By John Gruber

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Google and Microsoft Each Donate $1 Million to Trump’s Inauguration Racket ★

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 committee,” Karan Bhatia, Google’s global head of government affairs and public policy, told CNBC in a statement.

So Google joins Amazon and Meta with $1 million company donations. Tim Cook and Sam Altman are in with $1 million personal donations. I originally posted this piece wrongly thinking Microsoft hadn’t joined the party, but they just did too. That leaves, among the big six, just one company which as yet has not been reported to have donated, either from the company or its CEO: Nvidia.

By the way, a reader pointed my way to Biden’s Presidential Inaugural Committee FEC filing from four years ago:

• Microsoft gave $500,000.
• Google gave $337,500.
• Amazon gave $326,509.85.
• Apple gave $43,200; Tim Cook gave nothing.
• Neither Facebook (pre-name-change) nor Zuckerberg gave a cent.

‘Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Sprint to Remake Meta for the Trump Era’ ★

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 others to weigh in. Any shifts generally take months. But Mr. Zuckerberg turned this latest effort into a closely held six-week sprint, blindsiding even employees on his policy and integrity teams.

Months-long processes with a large number of stakeholders from inside and outside the company are the way you make policy changes intended to be as uncontroversial as possible. A six-week sprint with a tight team is how you make policy changes that you know will be controversial. The process was unusual because the nature of the changes was unusual.

In interviews, more than a dozen current and former Meta employees, executives and advisers to Mr. Zuckerberg described his shift as serving a dual purpose. It positions Meta for the political landscape of the moment, with conservative power ascendant in Washington as Mr. Trump takes office on Jan. 20. More than that, the changes reflect Mr. Zuckerberg’s personal views of how his $1.5 trillion company should be run — and he no longer wants to keep those views quiet.

This rings true to my ears, and my take on Zuckerberg. But they run counter to the Times’s headline for the story, which paints alignment with Trump as the primary motivation. I think it’s pretty clear that aligning with Trump is just the cover for Zuckerberg putting Meta’s content moderation policies back where he feels they should always have been. Zuck’s not rightwing but he’s not anti-right-wing. But for a large swath of the left today, anyone who’s not anti-right-wing is right-wing. Zuck is done trying to placate those of that mindset.

At Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg began preparing to change speech policies. Knowing that any moves would be contentious, he assembled a team of no more than a dozen close advisers and lieutenants, including Joel Kaplan, a longtime policy executive with strong ties to the Republican Party; Kevin Martin, the head of U.S. policy; and David Ginsberg, the head of communications. Mr. Zuckerberg insisted on no leaks, the people with knowledge of the effort said.

And give them credit — not a whisper regarding these changes leaked in advance of Zuckerberg dropping them in his Instagram video. Meta announced these changes on their own terms, in their own way.

Some employees were livid at what they saw as efforts by executives to hide changes to the “Hateful Conduct” policy before it was announced, two people said. While people across the policy division typically view and comment on significant revisions, most did not have the opportunity this time.

Some employees were surprised, after years of working for a company run by a face-eating founder who owns a controlling share of the company’s stock and thus answers to no one but himself, to find their own faces eaten off.

‘We’re All Trying to Find the Guy Who Did This’ ★

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” following “nonstop” concerns about misinformation from the “legacy media” and four years of the United States government “pushing for censorship.” It is clear from Zuckerberg’s announcement that he views establishment powers as having tried and failed to solve political problems by suppressing his users. That message is sure to delight Donald Trump and the incoming administration. But there’s one tiny hitch. Zuckerberg is talking about himself and his own policies. The establishment? That’s him.

The changes to Meta’s properties, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, are being framed by the CEO as a return “to our roots around free expression.” This bit of framing is key, painting him as having been right all along. It also conveniently elides nearly a decade of decisions made by Zuckerberg, who not only is Meta’s founder but also holds a majority of voting power in the company, meaning the board cannot vote him out. He is Meta’s unimpeachable king. [...]

Zuckerberg’s personal politics have always been inextricably linked to his company’s political and financial interests. Above all else, the Facebook founder seems compelled by any ideology that allows the company to grow rapidly and make money without having to take too much responsibility for what happens on its platforms. Zuckerberg knows which way the political wind is blowing and appears to be trying to ride it while, simultaneously, being at least a little bit afraid of it.

Exactly what I meant by Zuckerberg’s zigging and zagging and now back to zigging in my piece earlier this week on Meta’s policy about-face.

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Friday, 10 January 2025

Zuckerberg Disses Apple With Joe Rogan: ‘They Haven’t Invented Anything Great in a While’ ★

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 iPhone in the same way.

There were a lot of other companies in the world that would be able to build like a very good earbud, but Apple has a specific protocol that they’ve built into the iPhone that allows AirPods to basically connect to it.

It’s just much more seamless because they’ve enabled that, but they don’t let anyone else use the protocol. If they did, there would probably be much better competitors to AirPods out there.

