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…

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…

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…

It’s not easy to move around New York City as Zohran Mamdani anymore. Like when the 33-year-old Democratic nominee for mayor leaves a union meeting to walk to his Manhattan campaign office, as he did one Monday morning in July. Within a block, a phone--wielding crowd forms and follows. “Oh my God,…

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…

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Other peoples have risen. Other peoples have risen up to defend their rights, their dignity, and their democracies. In the past 50 years, they’ve done it in Poland, South Africa, Lebanon, South Korea, Ukraine,…

Recently, while in Geneva, I sat down with the ambassador of a closely allied country. In the shadow of the Palais des Nations—the European home of the United Nations—we discussed the state of multilateral diplomacy. At one point, he offered a blunt assessment of America’s diminished presence on the…

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Days after Attorney General Pam Bondi tried to put an end to the Justice Department’s revelations about Jeffrey Epstein, captains of the legal resistance gathered by Zoom. Norm Eisen, a former attorney for…

It’s not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of shit, all at once. Ask any Facebook user who has to scroll past 10 screens of engagement-bait, AI slop and surveillance ads just to get to one post by the people…

The skills AI will make more valuable (and how to learn them) By · Published June 16th, 2025 · (opens in new window) On this page: Around half of people are worried they’ll lose their job to AI.1 And they’re right to be concerned: AI can now complete real-world coding tasks on GitHub, generate…

glass-terpiece macOS 26 Tahoe: The Ars Technica review Liquid Glass brings translucent sheen to the typical batch of iterative changes. Andrew Cunningham – Sep 15, 2025 1:00 pm | 285 Credit: Apple Credit: Apple Story text Size Width * Links * Subscribers only Learn more The last time Apple gave…

Important Note: On this blog I speak only for myself as someone experienced in usable security and website authentication. I am not speaking for the company I work for. I encourage linking to and talking about this post, but if you can, please identify me without affiliation.[1] Independent media…

Jacobin‘s fall issue, “Borders,” is out now. Follow this link to get a discounted subscription to our beautiful print quarterly. Deportation as Class Strategy Oliver Eagleton Citizenship by Algorithm Nika Soon-Shiong The Borderland Where Fascism Learned to Rule David Broder From Scapegoats to…

Jacobin‘s fall issue, “Borders,” is out now. Follow this link to get a discounted subscription to our beautiful print quarterly. Deportation as Class Strategy Oliver Eagleton Citizenship by Algorithm Nika Soon-Shiong The Borderland Where Fascism Learned to Rule David Broder From Scapegoats to…

I’ve Got Better Things To Do Than This, and Yet Last week, when I posted my Finder icon suggestion on Mastodon, I mentioned how I don’t really like spending my time talking about this kind of stuff. To clarify, I don’t like doing it when I have other things I would much rather be doing. Lately, I…

Jacobin‘s fall issue, “Borders,” is out now. Follow this link to get a discounted subscription to our beautiful print quarterly. Deportation as Class Strategy Oliver Eagleton Citizenship by Algorithm Nika Soon-Shiong The Borderland Where Fascism Learned to Rule David Broder From Scapegoats to…

A Responsibility to the Industry Firstly, I maintain that it makes absolutely no sense that Alan Dye has the power he has, because he simply has no taste. But what’s worse is that he wields that power so clumsily, so carelessly. And because it goes unchallenged, unchecked by someone higher than him,…

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…

Ninety-two years ago this month, on Monday morning, January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed the 15th chancellor of the Weimar Republic. In one of the most astonishing political transformations in the history of democracy, Hitler set about destroying a constitutional republic through…

Last Thursday morning, a bit before 10 am in Austin and nearly 11 pm in Singapore, Joe Lonsdale had enough of Balaji Srinivasan’s views on China. “This is insane CCP thinking,” Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, wrote to a 300-member Signal group. “Not sure what leaders hang out w you in Singapore…

Back to Mac Feb 10th, 2025 Introduction Almost eight and a half years ago, I switched to using an iPad as my full-time computer, having come from decades of having Macs. In recent years we did get an emergency-use shared/household M2 MacBook Air, which my wife would occasionally take out of the…