Breaking Change

The summer heat has finally broken here in Shizuoka, and I'm enjoying a cool, wet, and cloudy day huddled around my microphone for warmth. I hope you'll join around my verbal campfire for yet another one of these.

As always, you can e-mail the show at podcast@searls.co. Only a small proportion of listeners will ever write an e-mail, so I now offer a second option: the justin.searls.co/feedback form. People love filling out forms! Go try it out! Check the anonymous checkbox! Hell, enter a fake e-mail address—see if I care!

Stuff we talked about, in order of me talking about them:

A TV commercial for the Famicom Disk System

Also, the animation that played when a Disk Writer kiosk was overwriting your disk with a new game

I am an SS-tier Gundam Designer

Test Double is now on Wikipedia

Aaron's puns, ranked

The End of Programming

Nvidia buys Hugging Face for 💵

AI Agents Are Working Around the Clock. Why Are Startup Founders Working Even Harder? (News+)

OpenAI is developing "Persistent Mode" for Codex (Archive)

Apple and European Commission Reach Agreement on App Payment Terms Under DMA

Apple Cuts Jobs in Siri, Vision Pro Immersive Video and Gaming Teams

Apple unveils M6, M5 Ultra chips and updates its desktop Macs

New Mac Mini and Studio

Surprise and Shine event on 9/9

Apple's Foldable iPhone Details (Archive)

Former Arkane leads say Xbox let them come in and finish Redfall's final major update after being laid off

Your Discs. Now Also Digital.

'This is horrifying' Nvidia's controversial DLSS 5 AI filter leaks and players are inserting it into every game

It's about preserving artistic vision

GTA 6 is a secret cozy game / healthy living simulator

Also with a neat 26-minute trailer.

Spiderman: Brand New Day

Park Hyatt Tokyo (the one from Lost in Translation)

Star Wars Zero Company

Star Wars Galactic Racer

Exit 8 the Game, Exit 8 the movie

We cut our trip a day short, so I found myself with a totally free day with no plans. Naturally, I wasted it by recording a 3-hour podcast. Dang.

I always enjoy shooting the shit with/at you, and if you'd like to be a more active participant in the shit-shooting, then hit me up at podcast@searls.co. Really, I'll be nicer to you than I am to Sam Altman and Tang Tan. I promise.

Back to manually writing links. The zen of monotonous input tasks is suddenly something to be cherished in the current era.

Mandibular Advancement Device

Better With Becky

Why doesn't the U.S. have small elevators like Europe and China? (News+)

My 240hz gaming QD-OLED (and this bizarre Reddit review)

App market share is tough apparently

Aaron's puns, ranked

Apple Upgrade Program

Apple might lojack your phone

They promise not to, though

Apple's MapKit tech will underlie Ford's EV platform

Tim Cook EGOTed (EGOT's origin)

The Information on Apple's Unusual Use of iCloud for Confidential Work (Archive)

OpenAI: Apple is getting this wrong

Google adds selfie as a login mechanism

A Missing Underscore Sent Innocent Man To Prison

GrapheneOS Defends Data-Wiping Function That Blocked US Border Search (Plausible deniability, meanwhile)

YouTuber Hank Green says his AI usage is 'not healthy'

Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

Gas Town was a fucking joke

Ed Zitron seems too sure that markets are rational

Square Enix denies claims its Kingdom Hearts Collection artwork was AI-generated, blames 'human error'

YouTube labels Kurzsegagt AI slop (Real Engineering's reaction video)

OpenAI's Astra Solved Decades-Old Math Problems For $2,000

Xbox's 'disc to digital' feature could be coming as soon as this month

Halo: Campaign Evolved

Jurassic World Rebirth

金曜ロードショー

Chicken Ramen commercials

Lazy Kickers

The Hot Spot

Ohashi Trio

Apple Music

Spotify

Ocarina of Time soundtrack by the Beatuls

The Prime Minister of Japan does not sleep (forgot to actually answer the fucking question, oops)

The summer heat ended up thawing out my podcast, so I had no choice but to go buy a new microphone and grumble into it for a couple hours. Just how that works. Please enjoy.

