Fascinating thread — and an almost entirely civil discussion of what has become, for obvious reasons, an inflammatory topic. These are mapping and metadata nerds approaching the dilemma in the very nerdiest of ways. I found it rather soothing, and also quite informative — particularly the posts from Minh Nguyễn, who seems to be an OpenStreetMap...
The whole tech world needs more projects that aren’t trying to become billion- (let alone trillion-) dollar ideas, but are happily shooting for success as million-dollar ideas (or less!).
David Pierce, writing at The Verge: Rather than buy another smartwatch, Migicovsky decided to try and get Pebble going again. He sold his most recent startup, a messaging app called Beeper, to Automattic last year and left the company in the fall. Since then, he’d thought about starting a Pebble-like product from scratch, figuring it’d be...
Even if the build of TikTok already installed on an American user’s phone continues to function, that user can’t reinstall TikTok (or any of ByteDance’s other apps) on a new or restored phone until those apps are back in the app stores.
Google, in an announcement on X: We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps. We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources. For geographic features in the U.S., this is when Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) is updated. When that happens, we will...
Here’s an addendum to my post yesterday on the recent shake-up atop the generally stable “top free downloads” list in the App Store. Some of the shake-up is from new entrants, like the much-ballyhooed AI chatbot DeepSeek. But a lot of it is the direct result of the absence of ByteDance’s entire lineup of apps: TikTok, CapCut, Lemon8, and Marvel...
Openvibe, which mashes together multiple accounts from mulitple networks into a single timeline, is interesting, but not for me — and I’m not really sure who it *is* for.
Chance Miller at 9to5Mac has a good rundown of everything new in iOS 18.3, and his colleague Ryan Christoffel has a similar rundown for MacOS 15.3 all-five-vowels Sequoia. (See also: Michael Tsai.) ★
Jim Acosta, signing off from CNN for the final time: It is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant. I believe it is the job of the press to hold power to account — I’ve always tried to do that here at CNN, and I plan on doing all of that again in the future. One final message: Don’t give in to the lies. Don’t give in to the fear. Hold on to...
MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass: Anyway, this matters because it doesn’t mean that DeepSeek, an app based off of the Chinese-developed AI model of the same name, is the most popular app ever despite its current place atop the charts. Your mom probably isn’t downloading it. Just as last week, your mom probably wasn’t downloading Xiaohongshu...
Jenni Reid and Alex Harring, reporting for CNBC: Nvidia and other U.S. technology firms plunged on Monday, part of a global sell-off as Chinese startup DeepSeek sparked concerns over competitiveness in artificial intelligence and America’s leadership in the sector. Nvidia, the chip designer who has been a major beneficiary of the AI hype, last...
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek made waves last week when they dropped their new “open reasoning” LLM named R1. But over the weekend the full repercussions of their achievements (plural) began to sink in across the industry. My partner-in-Dithering Ben Thompson has written an extraordinarily helpful FAQ-style explanation at Stratechery today. If you,...
Joe Rossignol, writing at MacRumors on Thursday: Apple’s website said the first vehicle models with support for next-generation CarPlay would “arrive in 2024,” but that did not happen. A little more than three weeks into 2025, Apple has now updated its website in the U.S. to remove that 2024 timeframe from the next-generation CarPlay section of...
Ben Stiller, on X, posted a short video with Tim Cook as a severed employee at Lumon Industries. Very fun, and it’s really the only thing on people’s minds about Tim Cook lately — that he’s a fun guy. Definitely the only thing people are thinking about him lately. Sebastiaan de With, on Threads: The Tim Cook Severance promo is wild because I...
Ben Stiller, seemingly only on X, posted a short video with Tim Cook as a severed employee at Lumon Industries. Very fun, and it’s really the only thing on people’s minds about Tim Cook lately — that he’s a fun guy. Definitely the only thing people are thinking about him lately. Sebastiaan de With, on Threads: The Tim Cook Severance promo is...
I see four possible futures regarding phones that are too thin for USB-C ports.
Jessica Lessin, writing for The Information back in 2014: Ms. Vorrath, who has worked on all seven iOS releases, generally operates by asking lots of questions of engineers, sticking to the facts and getting them to explain in plain English why a particular feature should be included in the operating system. She’s easy to get along with, say...
Mark Gurman has an interesting scoop at Bloomberg: Apple Inc. executive Kim Vorrath, a company veteran known for fixing troubled products and bringing major projects to market, has a new job: whipping artificial intelligence and Siri into shape. Vorrath, a vice president in charge of program management, was moved to Apple’s artificial...