If only there existed other phone platforms than the iPhone, we could see how cool these other earbuds would be. And Meta Ray-Bans could integrate with those phones in super cool ways that would make iPhone users realize what dopes they’ve been.

What’s really rich about Meta and Zuckerberg’s incessant complaining about being restricted by Apple’s rules for third party software on Apple’s platforms is that Meta doesn’t allow third parties any sort of access to their successful platforms. There are no third-party clients for Facebook, Instagram, Threads, or WhatsApp. It is very hard to get any information out of them let alone integrate with them bi-directionally.

Miller concludes:

Let us also not forget that Meta has never “invented anything great.” Oculus was an acquisition, WhatsApp was an acquisition, Instagram was an acquisition, and intermixed with those acquisitions are features copied and pasted from other platforms.

Yeah but other than that they invented a lot.

James Thomson on the Origins of the MacOS Dock ★

James Thomson:

So, we are coming up on a little anniversary for me this weekend. On the 5th of January 2000, Steve Jobs unveiled the new Aqua user interface of Mac OS X to the world at Macworld Expo.

Towards the end of the presentation, he showed off the Dock. You all know the Dock, it’s been at the bottom of your Mac screen for what feels like forever (if you keep it in the correct location, anyway).

I would not accept this Dock placement blasphemy from anyone else, but from Thomson, well, OK. (The correct location is on the right. Left, we’ll let you argue for. But definitely not on the bottom.)

I didn’t design the dock — that was Bas Ording, a talented young UI designer that Steve had personally recruited. But it was my job to take his prototypes built in Macromind Director and turn them into working code, as part of the Finder team.

I had already written another dock — DragThing — before I worked for Apple, and that had helped me get a job there. I moved over from Scotland to Ireland in late 1996 with my future wife, with both of us joining the small software team there. It was primarily a manufacturing plant, but there was a little bit of software and hardware testing and engineering that went on around the edges.

In the middle of all that, when I was out in Cupertino, I was asked if I wanted to work on a secret project with the code name “Überbar”. I was shown some prototypes and basically told that six people had seen it, and if it leaked they would know it was me that had talked. I figured if anybody was finally going to kill off DragThing, it might as well be me.

I’ve heard most of this story over the years — from James — but never all in one narrative like this. There are a lot of 25-year-old stories about how Mac OS X came together that I hope the participants start sharing. Even Apple folks should be free to talk about quarter-century-old work — and both the work and the stories are so good.

Los Angeles Fires: The Damage in Maps, Video, and Images ★

Just heartbreaking, and a scale of destruction that’s hard to comprehend.

Thursday, 9 January 2025

Understanding the Various Inscrutable Beeps, Bops, and Bloops AirPods Make ★

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 results), your AirPods may periodically play a quiet chime when they’re in their charging case.

Information on the mysterious chime was highlighted on Mastodon after Apple’s unclear AirPods sounds were discussed on today’s ATP podcast. As noted on the podcast, Apple does not have an established guide that provides insight into the different sounds that the AirPods make, so it can be confusing.

Years ago, Apple was a successful company and documented how their products work. These days, Apple is struggling financially, and alas can no longer afford to produce something even as simple as an interactive web page with examples of the sounds that AirPods make and explanations of what those sounds mean.

Breathable, Garrett Murray’s AQI Widget for iOS and MacOS, Is Now Free of Charge ★

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 only because I was interested in the idea of a widget-only weather app — Philadelphia generally doesn’t have air quality issues. I should have known better. Turns out, the whole world now has air quality issues.

Breathable costs just $2, and Murray is donating a portion of the proceeds to foundations focused on climate change initiatives.

Breathable is now up to version 3.0, and is better than ever. Today, Murray announced he’s making it free of charge:

In light of the awful fires and air quality in Los Angeles, I’ve made Breathable free and app will remain free permanently. I charged for the app prior only so I could donate the proceeds to climate change charities, but paying Apple 15% for that privilege is silly.

If you paid for the app in the past, thank you so much — your money was not wasted! It was donated to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Clean Air Task Force and the Climate Change Emergency Fund. I took great pride in donating to these terrific causes in Breathable’s name.

Good thoughts and best wishes to everyone in southern California facing this catastrophe.

Microsoft’s Recent History of Dirty Tricks With Edge ★

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 encouraging the user to “Compare answers with the AI-powered new Bing”. Ads in the tab bar, jeebus.

There’s also a longstanding practice where if you search for “Chrome” or “Chrome download”, Edge shows a special pop-up encouraging you to stick with it rather than switch. Google pulls a similar thing, using popups across its web properties to encourage users of other browsers — perhaps especially Safari, unsurprisingly, considering how much money they pay Apple each year — to switch to Chrome, often with the implication that Google recommends switching for security reasons, not financial ones.

