A few days ago I read a post by Terry Godier entitled Browsers have standards, the App Store has judgment. He explained how he went to upload a new astronomy app to the App Store, but Apple erroneously labeled it an astrology app instead, and so they rejected it. He was leaving out one little detail though, and when he came clean, John Gruber of Daring Fireball had to take down the post he made linking to Terry's:
You can now see the problem that has led me to fully retract my original post, given that my post was entirely predicated on the premise that Godier’s original description of the rejected app was true — that the app “has no tarot function, no horoscopes, and nothing that I, or anyone else I’ve asked, would associate with astrology.” The truth is, the app, as originally submitted by Godier to the App Store (under the name “Asterly”, not “Dark Hours”), was entirely dedicated to astrology, not astronomy, and did in fact include a “Tarot card of the day” feature amongst other occultist horseshit.
via Daring Fireball
That's not all though. Because the App Store turned him down, he decided to launch it as a free web app instead...
...and then the original dev showed up on a Bluesky thread to call him out. Not only does it have an identical name, minus the space between the words, but the code was so similar it even had the same bug that bopped your location over to a random spot in Mexico sometimes.
I honestly don't think it was intentional. I think it's a lesson in things that can go wrong with vibe coding. LLMs are plagiarism machines. They suck down content made by humans and shit it back out as an original idea while telling you you're a genius for coming up with it. And this kind of thing is only going to happen more often the more people blindly trust them to turn ideas into code. Most people can easily spot AI slop images, but code can fly under the radar — everyone has a set of eyeballs, but not everyone is a developer who can compare slop against existing code. Even if they were, who's going to take the time to do that?
Terry is still a super talented guy. As Gruber points out, his RSS app Current is top shelf. And I've made much worse mistakes in life than publishing a slop website with AI-hijacked code.
A user on Reddit called PhyFawkes (thanks SteamDeckHQ) has taken their Steam Deck and done some extraordinary (or sacrilegious things depending on your thoughts) to [it], taking it apart and turning it into a handheld that takes inspiration from the original Game Boy DMG. And it actually works, although mainly as a controller for playing games on your TV for now.
This is sick! I have an Anbernic GBA SP-style handheld, and one of the classic R36S devices, but they're both pretty low tech. They can play anything up to PS1 ROMs though, so that's more than enough for the 90s kid in me. This would be perfect for retro action RPGs and metroidvanias. So many good indie games on Steam I wish I could play on the Anbernic. I'm too dumb to figure something like this out though, and if I had a Steam Deck, the last thing I would ever do is open it up and scramble all of its guts around.
The project received its first public test Friday at the Def Con cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. Swearingen worked with Donut Media to cover a 2009 Toyota Yaris with one of his patterns and drive it past a Flock camera. "We proved it was effective," Swearingen, a cybersecurity professional and founder of SIXCYBER, told TechCrunch.
I would totally deck my Honda out in this wrap 😏
"It was like my body was working, but everything up here was silent, and I was noticing stuff I don’t normally notice,” he said. Apparently, DeLonge wasn’t having much of a better time. Halfway through the set, the guitarist came up to Barker and told him, “I wanna go home.”
"And I was like, ‘Me too,'” Barker continued. “It was so awful.”
Brother, I get too high and have to bail out on a trip to Kroger sometimes. And I'm smoking absolute trash compared to whatever B-Real probably has. I love when someone can actually admit they're too stoned. The kids I grew up with would be like a slab of fucking silly putty stuck to the couch talking about "I don't feel shit bro."
As the eclipse moves over the planet, the European Space Agency (ESA) will stream the event from the Astrophysical Observatory of Javalambre in Teruel, Spain.
Here's the link to the live stream on YouTube tomorrow — and you won't even need to break out your crusty old eclipse glasses from the 90s to watch it.