Trump says they’re targeting all undocumented immigrants, but so far they’re only targeting those who live in places that are popularly opposed to it. And that’s where the costs — both emotional and economic — will be felt.
Siri with Apple Intelligence gives confident but embarrasingly wrong answers to sports trivia questions, both famous (Super Bowls) and obscure (North Dakota high school hoops).
I sold Woot to Amazon and they made it shitty. So I quit. Then I got bored. I started A Mediocre Corporation with a few others from Woot. We just launched a classic daily deal site — only one thing for sale each day. Meh. Oh, and since you seem to be into RSS, we put one together just for you, at meh.com/deals.rss. Of course you can also just go...
Apple: Click the amount you wish to contribute, then click Donate and Apple will transfer 100% of your contribution to the American Red Cross in support of people impacted by the 2025 Southern California wildfires. Apple has prominent links to its Red Cross donation form on the web and in the App Store. They’ve been doing this after...
From a multi-byline profile of Stephen Miller in The New York Times last week: Mr. Miller told Mr. Zuckerberg that he had an opportunity to help reform America, but it would be on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s terms. He made clear that Mr. Trump would crack down on immigration and go to war against the diversity, equity and inclusion, or...
Alan Rozenshtein, writing for Lawfare: While Apple and Google maintained their compliance, Oracle and Akamai made the remarkable decision to resume services, despite facing potentially catastrophic liability rates. Shortly after his inauguration on Jan. 20, Trump followed through by issuing an executive order that suspended PAFACAA enforcement...
From Apple’s developer release notes for iOS 18.3, now at release candidate (RC) status: For users new or upgrading to iOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence will be enabled automatically during iPhone onboarding. Users will have access to Apple Intelligence features after setting up their devices. To disable Apple Intelligence, users will need to...
The order doesn’t change the law; it says to ignore the law. It’s going to be a very telling test of Republicans in both houses of Congress.
Bobby Allyn, reporting for NPR: According to the order, the law will be paused for 75 days and companies that work with TikTok will not be liable for doing so. I take issue with this framing. The order does not pause the law, because executive orders can’t “pause” laws. The order pauses enforcement of the law. The order itself even says so....
Apple Support document, which is linked from the App Store if you search for any of the apps from ByteDance: Apple is obligated to follow the laws in the jurisdictions where it operates. Pursuant to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, apps developed by ByteDance Ltd. and its subsidiaries — including...
Wesley Hilliard, writing for AppleInsider regarding Edits, Meta’s pre-announced mobile-first video editing app: Despite that, many apps and features on iPhone toe the line between fun tool and social platform. One of those tools was Clips, which arrived in 2017 to little fanfare and has been forgotten since. Meta and ByteDance have a reason to...
Wes Davis, writing at The Verge, under the headline “Instagram Announces a Blatant CapCut Clone”: Instagram head Adam Mosseri just announced a video editing app called Edits. Mosseri said the app is meant to rival CapCut, a video editing app that went offline along with TikTok. Edits is available for preorder on the iOS App Store. I don’t use...
Good takes on some unpleasant current events, and one of the best brief eulogies for Jimmy Carter I’ve heard. ★
Tim Cook on X: Dr. King once said, “Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.” True greatness lies in lifting others, making a difference, and serving with purpose. Let’s honor his legacy by finding ways to serve and create a better world together. Curious to see if that’s Cook’s only tweet of the day, or if a congratulatory one is...
PDF archive for posterity. Interesting selection of Martin Luther King Jr. quotes they’ve chosen for the homepage: “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.” “You must decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you.” “We cannot preserve self without being concerned about preserving...
Apple and Google, seemingly, are following the law, not Trump’s good-as-gold word and pinkie-swear promise that they won’t be held liable for violating it. But Oracle and Akamai seemingly are going with Trump’s word.
To the credit of the team that put this presentation together, they mostly got it.
Tom Warren, The Verge: Earlier this month you could search for “Google” on Bing and get a page that looked a lot like Google, complete with a special search bar, an image resembling a Google Doodle, and even some small text under the search bar just like Google search. The misleading UI no longer appears on the Google search result of Bing this...
Tim Hardwick, last week for MacRumors, “Apple Smart Home Hub Launch Possibly Delayed Until Later in Year”: Apple’s long-rumoured smart home hub or “command center” may not arrive in the spring as previously expected, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. [...] Apple originally planned to introduce the home hub in March 2025. However, writing in...
Joanna Stern, in her weekly Tech Things newsletter for the WSJ: Despite what my iPhone’s frequent notification summaries report, my husband isn’t messy, he isn’t sad and he definitely didn’t take out the garbage — because, again, I don’t have one. Wife? Yes. Husband? No. As part of Apple Intelligence, the company rolled out these AI-powered...