As a comparison, the best search engine in the world, Kagi, is so scrupulous that they don’t screw with the order of the results for the search term “Orion”, even though that’s the name of their own web browser. (If you missed it over the holidays, I had a great interview with Kagi founder Vlad Prelovac on The Talk Show last month.)

Wednesday, 8 January 2025

When You Search for ‘Google’ on Bing, Bing Attempts to Trick You Into Thinking the Results Page Is Google ★

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 query, and other searches just list the usual Bing search results without this special interface. The Google result includes a search bar, an image that looks a lot like a Google Doodle, and even some small text under the search bar just like Google does. Microsoft even automatically scrolls down the page slightly to mask its own Bing search bar that appears at the top of search results.

The idea here is that Edge is the default browser on Windows, and Edge remains the only browser that sets Bing as its default search engine. And so a lot of technically un-savvy Windows users open their browser (Edge) and type “Google”. This trick is meant to make them think they’re now on Google, and I have to say, it’s really well done. The lack of Google’s main logo above the search box is explained by the Google-Doodle-style illustration. It’s common for Google itself to do that. The autoscrolling moves the page down just far enough to move Bing’s own page header out of the viewable page content. But because they just autoscroll down from the Bing page header, as opposed to hiding it completely (say, using display: none in CSS) you can see it by just scrolling back up. But who thinks to scroll up immediately after typing a search term and hitting Return? (No one.) They even actually have the word “Google” and Google’s actual logo on the results page, in an “info box” for Google, the “American tech company”. See for yourself.

It’s an exquisite dirty trick, and I’ll bet it actually works remarkably well. Google itself has long claimed that “google” is the most-searched-for term on Bing. I’ll bet that presenting the results for that search this way greatly increases the number of users who, thinking they’re actually now on Google, perform the search they intended to do on Google right there on Bing. And then do it again, and again, until some helpful friend or colleague shows them how to install a better browser or just switch Edge’s default search to Google.

This is the most classic old-school Microsoft rat fuck they’ve pulled in a long while. They used to scheme up these type of devious moves all the time back in the ’80s and ’90s. Deceptive enough to work, but with plausible deniability, however thin, for every aspect of it. Glad to see they’ve still got it in them.

Tuesday, 7 January 2025

Also From the Archive: ‘“Beta” Is Not an Excuse’ ★

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. not-released is the distinction that warrants critical restraint. Film critics don’t write reviews of rough cuts. Book critics don’t review non-final manuscripts of novels.

Released software that is labeled “beta” is still released software, and is fair game for the same level of criticism as any released software. You can’t “semi-release” your 1.0 just because you want it out there but aren’t yet finished. Being semi-released is like being semi-pregnant. [...]

What exactly is meant by software that is released, but labeled “beta”? That there are missing features? All software has missing features. I’ve never met a single developer working on a significant software project who has completely zeroed out the features-to-do list. Knowing how to draw that line between features that make it for this release and features postponed for later is a big part of the art of shipping.

No, what “beta” means in this context is “buggy”.

Read through to the end, and I even have a badge (courtesy my friend Bryan Bell) that Apple could use to more clearly label Apple Intelligence notification summaries.

From the DF Archive: ‘Life as a Facebook Moderator’ ★

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, I wrote:

If this is what it takes to moderate Facebook, it’s an indictment of the basic concept of Facebook itself. In theory it sounds like a noble idea to let everyone in the world post whatever they want and have it be connected and amplified to like-minded individuals.

In practice, it’s a disaster.

The problem isn’t the “everyone can post whatever they want” — that’s the nature of the internet, and I truly believe it has democratized communication in a good way. The disastrous part is the “be connected and amplified to like-minded individuals”. That’s the difference between Facebook (and to some degree, YouTube and Twitter) and things like plain old web forums. Facebook is full of shit about most of what they actually do, but one part of their self description that is true is that they really do connect people. The problem is that some people shouldn’t be connected, and some messages should not be amplified.

There is something fundamentally wrong with a platform that — while operating exactly as designed — requires thousands of employees to crush their own souls.

Holds up.

Dude, You’re Getting a Dell Pro Max Premium Plus ★

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 its new laptops, desktops, and monitors and replacing them with three main product lines: Dell (yes, just Dell), Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max.

If you think that sounds a bit Apple-y and bland, you’re right. But Dell is taking it further by also adding a bit of auto industry parlance with three sub-tiers: Base, Plus, and Premium.

It’s simple, really. You can choose a Dell Pro Premium, which is not as good as a Dell Pro Max Plus, but both are better than a Dell Premium, which actually isn’t premium at all. Easy.

It is never not funny when a company is willing to shamelessly copy Apple but their institutional marketing bureaucracy completely fucks it up. If Dell was willing to wipe its existing branding slate completely clean, they could have easily devised a taxonomy of adjectives that created a hierarchy that’s more obvious and intuitive than Apple’s (where, for example, “Max” is sometimes but not always not the max).

