release a high-resolution version without result. However, there are two great third-party options.

Hector Simpson made an excellent set a few years ago that has received colour scheme updates all the way through MacOS Sequoia.

Keir Ansell also published a set with his own take on a range of mostly blues and grey. Ansell has just added a variant based on the colour scheme of the MacOS Tahoe desktop picture.

I love both sets and, if you are as enthusiastic about this era of Mac OS X wallpapers as I am, I think you will too. Simpson’s set is $4 and Ansell’s is $5, though the standard Aqua variant is free.

I should also mention Stephen Hackett’s excellent high-res gallery of Mac desktop pictures, including upscaled versions of older images. Aside from Tiger, I am partial to the Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion space pictures.

Tea Spilled ⇥ 404media.co

Emanuel Maiberg and Joseph Cox, 404 Media:

Tea, which claims to have more than 1.6 million users, reached the top of the App Store charts this week and has tens of thousands of reviews there. The app aims to provide a space for women to exchange information about men in order to stay safe, and verifies that new users are women by asking them to upload a selfie.

“Yes, if you sent Tea App your face and drivers license, they doxxed you publicly! No authentication, no nothing. It’s a public bucket,” a post on 4chan providing details of the vulnerability reads. “DRIVERS LICENSES AND FACE PICS! GET THE FUCK IN HERE BEFORE THEY SHUT IT DOWN!”

This is ghastly. It seems possible Tea did not do even the most basic step of stripping location metadata from submitted photos.

Maiberg and Cox, 404 Media:

A second, major security issue with women’s dating safety app Tea has exposed much more user data than the first breach we first reported last week, with an independent security researcher now finding it was possible for hackers to access messages between users discussing abortions, cheating partners, and phone numbers they sent to one another. Despite Tea’s initial statement that “the incident involved a legacy data storage system containing information from over two years ago,” the second issue impacting a separate database is much more recent, affecting messages up until last week, according to the researcher’s findings that 404 Media verified. The researcher said they also found the ability to send a push notification to all of Tea’s users.

Lots of apps have insecure or poorly secured cloud data buckets, and their data gets leaked, and that really sucks. Given the function of Tea and the deserved reputation of 4chan, however, this seems to be driven by motivations greater than a typical breach. In my head, it aligns with the politically motivated breaches of university data.

It is entirely possible this is nothing more than hackers getting lucky, and they were not picking Tea specifically. Fine. Tea should have anticipated the possibility it is a greater target because of the function it serves.

From Tea’s response:

Why did you require IDs prior to end of 2023?

During our early stages of development, we required selfies and IDs as an added layer of safety to ensure that only women were signing up for the app. In 2023, we removed the ID requirement.

Shoshana Weissmann, of the R Street Institute:

Security is dependent in no small part on norms. Understanding how to spot a phishing email, not to share one’s two-factor authentication code, or how to recognize a scam call are all examples of norms that bolster security. Yet when people are increasingly encouraged to share their most sensitive information — photo IDs, Social Security numbers, face scans — across websites and apps, they will begin to feel comfortable doing so. Offering up sensitive data could become a reflexive act like agreeing to terms of service documents. However, people cannot be sure how this data will be stored and used. In this case, Tea could not have been adhering to its privacy policy regarding its data storage, which before now might have assuaged fears of people concerned how their information might be stored or used. Some companies may store and use sensitive data in safer ways, but users do not have the ability to vet this. Even companies using better security practices can face hacks.

R Street is a think tank that stands for “free markets and limited, effective government”, so they will not say this, but privacy legislation would help protect users from these kinds of abuses. It was probably a bad idea for Tea to be collecting so much personal information in the first place. Yet this kind of data is routinely used in some industries, and it is unrealistic to expect individuals to figured out and monitor the privacy practices of individual services. Policies that limit data collection and retention, along with public auditing or other compliance-checking methods, can allow us to be more confident and provide remedies for bad practices and misuse.

Substack Sent a Push Alert Promoting a Nazi Blog ⇥ usermag.co

Taylor Lorenz, User Mag:

Substack sent a push alert encouraging users to subscribe to a Nazi newsletter that claimed Jewish people are a sickness and that we must eradicate minorities to build a “White homeland.”