Kyle Wiggers, writing at TechCrunch: Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript, the widely used programming language to make web pages interactive, in order to use Google Search. In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the change is intended to “better protect” Google Search against malicious...
Parker Ortolani works near Grand Central and wrote a great post about the in-character Severance experience on Wednesday, replete with photos, both early in the day when the diorama was largely empty and Parker Ortolani works nearby, and wrote a great post about the experience, replete with photos, both early in the day when the diorama was...
Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac: Here are the changes included in iOS 18.3 for Apple Intelligence notification summaries: When you enable notification summaries, iOS 18.3 will make it clearer that the feature — like all Apple Intelligence features — is a beta. You can now disable notification summaries for an app directly from the Lock...
Maddy Myers, writing for Polygon: But the weirdest part of the reveal video, in my opinion, is the implication that the Joy-Cons can be used as a mouse. This was already rumored, and if I hadn’t seen those rumors, then I might not have understood what I was looking at during the portion of the teaser that depicts the Joy-Cons sliding around on...
Kyle Maclachlan, remembering his friend longtime collaborator David Lynch, on Instagram: What I saw in him was an enigmatic and intuitive man with a creative ocean bursting forth inside of him. He was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could get to. Our friendship blossomed on Blue Velvet and then Twin Peaks and I always found him...
Another fun promo for Severance season 2. And a promo on Apple’s homepage featuring a computer made by another company. And a free in-universe book, The Lexington Letters, at Apple Books. ★
Brian Tallerico, writing for RogerEbert.com: David Lynch saw my dreams. As a teenager growing up in suburban America in the ’80s, “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks” hit like a bolt of lightning. Not only did they capture something about the sinister, surreal underbelly of life under the picket fences, but they said something directly to anyone who...
Ray Ratto, writing for Defector, gets it right. Bob Uecker was just the best: He was the face and voice of baseball cinema, the man whose line-reading made “Ju-u-u-u-st a bit outside” so good that “iconic” doesn’t remotely cover its impact. Even if you’re not a seamhead, you likely came across Bob Uecker and smiled. So Thursday’s announcement...
Fun trailer and a smart if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it design. Switch 2 just looks like a slightly bigger Switch. Pure joy. That it’s just a bigger faster Switch is proof of the genius of the Switch form factor, which has now been widely copied across the industry. The Switch is to handheld + dockable console gaming what the iPhone is to phones....
Bryan Bedell, on the Field Notes Dispatches blog: The anniversary date of “Field Notes” varies a bit, depending on who you ask. Aaron Draplin first used the name (typeset, of course, in all-caps Futura Bold) on a customized one-off red hardcover notebook in 2002. Our “official line” sets the birth of the company in mid-2007, when Coudal...
Marko Parker, reporting for Bloomberg: Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook is planning to attend the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump next week, the latest in a wave of Silicon Valley leaders traveling to Washington for the ceremony. Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, Meta Platforms Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of...
Juli Clover, MacRumors: Ahead of the season two premiere of hit TV show Severance, Apple is marketing the show with a fun Severance pop-up at the Grand Central Terminal in New York City. Apple has assembled a glass cube with workstations that are identical to the setups that Lumon employees use on the show, complete with employees “working,”...
Noah Smith, writing at Noahpinion: As many observers have noted, this tells us two important things. First, it tells us that Chinese officials are the ones calling the shots with regards to TikTok. This should be no surprise, given that ByteDance is legally required to obey CCP directives. Second, the refusal to sell the app tells us that the...
Jane Mayer, reporting for The New Yorker: As recently as the spring of 2023, according to an account shared last week with The New Yorker, Hegseth ordered three gin-and-tonics at a weekday breakfast meeting with an acquaintance in Manhattan. “It was an extremely strange experience,” his companion that morning told me. “We met at Fox News in New...
Speaking of new (“interim”) Sonos CEO Tom Conrad and Scott Forstall, here’s an interesting anecdote from Tyler Hall’s terrific piece for Motherboard in 2021, “How Pandora Won Its Royalty Battle but Lost the War to Spotify”: After pushback on only allowing web apps for the iPhone, Steve Jobs announced that native apps would be coming to the...
Sonos interim CEO Tom Conrad, in a company-wide memo obtained by The Verge: With my stepping in as CEO, the Board, Max, and I have agreed that my background makes the Chief Product Officer role redundant. Therefore, Max’s role is being eliminated and the Product organization will report directly to me. I’ve asked Max to advise me over the next...