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Monday, 6 January 2025

Jason Snell: ‘Apple Intelligence Summaries Might Get Warning Labels. That’s Not Enough.’ ★

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 notifications of related content (a bunch of emails or chat messages in a thread) versus unrelated content (BBC headlines, podcast episode descriptions) and change how the unrelated content is summarized. Perhaps a little further down the road, news notifications should be summarized based on the full text of the news article, rather than generating a secondhand machine summary of a story already summarized by a human headline writer.

In all the years Snell and I have been doing what we do, I don’t think we’ve ever come so close to writing the exact same take at the same time. The only subtle differences are that (a) I side with Apple in not giving developers the option to opt out of notification summaries, and (b) that I’m a bit more of the mind that Apple can address this by somehow making it more clear which notifications are AI-generated summaries. Like, perhaps instead of their “↪︎” glyph, they could use the 🤪 emoji.

Update: Guy English:

Use the Apple logo. If you’re going to usurp the hard won decades of trusted reporting the BBC has with your own automated hot take you should put your reputational wood behind the arrow. Put your logo on what you generate from other people’s work.

My wacky emoji idea is obviously a joke, but this isn’t. Sign your work. Take responsibility for it.

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Monday, 6 January 2025

Listen Later ★

My thanks to Listen Later for sponsoring last week at DF. Listen Later is a super simple, super useful service that turns articles into podcast episodes. When you sign up, you get a custom email address to send articles to; every article you forward to your Listen Later address is transformed into very human-like narration, and gets delivered to your private podcast feed. You can subscribe to your private Listen Later podcast feed in any podcast app.

In addition to the email gateway, there’s a Shortcut for sending articles from Safari (on Mac or iOS), a web extension for Chrome, and a simple web interface for submitting new articles. It’s very simple and the narrated versions sound great.

Sign up for free and start listening today. New users get $2 in credits to try it out — no commitment. And if you like it, you simply prepay for credits as you go. There’s no subscription — you simply pay for what you use. I wish more services had a pay-as-you-go model like Listen Later’s.

Sunday, 5 January 2025

Jamison Foser on the Obsequiousness of The Washington Post Spiking Ann Telnaes’s Cartoon ★

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 interpretation of events.”

“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Mr. Shipley said in the statement. “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.”

Look, this is bullshit. It is risible to suggest that the world’s most powerful billionaires — men who control Facebook, Amazon, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Disney, ABC News, and OpenAI — aligning themselves with an aspiring autocrat is unworthy of two columns (one satirical) and a drawing.

And Shipley’s claim that the Post opinion section has a “bias … against repetition”? As I write this, at 8:50 pm on January 4 the main page of the opinion section at WashingtonPost.com currently features the following:

• “The 10 worst things Biden did in 2024” by Marc Thiessen
• “The 10 best things Biden did in 2024” by Marc Thiessen
• “Dave Barry’s 2024 year in review” by Dave Barry
• “24 good things that happened in 2024” by the Editorial Board
• “2025 promises to be tumultuous. Here’s our New Year’s resolution” by the Editorial Board
• “How poker players keep New Year’s resolutions” by Annie Duke
• “Classifying New Year’s resolutions,” a cartoon by Edith Pritchett
• “Bringing in the New Year,” a cartoon by by Ann Telnaes

Clearly this is not an opinion section that has a “bias … against repetition.” Just as clearly, the Post’s explanation for spiking Telnaes’ cartoon is bullshit. It is a defense so preposterous it serves as unwitting acknowledgment of the most obvious — and damning — interpretation of the Post’s actions: The Post spiked Telnaes’ cartoon because of its portrayal of Post owner Jeff Bezos.

Foser further makes the point that the Post’s obsequiousness here is not toward Trump, but rather toward Bezos. In fact, if Trump has seen Telnaes’s cartoon, he surely loves it. He might have it framed.

Charlie Sykes on the Stupidity of The Washington Post Spiking Ann Telnaes’s Cartoon ★

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 benefited.

Instead of looking like a thin-skinned, craven autocrat, he would have looked like someone big enough to tolerate criticism.

And as Sykes’s post points out right at the start, the Streisand Effect is fully in play here. Telnaes’s draft of the cartoon is now the most celebrated and re-posted political cartoon in recent memory.

Saturday, 4 January 2025

Pulitzer-Prize-Winner Ann Telnaes Quits the Washington Post After Editors Nix Cartoon Mocking Bezos (and His Tech/Media Mogul Cohorts) for Paying Fealty to Trump ★

Ann Telnaes, from her personal site on Substack (alas):

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 chose to aim my pen at. Until now.

The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump. There have been multiple articles recently about these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-lago. The group in the cartoon included Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook & Meta founder and CEO, Sam Altman/OpenAI CEO, Patrick Soon-Shiong/LA Times publisher, the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos/Washington Post owner. [...]

As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, “Democracy dies in darkness”.

