Linked List: September 6, 2026

Sunday, 6 September 2026

Meta AI Has a Native Mac App Now, and It Seems Decent ★

Zac Hall, writing for 9to5Mac on August 19:

The new Meta AI desktop app is version 1.0 beta at launch and weighs just 16MB once installed. Based on initial inspection, it runs natively on Apple silicon Macs with macOS 15 or later, using an AppKit and SwiftUI shell with WebKit for richer chat content. In other words, this is not an Electron app or a repackaged iPad release.

It includes Mac-specific hooks, making the desktop experience more robust than the Meta AI mobile app. Quick Invoke uses Option-Space to place a compact Meta AI composer over whatever you are doing. A separate dictation feature lets you hold a shortcut, speak, and have the resulting words typed into any app, from Mail and documents to code editors.

Meta AI can also attach another Mac window to a conversation. With Screen Recording and Accessibility permission, the app reads the window’s visible text and captures a screenshot for the next question. This is context gathering rather than computer control for now.

Passes the Settings window sniff test too — it actually has a Settings window. Meta, institutionally, seems more keen on native Mac apps than they are native Windows apps.

Update: The Mac app is not available in the App Store. You need to download it directly from Meta’s web page, using the “Download for Mac (Beta)” link. The ChatGPT and Claude Mac apps aren’t in the Mac App Store either — they do too many things outside the App Store’s mandatory sandbox (and probably use APIs require that special entitlements in the App Store too).

WorkOS: How to Give an Agent a Task Instead of a Token ★

My thanks to WorkOS for once again sponsoring Daring Fireball. Give an agent an access token and it spreads: into the context window, into tool call logs, into notes it keeps between steps. Each copy works from anywhere, long after the fact.

Relay keeps the credential at WorkOS. Your agent names the user, WorkOS attaches that token, refreshes it, and releases it only to allowlisted hosts. A hijacked agent session is a live process you can kill.

Learn how it works at WorkOS’s blog.

Matt Haughey: ‘The Car Industry A/B Tested Selling a Car With and Without CarPlay and the Results Are Not Shocking’ ★

Matt Haughey:

One case in point is the Honda Prologue EV. It’s a partnership between Honda and Chevrolet, where the Prologue is basically a Chevy Blazer EV with Honda badges, slight visual differences in the sheetmetal and interior, but all the underpinnings are straight up Chevy. Even though the keys say Honda on a Prologue, it’s a General Motors key design with a Honda logo over it.

But one big difference the Prologue has from the Blazer it is based on is this: it includes Apple CarPlay and Android Auto integration. [...]

For the years these cars were sold together, the Honda outsold the Blazer by 43%, 73%, and 166% in each time period. Today in 2026, people are buying a Honda Prologue over one and a half times more often than the Chevy Blazer EV the Prologue is based on.

It’s not a perfect test. It’s reasonable to argue that Honda has a better brand and reputation than Chevrolet, and is just plain better at selling cars. But the trendline over the last three years is pretty stark.

Trump Administration Launches Rip-Off Video Games at Arcade.gov ★

A handful of Temu-style knockoffs of games like Flappy Bird, Snake (that’s the one where you round up border-crossing migrants), and, most notably, Tetris (the one where you “build a wall” to keep border-crossing migrants out) — the copyright to which is held by the notoriously litigious The Tetris Company, which tweeted:

At Tetris we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them. To our fans everywhere: we love you, we see you, and we’re grateful to have you in our community.

P.S. The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall’.

P.P.S. We take copyright infringement very seriously.

Whatever you think of these games, just like with the rebranding of Lake Ontario, Trump Arcade shows American voters that this administration is focused on their problems and concerns.

Gurman on Schiller’s Departure and Ternus’s Goals for the App Store ★

Mark Gurman, in his weekend Power On column at Bloomberg (gift link):

The Schiller exit is a bit more notable. Unlike Maestri, he still had a real job: The veteran executive ran the App Store and Apple Events. The App Store portion alone is no joke. It generates an estimated $30 billion a year and can be very challenging to manage. Apple’s app marketplace is loved by many consumers, but often criticized by developers and subjected to increasingly onerous regulations. It was a busy, all-encompassing gig and nowhere near a semiretirement. Apple Events, meanwhile, is how the company communicates its new product launches to customers. It’s also nothing close to fun and games.

Now, Schiller is 66 and clearly wanted to have some semblance of retirement. He can focus on philanthropy and spend more time with family. But there’s a bit more to the story, I’m told. Ternus and services chief Eddy Cue want to make even more money from the App Store and figure out ways to raise margins and squeeze additional recurring revenue from the platform. Schiller, on the other hand, seems to believe that such moves will only further irk developers and governments. While there was no internal blowup or anything like that, it’s something he wanted no part of.

I sure hope that’s not true, because that would be awful — making a bad situation worse — and pretty much the exact opposite of what Apple ought to do.

From the archive: Schiller, in a 2011 email to Cue and Steve Jobs:

Just as one thought, once we are making over $1B a year in profit from the App Store, is that enough to then think about a model where we ratchet down from 70/30 to 75/25 or even 80/20 if we can maintain a $1B a year run rate? I know that is controversial, I just tee it up as another way to look at the size of the business, what we want to achieve, and how we stay competitive. Again, just food for thought.

Dickover of the Week: Slashdot Put One in Their RSS Feed ★

How does this even happen? Who is this for? What possible purpose could by served by injecting a “We value your privacy” dickover into an RSS feed via iframes in the entry bodies?

Litterbox: Safari Extension for Viewing X Tweets ★

In the wake of Nitter/XCancel’s demise, here’s a delightful new Safari extension from Zhenyi Tan (of And a Dinosaur fame):

But sometimes people still post X content. Maybe you want to see Gruber roast Google Design. Maybe you want to see posts by Federico Viticci who recently returned to X. So I made Litterbox, a Safari extension that opens x.com links in a popup. The idea is you open it, take a look, gag a little, then close the lid. [...]

Litterbox doesn’t send your cookies when you open those popups, because of course. It uses the same API X uses for its website embeds. I don’t think they’ll kill the website embed feature. But if they do, it will be very funny.

I love it. I’ve got it installed even though I don’t avoid visiting X.com. It’s just faster and nicer to view tweets in Litterbox’s popup. And if I do want to proceed to X.com, there’s a link at the bottom of the popup. Perfect.