[…]

Substack said that the alert was issued by mistake. “We discovered an error that caused some people to receive push notifications they should never have received,” a spokesperson told User Mag. “In some cases, these notifications were extremely offensive or disturbing. This was a serious error, and we apologize for the distress it caused. We have taken the relevant system offline, diagnosed the issue, and are making changes to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

One way for a social media platform administrator to reduce the likelihood people will erroneously receive notifications for Nazi stuff is by disallowing Nazi stuff on their social media platform. Sadly, I do not think that is the change Substack is committing to making.

That Pew Report Is Sure Looking Like a Foundational Text, Unfortunately ⇥ bbc.com

Thomas Germain, BBC News, covered the Pew report about the relationship between Google’s A.I. Overviews and click-through traffic:

Pew says it’s confident in its research. “Our findings are broadly consistent with independent studies conducted by web analytics firms,” [Pew’s Aaron] Smith says. Dozens of reports show AI Overviews cut search traffic as much as 30% to 70% depending on what people are Googling. [Amisive’s Lily] Ray says she’s personally seen this in data from hundreds of websites.

But Google tells the BBC you should disregard this, because it’s bad research, biased data and meaningless anecdotes. The company says web traffic fluctuates for many reasons, and AI Overviews link to a wider variety of sources and create new ways to discover websites. Google’s spokesperson says the clicks from AI answers are also higher quality because people spend more time on the sites they visit.

I will continue to harp on this report. I think it is going to be foundational, yet I do not think it is robust enough to sustain the number of articles and conclusions that will be derived from it. The same is also true of a lot of third-party research into Google’s search engine. A decline of 30% in click-through rates is significant, but 70% is catastrophic. It is hard to see how these are both valid results.

This research is also more complex than these headline findings. Take the report showing a 70% reduction in click-through rates when an A.I. Overview is present. That is true — it is a reduction from 2.94% to 0.84% — but the next finding is a near-doubling of the click-through rate when a link is a source in the A.I. Overview compared to if it is not. Not only does this appear to contradict Pew’s findings, it is also described as an “incremental” change despite click-through figures being as similarly small as the previous finding.

The overall trend seems undeniable, however — A.I. Overviews are generally clobbering search referral traffic. Publishers are aware of ebbs and flows in search referral traffic. A.I. Overviews are not having that kind of middling effect. I appreciate Germain’s yadda-yadda framing of Google’s response here; if it wishes to dispute the overall trend, Google should provide evidence.

Germain:

Ironically, Google’s own AI disagrees with its PR department. If you ask Google Gemini, it says AI Overviews hurt websites. […]

I get the joke but I wish it was not included in this article because it plays into myths of how generative A.I. works. Germain is smart enough to know Gemini is just parroting news articles about the subject. And if it did not, it would be deeply suspicious! If questions to Gemini only showed Google P.R.-approved responses, that would be much worse.

Subreddits with War Media Are Caught in the U.K. Age Verification Law ⇥ 404media.co

Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media:

Several Reddit communities dedicated to sharing news and media from conflicts around the world now require users in the UK to submit a photo ID or selfie in order to prove they are old enough to view “mature” content. The new age verification system is a result of the recently enacted Online Safety Act in the UK, which aims to protect children from certain types of content and hold platforms like Reddit accountable if they don’t.

One formative memory from my childhood is when I saw nightly news broadcasts about the Bosnian war. I was too young to understand it, though I remember seeing gruesome footage of bloodied bodies. I have considered that maybe this is something I should not have been exposed to, and I have also considered it is how I have grown up having a glimpse of the horrors. However, a mix of broadcast standards and my parents’ decisions is how I saw that footage. None of that changes in the post-verification era. Broadcasters will continue to show this footage, and children and teenagers will continue to see it in their homes. But they will be carded when they try to learn more on the web.