The only thing wrong with the cartoon is that she drew it too soon to include Tim Cook. The cartoon isn’t even particularly scathing. I’d describe it as tame even. It shows these moguls as offering money to Trump — which they are! What a bizarre decision by Telnaes’s editors. It’d be like me getting offended if someone drew a cartoon that showed me wasting money betting on the Dallas Cowboys. If the shoe fits you have to wear it.

This isn’t a sign that the Washington Post has taken another turn for the worse. It’s simply proof of what many of us wrote before the election, when Bezos kiboshed the Post editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. In one fell swoop that decision collapsed the entirety of The Washington Post’s editorial integrity. This Telnaes fiasco is just more proof. More will follow until Bezos sells.

Friday, 3 January 2025

The Great American Tradition ★

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 activities.

That website is now defunct, and the “bideninaugural.org” domain redirects (for the next 17 days) to “www.whitehouse.gov”, but Internet Archive has a capture from Inauguration Day, 20 January 2021.

Apple is not listed, and while there is a “Tim Cook” on the list, he’s listed as residing in Michigan. [Update 11 January 2025: The Biden Inaugural Committee’s eventual filing with the FEC did list Apple Inc. as a donor, for a grand total of $43,200. Times were tight for Apple in 2020, perhaps.]

All “great American traditions” have to start somewhere, and perhaps Tim Cook — the one from California, by way of Alabama — believes the great American tradition of donating money to presidential inaugural committees is only beginning now. Or, giving him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he only saw fit to contribute $199 to Biden’s inauguration and thus wasn’t listed, and bumped his donation by $999,801 this time. You know, for “unity”.

(Thanks to reader Daniel Streicher for the link.)

‘Don’t You Think We Should Maybe Ask for More Than a Million Dollars? A Million Dollars Isn’t Exactly a Lot of Money These Days.’ ★

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.

Axios: Tim Cook Donates $1 Million to Trump Inauguration ★

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 said. The company is not expected to give.

Donald Trump tried to overthrow the legitimate results of the 2020 election to remain in office, and as part of his efforts, inspired a violent mob of insurrectionists to invade the U.S. Capitol and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

For that reason alone — there are, of course, many others, but to me, Trump’s betrayal of U.S. democracy itself remains paramount — this donation is gross and perverse. But I’m not sure it was feasible not to play ball here. In times like this, realpolitik is the only politics. I wouldn’t have the stomach to make this donation, and those of you disgusted by this likely don’t either. Few people are cut out to be the CEO of a large multinational company like Apple. Sometimes you have to eat the shit sandwich.

It seems pretty obvious that it was Apple/Cook that leaked this to Axios, not Trump’s side, given the eye-roll-inducing “proud American tradition” spin, but more especially the nugget that only Cook personally, not Apple as a company, is contributing. That’s Cook asking for any and all ire to be directed at him, personally, not Apple. Good luck with that.

The Intricacy of ASML’s Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Machines ★

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:

1. 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 millimeter.

2. The precision of EUV machines is comparable to directing a laser beam from your house and hitting a ping-pong ball on the moon.

It took decades for these absurdly sophisticated machines to make their way from labs to fabs. And until recently, it wasn’t clear if the company’s audacious bet on EUV lithography would ever pay off. In 2012, ASML was strapped for cash and sold a 23% equity stake to Intel, Samsung Electronics and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, which meant its biggest customers were literally invested in the company’s success.

ASML soon ramped up production — very, very slowly. The company delivered the first EUV system in 2010. Not until 2020 did it deliver the 100th. And last year was a busy one: ASML shipped a total of 42 EUV machines.

The piece is also a profile of one ASML engineer, Brienna Hall, who is one of a small cadre of frontline support engineers who keep these machines operating perfectly. The article’s headline, though, is bizarrely framed to suggest that she’s the only such support engineer in the world. The weird headline distracts from an otherwise fascinating story.

Thursday, 2 January 2025

Simon Willisons’s Approach to Running a Link Blog ★

Speaking of Simon Willison, I greatly enjoyed this post from last week, with some of the self-imposed principles he follows writing his excellent eponymous blog. Amongst them:

• I always include the names of the people who created the content I am linking to, if I can figure that out. Credit is really important, and it’s also useful for myself because I can later search for someone’s name and find other interesting things they have created that I linked to in the past. If I’ve linked to someone’s work three or more times I also try to notice and upgrade them to a dedicated tag. [...]
• If the original author reads my post, I want them to feel good about it. I know from my own experience that often when you publish something online the silence can be deafening. Knowing that someone else read, appreciated, understood and then shared your work can be very pleasant.
• A slightly self-involved concern I have is that I like to prove that I’ve read it. This is more for me than for anyone else: I don’t like to recommend something if I’ve not read that thing myself, and sticking in a detail that shows I read past the first paragraph helps keep me honest about that.

Every step of the way, I found myself nodding my head, thinking to myself, I do that too! — right down to creating tags for people after I’ve mentioned their work or simply credited their bylines a few times. (The difference is that Willison seemingly isn’t a procrastinator, and I am, so my decades of tagging aren’t yet exposed to anyone but me.)

