daniel
In his monumental work “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, historian Edward Gibbon argued that empires rarely collapse suddenly. Their decline is usually gradual, shaped by long-term structural changes. Yet, history occasionally records moments when a single strategic…
Last week, I read a story about how Waymo (self-driving taxi service) is partnering with Door Dash (food delivery service). And it surprised me. I was genuinely shocked. I couldn’t believe it. Because when I first read the headline, I thought it must be about putting food in a car and driving it off…
Contents March has a way of bringing a lot of new things to WebKit — and this year is no exception. With 44 features, 191 fixes and one deprecation, Safari 26.4 is a release packed with web technology. What’s most exciting? CSS Grid Lanes brings masonry-style layouts to the web platform — a…
Sign up for Trump’s Return, a newsletter featuring coverage of the second Trump presidency. In the past few weeks, Americans learned that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. canceled half a billion dollars of government investment in the development of mRNA vaccines, Las Vegas saw a 7 percent drop in visitors,…
On Software Quality is a very fine article by Nick Heer I suggest you read. There’s a passage I don’t fully agree with: There was a time when remaining on an older major version of an operating system or some piece of software meant you traded the excitement of new features for the predictability of…
Apple's Assault on Standards Will we notice? And what can be done? September 2, 2025 Updated: September 10, 2025 This is part 12 of the 15-part series "Browser Choice Must Matter" TL;DR: Market competition underlies the enterprise of standards. It creates the only functional test of designs and lets…
When I was in college in North Carolina, I flew home to Pennsylvania for the holidays. My mother and father were going through a divorce at that point (a divorce that should’ve happened many years before), and so my father had decided I had to spend my holiday weekend staying with him, not her, and…
Bias toward action is defaulting to the smallest responsible step that produces real feedback, while pre-committing to guardrails so that being wrong is survivable and quickly correctable. “Bias toward action” sounds like something a startup founder shouts before doing something reckless. It’s not.…
This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. I’ve arrived in the middle of a vast expanse of what looks like green LEGO plastic subdivided into fenced lots. Mozart’s “Turkish March” plays sourcelessly over a chorus of…
A few weeks ago, stock prices for SaaS (Software as a Service) companies have dropped significantly. It seems that many people expect AI to be capable of writing such tools at very low cost soon. But these events could be only forerunners for much bigger things yet to come. What happens on a broad…
This is a little embarrassing to share, but I’d rather someone else be able to spot a dangerous scam before they fall for it. So, here goes. One evening last month, my Apple Watch, iPhone, and Mac all lit up with a message prompting me to reset my password. This came out of nowhere; I hadn’t done…
On April 1, 1976, Apple Computer was founded with a radical idea: that powerful computing should be personal. Fifty years later, Apple stands as one of the most influential technology companies in history—shaping not only products, but culture, design, and how billions of people interact with…
Some camera-equipped Apple devices have dedicated camera indicator lights. E.g. recent MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs have them in the notch, next to the camera itself. The Studio Display has one in the bezel, next to its camera. Other devices — like iPhones and, now, the MacBook Neo — render a green…
Comprehension debt is the hidden cost to human intelligence and memory resulting from excessive reliance on AI and automation. For engineers, it applies most to agentic engineering. There’s a cost that doesn’t show up in your velocity metrics when teams go deep on AI coding tools. Especially when…
Over the years I’ve been writing here, I’ve often used the term speed bump to describe a certain type of hardware update: a new version of an existing product where the new stuff is mostly faster components, especially the CPU and GPU, but where a lot of the product, including the enclosure, remains…
Lately, I’ve been getting the same question over and over. Where do I think product design headed? Everyone working in software is looking at what AI can do and asking, what’s next? It’s both an exciting and unsettling time. So I wanted to write about how I’m thinking about this right now—not as a…
27.2.2026 browsersTILCSS tl;dr On Safari 26 on MacOS/iOS/iPadOS 26 the theme color for the browser UI is either taken from the site’s body background color or the topmost position-fixed element with a background-color if there is one. theme-color meta tag and theme_color manifest member do not…
The search for the perfect web browser feels like a modern quest. We seek a tool that is fast, secure, respects our privacy, and stays out of our way. The latest entrant into this crowded field is Helium, a browser that promises an "internet without interruptions." It's built to be lightweight,…
This article was originally commissioned by Luca Rossi (paywalled) for refactoring.fm, on February 11th, 2025. Luca edited a version of it that emphasized the importance of building “10x engineering teams” . It was later picked up by IEEE Spectrum (!!!), who scrapped most of the teams content and…
In May, OpenAI agreed to pay $3 billion for Windsurf, the AI coding assistant formerly known as Codeium. Three billion dollars. For a VSCode fork. The deal eventually fell apart, but what matters is that they wanted to do it in the first place. Last week, Anthropic made an interesting acquisition:…