I am actively soliciting mailbag participation. As always, the address is podcast@searls.co, and I'd be really curious to hear how America is doing because it seems like everything is going great.

For the first time I let Claude write these links for me, because it never occurred to me I didn't have to format the markdown manually:

PicoRuby Kaigi 2025

FleaFlicker, my first iOS game!

Aaron's puns, ranked

Claude Fable 5 gets another bump: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Who's Afraid of Chinese Models?

Apple vs OpenAI

Apple's Chip Plans: M6, M7 Pro, M7 Max, M7 Ultra, M8 Details; Touch MacBook Pro (archive)

Public betas for iOS 27, macOS 27 and more Apple platforms are now available

Apple's fm CLI

Nvidia's Jensen Huang reunites with Sega exec who saved the company with $5M investment

New survey claims 100% of Japanese online game developers use generative AI tools

PlayStation announces the end of disc games, starting in January 2028

Super Mario Bros. 2: The Lost Levels and Japan's HARD OFF stores

Xbox confirms plans to cut 5 studios and thousands of jobs

Obsidian is reportedly making a new Avowed Fallout game

Id Software dev claims it's been 'relegated to support studio size'

Rebooting (a.k.a. Brush Up Life)

Straight to Hell

You Can't Expense This!

Forza Horizon 6

Cook, Serve, Delicious!

The Odyssey

The promise of Breaking Change is that with every major version (this being the 60th episode of the program, but only the 53rd such release), I will break something. Well, I finally did it. I think I broke the show. Find out how by listening for yourself!

Want to be my friend? Drop me a line at justin@searls.co. Want to file a complaint with my supervisor? Forward your concerns to podcast@searls.co.

These links may rot, but alas—death comes for us all:

Tonal (without a subscription)

Better with Becky

My appearance on the freeCodeCamp podcast

Dual-loop BDD is the new Red-green TDD

Models are commodities, harnesses are differentiators

Aaron's puns, ranked

United Airlines can now boot passengers who refuse to use headphones with their devices (News+)

Your Meta glasses are watching you pee (9to5mac's summary)

Tuna for Mac by friend of the show, Mikkel Malmberg

MacBook Neo

MacBook Neo offers more single-core performance than any mobile processor from AMD, Intel or Qualcomm

Apple + Nvidia's CloudXR & Foveated streaming partnership: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Xbox's Project Helix

Microsoft's 'Xbox mode' is coming to every Windows 11 PC (News+)

Windows: Announcing new tools and platform updates for Windows PC game developers

Sony is testing dynamic pricing in the PlayStation Store

DLSS 5 should make you excited and/or outraged: video, backlash

Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don't rewrite an Iran missile story

South Korean Police Lose Seized Crypto By Posting Password Online

China mobilizes "one-person company" AI startups

Scrubs is back!

Mickey 17 is not about a cartoon mouse

The Expanse

Marathon - and how sickos like me can't stop thinking about it

Today, we're joined by a very special guest, Len Testa! You might know him from The Disney Dish podcast or from his excellent theme park travel planning app Touring Plans. Or you might not know him at all! No wrong answers.

This episode is all about Disney's ill-fated Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser live action role-playing hotel—which we both had the opportunity to experience right when it first launched. It was a life-changing experience for both of us, so why did it fail? Is it true that the top Disney brass learned all the wrong lessons from that failure? And will the CEO-in-waiting Josh D'Amaro ever have the courage to attempt something so ambitious again? Listen to this episode, in which we speak with an unearned confidence that suggests we have all of these answers!

You can reach out to Len at len@touringplans.com and you can write into the show at podcast@searls.co. He'll read your e-mail and reply to it, but I may only skim it.