Contrary to the beliefs of one moderator of one of these subreddits, this does not seem to be motivated by burying evidence of the atrocities of war. This is the predictable overreach of Reddit choosing to require age verification to view any “not safe for work” subreddit, because of course Reddit is not going to be sensitive to context. It is not right; it is what is least expensive because it requires little additional moderation or underlying technical changes. Reddit could implement different types of NSFW labelling, but that also increases its risk of legal liability if something is improperly labelled.

The Unknown Effect of Google A.I. Overviews on Search Traffic

Pew Research Centre made headlines this week when it released a report on the effects of Google’s A.I. Overviews on user behaviour. It provided apparent evidence searchers do not explore much beyond the summary when presented with one. This caused understandable alarm among journalists who focused on two stats in particular: a reduction from 15% of searches which resulted in a result being clicked to just 8% when an A.I. Overview was shown, and finding that just 1% of searches with an Overview resulted in a click on a citation in that summary.

Beatrice Nolan, of Fortune, said this was evidence A.I. was “eating search”. Thomas Claburn, of the Register, said they were “killing the web”, and Emanuel Maiberg, of 404 Media, says Google’s push to boost A.I. “will end the flow of all that traffic almost completely and destroy the business of countless blogs and news sites in the process”. In addition to the aforementioned stats, Ryan Whitwam, of Ars Technica, also noted Pew found “Google users are more likely to end their browsing session after seeing an A.I. Overview” than if they do not. It is, indeed, worrisome.

Pew’s is not the only research finding a negative impact on search traffic to publishers thanks to Google’s A.I. search efforts. Ryan Law and Xibeijia Guan of Ahrefs published, earlier this year, the results of anonymized and aggregated Google Search Console data finding a 34.5% drop in click-through rate when A.I. Overviews were present. This is lower than the 47% drop found by Pew, but still a massive amount.

Ahrefs gives two main explanations for this decline in click-through traffic. First, and most obviously, these Overviews present as though they answer a query without needing to visit any other pages. Second, they push results further down the page. On a phone, an Overview may occupy the whole height of the display, as shown in Google’s many examples. Either one of these could be affecting whether users are clicking through to more stuff.

So we have two different reports showing, rather predictably, that Google’s A.I. Overviews kneecap click rates on search listings. But these findings are complicated by the various other boxes Google might show on a results page, none of which are what Google calls an “A.I.” feature. There are a slew of Rich Result types — event information, business listings, videos, and plenty more. There are Rich Answers for when you ask a general knowledge question. There are Featured Snippets that extract and highlight information from a specific page. These “zero-click” features all look and behave similarly to A.I. Overviews. They all try to answer a user’s question immediately. They all push organic results further down the page. So what is different about results with an A.I. twist?

Part of the problem is with methodology. That deja vu you are experiencing is because I wrote about this earlier this week, but I wanted to reiterate and expand upon that. The way Pew and Ahrefs collected the data for measuring click-through rates differs considerably. Pew, via Ipsos KnowledgePanel, collected browsing data from 900 U.S. adults. Researchers then used a selection of keywords to identify search result pages with A.I. Overviews. Ahrefs, on the other hand, relied on data directly from Google Search Console automatically provided by users who connected it to the company’s search optimization software. Ahrefs compared data collected in March 2024, pre-A.I. rollout, against that from March 2025 after Google made A.I. Overviews more present in search results.

In both reports, there is no effort made to distinguish between searches with A.I. Overviews present and those with the older search features mentioned above, and that would impact average click-through rates. Since Featured Snippets rolled out, for example, they have been considered the new first position in results and, unlike A.I. Overviews in the findings of Pew and Ahref, they can drive a lot of traffic. Search optimization studies are pretty inconsistent, finding Featured Snippets on between 11%, according to Stat, and up to 80% according to Ahrefs.

But the difference is even harder to research than it seems because A.I. Overviews do not necessarily replace Featured Snippets, nor are they independent of each other. There are queries for which Overviews are displayed that had no such additional features before, there are queries where Featured Snippets are being replaced. Sometimes, the results page will show an A.I. Overview and a Featured Snippet. There does not seem to be a lot of good data to disentangle what effect each of these features has in this era. A study from Amisive from earlier this year found the combined display of Overviews and Snippets reduced click-through rates by 37%, but Amisive did not publish a full data set to permit further exploration.