Even when most big corporations give us something open-source, it seems we still can't escape the clutches of their data-hungry ways. That's why new projects are often born from these corporate efforts, to right what's so often wrong with big tech's idea of "open-source." Helium is one such effort:…
When I joined Google ~14 years ago, I thought the job was about writing great code. I was partly right. But the longer I’ve stayed, the more I’ve realized that the engineers who thrive aren’t necessarily the best programmers - they’re the ones who’ve figured out how to navigate everything around the…
Newsletter David French Jan. 29, 2026 By Opinion Columnist Leer en español You’re reading the David French newsletter. Reflections on law and culture, war and peace, and the deeper trends that define and divide America. It’s important to know exactly what is happening in our country. President Trump…
What if your car worked like so many apps? You’re driving somewhere important…maybe running a little bit late. A few minutes into the drive, your car pulls over to the side of the road and asks: “How are you enjoying your drive so far?” Annoyed by the interruption, and even more behind schedule, you…
Tim Cook sold Apple's soul February 01, 20261896 words, posted in apple and insights I think Apple is going downhill on almost every front that matters to me: software quality, user interface design, usability, and accessibility. Their Human Interface Guidelines used to feel close to sacred. They…
Infinite Scroll The bare-bones Mac writing app represents a literalist sensibility that is coming back into vogue as A.I. destabilizes our technological interactions. October 22, 2025 Illustration by Ariel Davis You’re reading Infinite Scroll, Kyle Chayka’s weekly column on how technology shapes…
Imagine you were Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping and you woke up a year ago having magically been given command of puppet strings that control the White House. Your explicit geopolitical goal is to undermine trust in the United States on the world stage. You want to destroy the Western rules-based…
Let’s Just Get It Out of the Way and Talk About the New Icons First, but Let’s Also Use the Icons as a Proxy for Talking About the Broader Software Design Problems at Apple There’s a lot of hate for the new app icons of the entire Creator Studio suite, but while I think the icons are tragically…
Tata Martino shrugged his shoulders and dismissed the notion that Designated Players Alexey Miranchuk and Miguel Almiron can’t play together when speaking to reporters Wednesday during the opening week of training camp. It’s the Million Dollar Question that Ronny Deila never got right. Atlanta…
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. A worried mother sits on the couch in my office. Her spouse was recently laid off, they’re experiencing tension at home, and her 15-year-old son’s grades have started to drop. “The one thing he seems to care…
John: 2025 was a different sort of year for apps, which is reflected in this year’s MacStories Selects Awards winners. App innovation comes from many places. Sometimes it’s new Apple APIs or hardware, and other times it’s broader shifts in the tech world. Supported By RevenueCat RevenueCat: The…
In my post earlier today on the then-breaking news that Alan Dye has left Apple to join Meta as chief design officer (a new title at the company1), I wrote: It sounds like Dye chose to jump ship, and wasn’t squeezed out (as it seems with former AI chief John Giannandrea earlier this week).…
Manager at the first start-up. Solid guy. Significant experience. I know that I can learn from him. No doubt. All the correct operational 1:1 hygiene is there. We meet every week like clockwork; we fill the time, and I often leave with a healthy sense of productivity. But sometimes… he talks. And…
As I get older, I increasingly think about whether I’m spending my time the right way to advance my career and my life. This is also a question that your company asks about you every performance cycle: is this engineering manager spending their time effectively to advance the company or their…
Photo-Illustration: New York Magazine; Photos Matt Wilson/Comedy Central’s The Daily Show This article was featured in New York’s One Great Story newsletter. Sign up here. Since last November’s election defeat, the Democratic Party has been subject to an endless battery of postmortems, and a shadow…
In 1933, German conservatives thought they could control Hitler. Two years later, they were being executed in their own homes. I spent weeks researching this question, desperately looking for counter-examples, for hope, for any time in history where people successfully stopped fascists after they…
President Biden’s standing with Americans has improved slightly over the past two months, but he remains in negative territory in most assessments of his performance in office and Republicans hold substantial advantages over Democrats on key economic indicators that are shaping the midterm election…
Democrats are not just losing arguments; they are often losing the room. The problem runs deeper than messaging. It is a crisis of attention and, beneath that, a crisis of credibility. Voters may still tell pollsters they prefer Democrats, yet few believe the party can change the cost of anything…
In February 2020, the insurgent left was on top of the world. Bernie Sanders had just won the Nevada caucuses, solidifying his status as the front-runner in the Democratic presidential primary. A month later, the Democratic Party had consolidated behind Joe Biden, who won South Carolina and…
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