Linked List: October 25, 2026

Sunday, 25 October 2026

Sunnny 

My thanks to Sunnny for sponsoring last week at DF. Sunnny’s pitch to B2B companies is simple: you store valuable customer information across a myriad of systems, making it hard to get a simple overview. Sunnny consolidates your customer data, cleans it, resolves identities, identifies relationships, and presents it neatly for you, your team, and your AI model.

Early access is open now.

Duo Users Are Registering the Base of Their Index Finger as a Touch ID Coping Strategy 

Some guy on Reddit (with an illustration video):

Saw this online, tried it, and it works beautifully. Basically, I registered the lowest part of my right index finger. That part of the finger sits naturally when you go to swipe up at the phone.

This resolves a major issue I had where I couldn’t easily just look at my phone to glance through notifications on the lock screen. Now, it’s never been easier (shown at the end of the video).

This is arguably better than Face ID. The speed is up there, and the phone doesn’t need to be facing directly at you to unlock, this motion can be done as soon as you pick up the phone.

Tim Hardwick at MacRumors quotes the “arguably better than Face ID” line.

This idea is clever, and it does seem to work if you grip the Duo just right, but the idea that this is better than Face ID is a joke. Copium is a strong drug but it wears off quickly.

The Talk Show: ‘Lubricate the Inside of the Hinge’ 

Special guest: Joanna Stern.
Special topic: The iPhone Duo.

Sponsored by:

  • Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off and one free breakfast item per box for one year, while supplies last, with code talkshow50off.
  • Notion: The collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side, with a developer platform teams can build on.
iPhone Portrait Mode, 10 Years In 

Speaking of Johnnie Manzari, he wrote a post yesterday marking the 10 year anniversary of Portrait Mode:

Initially, Portrait mode was seen as a giant math problem. You’d do disparity calculations on the two sensors and output a depth map. The problem was this approach feels and looks digital; it feels fake. In areas without texture, it’s impossible to do this calculation. In areas with ultra fine detail, a lower resolution depth map leads to terrible transitions and a full resolution depth map takes forever to compute. One solution would be to reduce the amount of bokeh so the issues are not as obvious. But then you lose the whole point of the feature, which was to make it look like you had a large, wide-open lens.

The solution to this conundrum — the tradeoff between artifacts and the amount of blur — was quite elegant, but it took a while to stumble across. There’s a saying in painting that if you get the eyes right, nothing else matters. Inspired by this principle from oil painting, the idea was to make sure we never got the eyes wrong.

Matthew Panzarino:

I remember getting the call to test out portrait mode before its release. The marriage of history, art and computational science that came together to make this possible is still incredible to me to this day.