But publishers do seem to be feeling the effects of A.I. on traffic from Google’s search engine. The Wall Street Journal, relying on data from Similarweb, reported a precipitous drop in search traffic to mainstream news sources like Business Insider and the Washington Post from 2022 to 2025. Similarweb said the New York Times’ share of traffic coming from search fell from 44% to 36.5% in that time. Interestingly, Similarweb’s data did not show a similar effect for the Journal itself, reporting a five-point increase in the share of traffic derived from search over the same period.

The quality of Similarweb’s data is, I think, questionable. It would be better if we had access to a large-scale first-party source. Luckily, the United States Government operates proprietary analytics software with open access. Though it is not used on all U.S. federal government websites, its data set is both general-purpose — albeit U.S.-focused — and huge: 1.55 billion sessions in the last thirty days. As of writing, 44.1% of traffic in the current calendar year is from organic Google searches, down from 46.4% in the previous calendar year. That is not the steep decline found by Similarweb, but it is a decline nevertheless — enough to drop organic Google search traffic behind direct traffic. I also imagine Google’s A.I. Overviews impact different types of websites differently; the research from Ahrefs and Amisive seems to back this up.

Google has, naturally, disputed the results of Pew’s research. In an extended comment to Search Engine Journal, the company said Pew “use[d] a flawed methodology and skewed queryset that is not representative of Search traffic”, adding “[we] have not observed significant drops in aggregate web traffic”. What Google sees as flaws in Pew’s methodology is not disclosed, nor does the company provide any numbers to support its side of the story. Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, has even claimed A.I. Overviews are better for referral traffic than links outside Overviews — but, again, has never provided evidence.

Intuitively, it makes sense to me that A.I. Overviews are going to have a negative impact on click-through rates, because that is kind of the whole point. The amount of information being provided to users on the results page increases while the source of that information is minimized. It also seems like the popular data sources for A.I. Overviews are of mixed quality; according to a Semrush study, Quora is the most popular citation, while Reddit is the second-most popular.

I find all of these studies frustrating and it is not necessarily the fault of the firms conducting them. Try as hard as the search optimization industry has, we still do not have terrifically reliable ways of measuring the impact each new Google feature has on organic search traffic. The party in the best possible position to demystify this — Google — tends to be extremely secretive on the grounds it does not want people gaming its systems. Also, given the vast disconnect between the limited amount Google is saying and the findings of researchers, I am not sure how much I trust its word.

It is possible we cannot know exactly how much of an effect A.I. Overviews will have on search trafic, let alone that of “answer engines” like Perplexity. The best thing any publisher can do at this point is to assume the mutual benefits are going away — and not just in search. Between Google’s legal problems and it fundamentally reshaping how people discover things in search, one has to wonder how it will evolve its advertising business. Publishers have already been prioritizing direct relationships with readers. What about advertisers, too? Even with the unknown future of A.I. technologies, it seems like it would be advantageous to stop relying so heavily on Google.

In Alberta and Ontario, Provincial Governments Are Interfering With City Cycling Lanes ⇥ sprawlcalgary.com

Vjosa Isai, New York Times:

Some of the most popular bike lanes were making Toronto’s notorious traffic worse, according to the provincial government. So Doug Ford, Ontario’s premier, passed a law to rip out 14 miles of the lanes from three major streets that serve the core of the city.

Toronto’s mayor, Olivia Chow, arrived for her first day in office two years ago riding a bike. She was not pleased with the law, arguing that the city had sole discretion to decide street rules.

Jeremy Klaszus, the Sprawl:

Is Calgary city hall out of control in building new bike lanes or negligent in building too few?

Opinions abound. But with Alberta Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen talking about pausing new bike lanes in Calgary and Edmonton (he’s meeting with Mayor Jyoti Gondek about this July 30), it’s worth looking at what city hall has and hasn’t done on the cycling file.