Nick Wingfield, writing today’s The Briefing column for the paywalled (alas) The Information: Sonos has always been a bit of an odd duck. There aren’t that many consumer electronics startups of its size created in the last quarter century (Sonos was founded in 2002) that have survived as independent companies. Its products are expensive...
Mike Davidson: I grew up on Iliff Street, right in the middle of the ashes that up until a few nights ago, was a sunkissed neighborhood known as Pacific Palisades. It was 1978, and I remember my dad climbing up on our roof with a garden hose. Every couple of hours, he would wet the house down, top-to-bottom, and everything surrounding it. I...
Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage, reporting for The New York Times: Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted President-elect Donald J. Trump on charges of illegally seeking to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, said in a final report released early Tuesday that the evidence would have been sufficient to convict Mr. Trump in a...
No byline, which is really weird, just “Bloomberg News”: Chinese officials are evaluating a potential option that involves Elon Musk acquiring the US operations of TikTok if the company fails to fend off a controversial ban on the short-video app, according to people familiar with the matter. But here’s Todd Spangler, reporting (with his name)...
Does your app get fake signups, throwaway emails, or users abusing your free tier? Or worse, bots attacks and brute force attempts? WorkOS Radar can block all this and more. A simple API gives you advanced device fingerprinting that can detect bad actors, bots, and suspicious behavior. Your users trust you. Let’s keep it that way. ★
Chris Welch, The Verge: Sonos CEO Patrick Spence is resigning from the job today, effective immediately, with board member Tom Conrad filling the role of interim CEO. It’s the most dramatic development yet in an eight-month saga that has proven to be the most challenging time in Sonos’ history. The company’s decision to prematurely release a...
Free Our Feeds: With Zuckerberg going full Musk last week, we can no longer let billionaires control our digital public square. Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control. But it will take independent funding and governance to...
The notion that mobile web apps are closing the gap with native apps is laughable. The gulf between them is widening, not narrowing.
Jason Koebler, 404 Media: Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized Instagram competitor. On Facebook, the company is labeling links to Pixelfed.social as “spam” and deleting them immediately. Pixelfed is an open-source, community-funded and decentralized image sharing platform that runs on Activity Pub, which is the same technology...
LA resident Matthew Butterick, in his MB XS newsletter: Easy answer — donate money! A good friend of mine works in California disaster relief. He recommends these nonprofits because they have a strong local impact: The California Community Foundation is seeking donations for its wildfire recovery fund. The Center for Disaster Philanthropy is...
Josh DuBose, reporting for KTLA: In an emotional interview, Shelley Sykes, the mother of former child actor Rory Sykes who died in their Malibu home amid the Palisades Fire, shared her harrowing story and grieved the devastating loss of her son. Shelley fought back tears recalling the final moments with 32-year-old Rory, who was born blind and...
CNBC: Google donated $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration fund, becoming the latest major tech company to try and curry some goodwill with the incoming administration. “Google is pleased to support the 2025 inauguration, with a livestream on YouTube and a direct link on our homepage. We’re also donating to the inaugural...
Mike Isaac, Sheera Frenkel, and Kate Conger, reporting for the NYT in the best-sourced piece I’ve seen on Meta’s big policy changes this week (gift link): The entire process was highly unusual. Meta typically alters policies that govern its apps — which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads — by inviting employees, civic leaders and...
Good piece and great headline by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic: The social-media hall monitors have been so restrictive on “topics of immigration and gender that they’re out of touch with mainstream discourse,” Zuckerberg said with the zeal of an activist. He spoke about “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech”...
The answer to the question of which company held the keynotes which attracted the most enthusiastic large live audiences was always Apple. And they just walked away from that.
Chance Miller listened so we don’t have to: Zuckerberg also took issue with AirPods and the fact that Apple wouldn’t give Meta the same access to the iPhone for its Meta Ray-Ban glasses: They build stuff like AirPods, which are cool, but they’ve just thoroughly hamstrung the ability for anyone else to build something that can connect to the...
Just heartbreaking, and a scale of destruction that’s hard to comprehend. ★
Juli Clover, MacRumors: In a support guide, Apple says that the AirPods Pro may play a sound every so often while in the case to ensure the microphones and speakers are working as intended. From Apple: To help ensure that your AirPods microphones and speakers are operating at their best (for example, to help provide high-quality hearing test...
I first linked to Breathable back in 2021 when Murray released the first version, writing then: The entire point of Breathable is to offer widgets — the app itself just lets you configure how the widgets look. Brilliantly simple, and in a way, fun, with its clever “emoji scale”. I started using it last week after Murray pinged me about it, but...
