Rodrigo Ghedin

I almost got hit by a car

In early June, while visiting my parents in a small town in the interior of Brazil, I decided to skip the gym and make a quick run to the pharmacy — the first signs of a migraine had set in, and that’s the best time to take something before it gets worse.

The nearest pharmacy is about 1,5 km (a mile) away. I laced up my running shoes to make it worth the trip: a light walk to pick up the medicine.

On the way back, I decided to change my route and loop through a small square where, when I used to live there, I’d often go for walks.

Almost back at my parents’ house, I crossed a busy avenue without incident. On the other side, I had a momentary lapse and assumed the cross street was one-way. (It actually is — but only on the other side of the avenue.)

I looked one way, saw no cars or motorcycles, and stepped out.

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Apple Intelligence may become mandatory in iOS and macOS 27

Until now, Apple has kept Apple Intelligence — the suite of artificial intelligence tools baked into its operating systems — entirely optional. If you don’t want it, you can simply skip it during a new device setup or when updating the system.

That show of respect for its customers may change with iOS/macOS 27. Reports suggest that, at least in the first beta, Apple Intelligence is mandatory:

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Google will remove the last traces of Manifest v2, the feature that enabled robust ad-blocking extensions like uBlock Origin, in Chrome versions 150 and 151. Chromium forks — Edge and Opera — have signaled they will follow Google’s lead, though no firm deadlines have been set. Manifest v3-compliant ad blockers work, albeit with limitations.

Firefox (and its derivatives) and Safari will continue to support Manifest v2.

The excellent The social network (2010), which dramatized the founding of Facebook, is getting a “companion piece” this October: The social reckoning.

This time, it will depict the events surrounding the release of the “Facebook Papers” — internal documents leaked to the press in 2021 by Frances Haugen, a former Meta (then still Facebook) engineer.

The first trailer shows Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, which I think is a strong casting choice: the voice is uncannily close, and Strong in character comes across as just as odd as the real person who inspired the role. (In the first film, Zuckerberg was played by Jesse Eisenberg.)

Aaron Sorkin wrote the screenplay solo and is also directing. It’s a shame David Fincher didn’t come back to helm the sequel — sorry, the “companion film.” The trailer didn’t give me enough confidence that we’re in for something on par with the original.

Cool links of the week

I collect cool, interesting links spread all over the web and share them here every Thursday. Hope you enjoy! More of them in the archive.

Benny Powers. Benny’s site/portfolio is a desktop straight out of the beloved Gnome 2.

Paint.NET at paint.net. After 22 years, the developer of Windows image editor Paint.NET finally secured the matching domain — thanks to the greed of its previous owners.

Rejected Emoji Proposals. Emoji is serious business. For a new one to appear on your phone, it has to clear a committee. This page collects the ones that didn’t make the cut. There are plenty — and some of them are actually great.

Stream Spigot. Generate secret RSS/JSON feeds to read the people you follow on Mastodon and Bluesky, plus specific profiles on X, in your favorite RSS reader app.

eyeball. A line from 0 to 6,500. A number somewhere in that range appears on screen. Your challenge: guess where on the line it falls.

Protecting the Blue Corridors. A gorgeous site mapping the migration routes of different whale species and the main threats they face. The “Flat (Dynamic)” mode displays the data as an interactive timeline.

heerich.js. heerich.js is a minimalist JavaScript engine that constructs 3D voxel compositions and distills them into pristine SVG.

How AI chatbots manipulate you and undermine your privacy

At the risk of being among the first victims of artificial intelligence in a potential machine uprising, I keep my interactions with today’s generative AIs (or AI chatbots) strictly transactional.

I open the site, ask or request what I need, get the answer, close the site. No names, no pleases, no thank-yous, no small talk. I avoid anthropomorphizing them as much as possible. I treat them for what they are: statistical machines churning out words that make sense, not a new form of sentient life — at least, not yet.

Keeping a transactional relationship with AI chatbots is, for me, a way of keeping the line between us clearly drawn, to ward off an unlikely — but not impossible — “AI psychosis,” the kind of spiral where someone genuinely believes the AI is alive.

A newly published report by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), authored by researchers Ruchika Joshi, Adinawa Adjagbodjou and Michal Luria, gave me further reasons to stand by that approach.

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Cool links of the week

I collect cool, interesting links spread all over the web and share them here every Thursday. Hope you enjoy! More of them in the archive.

How diamonds are made? An interesting story on a beautifully designed website. Tip: hold your finger or cursor over the 3D diamond to move it around.

It’s time to talk about my writerdeck. Veronica took an old laptop and transformed it into a disconnected digital typewriter. (If you prefer, there’s a video version too.)

Is AI profitable yet? A tracker of spending and revenue for cutting-edge AI companies. It’s a gold rush: the only profitable one is the one selling the shovels and pickaxes (Nvidia).

Placedog. A free stock image library of everyone’s favorite best friend: dogs[citation needed].

Historic WordPress. Copies of the admin dashboard and default theme from the earliest WordPress versions, including the most beautiful wp-admin of all time (2.5).

Kill Yr Substack. A browser extension that replaces Substack links (including custom domains) with archived copies from Archive.org. For Chrome and Firefox; manual installation.

Markerhighlight.js. A JavaScript library for generating text highlights. Analog-style highlights — yellow marker pen, red circles, that sort of thing.

WhatCable. A free and FOSS application for macOS that identifies USB-C cable specs and displays them in plain English. (Did you know USB-C cables vary widely? It’s more of a non-standardized standard.)

At the opening of Build 2026, Microsoft lived up to the nature of the event — focused on developers — and announced, among other things, a slew of updates to make Windows 11 more appealing to this audience. The linuxification of Windows is moving forward at full steam, now with native coreutils and container support in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Beyond that, plenty of things involving AI “agents” — the big theme this year — including native support for OpenClaw.

Wipr 2 expands Safari ad blocking to all other apps

Wipr 2 icon.Wipr 2, the Safari ad blocker created by Kaylee Serena (and the one I use), got a new feature that extends its functionality system-wide: Filtr.

Developed over the past ten months, it makes use of a new technology introduced in version 26 of Apple’s operating systems, the URL Filter. According to Kaylee, it allows you to “to block network requests system-wide without having access to any network traffic at all, and with more granularity than previous solutions.” She says this is the first app to make use of the URL Filter.

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