Sponsorships have been selling briskly, of late. Knock on wood. As of yesterday, the next opening on the schedule wasn’t until the very end of July. However, due to some schedule rejiggering, next week is now open. After that, the next opening remains the week starting July 27.

If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch — especially if you can act quick for next week’s opening. I’m also booking sponsorships for Q3 and Q4 2026, and over half of those weeks are already sold.

One more follow-up point after I spent two days using an iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.7.7 as my main phone. At some point late in the iOS 26 beta cycle last summer, it became obvious that Apple had sped up a bunch of system-level animations. Prime example: the animation when you swipe up from the bottom of the screen to go back to the Home Screen. People noticed. But it hasn’t gotten a lot of attention since.

But man, if you want to notice, do what I did and spend two days back on iOS 18. So many little things feel slower. I don’t know if anything actually is slower, but because the animations are slower, it looks slower, and that means it feels slower. You may not notice if you only use iPhones, but people contemplating a switch from Android definitely notice. Apple should speed up some of these animations again this year. (And/or offer a system-wide setting to make them faster. I do not want to eliminate these animations. I just want them to go very very fast.)

Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica:

Using developer tools, the lawsuit found that opening prompts are always shared, as are any follow-up questions the search engine asks that a user clicks on. Privacy concerns are seemingly worse for non-subscribed users, the complaint alleged. Their initial prompts are shared with “a URL through which the entire conversation may be accessed by third parties like Meta and Google.”

Disturbingly, the lawsuit alleged, chats are also shared with personally identifiable information (PII), even when users who want to stay anonymous opt to use Perplexity’s “Incognito Mode.” That mode, the lawsuit charged, is a “sham.”

Everything about Perplexity looks like a scam.

Munsif Vengattil / Reuters:
How India's film industry is embracing AI, as studios use the tech to cut production time and costs, while union rules constrain its use in Hollywood  —  India's studios are transforming filmmaking by using AI to slash production time, cut costs and dub movies into numerous languages.

AppleInsider:
Apple reportedly signed a 3rd-party driver, by Tiny Corp, for AMD or Nvidia eGPUs for Apple Silicon Macs; it's meant for AI research, not accelerating graphics  —  Apple has signed a driver for AMD or Nvidia eGPUs connected to Apple Silicon but there are some big caveats, and it won't improve your graphics.