Following up on yesterday’s item regarding Bing masquerading as Google to trick Edge users into searching with it, this Mastodon post from Timo Tijhof lists a few other such subterfuge tactics they’ve pulled recently. My favorite was this one from last year: when users opened a tab for “bard.google.com”, Edge inserted an ad in the tab bar...
Tom Warren, The Verge: Microsoft is pulling yet another trick to get people to use its Bing search engine. If you use Bing right now without signing into a Microsoft account and search for Google, you’ll get a page that looks an awful lot like... Google. It’s a clear attempt from Microsoft to make Bing look like Google for this specific search...
2006 post from yours truly that applies perfectly to Apple Intelligence today: The sentiment here is that it’s somehow unfair to developers to treat software labeled “beta” with the same critical eye as non-beta software. That’s true, in the case of actual beta software, where by “actual beta” I mean “not yet released, but close”. Released vs....
I mentioned earlier today Casey Newton’s remarkable 2019 piece for The Verge, “Bodies in Seats”, an eye-opening look at the lives of content moderators at a large Facebook contractor in Tampa. When I linked to it at the time, I wrote: If this is what it takes to moderate Facebook, it’s an indictment of the basic concept of Facebook itself. In...
Antonio G. Di Benedetto, reporting for The Verge: The tech industry’s relentless march toward labeling everything “plus,” “pro,” and “max” soldiers on, with Dell now taking the naming scheme to baffling new levels of confusion. The PC maker announced at CES 2025 that it’s cutting names like XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision, and OptiPlex from...
Don’t get distracted by blather. Let’s see what happens.
Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors: So what can Apple do now? A non-apology and the promise of a warning label isn’t enough. The company should either give all apps the option of opting out of AI summaries, or offer an opt-out to the developers of specific classes of apps (like news apps). Next, it should probably build separate pathways for...
I think it’s correct for Apple to leave this in control of users, not developers. But Apple really does need to make it more clear what is an AI-generated summary and what is a verbatim original notification.
Jamison Foser: Washington Post opinion editor David Shipley offered the kind of obviously-false explanation you only utter when you know admitting the truth will make you look even worse: David Shipley, The Post’s opinions editor, said in a statement that he respected Ms. Telnaes and all she had given to The Post “but must disagree with her...
Charlie Sykes: To fully absorb the profound stupidity of the Wapo’s decision, consider the alternative timeline in which the paper published Telnaes’s sketch. If the Wapo had published it, both the paper and Bezos would have looked… better. The paper would have reasserted a modicum of independence and integrity; and even Bezos would have...
Ann Telnaes, from her personal site (alas) on Substack: I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations — and some differences — about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I...
Kelly Hooper, reporting for Politico on 9 January 2021: The Biden Inaugural Committee on Saturday released its list of donors, which included Google, Microsoft, Boeing and several other major corporations. The list contains all contributors who donated more than $200 to President-elect Joe Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration ceremony and related...
Hard not to think of this clip today, re: an egomaniacal villain, whose worldview is frozen several decades in the past, setting the terms for an extortion racket. ★
Fascinating piece by Ben Cohen for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link): And there are two things I learned about the EUV tool I saw that I can’t get out of my head: ASML teamed up with a German optical company to develop mirrors so flat that if they were scaled up to the size of Germany itself, their largest imperfection would be less than a...
Axios co-founder Mike Allen: Apple CEO Tim Cook will personally donate $1 million to President-elect Trump’s inaugural committee, sources with knowledge of the donation tell Axios. [...] Cook, a proud Alabama native, believes the inauguration is a great American tradition, and is donating to the inauguration in the spirit of unity, the sources...
There are metaphors, and then there are metaphors. Happy New Year. ★
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Hartley Charlton, MacRumors: Apple TV+ is set to be available to stream for free from Saturday, January 4 to Sunday, January 5, providing its full catalog with no subscription fee. Following a series of teasers, Apple today confirmed the free weekend on social media, building anticipation for new releases early in 2025 such as the second season...
James Fallows, in a 2023 piece for The Atlantic, written when Carter entered hospice care: Jimmy Carter survived to see many of his ambitions realized, including near eradication of the dreaded Guinea worm, which, unglamorous as it sounds, represents an increase in human well-being greater than most leaders have achieved. He survived to see his...
Juli Clover, MacRumors: An upcoming version of the Magic Mouse with voice control for AI would “make sense,” Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said today, though he claimed that he has heard no rumors about the feature so far. Alongside the voice-input mouse, it’d make just as much sense to bring back some of that 1998 iMac aesthetic by switching...
