Linked List: August 25, 2026

Tuesday, 25 August 2026

XCancel, the Twitter/X Mirror, Shuts Down After Cease and Desist From the Fine Folks at X Corp 

XCancel:

On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel.

The service XCancel is stopped until further notice.

We are seeking legal advice and won’t share more details for now.

Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel.

I didn’t want to jinx them, but this obvious threat hanging over their head was the main reason I never linked only to XCancel rather than directly to tweets on x.com. This sucks not just because some people don’t want to visit x.com, but because XCancel was a faster-loading website with no bullshit.

Update: Nitter, the open source project that XCancel was an instance of, got the same cease and desist and also shut down.

Dolly Parton Dies at 80 

Bill Friskics-Warren for The New York Times:

Her death was announced in a video posted on social media by her nephew Bryan Seaver. No cause was provided. Concerns about Ms. Parton’s health were raised last year as she postponed and later canceled a Las Vegas residency, and intensified to the point that she took to social media in October to announce, “I ain’t dead yet.” This May, she said that she had responded well to treatment after her immune and digestive systems had, as she put it, “got all out of whack” in recent years.

From her hardscrabble beginnings to glittering stardom, Ms. Parton’s life was the stuff of make-believe. With her voluptuous figure, sparkly stage costumes and blond bouffant wigs, she was likened by the writer Chet Flippo to the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the Depression-era symbol of abundance. Her songs spoke to millions, confronting privation and loss even as they radiated possibility and hope.

She was, quintessentially, a uniter of people. In 2019, The New York Times ran a story with the headline “Is There Anything We Can All Agree On? Yes: Dolly Parton.”

Hillary Clinton, on Threads:

Dolly Parton did all the good she could, for all the people she could, for as long as ever she could.

From her legendary songwriting to the Imagination Library — which sent 1 million books a month to children across the country — she was the best of America.

Dolly, we’ll miss your great heart.

Parton accomplished so many great things, but man, the Imagination Library is just hard to believe. They’ve distributed over 330 million books to children — and counting. In lieu of flowers or anything else, her family is requesting that any money you might want to contribute to show your appreciation be donated to the library. Count me in.

Update Regarding the Base Prices of the M5 Max Mac Studio 

I made a mistake in my table earlier today regarding the base price of the M5 Max Mac Studio, but my mistake was because of a rather sneaky design in Apple’s purchasing flow. Apple’s web interface looks like this:

Screenshot from Apple.com, showing the 40-core GPU version of the M5 Max Mac Studio as “+ $300”.

Both of the available M5 Max SoCs have 18-core CPUs, but the entry model (that starts at $2,500) has a 32-core GPU, and the upgraded chip has a 40-core GPU. That upgrade is labeled “+ $300”, which makes it look as though the starting price for the 18/40-core model is $2,800. That’s the price I put in the original version of my chart.

But if you select that option, you’ll notice that the actual starting price jumps from $2,500 to $3,100 — a $600 difference, not $300. The reason is that the $2500 18/32-core version only comes with one option for RAM: 36 GB. The 18/40-core chip has three tiers for RAM: 48, 64, and 128 GB. So when you switch from the 18/32-core chip to the 18/40-core chip, you don’t just get 8 extra GPU cores (which Apple is saying costs $300), but the base RAM jumps from 36 to 48 GB, and that costs you an additional $300.

Apple does show a blue notification stripe when you change chips here, which states “Based on your new selection, other parts of your configuration have been updated. Please review the changes.” But because the RAM options are mutually exclusive between the two M5 Max variants, it’s easy to make the mistake I did, and think the base price for the 18/40-core M5 Max Studio is $2,500 + $300 = $2,800, when in fact it’s $2,500 + $300 + $300 = $3,100.

I regret the error, and we all regret how expensive all of this has gotten.

If you already read my “What Is the Point of the DMA?” piece yesterday, this morning I added a lengthy footnote regarding the DMA’s predecessor, the GDPR. Click through to read the entire note, but here’s the kicker:

The GDPR went into effect 10 years ago. By their inaction, they obviously think it’s working just fine. I think they look at the situation and realize, with satisfaction, that every time any website presents a cookie-permission dickover, that dickover effectively has a “Brought to you by the European Commission” badge on it. They were here, they did something, and everyone around the world sees the fruits of the GDPR cookie regulations every time they open their web browser. Job well done.

Apple Introduces M6 and M5 Ultra Chips, in New Mac Mini and Mac Studio 

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today debuted M6 in the new Mac mini and M5 Ultra in the new Mac Studio, providing an extraordinary leap in performance and AI capabilities. M6, Apple’s first state-of-the-art 2-nanometer chip, advances every compute block, delivering gains across every dimension of performance. The chip features a larger 12-core CPU complex with the world’s fastest CPU core, a larger 12-core GPU with Neural Accelerators, a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, and up to 170GB/s of unified memory bandwidth. M5 Ultra, the ultimate powerhouse for pro and AI workloads, uses next-generation UltraFusion technology to form a quad-die architecture for the first time in an M-series system on a chip (SoC). The chip includes an up-to-36-core CPU and up-to-80-core GPU with a massive 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth, 50 percent more than M3 Ultra.

The new Mac Mini (M6 and M5 Pro) and Mac Studio (M5 Max and M5 Ultra) are available for preorder today, but none of them ship until September 22.

All are slated to ship with MacOS 27 Golden Gate. On a background briefing for these new desktops yesterday, I asked if that implied that MacOS 27 would be released to the public on or before September 22, and the folks from Apple just sort of smiled and said they had no comment on anything other than the new hardware.