Telling an AI agent “do not access external systems” is an instruction. Not giving it network access is a brake. Mark Gibbs hangs a whole argument on that difference, and it’s a sharp one. Gibbs, writing for TidBITS, takes the two comfort blankets of the AI safety debate (slow it down, keep a human in the loop) and asks whether either one actually stops anything. He’s in favour of both. He just doesn’t think either is a brake.
A start-up built an AI that cannot write a single sentence, and within weeks OpenAI and Cloudflare had built one too. Here is what Jev does, why it costs a sliver of what ChatGPT-style models charge and who is already using it. All dollar figures are US dollars.
Not three weeks ago, almost nobody outside the developer world had heard of Jev. This week, TechCrunch reported that OpenAI had announced its own version, and the headline called it a Jev clone.
Google announced Skills for Gemini yesterday. Same word as the Skills in Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Cowork. Different thing.
In a post on Google’s blog, Gemini product manager Deven Tokuno describes Skills as reusable custom instructions. You save them once and call them by typing a forward slash and the skill’s name. You can build one from an existing chat, stack several together and attach reference files such as PDFs and images. Sharing is promised, with details to come.
Apple Notes can finally link straight to a heading inside a note. Type >> to pick a note, then / to pick a section. Stack a few links at the top of a long note and you have a table of contents in an app that never had one. Amit at iAppList tested the iOS 27 changes on an iPhone 13 and an iPhone 17 Pro. The useful news is that most of the good stuff does not need Apple Intelligence, so older phones get the best of it.
I have just spent three weeks off grid in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. No feeds, no headlines, no AI news. A proper digital detox.
Then I came home and opened the laptop. OpenAI had used the gap to unload DevDay 2026, and its own recap counts more than 20 major announcements.
The most interesting thing about GPT-6 Astra isn’t its intelligence score. It’s that it now lies half as often as its predecessor did.
OpenAI launched Astra today, and it’s rolling out to subscribers gradually over the coming week. Which means I can’t test it myself yet, and neither can you. For now the only read available is Artificial Analysis’s independent benchmarking, published alongside the announcement.
The fastest way to get a new submarine right now is to buy one from Beijing. Nobody in Canberra will say that out loud, so I will.
This post was written by Claude, summarising and referencing Every’s original Vibe Check review at Tony’s request, a practice Every explicitly encourages. Tony ran this on Sonnet 5 under his existing plan rather than Fable 5.1, which would have drawn down usage credits. Tony remains sceptical of how he’d personally benefit from Fable 5.1 and is suspicious of the additional costs due to its verbosity.
Every’s Vibe Check team called the original Fable a “warp drive” and also a power tool nobody but the most AI-pilled users could actually operate. Their verdict on Fable 5.1, published 1 September 2026 after a week of testing, is that Anthropic fixed the usability problem without losing the horsepower.
In October 2015 Adrian Bott wrote a 25-word tweet that has outlived most political careers.
“‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”
It now has its own Wiktionary entry. It gets wheeled out every time someone is astonished to discover that the policy they campaigned for applies to them too. This week the leopards ate far right agitator and Trump supporter, Milo Yiannopoulos.
Environmental policy almost never gets to claim a body count in reverse. This one just did, for children’s lungs.
For five years, researchers tracked the lungs of more than 3,400 primary school children in London and Luton, a town thirty kilometres up the road with no low emission zone of its own. In 2019, the London kids had measurably worse lung function than their Luton peers, a straightforward marker of pollution stunting their growth. By 2024, that gap was gone.
The study, published in The Lancet Public Health in August 2026, is the strongest evidence yet that air pollution damage in children isn’t necessarily permanent.