I think everyone is floored by this $1.5 billion settlement. Anthropic essentially won on fair use, so I just assumed the pirated books settlement was going to be a little more low-key than this. Hope the authors see most of the money. Never a dull moment in AI land!

The Verge

Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion to authors in landmark AI settlement

Lawyers said it’s believed to be the largest-ever settlement in a US copyright case, paying about $3,000 per book.

Sarah Perez reporting on a Common Sense Media assessment of Gemini: "Common Sense also said that Gemini’s products for kids and teens ignored how younger users needed different guidance and information than older ones. As a result, both were labeled as “High Risk” in the overall rating, despite the filters added for safety." This is part of what is probably a major shift underway at AI companies to worry less about helping create biological weapons and more about kids and psychological safety. Maybe futurists think too much about the sci-fi inevitabilities and not enough about today.

TechCrunch

Google Gemini dubbed 'high risk' for kids and teens in new safety assessment | TechCrunch

Google's Gemini comes up short on kids' safety, says Common Sense Media.

This is great. James Dempsey’s Liquid Glass song: "I made the lyrics as intelligible… as Liquid Glass controls are legible. Come on everyone, sing along! You don’t know the words, but neither do I. 🎶"

Liquid Glass: The Song

Kagi News looks good! First they define the problem: "Driven by relentless ad monetization, news has become mental junk food - an endless stream of clickbait that destroys our ability to think deeply and clearly."

Kagi News

Kagi News

Kagi News distills thousands of world-wide news sources into one perfect daily briefing. Get every critical perspective in just 5 minutes. No endle...

Kagi News

Kagi News

Kagi News distills thousands of world-wide news sources into one perfect daily briefing. Get every critical perspective in just 5 minutes. No endle...

White House dinner comment draft

Manton Reece - White House dinner comment draft

Texas is adding state parks faster than I can visit them. Bear Creek: "Not only does the site provide access to the Frio River, Spring Creek, as well as its namesake Bear Creek, but there are several streams, canyons and ridges providing an idyllic background for hikers." 🏕️

Texas Parks and Wildlife

News Release: Aug. 25, 2025: 1,720-acre Bear Creek State Park Becomes Latest Acquisition to Texas State Parks

News Release, Aug. 25, 2025: 1,720-acre Bear Creek State Park Becomes Latest Acquisition to Texas State Parks

There have been a lot of improvements to Micro.blog lately. If you don’t follow the @news account closely, you can also subscribe to the weekly email of posts from news.micro.blog, delivered every Monday.

Micro.blog - @news

Micro.blog News - Subscribe

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Micro.blog News

Seeing this sign after parking my car… Not so much worried as I am curious how bad it must be to order a custom sign for this.

Dusting off a little of the queued up work for JSON Feed. Thanks to Daniel Pietzsch, the JSON Feed Validator now has a JSON API, if any apps need to hook into validating JSON Feeds using it. There’s a new format=json URL parameter.

JSON Feed

Daniel Pietzsch

Daniel Pietzsch

I’m a web developer based in Düsseldorf, Germany. I make a RSS feed reader called FeedCity. I co-organise the local Homebrew Website Club. I’m...

JSON Feed Validator

Ever since first adding book reading to Micro.blog, I’ve tried to avoid recreating my own book database. So we lean on Google Books, Open Library, Goodreads, and even (for a while) paying for metadata. I think that approach has run its course. Going to add our own book curation and cover tools.

I know I go on and on too much about AI sometimes, but… OpenAI’s Codex continues to amaze me. You can have it just watch a GitHub repo for pull requests, then automatically check the new code and add a comment if anything looks wrong. 🤯 Great for a tiny team with not enough eyeballs on things.

As a VC-backed company, perhaps The Browser Company was always going to need to sell. My initial reaction is Atlassian seems a weird fit. But maybe not? From The Verge: "Miller is clear, even forceful, that Dia is not about to become just a wrapper for Atlassian apps, or shift to thinking primarily about IT managers and enterprise features. Dia is still for individual users. It’s just that now, it’s primarily for individual users at work." I’m really enjoying Dia. I’ll probably keep using it unless or until it gets worse.

The Verge

The company behind the Dia and Arc browsers is being acquired

$610 million is a pretty big number for a web browser

Kind of odd if someone has a link to schedule a meeting on their website, but they don’t share an email address or any other contact info. Is email a lost art? It still works. Simple, everywhere.

If you’re on the iOS 26 beta and use Micro.blog, you may want to try switching to our TestFlight beta. It is updated with very minimal Liquid Glass support. Nothing drastic, most of the app is going to stay flat and non-squishy.

Join the Micro.blog beta

Available on iOS

Thought about burning an expedited review request with Apple. It has been many years since I asked for one. But also, reviews are consistently 24 hours, so don’t want to risk making things worse than just waiting.

Sounds like things are moving forward on a possible Gemini-powered Siri. Mark Gurman reports on an agreement between Google and Apple for testing, and a bunch more about Apple’s plans and new Siri architecture: "Apple is rebuilding Siri around three core components: a planner, the search systems for the web and devices, and a summarizer. The planner interprets voice or text input and decides how to respond; the search system scans the web or user data; and the summarizer pulls it all together into an answer."

Bloomberg.com

Apple Plans AI-Powered Web Search Tool for Siri to Rival OpenAI, Perplexity

Apple Inc. is planning to launch its own artificial intelligence-powered web search tool next year, stepping up competition with OpenAI and Perplex...

I was pretty excited about the new Epilogue release until we released I had messed up signing in for new users. Bug fix submitted to Apple. 🙁

Manton Reece - Epilogue 2.0

Oh wow, the smaller reMarkable tablet looks really good. I think they’ve got a winner on their hands. Might still be a bit too pricey for me, but I love the size and design of it.

The Verge

Remarkable’s Paper Pro Move digital notepad is smaller than a paperback

The first digital notebook that’s as small as a notepad.

Epilogue 2.0

Manton Reece - Epilogue 2.0

Jeremy Cherfas blogging about the linkrot that will hit when Typepad shuts down: "Links are the foundation that supports the world wide web, and I take them seriously. I correct broken links when I come across them, archive my own stuff (and support archive.org), and generally try to get to the original behind anything I choose to link to." This is why Micro.blog has a feature to automatically archive everything you link to. (Seriously! Here’s a video explaining it.) But I think Micro.blog is probably too new to contain a large number of Typepad links.

Doing Typepad’s Dirty Work | Jeremy Cherfas