macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 8
Apple today provided developers with the eighth beta of macOS Tahoe 26 for testing purposes, with the update coming a week after the seventh beta.
The release notes don’t call out any changes since beta 5.
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Archive for August 25, 2025
iOS 26 Developer Beta 8
Apple today provided developers with the eighth betas of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 for testing purposes, with the updates coming a week after Apple seeded the seventh betas.
The release notes don’t call out any changes since beta 5.
Historically, since iOS 13, beta 8 has been the last beta of the summer cycle before the release candidate builds. That suggests that today’s seed is as good as it gets before release — this is it, folks, this is iOS 26.
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Bluesky Blocking Access to Mississippi
Bluesky (via Hacker News):
Mississippi’s approach [to child safety] would fundamentally change how users access Bluesky. The Supreme Court’s recent decision leaves us facing a hard reality: comply with Mississippi’s age assurance law—and make every Mississippi Bluesky user hand over sensitive personal information and undergo age checks to access the site—or risk massive fines. The law would also require us to identify and track which users are children, unlike our approach in other regions. We think this law creates challenges that go beyond its child safety goals, and creates significant barriers that limit free speech and disproportionately harm smaller platforms and emerging technologies.
[…]
Mississippi’s new law and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) are very different. Bluesky follows the OSA in the UK. There, Bluesky is still accessible for everyone, age checks are required only for accessing certain content and features, and Bluesky does not know and does not track which UK users are under 18. Mississippi’s law, by contrast, would block everyone from accessing the site—teens and adults—unless they hand over sensitive information, and once they do, the law in Mississippi requires Bluesky to keep track of which users are children.
Laws like these favor tech giants (which have the money to throw at compliance) and require the collection of sensitive identification material from every user for any purpose. As anyone who has followed the data leaks in the Tea app already knows, strict ID requirements for all users open up enormous risks for all users.
[…]
The case is being appealed and Justice Brett Kavanaugh has gone so far as to write, that the appealing party “has, in my view, demonstrated that it is likely to succeed on the merits—namely, that enforcement of the Mississippi law would likely violate its members’ First Amendment rights under this Court’s precedents.”
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US Government Takes 10% Stake in Intel
Kif Leswing (via Hacker News):
Intel, the only American company capable of making advanced chips on U.S. soil, said in a press release that the government made an $8.9 billion investment in Intel common stock, purchasing 433.3 million shares at a price of $20.47 per share, giving it a 10% stake in the company. Intel noted that the price the government paid was a discount to the current market price.
Of the total, $5.7 billion of the government funds will come from grants under the CHIPS Act that had been awarded but not paid, and $3.2 billion will come from separate government awards under a program to make secure chips.
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The government will also have a warrant to buy an additional 5% of Intel shares if the company is no longer majority owner of its foundry business.
[…]
Earlier this week, Intel announced another major backer, when SoftBank said it would make a $2 billion investment in the chipmaker, equal to about 2% of the company.
Intel will continue to deliver on its Secure Enclave obligations and reaffirmed its commitment to delivering trusted and secure semiconductors to the U.S. Department of Defense.
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“As the only semiconductor company that does leading-edge logic R&D and manufacturing in the U.S., Intel is deeply committed to ensuring the world’s most advanced technologies are American made,” said Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel.
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The government’s investment in Intel will be a passive ownership, with no Board representation or other governance or information rights. The government also agrees to vote with the Company’s Board of Directors on matters requiring shareholder approval, with limited exceptions.
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The existing claw-back and profit-sharing provisions associated with the government’s previously dispersed $2.2 billion grant to Intel under the CHIPS Act will be eliminated to create permanency of capital as the company advances its U.S. investment plans.
On the one hand, this seems to come out of the blue, but it’s kind of just making Intel’s implicit quasi-government status more explicit. In addition to being a direct military supplier, Intel is at least as strategic as GM was during the GFC, and no American government is going to allow it to fail. It’s not clear to me how much strong-arming the deal required. With the funds already committed, you could look at this as the government just taking shares that were not part of the original CHIPS deal. What Intel is getting in return is the removal of some restrictive conditions, in exchange for essentially non-voting shares. Is that worth more than the dilution to shareholders? Did Congress authorize this? What happens from here? Maybe the government becomes a long-term partner, and maybe it’s not such a silent partner in reality. Maybe, with the provisions removed, Intel starts buying back shares, the stock price goes up, investors are happy, and the government sells its stake that “cost nothing” and claims victory.
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Git Tower 14
This update allows you to create custom Git workflows, enabling you to define and enforce the exact workflow that meets your project’s needs.
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The first step is to define your core branches, i.e., your “trunk” (e.g.,
main,master) and “base” (e.g.,develop,dev) branches so that you can establish the foundational structure of your repository. […] For each topic branch type, you can set specific branch prefixes (e.g.,feature/,hotfix/). This clarifies intent and ensures consistency across your team and can be used for automated checks and organization.[…]
Next, you can take full control of how changes flow through your branches. You can now define distinct downstream merge strategies (merging the parent into your topic branch to keep it up to date) and upstream merge strategies (merging a branch into its parent to finalize topic branches).
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Retcon 1.4
Enjoy staggering performance improvements. Every last part of the app has been thoroughly tuned: Retcon is now incredibly responsive, and easily handles Git histories with hundreds of thousands of commits.
No compromise was made to reach these speeds: Retcon still transparently preserves your working directory and stage, offers pervasive undo, a combined stage, and the ability to rewrite history even when conflicts are pending.
I kind of love seeing release notes that are like: no new features, we just fixed some bugs and made it 35× faster.
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