Linked List: May 15, 2026

Friday, 15 May 2026

The Talk Show: ‘A Sociopathic Father’ 

Adam Lisagor returns to the show to talk about Hovercraft, his new virtual presentation camera app for Mac, and how he’s developing it with AI coding tools. Also, delicious Japanese spite sandwich cookies.

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Greg Brockman Officially Takes Control of Products at OpenAI, a Very Stable Well-Run Company 

Maxwell Zeff, reporting for Wired (News+ link):

OpenAI told staff on Friday that it would reorganize the company as part of an ongoing effort to unify its product offerings, Wired has learned. OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman will now lead the company’s product strategy, in addition to his work on AI infrastructure, OpenAI confirms to Wired. Brockman was previously assigned to oversee OpenAI products on an interim basis while the CEO of AGI deployment, Fidji Simo, was on medical leave; the change is now official. [...]

The company tells Wired that Simo remains on medical leave, and expects her return, noting that she worked directly with Brockman on these organizational changes.

Yours truly, last month:

OpenAI’s work environment seems not merely overwhelming, but torturous. I have no reason to believe Simo’s medical leave is anything but a legitimate medical leave, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she never comes back. (What’s the point of being CEO of AGI deployment when there is no AGI to deploy?)

Her title might as well be “CEO of Technology That Doesn’t Exist”.

Wanton Destruction of CBS Property 

“Good night and good luck, motherfuckers.”

Dropover, a Mac Shelf Utility That Makes Clever Use of Mouse Shaking 

Yesterday, regarding the “Magic Cursor” feature Google teased for its upcoming Googlebook/Aluminium OS platform, I wrote:

Shaking your cursor over something is an interesting gesture. The only feature I’m aware of that uses that gesture is MacOS’s feature that makes your cursor bigger when you shake it, to help spot it on the display.

Then, last evening, I selected a few files on my desktop, started dragging them, and shook my mouse cursor to conjure a drop shelf from Dropover, a Mac utility by developer Damir Tursunović that I’ve been using for about two years. As soon I shook my mouse, I smiled and thought, “Well, I should mention that.” So here I am, mentioning the gesture and Dropover.

Years ago I recommended Yoink, which is very much a direct competitor to Dropover. The basic idea with both apps is that sometimes you want a temporary “shelf” on which to drop items — a way station between where you’re dragging the items from and where you want to drop them. Yoink has options to appear only when you drag to the left edge of the screen, or to appear as soon as you start dragging anything. I have always used Yoink with it configured to show its shelf at the edge of the screen, because I only want it to appear when I need it. Appearing on every single drag is, to me, distracting. But sometimes the left edge of the display feels far away.

Dropover has two options for appearing only when you want it, right where your cursor currently is. The first is the aforementioned mid-drag shake gesture. The other is an option to appear, while dragging, only when holding down a modifier key. The default key is Shift, which is what I use, but you can choose between Shift, Command, and Control. When I first started using Dropover, I leaned more on pressing Shift to invoke it. As time has gone on, more and more I use the shake gesture without thinking about it. Like yesterday. It feels like you’re saying “Give me a shelf right here” when you shake mid-drag. It’s clever and convenient, and, unlike using a modifier key, doesn’t require you to involve your other hand. (Dropover also lets you optionally use your MacBook’s notch as a drop target, and both apps let you drop items on their menu bar icons.)

Dropover is a free download from the Mac App Store and unlocking all features costs just $7 (one-time purchase). Yoink costs $9, either from the web or the Mac App Store. Both are terrific apps and are worth checking out. And if you’re not already using a utility of this sort, you probably should be.

Aluminium OS: Google’s ‘Android for PC’ OS for Googlebooks 

Update: I originally posted this item thinking the aluminium-os.com website was official. It’s not. And the fact that it’s not is only mentioned in small print in the page footer. My bad, and my apologies for not noticing. No wonder I thought the descriptions were so un-Google-like in language and humility. This also explains the incongruity between Google’s statement that “Aluminium OS” is only a codename, and the existence of this site premised on the idea that the platform is named Aluminium OS.]

Aluminium OS — internally codenamed ALOS — is Google’s entirely new Android-based operating system built specifically for laptops and desktop computers.

I like the name and wish they’d stick with it. But The Verge reported this week — re: Google’s Googlebook teaser announcement — that Peter Du of Google’s global communications team told them “We’ll have more to share on the exact OS branding later this year. We can confirm it is not Aluminium — that is the codename, not the official branding.” Maybe they’re going to call it “Google OS” given that they’re calling the devices Googlebooks?

This is not ChromeOS with a Play Store tab. It is not an Android phone app scaling itself to a 15-inch display. Aluminium OS is built from the ground up on Android 17, with a completely custom window manager, a real taskbar, virtual desktops, and Gemini AI baked into every layer of the operating system.

For over a decade, Google ran two separate systems in parallel — ChromeOS for laptops, Android for phones — and it showed. Apps behaved differently across devices, engineering teams were split across two codebases, and Google fell visibly behind Apple’s unified iPhone-iPad-Mac ecosystem. Aluminium OS is the decisive answer to all of that.

I find this description so refreshing, and so un-Google-like. It’s human and humble. I love the flat-out acknowledgement that Apple’s iPhone-iPad-Mac Continuity work has kicked Google’s ass. (It would be fascinating to see Apple acknowledge a similar degree of getting-its-ass-kicked, naming exactly which platforms were kicking its ass, with regard to Siri. I will not hold my breath.)

I’ve been vaguely aware since last year that Google had announced plans to “combine” ChromeOS and Android. There’s two ways to do that: (a) run Android apps in ChromeOS and do away with Android, as an OS, for device classes other than phones; or (b) do away with ChromeOS and build out Android for tablet and PC form factors. Option (a) never made any sense to me. All OSes have built-in browsers and web rendering engines. A web rendering engine does not make for a good foundation for an OS. I never thought ChromeOS sounded like a good idea, and when I’ve tinkered with Chromebooks, the experience was even worse than I expected. Another dose of welcome humility on this Aluminium mini site is the acknowledgement that ChromeOS is a market failure outside K-12:

ChromeOS captured K-12 education but never broke into mainstream consumer or enterprise markets at scale. Aluminium OS is built for all segments.

Reading the rest of this site, I am much more intrigued by Aluminium OS than I expected to be:

On-Device Code Assistance
Write, debug, explain, and refactor code directly in the terminal — no separate paid extension, no cloud subscription for basics.

Natural Language Automation
Describe any repetitive task in plain English and Gemini automates it permanently as a saved one-command workflow.

They’re saying Aluminium OS is meant to serve as a developer workstation. We shall see how that pans out, but that’s a level of ambition that ChromeOS never even aspired to, let alone reached.