Fun and interesting list overall (via Kottke), but #7 caught my attention: Walking speed on the streets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia has increased 15% since 1979. (“Shifting Patterns of Social Interaction: Exploring the Social Life of Urban Spaces Through A.I.”) Not sure what made the researchers pick those three cities, but in my...
The New York Times: While his presidency was remembered more for its failures than for its successes, his post-presidency was seen by many as a model for future chief executives. Rather than vanish from view or focus on moneymaking, he established the Carter Center to promote peace, fight disease and combat social inequality. He transformed...
OpenAI is to this decade’s generative-AI revolution what Netscape was to the 1990s’ internet revolution.
Kagi founder and CEO Vlad Prelovac joins the show to talk about the business of web search, the thinking behind Kagi’s own amazing search engine, and their upstart WebKit-based browser Orion. Sponsored by: Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order. Memberful: Monetize your passion with membership. Start your...
Via Jason Snell (back in October), who points first to this thread on Mastodon where a few of us posted about our preferences for the fonts we use for writing, and then describes this fun “tournament” from Typogram that lets you pick your favorite monospaced coding font from 32 choices. One limitation is that the only options are free...
Thrice a week, I pay for my son’s tuition. Once, I forgot, and the tutor had to ask for it days later. I felt terrible for making him ask. After putting it in Due, awkward moments like that never happened again. If keeping promises, meeting deadlines, and showing up on time matter to you as much as they do to me, Due might be the app for you. PS:...
Another great Rickey Henderson remembrance, this one from Joe Posnanski: I’d argue that no player in baseball history was ever more alive than Rickey Henderson, which is why his shocking death just days before his 66th Christmas hits so hard. Rickey played a cautious sport with abandon. Rickey played a timid sport with flash. Rickey irritated...
Craig Calcaterra, writing at Cup of Coffee: To say this is a massive loss is about as big an understatement as is possible. Henderson was the biggest and brightest star of his generation. There may not have been any player in history who was better at more things than Rickey Henderson was. Henderson was, without question, the greatest leadoff...
Bezos can still be a hero in this story. But his only move is to sell.
Zack Rosenblatt, Dianna Russini, and Michael Silver have written a devastating profile of the most dysfunctional franchise in all of U.S. pro sports, the New York Jets, whose dysfunction has a clear and obvious root cause: meddling idiot owner Woody Johnson (heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune). One example: A few weeks later,...
Joe Otterson, reporting for Variety: “Silo” has been renewed for both Seasons 3 and 4 at Apple TV+, with the fourth season set to be the show’s last. The renewal news comes as the post-apocalyptic drama is currently airing its second season. The sixth episode of Season 2 is due out on Dec. 20. The season finale is scheduled to debut on Jan. 17....
Dave Nanian, writing on the Shirt Pocket blog: macOS 15.2 was released a few days ago, with a surprise. A terrible, awful surprise. Apple broke the replicator. Towards the end of replicating the Data volume, seemingly when it’s about to copy either Preboot or Recovery, it fails with a Resource Busy error. In the past, Resource Busy could be...
One last item on Acorn 8. Whether you are a longtime Acorn user (like me), or a would-be new user, you should set aside some time to actually read Acorn’s documentation. It’s a full user manual, and it not only describes, in detail, what every feature in the app does and how to use them, but also a vast array of “how-to” tutorials, many of them...
Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors: The newly released Acorn 8 adds a bunch of great features to the mix. A few of them will be familiar to Apple platform users: subject selection uses machine learning to let you quickly isolate and grab the subject of a picture (there’s also a corresponding “Remove Background” feature to simplify that task) and...
Gus Mueller: This is a major update of Acorn, and is currently on a time-limited sale for $19.99. It’s still a one time purchase to use as long as you’d like, and as usual, the full release notes are available. I want to highlight some of my favorite things below. “Select Subject”, “Mask Subject”, and “Remove Background” are new commands which...
Blackmagic Design: Blackmagic Design announced it will start taking pre-orders for the new Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive camera — the world’s first commercial camera system designed to capture Apple Immersive Video for Apple Vision Pro — today with deliveries due to start in early 2025. DaVinci Resolve Studio will be updated to support editing...
With over 75 shows that aired this past season alone, keeping up with and discovering new anime can be hard, especially across several streaming services. Jiiiii makes that simple by giving you a single schedule to stare at1 as you await your favorite’s show’s weekly release! Unlike any other anime aggregation site out there, Jiiiii has a...
After being sold out for months, the upcoming sponsorship schedule at DF is wide open at the moment — including the final week of the year. I know sponsors are sometimes hesitant to book weeks around major holidays, but, well, Daring Fireball is never “closed”. And traffic to the site is remarkably consistent even during weeks like Thanksgiving,...