I commute and do a fair slice of my regular errands by bike, and it is clear to me that seemingly few people debating this issue actually ride these lanes. Bike lanes on city streets have always struck me as a compromised version of dedicated cycling infrastructure, albeit made necessary by an insufficient desire to radically alter the structure of our roadway network. Everything — the scale of the lanes, the banking of the road surface, the timing of the lights — is designed for cars, not bikes.

But it is what we have, and it is not as though the provincial governments in Alberta and Ontario are seriously considering investment in better infrastructure. They simply do not treat cycling seriously as a mode of transportation. Even at a municipal level, one councillor — who represents an area nowhere near the city’s centre — is advocating for the removal of a track on a quiet street, half of which is pedestrianized. This is not the behaviour of people who are just trying to balance different modes of transportation.

Klaszus:

Meanwhile independent mayoral candidate Jeromy Farkas, who was critical of expanding the downtown cycle track network when he was a councillor, has proposed tying capital transportation dollars to mode usage.

“Up until now we’ve had the sort of cars versus bikes debate and I think the way to break that logjam is to just acknowledge that every single form of transportation is legitimate,” Farkas said. “When we tie funding to usage, we take the guesswork and the gamesmanship out of it.”

This is a terrible idea. Without disproportionately high investment, cycle tracks will not be adequately built out and maintained and, consequently, people will not use them. This proposal would be a death spiral. Cycling can be a safe, practical, and commonplace means of commuting, if only we want it to be. We can decide to do that as a city, if not for the meddling of our provincial government.

The U.K. Begins Enforcing Age Verification ⇥ bbc.com

Liv McMahon and Andrew Rogers, BBC News:

Around 6,000 sites allowing porn in the UK will start checking if users are over 18 on Friday, according to the media regulator Ofcom.

Dame Melanie Dawes, its chief executive, told the BBC “we are starting to see not just words but action from the technology industry” to improve child safety online.

She told BBC Radio Four’s Today programme that “no other country had pulled off” such measures, nor gained commitments from so many platforms, including Elon Musk’s X, around age verification.

It is remarkable that one of the first large-scale laws of this type happened on the web before it hit smartphone apps. Perhaps that is because both the App Store and Play Store have rules prohibiting pornography. The web has so far only had voluntary guidelines and minimal verification. In the U.K., that has now changed.

This article is headlined “Around 6,000 Porn Sites Start Checking Ages in U.K.”, yet in this — the first paragraph — the reporters acknowledge these are “sites allowing porn” not “porn sites”. This might sound like I am splitting hairs, but this figure seems to include some extremely large non-porn websites too:

Ofcom said on Thursday that more platforms, including Discord, X (formerly Twitter), social media app Bluesky and dating app Grindr, had agreed to bring in age checks.

The regulator had already received commitments from sites such as Pornhub – the UK’s most visited porn website – and social media platform Reddit.

When we are talking about large platforms like Discord and Reddit, there is a meaningful difference between describing them as “porn sites” and “sites allowing porn”.

Apps for Bluesky, Discord, Grindr, Reddit, and X are all available on the App Store, where they all have “16+” ratings, and the Play Store, where they have a “Mature 17+” rating with the exception of Discord’s “Teen” rating. These platforms are in a position to provide privacy-protecting age gating and, I think, they ought to do so with APIs also available to third-party stores.

The age verification mandated by this British law, however, is worrisome, especially if it becomes a model for similar laws elsewhere. The process may be done by a third-party service and can require sensitive information. These services may be specialized, meaning they may have better security and privacy protections, but it still means handing over identification to some service a user probably does not recognize. What is a “Yoti” anyway? And, because website operators are liable if they do not adequately protect youth, they may choose to take broader measures — just in case. For example, the law requires age verification for “material that promotes or encourages suicide, self-harm and eating disorders”. Sounds reasonable, but it also means online support groups could be age-restricted as a precautionary measure by their administrators. Perhaps that is reasonable; perhaps young people should only participate in professional support groups. But it is a notable compromise.

