Belgium for the win
Justice is done in the face of FIFA corruption.
Why Claude still ships as an Electron app
Claude Code can write native Swift good enough to ship a Mac App Store app. Anthropic’s own Claude desktop app is still built using Electron - a web browser (Chromium) wearing a costume.
Electron bundles a full Chromium browser and a Node.js runtime inside every app, so one codebase renders on Windows, macOS and Linux instead of three native builds. It’s why Slack, Discord and (until recently) Notion feel identical everywhere. It’s also why they’re memory-hungry, slow to open and never quite right: patchy keyboard shortcuts, no proper native menu behaviour, battery life your MacBook resents.
Worth reading - Would Grok vote for Biden?
Elon Musk built Grok as the anti-woke alternative to ChatGPT and Gemini. According to a new analysis of AI political values, it would probably have voted for Biden.
The Economist put five major AI models through a global values survey normally reserved for humans. Every model, including Grok, landed left of centre on questions about wealth, merit and inequality.
Worth reading — Dismantling the manosphere
Twenty-three minutes. That is how long it takes a social media account set up to look like a 16 to 18 year old boy to be shown misogynistic content, according to the audit Tanya Plibersek, Federal minister for social services, cites in this piece. Not sought out. Delivered.
Plibersek’s argument is blunt: young men are not choosing this content, they are being stalked by it. Everyday frustrations, rejection, loneliness, a bad week, get reframed by the algorithm as proof of a system rigged against men. Writing in The Saturday Paper, she traces how that reframing hardens into grievance, and how fast grievance gets monetised.
94 worth-watching films leave SBS On Demand in July
Every month SBS publishes a wall of text listing what is about to vanish from On Demand. Every month it mixes Studio Ghibli classics in with season 7 of some cooking show and a documentary about sharks, all sorted by date, none sorted by whether they are any good.
As I did in previous months I leaned on Claude to build a searchable and sortable page to make it easier to figure out what I really want to watch. SBS really should do this for their audience.
I pulled the full July list, stripped out the series and the reality TV, ran every standalone film past its IMDB rating and kept the ones at 7.0 or above. That left 94 films. The result is a single sortable, searchable page you can filter by rating, genre or leaving date.
Your local AI is about to get faster and it won't cost you a cent
Same hardware. Same model. Same quality output. Up to four times faster. And you don’t have to spend anything to get it.
That’s DSpark - a new text generation technique just published by DeepSeek. If you run AI models locally, this is going to matter to you.
Free text-to-speech on your Mac that's actually good
Text to speech (TTS) is a brilliant service for those who would otherwise be literally speechless. Lost Voice Guy on Britain’s Got Talent rather humorously demonstrated the challenge.
But TTS has broad use. DIY personal podcasts. Read some text when on a walk or in the car. Share a personal update with someone who is more of a listener than a reader.
The good news is you don’t need to pay for a service like ElevenLabs to get quite good TTS. At least not on a Mac. (Don’t ask me about Windows — that’s for someone else to untangle).
Read the book Meta is trying to bury
Meta has a court order stopping Sarah Wynn-Williams from promoting her own book. She cannot talk about it, cannot criticise the company, cannot even sit near a bookshop that stocks it without risking a fine. So let me do the promoting for her.
The book is Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. Wynn-Williams spent six years as Facebook’s global director of public policy. Her memoir is a first-hand account of what the company is like from the inside, and it is not flattering: allegations of sexual harassment, of courting Beijing with censorship tools, of contempt for the very users whose teenagers it studied.
The best model got banned, so I tested Fusion
Three days after Anthropic shipped its best ever model, the US government switched it off for everyone outside America. So I went looking for the next best thing, and OpenRouter reckons it has one.
Worth reading — Alan Turing's secret Delilah project
Alan Turing taught himself electronics from an RCA vacuum tube manual on a ship crossing the Atlantic in 1943. Within months he was in a Nissen hut in the English countryside, building a working voice encryption device that shrank a 50,000 kilogram Bell Labs room-filling machine down to three shoebox-sized units. Donald Bayley was a young electrical engineering graduate who arrived at Hanslope Park in 1944. He found Turing’s soldered circuits looking like a “spider’s nest” and promptly dragged him through breadboarding boot camp.