Linked List: October 25, 2025

Saturday, 25 October 2025

‘Boring Is What We Wanted’ 

Stephen Hackett, writing at 512 Pixels:

Apple silicon has been nothing but upside for the Mac, and yet some seem bored already. In the days since Apple announced the M5, I’ve seen and heard this sentiment more than I expected:

This is just another boring incremental upgrade.

That 👏 is 👏 the 👏 point.

Back in the PowerPC and Intel days, Macs would sometimes go years between meaningful spec bumps, as Apple waited on its partners to deliver appropriate hardware for various machines. From failing NVIDIA cards in MacBook Pros to 27-inch Intel iMacs that ran so hot the fans were audible at all times, Mac hardware wasn’t always what Apple wanted.

Consider the MacBook Air — by all accounts the most popular Mac Apple sells. There was a March 2015 update, and then a very minor speed bump in June 2017. That June 2017 update was so insignificant that it didn’t even warrant its own press release from Apple. All it got from Apple was, at the very end of a press release touting updates to the iMac, MacBook Pro, and late great 12-inch MacBook, this single sentence: “Apple today also updated the 13-inch MacBook Air with a 1.8 GHz processor.”

It wasn’t until the very end of October 2018 that Apple released a significant MacBook Air update — the first models with retina displays. For the three-and-a-half-year stretch between March 2015 and October 2018, there wasn’t a single notable MacBook Air refresh — at a time when all other Macs had gone retina. Intel’s processor offerings were so unpalatable during that stretch that Apple just didn’t update their most popular Mac model.

WorkOS 

My thanks to WorkOS for their continuing support of DF with another sponsorship week. With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. WorkOS provides a complete user management solution along with SSO, SCIM, and RBAC. The APIs are modular and easy-to-use, allowing integrations to be completed in minutes instead of months. WorkOS simplifies MCP authorization with a single API built on five OAuth standards.

Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including OpenAI, Cursor, and Vercel.

For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.

Sora Has a Pervert Problem 

Katie Notopoulos, writing at Business Insider:

There are really two separate issues at hand: Should users be allowed to make fetish content of any woman who is stupid enough (like me) to allow anyone to make cameos of her? And how do you stop people from making fetish content of purely AI-generated characters that aren’t cameos of real people? Does OpenAI want to stop that? Maybe OpenAI thinks it’s fine for people to make belly-flation or foot-fetish videos as long as they’re not of a real person.

For now, I keep going back to a thought I had early on while scrolling Sora: There’s hardly any women on here, and it’s no wonder why. Women innately understand the risk of letting anyone make videos with their faces — the likelihood of something being creepy is extremely high. These fetish videos are kind of goofy — I have to admit I even cracked up a little at the centaur one — but overall, it’s an icky and somewhat menacing feeling seeing a lot of them.