Nevertheless, I think the justification behind this policy is fair and deserved. There are apps and parts of the web where children should not be able to participate. I do not even mind the presence of a third-party in the verification chain — many Canadian government services include the option of logging in with a bank or credit union account, and it works quite well. But there are enough problems with this law that I hope it is not seen by other governments — including my own — as a good foundation, because it is not.

Artists Are Removing Music From Spotify Due to CEO Daniel Ek’s ‘Investment in A.I. War Drones’ ⇥ nme.com

Tim Bradshaw and Ivan Levingston, Financial Times:

Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s investment company is leading a €600mn funding round in Helsing, valuing the German defence tech group at €12bn and making it one of Europe’s most valuable start-ups.

The deal comes as the Munich-based start-up is expanding from its origins in artificial intelligence software to produce its own drones, aircraft and submarines.

Laura Molloy, NME:

Xiu Xiu have announced that they are in the process of removing their music from Spotify, over CEO Daniel Ek’s “investment in AI war drones”.

[…]

It comes after Deerhoof also recently pulled their catalogue from the platform for the same reason, stating: “We don’t want our music killing people. We don’t want our success being tied to AI battle tech,” Deerhoof said in a statement.

Financial relationships between the music industry and arms suppliers has been documented before, but it was more of a hop-skip-and-jump away. Ek’s investment is pretty direct. A Spotify subscription boosts his net worth, which he puts into his fund, which gives that money to an drone company he helps oversee.

Update: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard has also removed its music from Spotify.

Google A.I. Summaries and Search Traffic ⇥ pewresearch.org

Athena Chapekis and Anna Lieb, Pew Research Center:

Google users who encounter an AI summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who do not see one. Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits).

Google users who encountered an AI summary also rarely clicked on a link in the summary itself. This occurred in just 1% of all visits to pages with such a summary.

I looked through this article and the methodology to see how this survey came together, since it seems to me the real question is if A.I. summaries are more or less damaging to search traffic than older features like snippets.

As far as I can figure out, the way Pew did this survey is that it looked for mentions of A.I. among users who consented to having their web browsing data tracked, and then categorized that traffic depending on whether it was a news article about A.I. or an A.I. feature being used. Any Google data without an A.I. summary was, as far as I can see, categorized as not containing an A.I. summary. But this latter category amounted to 82% of all Google searches, and there does not appear to be any differentiation in what features were shown for those. Some may have snippets; others may have some other “zero-click” feature. Some may have no such features at all. Lumping all those together makes it impossible to tell what impact A.I. summaries are having on search compared to Google’s previous attempts to keep users in its bubble.

This survey does a good job of showing how irrelevant the source links are in Google A.I. summaries to search traffic. Much like the citations at the end of a book, they serve as an indicator of something being referenced, but there is no expectation anyone will actually read it to confirm whether the information is accurate. There was such a citation to a Microsoft article ostensibly containing an Excel feature Google made up. Unlike citations in a book, Google’s A.I. summaries are entirely the product of a machine built by people who have only some idea of the output.

Adam Aaronson Drank Every IBA Cocktail ⇥ aaronson.org

Adam Aaronson:

As of 2025, there are 102 IBA official cocktails, and as of July 12, 2025, I’ve had every one of them.

The journey has taken me to some interesting places, and now that it’s done, I have a little story to tell for each cocktail. I’m not gonna tell you all 102 stories, but I do want to debrief the experience. Drinking all 102 cocktails turned out to be unexpectedly tricky, and for reasons you’ll soon understand, I might be one of the first people in the world to do it.

Far from the first, as Aaronson notes later. If you are into cocktails, this looks like quite the experience. If the cocktail is truly a U.S. invention, it is among the finest things contributed by the country, along with Reese’s cups. Which are, I guess, a chocolate cocktail of sorts.

Aaronson put together a table “based on name recognition and ingredient availability”. It is pretty close to my own reactions as I read the piece — never heard of an Illegal but it sounds great — though I was surprised to see the White Lady in the “Obscure” row. It is a personal favourite, though I rarely order it as I typically have the ingredients on hand. For an excellent twist, try it with an Earl Grey gin.