Then I got to this:

There are a lot of great link blogs out there, but the one that has influenced me the most in how I approach my own is John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. I really like the way he mixes commentary, quotations and value-added relevant information.

And now it doesn’t seem quite as amazing that I was nodding my head in agreement with each of his guidelines. But, call me biased, it’s still a hell of a good start to a blogging rulebook.

‘Things We Learned About LLMs in 2024’ ★

Simon Willison:

A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past twelve months, plus my attempt at identifying key themes and pivotal moments. [...]

I think telling people that this whole field is environmentally catastrophic plagiarism machines that constantly make things up is doing those people a disservice, no matter how much truth that represents. There is genuine value to be had here, but getting to that value is unintuitive and needs guidance.

Those of us who understand this stuff have a duty to help everyone else figure it out.

Nobody is doing a better job of that than Willison. I learned so much from reading this piece — I bet you will too.

Update: Anil Dash:

I think everyone who has an opinion, positive or negative, about LLMs, should read how @simonwillison has summed up what’s happened in the space this year. He’s the most credible, most independent, most honest, and most technically fluent person watching the space.

Couldn’t say it better myself.

Wednesday, 1 January 2025

Tesla Cybertruck Explodes and Burns Outside Entrance of Trump International Hotel and No-Casino in Las Vegas ★

There are metaphors, and then there are metaphors.

Happy New Year. Buckle up.

Tuesday, 31 December 2024

Apple TV+ Is Free This Weekend, January 3–5 ★

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 of Severance. Simply open the Apple TV app to watch for free.

Bizarrely, the only places Apple announced this seems to be on X and Instagram. Not a word on Apple Newsroom, for example. Update: OK, it’s also posted on Apple’s dedicated press release site for TV+, which I heretofore didn’t know existed.

Apple TV+ has an abundance of great shows (but a relative dearth of good original movies, with Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon being the standout exception). I wouldn’t hesitate to argue that the average quality of an Apple TV+ original show is higher than that for any other streaming platform. It really is the new HBO. But for one weekend of free viewing I can easily name my two favorites, both of which I think will stand the test of time and long be remembered: Severance and Slow Horses.

Monday, 30 December 2024

DF Sponsorships ★

Speaking of sponsorships, the Q1 schedule is filling up, but I’ve still got this week and next open. 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.

James Fallows: ‘Jimmy Carter Was a Lucky Man’ ★

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 character, vision, and sincerity recognized, and to know that other ex-presidents will be judged by the standard he has set.

He was an unlucky president, and a lucky man.

We are lucky to have had him. Blessed.

Mark Gurman Says Voice Control for Next Magic Mouse ‘Makes Sense’ ★

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 see-through 1998 iMac aesthetic by switching MacBooks to transparent aluminum.

52 Things Kent Hendricks Learned in 2024 ★

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 experience they’re the only three cities in America where people walk at a reasonable clip.

(Sidenote: #1 on Hendricks’s list was an item claiming that Firefox and Chrome users tend to be happier and more satisfied employees than Internet Explorer or Safari users, because they’re the sort of non-conformist thinkers who install third-party web browsers rather than use the system default. As if the inclusion of “Internet Explorer” weren’t hint enough that one should be skeptical of this claim, the cited source is an article from 2016, and the study only applied to people with jobs as customer service agents. Chrome has 66 percent market share for desktop browsers today — pretty sure using it doesn’t make one a non-conformist.)

Sunday, 29 December 2024

Due ★

My thanks to Junjie for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Due, their excellent reminder app for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. I first linked to Due back in 2010, writing this short post:

I’ve been trying this $3 app for a few days and digging it — a convenient, low-friction way to set short-term reminders and timers. Sort of like Pester but for iPhone. Focused and thoughtful design.

A lot of apps have come and gone since then. But Due has thrived. I never would have expected it when I penned the short blurb above, but here we are at the very end of 2024 and I’ve been relying upon Due for 14 years and counting. I started using it then and haven’t stopped. Due has long held a permanent position on my iPhone’s first home screen. And for several years now, Due has been available, with seamless iCloud syncing, on the Mac.

You might ask why use Due instead of Apple Reminders. For me the answer is simple. Due’s conception and presentation of “reminders” works for me and my way of thinking in a way that Apple Reminders does not. I have tons of to-do items in Reminders. But for a certain type of recurring and one-off tasks that I want to be reminded about at a certain time, they go in Due.

For example, our trash gets picked up on Monday and Thursday mornings. So I have recurring Due reminders to take out the trash every Sunday and Wednesday night. I don’t want these in my calendar. I just want them in Due, and Due makes sure I see notifications at 9:00pm every trash night. Due’s intuitive snoozing options make it easy to postpone one of these by a day during weeks when trash pickup is delayed by a holiday. I also keep my reminders related to Daring Fireball’s weekly sponsors in Due — posting the new sponsor’s ad at the start of the week, and writing my thank-you post at the end of the week — which reminders were quite meta this week.