Update: The store is now closed. My sincere thanks to everyone who’s bought one (or in many cases, more than one). Original post: Unsurprisingly given that I went a few years without selling DF-branded shirts, while I procrastinated on launching a modernized new store (long story short: Shopify is a killer platform — the new store now supports...
Paul Kafasis, on the Rogue Amoeba blog: Even as our products steadily grew in popularity, our relationship with Apple was almost non-existent. Plenty of individuals inside the company were fans, but we received very little attention from Apple as a corporate entity. We didn’t much mind being outsiders, but it meant that we often had zero notice...
A few weeks ago, in a post primarily complaining about Google’s disingenuous claims about their Messages app’s support for encryption (they suggest, heavily, that it encrypts every message or most messages, but in fact only supports encryption for RCS messages sent between users of Google Messages on Android devices), I also complained about the...
Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: Apple plans to stop selling the iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Plus, and third-generation iPhone SE in European Union countries later this month, to comply with a regulation that will soon require newly-sold smartphones with wired charging to be equipped with a USB-C port in those countries, according to French blog iGeneration....
This is why it’s more than vanity to put your name on your work, whatever your work is — it shows you take responsibility for its validity.
Like Viticci, I remain largely skeptical and uncomfortable with AI for purposes of generating original new stuff — writing, imagery, whatever. But as an assistive agent, it’s quite remarkable today and improving at a fast clip.
Excellent five-minute short video from the ever-insightful Kirby Ferguson for The New York Times, exploring why everything looks the same, sounds the same, and seemingly is the same in today’s pop culture. The short answer: that sameness is only pervasive when you only look at what’s promoted by our three-headed social media hegemony (Meta,...
Another week with another outstanding indie developer whom I’m delighted to thank for sponsoring DF. This week, it’s Sophiestication Software promoting the return of CoverSutra — a previous hit from the “delicious” era of Mac apps that is now back and better than ever. After over a decade, the rejuvenated (reanimated?) CoverSutra has been...
Nifty new convert-to-Markdown library from a small indie development shop named Microsoft: The MarkItDown library is a utility tool for converting various files to Markdown (e.g., for indexing, text analysis, etc.) It presently supports: PDF (.pdf) PowerPoint (.pptx) Word (.docx) Excel (.xlsx) Images (EXIF metadata, and OCR) Audio (EXIF...
Juli Clover at MacRumors: Apple today made a mistake with its macOS Sequoia 15.2 update, releasing the software for two Macs that have yet to be launched. There is a software file for “Mac16,12” and “Mac16,13,” which are upcoming MacBook Air models. The leaked software references the “MacBook Air (13-inch, M4, 2025)” and the “MacBook Air...
Ryan Christoffel, also at 9to5Mac: There are two key features that are part of iOS 18.2, but aren’t yet ready for the Mac: Genmoji Mail app redesign Genmoji are an especially unfortunate omission, as they’re available on both iPhone and iPad with iOS and iPadOS 18.2. Meanwhile the Mail app redesign is currently iPhone-exclusive, so it’s missing...
Chance Miller has a good rundown for 9to5Mac: The update includes major new Apple Intelligence features, upgrades to the Camera Control on iPhone 16, a redesign for the Mail app, and much more. The new Apple Intelligence features lead the list, and certainly lead Apple’s marketing, but there’s quite a bit else new in 18.2 too. ★
Reporting from The Information suggests that an M-series tier above Ultra might remain years away.
Katie Robinson, reporting for The New York Times: After President-elect Donald J. Trump announced a cascade of cabinet picks last month, the editorial board of The Los Angeles Times decided it would weigh in. One writer prepared an editorial arguing that the Senate should follow its traditional process for confirming nominees, particularly...
Ev Williams, writing the backstory of, and raison d’être for, Mozi: And here we are, 20+ years later, with address books full of partial, duplicate, and outdated information. Perhaps the reason for this is that social networks (or the social network) solved this problem — for a while. When Facebook was ubiquitous it was probably a pretty good...
One last Letterman link: a new half-hour interview about interviewing with Zach Baron for GQ. I watched the first minute and I’m saving the rest for tonight: Baron: If you read pieces about you — pieces of press, profile stuff like that — from the ’80s and ’90s, even a little bit in the 2000s, you were often portrayed as miserable. Letterman:...
New app, spearheaded by Ev Williams: Mozi is a private social network for seeing your people more, IRL. Add your plans, check who’s in town, and know when you overlap. iOS only at the moment, with “Sign in with Apple” as the only supported authentication method. One clever idea is that you can share travel plans and your location, and Mozi will...