Fixing ‘Optimize Storage’ ⇥ mjtsai.com

Ryan Jones in a thread on X (mirrored):

How to Clear Local iMessage Cache

- Settings > Name > iCloud > Messages > turn off Messages in the Cloud. Follow scary prompts.

- Messages > Settings > Apple Account > Sign Out. Follow scary prompts.

- Go to /Library/Messages and delete everything

- Empty trash

- Now you have nothing iMessage local

- Just reactive iMessage in the Cloud, and sync

Friendly reminder Optimize Storage was introduced in… iOS 8.1😑

Obviously, at your own risk.

Via Michael Tsai:

I think both Photos and Messages should have settings to specify the number of GB to cache locally.

I would like something similar, but I also do not understand why Messages — in particular — behaves like it does. As far as I can tell, my Messages cache on my iMac is a full copy of Messages in my iCloud account. It is not as though Apple is treating the cloud portion as merely a syncing solution, as it used to do with something like My Photo Stream, so it is not necessarily saving space in either my iCloud account or on my devices. I would like the option to store a full copy of my Messages history on my Mac, yes, but I also think it should more aggressively purge on-device copies. Is that not a key advantage of the cloud — that I do not need to keep everything on-disk?

Apple Releases Public Betas for Its ‘26’ Operating Systems ⇥ sixcolors.com

Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:

As promised, Apple has just released the first public beta versions for the next-generation versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and most of its other operating systems. The headlining feature of all the updates this year is Apple’s new Liquid Glass user interface, which is rolling out to all of these operating systems simultaneously. It’s the biggest and most comprehensive update to Apple’s software design aesthetic since iOS 7 was released in 2013.

I have been using the iOS 26 beta since WWDC, and the MacOS Tahoe beta for a couple of weeks. Though I have been getting better battery life than I had expected, I am finding enough bugs and problems that I would recommend against participating in the public beta builds, at least for one or two more versions.

However, if you have a spare Mac or are comfortable setting up a dual-booting situation — and you like doing Apple’s quality assurance without pay — please try MacOS Tahoe and report as much feedback as you can.

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

The result of this feels more like a work in progress than a finished design, and since this is a beta, that’s fair enough. But I get the sense that this really is a design that’s been thoroughly considered for iPhones, is similar enough on the iPad to be in the ballpark, but that has not really been thought through on the Mac. At least, through the first few developer beta releases, there are signs that Apple is making progress adapting this design to the Mac. I hope it continues, because it’s still in a state of disrepair.

My experience has mirrored this almost exactly. There is a lot to like in the technical and feature updates in Tahoe, but the U.I. changes are disappointing. Even with Reduce Transparency switched on, I find myself distracted by elements with poor contrast and clunky-looking toolbars. Tabs look bizarre.

I am not an outright hater; there are many places where I find Liquid Glass joyful or, at least, interesting in iOS. I see what Apple is going for even in places where I think other choices would have made sense. But the changes in MacOS Tahoe are worrisome knowing this is pretty close to what I will be living with for the next year or longer.

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac:

Apple has launched its first ever public beta for AirPods firmware, bringing forthcoming iOS 26 features to AirPods users ahead of their fall launch. Here’s everything new.

No Liquid Glass here.

The Great Canadian Rights Grab ⇥ jacobin.com

David Moscrop, Jacobin, on the phenomenal curtailing of civil liberties promised by Bill C-2:

As a thought experiment, we might ask whether Carney would be tabling his bill absent Trump’s trade threats — and it’s reasonable to think that he wouldn’t. Nor, likely, would he be spending billions more on the armed forces. Carney’s goal, above all, is to grow the Canadian economy, using state power to “catalyze” private sector investment and growth. A heavily securitized border and expanded surveillance capacity may serve that purpose — or may simply reflect a managerial logic in which institutional capacity is an end in itself, pursued without much democratic deliberation. He may believe in these tools as necessary to modern governance. But in either case, had Trump not upended the framework of free trade between Canada and the United States, there’s a good chance there would no border bill at all — or at least a far weaker one.

And this is an optimistic paragraph.