It turns out, that brief blurb I wrote about Due 14 years ago was meaningful to the success of Due. Reading Junjie’s remembrance about that post made me sit up a bit straighter, I’ll admit. I’ll accept some small measure of credit for discovering Due back then, but Due is so good, so distinctively original and useful, that I firmly believe its success was inevitable. Go check it out.

Jimmy Carter Dies at 100 ★

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 himself into a freelance diplomat traveling the globe, sometimes irritating his successors but earning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

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Tuesday, 24 December 2024

The Talk Show: ‘A Professional Internet User’, With Kagi Founder and CEO Vlad Prelovac ★

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 free trial today.

Coding Font Selection ‘Tournament’ ★

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 fonts — some of my favorite monospaced fonts aren’t free and thus aren’t included (e.g. Consolas, Berkeley Mono, or Apple’s SF Mono). Another limitation is that some of the fonts in the tournament just plain suck. But it’s really pretty fun.

It’s also a good thing I procrastinated on linking to this for two months — it’s improved greatly in the weeks since Snell linked to it. The example code is now JavaScript, not CSS, which is a much better baseline for choosing a programming font. And there are some better font choices now.

I highly recommend you disable showing the font names while you play, to avoid any bias toward fonts you already think you have an opinion about. But no matter how many times I play, I always get the same winner: Adobe’s Source Code Pro. My second favorite in this tournament is IBM Plex Mono. The most conspicuous omission: Intel One Mono.

Sunday, 22 December 2024

Jiiiii ★

My thanks to Mochi Development for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Jiiiii, their exquisitely well-crafted app for tracking anime. (Jiiiii — with five i’s — is the onomatopoeia for staring at something, commonly used in Japanese media.) 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 check as you await your favorite’s show’s next episode.

Unlike any other anime aggregation site, Jiiiii has a collection of beautiful native apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Vision Pro, making it the best way to keep up with anime on Apple devices. They even have a progressive web app in beta, that you can download on almost any other platform to get a similar experience.

The best part? No ads, no tracking, and complete privacy — all the benefits you’d expect from the indie husband-and-wife developers Dimitri and Linh Bouniol. (Dimitri streamed the entire development of Jiiiii to YouTube, and continues to do so every night.)

Catch up on anything you missed from the fall season, and get ready for the winter season’s new anime with Jiiiii, and never miss out on a show again.

‘Well, Hang Tight. Rickey’s Gonna Give You That Chance.’ ★

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 and thrilled and frustrated and dominated and left us all wanting more.

“When we were kids,” his teammate Mike Gallego said, “we played in the backyard emulating Pete Rose’s stance or Joe Morgan’s. I believe Rickey emulated Rickey.”

Yes, Rickey was his own thing, entirely, completely, from the way he crouched at the plate (“he has a strike zone the size of Hitler’s heart,” Jim Murray famously wrote), to the way he slid headfirst on the bases (he modeled his slide after an airplane landing) to the way he held out virtually every spring (“You have to say Rickey’s consistent,” Don Mattingly said during one of those holdouts, “and that’s what you want from a ballplayer: consistency”) to the way he referred to himself in the third person (“People are always saying, ‘Rickey says Rickey,’” Rickey said, “but it’s been blown way out of proportion”) to the joyful confidence he exuded every time he stepped out on the diamond from age 20 to age 44.

“You wanna throw me out today?” he would ask catchers the first time he stepped to the plate. “Well, hang tight. Rickey’s gonna give you that chance.”

I don’t want to spoil a single word of the story Posnanski closes his piece with. Just be sure to read through to the very end.

See also:

From ESPN’s obit, by Howard Bryant and Jeff Passan:

He played his last game at 44 years, 268 days old Sept. 19, 2003, for the Dodgers, and his stolen base total remains more than 1,000 ahead of the current active leader.

Here’s the list of career steals leaders among active players, led by Starling Marte with 354 and Jose Altuve with 315. There are only four other active players with more than 200. Rickey had 1,406. Lou Brock is second place on the all-time list with 938 steals. So even if Marte (who is already 36 years old) or Altuve (34 years old) were to steal as many additional bases as Lou Brock did in his entire 19-year career — the guy who is second-place all-time — they’d still be well short of Rickey’s record. In the entire history of Major League Baseball there are only nine players who stole half of Rickey’s career number. But as FanGraphs’s Dan Szymborski observes, “The funny thing with Rickey is that you take away the stolen bases, he’s still easily in the top 10 for LF WAR all time.”

Also from ESPN:

Stories about Henderson were as legendary as his play, such as the true story of him once framing a million-dollar bonus check and hanging it on his wall — without first cashing it.

Last but not least, give a listen to this quick story from Giants great Will Clark, about a preseason game against Rickey’s Oakland A’s when the A’s coaches tried to give him the “don’t steal” sign. You know what Rickey did.