The New York Times: George J. Kresge, who as the entertainer the Amazing Kreskin used mentalist tricks to dazzle audiences as he rose to fame on late-night television in the 1970s, died on Tuesday in Wayne, N.J. He was 89. A close friend, Meir Yedid, said the death, at an assisted living facility, was from complications of dementia. Kreskin’s...
Erik Hayden, reporting for The Hollywood Reporter: For his next move, David Letterman is jumping in to the increasingly crowded free, ad-supported TV channel (FAST) space. The late-night great’s production company Worldwide Pants has inked a deal with Samsung TV Plus to bring around 4,000 hours of original video to the company’s streaming...
David Ingram, reporting for NBC News: U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez said after a two-day hearing that The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, had not submitted the best bid and was wrongly named the winner of an auction last month by a court-appointed trustee. “I don’t think it’s enough money,” Lopez said in a late-night...
Brandon Silverman: It was September of 2011 and I saw a link on kottke.org to a small collection of incredible typography from something called the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. I had never seen them before and they blew my mind. I immediately became a massive fan and in fact, when I got married, my wife and I designed our wedding invitation...
Mark Gurman, in his Power On column for Bloomberg: Apple is now working on a major effort to support third-party hand controllers in the device’s visionOS software and has teamed up with Sony Group Corp. to make it happen. Apple approached Sony earlier this year, and the duo agreed to work together on launching support for the PlayStation VR2’s...
While there is no subscription offering for Daring Fireball (never say never again), I am reminded this week to remind you that, if you enjoy podcasts, you should subscribe to Dithering, the twice-weekly 15-minutes-on-the-button podcast I do with Ben Thompson. Dithering as a standalone subscription costs just $7/month or $70/year. People who try...
My thanks to 1Password — which, earlier this year, acquired frequent DF sponsor Kolide — for sponsoring last week at DF. Imagine if you went to the movies and they charged $8,000 for popcorn. Or, imagine you got on a plane and they told you that seatbelts were only available in first class. Your sense of outraged injustice would probably be...
If I had wanted to write a column about presidential pardons, I’d find ChatGPT’s assistance a far better starting point than I’d have gotten through any general web search. But to quote Reagan: “Trust, but verify.”
Purely fun, pay-whatever-you-think-fair app for the Mac from Simon Støvring (developer of numerous fine apps such as Runestone and Scriptable): Festivitas automatically adds festive lights to your menu bar and dock upon launch and you can tweak their appearance to match your preferences. There is something very core to the Mac’s origins about...
David Frum, writing at The Atlantic, regarding his jarring appearance as a guest on MSNBC’s Morning Joe: Before getting to the article, I was asked about the nomination of Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense — specifically about an NBC News report that his heavy drinking worried colleagues at Fox News and at the veterans organizations he’d...
Oliver Darcy, in a well-sourced report at Status (paywalled, alas, but with a preview of the article if you sign up for the free version of his newsletter, which I agree is sort of a “Yeah, no thanks” offer): Patrick Soon-Shiong is tightening his grip over the Los Angeles Times. The MAGA-curious owner, who drew controversy when he blocked the...
Stephanie Palazzolo, writing for The Information (paywalled, alas): Researchers at OpenAI believe that some rival AI developers are training their reasoning models by using OpenAI’s o1 reasoning models to generate training data, according to a person who has spoken to the company’s researchers about it. In short, the rivals can ask the o1...
Kevin Collier, reporting for NBC News: Amid an unprecedented cyberattack on telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon, U.S. officials have recommended that Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their communications stay hidden from foreign hackers. The hacking campaign, nicknamed Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, is one of the...
Alex Heath, writing at The Verge: “I’m actually very optimistic this time around,” Bezos said of Trump during a rare public appearance at The New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday. “He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. If I can help him do that, I’m going to help him.” Trump railed against Bezos and his...
From The Stanford Review editor-in-chief Julia Steinberg’s interview with university president Jonathan Levin: Stanford Review: What is the most important problem in the world right now? President Levin: There’s no answer to that question. There are too many important problems to give you a single answer. Stanford Review: That is an application...
While writing the previous item regarding the FBI encouraging the use of E2EE text and call protocols, I wound up at the Play Store page for Google Messages. It’s shamefully misleading regarding Google Messages’s support for end-to-end encryption. As I wrote in the previous post, Google Messages does support E2EE, but only over RCS and only if...
Grove’s words don’t read merely as advice — they read today as a postmortem for what happed to Intel over the last 20 years.