Iranian Brickwork Shows Us Better Architecture Is Possible ⇥ thenation.com

Kate Wagner, the Nation:

What makes this architecture so appealing to Western eyes, aside from its beauty, is its uniqueness. Architectural culture, especially in the United States, remains (with some exceptions) bound to either bloated, athletic forms and spectacle or the same dull residential minimalism it’s been shilling since the early 2000s. Practice in the field is fragmented, and there is no longer a cohesive creative or ideological movement to shape it in progressive or public-facing ways. Capital, meanwhile, pushes architectural labor to the brink and incentivizes cheapness and repetition, resulting in eyesore offices, identikit apartment buildings, and disposable single-family homes. This is merely one example of the disintegration of artistic culture writ large across all fields, as each of them enter their own crises of funding and structural decline.

It is endlessly disappointing to see new buildings in prime real estate with scant thought given to how they fit with their environment, their relationship to pedestrian traffic, or — seemingly — their aesthetics. New buildings are going in on two busy intersections not far from me and both look absolutely dreadful. In many cities, including mine, there are simply no standards or expectations that we should live in an environment built with much care. When I look at the work Wagner describes in this article — say, the Saadat Abad residential building — I see care.

Selfish Rounded Corners in MacOS Tahoe Preview ⇥ pxlnv.com

I have added a small update to my link last month regarding rounded corners and design fidelity. Here is the addition in full:

After using MacOS Tahoe, here is one area not mentioned by Oakley where I firmly disagree with the extreme corner radii in the system — multipage PDF documents in Preview. Each page, bafflingly, gets significant rounded corners, and there is no way to turn this off. At no zoom level does each page get its original squared corners. An awful and selfish design choice.

This is, admittedly, using the current developer beta build, so it may not reflect the final version. But, still, who steps back from updating a PDF document viewer in which each page is cut off at the corners and thinks yes, this is an improvement? I repeat: a selfish design choice prioritizing Apple’s goals over that of its users.

Podcasting’s Pivot to Video ⇥ nytimes.com

Joseph Bernstein, New York Times:

Indeed, according to an April survey by Cumulus Media and the media research firm Signal Hill Insights, nearly three-quarters of podcast consumers play podcast videos, even if they minimize them, compared with about a quarter who listen only to the audio. Paul Riismandel, the president of Signal Hill, said that this split holds across age groups — it’s not simply driven by Gen Z and that younger generation’s supposed great appetite for video.

[…]

Still, this leaves everyone else — more than half of YouTube podcast consumers, who say they are actively watching videos. Here, it gets even trickier. YouTube, the most popular platform for podcasts, defines “views” in a variety of ways, among them a user who clicks “play” on a video and watches for at least 30 seconds: far from five hours. And the April survey data did not distinguish between people who were watching, say, four hours of Lex Fridman interviewing Marc Andreessen from people who were viewing the much shorter clips of these podcasts that are ubiquitous on TikTok, Instagram Reels, X and YouTube itself.

Thirty seconds is an awful short time to be counted as a single view on these very long videos. At the very least, I think it should be calculated as a fraction of the length of any specific video.

This report (PDF) has a few things of note, anyhow, like this from the fifth page:

YouTube is not a walled garden of podcasts: 72% of weekly podcast consumers who have consumed podcasts on YouTube say they would switch platforms from YouTube if a podcast were to become available only on another platform. 51% of YouTube podcast consumers say they already have listened to the same podcasts they consume on YouTube in another place.

There is not another YouTube, so this indicates to me the video component is not actually important to many people, and that YouTube is not a great podcast client. It is, however, a great place for discovery — a centralized platform in the largely decentralized world of podcasting.

Bernstein:

Now, the size of the market for video podcasts is too large to ignore, and many ad deals require podcasters to have a video component. The platforms where these video podcasts live, predominantly YouTube and Spotify, are creating new kinds of podcast consumers, who expect video.

The advertising model of podcasts has long been a tough nut to crack. It is harder to participate in the same surveillance model as the rest of the web, even with the development of dynamically ad insertion. There is simply less tracking and less data available to advertisers and data brokers. This is a good thing. YouTube, being a Google platform, offers advertisers more of what they are used to.