Saturday, 21 December 2024

Yankees Legend Rickey Henderson Dies at 65 ★

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 hitter of all time and the greatest base-stealer of all time. He, arguably, possessed the greatest combination of power and speed of any player in the history of the game as well. Perhaps the best characterization of Henderson’s career came from Bill James who once wrote that, “if you could split Rickey Henderson in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers.” [...]

In 1980, his first full major league season, Henderson broke Ty Cobb’s 65-year-old American League record for stolen bases by swiping 100 bags to Cobb’s 96. In 1982 he stole 130 bases, breaking Hall of Famer Lou Brock’s all-time single-season record of 118. Henderson’s 130 steals that year stands as the record to this day. He would lead the American League in stolen bases in each of his first seven full seasons and nine of his first ten. He’d lead his league in steals in 12 seasons in all, the last of which came in 1998 when he was 39 years-old.

On May 1, 1991, Henderson broke Brock’s all-time stolen base record with his 939th steal and would go on to steal an astounding 1,406 bases before he retired. No player has come anywhere close to Henderson’s mark in the three decades since he set it and many doubt anyone ever will.

You have to be really good even to have had been on base that many times, to have had the opportunity to steal 1,400+ bases, let alone to have actually swiped them. He was amazing. He’s best known for his career base-stealing record, but Henderson — thanks to his speed, talent, competitiveness, and remarkable longevity — is also the career leader in runs scored. Scoring runs is how you win — you can make the case that no stat is more important in baseball, and Rickey (as everyone called him, including himself) scored more runs than anyone who ever played. Look at the names on the top 10 for career runs scored:

1. Rickey Henderson 2,295
2. Ty Cobb 2,245
3. Barry Bonds 2,227
4. Hank Aaron 2,174
5. Babe Ruth 2,174
6. Pete Rose 2,165
7. Willie Mays 2,068
8. Alex Rodriguez 2,021
9. Stan Musial 1,949
10. Derek Jeter 1,923

What a player, and character, he was. Rickey was the most exciting player I ever saw.

Thursday, 19 December 2024

Woody Johnson’s New York Jets ★

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, Douglas and his Broncos counterpart, George Paton, were deep in negotiations for a trade that would have sent Jeudy to the Jets and given future Hall of Fame quarterback Aaron Rodgers another potential playmaker. The Broncos felt a deal was near. Then, abruptly, it all fell apart. In Denver’s executive offices, they couldn’t believe the reason why.

Douglas told the Broncos that Johnson didn’t want to make the trade because the owner felt Jeudy’s player rating in “Madden NFL,” the popular video game, wasn’t high enough, according to multiple league sources. The Broncos ultimately traded the receiver to the Cleveland Browns. Last Sunday, Jeudy crossed the 1,000-yard receiving mark for the first time in his career.

Coming into this season, the Jets had hopes of ending the franchise’s 13-year playoff drought — the longest in the four major men’s North American sports — and quieting years of talk about the franchise’s dysfunction. Instead, this season has only cemented the Jets’ reputation.

The fans of every other team in the NFL that is having a disappointing season — like yours truly — are all texting this story to each other today, with the same message: “At least we’re not the Jets.”

Wednesday, 18 December 2024

‘Silo’ Renewed for Two Additional Seasons ★

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.

I feel bad complaining about a good show not only getting renewed, but renewed through to a planned conclusion. I fucking hate when good shows get cancelled after one season.

But. While I really liked season 1 of Silo, season 2 has been a bore. We’re halfway through — five episodes — and everything interesting could have been put in one episode. Maybe one and half. I hope the remaining five episodes of season 2 pick up, but so far, it really feels like this entire season has just been padding, spinning its wheels, waiting to get to what’s next. Hugely disappointing, really.

Acorn 8’s Documentation ★

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 videos.

In broad strokes, there are two approaches to documenting a serious, professional-level app or software system. One way is a comprehensive functional reference resource. That’s a way that you, the user, can teach yourself how to use a feature, refresh your memory about a feature you haven’t used in a while, or even just check to see if a certain feature even exists. The other is a narrative, storytelling, tutorial approach. That’s not teaching yourself — that’s letting an expert teach you, and today that’s often a visual approach through video.

Acorn’s documentation is so thorough that it encompasses both approaches. Either one would qualify Acorn as a well-documented application. But by including both, Gus Mueller should be given some sort of medal or award. Different people learn in different ways, and Acorn’s documentation is there for everyone.

It should go without saying, but no serious tool — hardware or software — is complete without thorough, polished documentation. Acorn goes above and beyond. It’s amazing enough that a company as small as Flying Meat — it’s really just Gus and his wife Kirstin — has produced a full-fledged professional-strength image editing application that has remained modern and cutting-edge for 17 years and counting. But it’s also accompanied by first-class comprehensive documentation.

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