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:

Rickey Henderson 2,295
Ty Cobb 2,245
Barry Bonds 2,227
Hank Aaron 2,174
Babe Ruth 2,174
Pete Rose 2,165
Willie Mays 2,068
Alex Rodriguez 2,021
Stan Musial 1,949
Derek Jeter 1,923

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

Journalism Requires Owners Committed to the Cause

Friday, 20 December 2024

Mike Allen, in the bizarre notes-hurriedly-jotted-on-a-napkin house prose style of Axios:

Kara Swisher, the popular podcaster and pioneering tech journalist, is trying to round up a group of rich people to fund a bid for the Washington Post, she told us.

One big problem: Jeff Bezos, the owner, has shown no interest in selling.

Why it matters: Swisher — who started in the Post mailroom, and became an early tech reporter at the paper (and later one of the first at The Wall Street Journal) — believes the Amazon founder will eventually want to sell, since the paper has become a managerial nightmare.

Like many, Swisher thinks Bezos should sell since he has other financial and personal interests — like space tech — that are more important to him, and can conflict with his Post ownership.

“The Post can do better,” she told us. “It’s so maddening to see what’s happening. ... Why not me? Why not any of us?”

This would be an excellent outcome. Bezos should sell. These last few months should make clear to him that he should not own the Post. Swisher would be an excellent publisher. Her entire career has been focused on sharp, smart, good journalism.

One simple fact that’s been clear to me ever since I worked (as a designer in the promotions department) at The Philadelphia Inquirer in the late 1990s is that news publications need to be owned by people who are devoted to the core pursuit of journalism. The Inquirer was a world-class newspaper at the time. I played supposedly casual lunchtime softball with colleagues from across the company on Fridays, and only after a few weeks found out that around half the regulars in our group had won Pulitzer prizes. When I learned this I was astonished. It gave me a moment’s pause about hitting the ball as hard as I could. I didn’t want to injure journalistic royalty. (But just a moment’s pause. It was a friendly game but we were all competitive bastards.) There was a stretch in the late 1980s when the Inquirer, under the leadership of editor Gene Roberts, won more Pulitzers than The New York Times and Washington Post. That culture, and the journalists, remained in place through the 1990s. But The Inquirer was owned at the time by Knight Ridder, a national conglomerate, and Knight Ridder wasn’t in the newspaper business for the journalism. They were in it for the profits. Which, at the time, were quite lucrative. There was one quarter where word spread that Knight Ridder brass was pissed because The Inquirer’s profit margin for the quarter had dropped to 19 percent. 20 was the magic number. Newspapers were still minting money from the classified ads. Much of the great editorial and reporting talent at The Inquirer soon left for other publications, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time magazine. It fell apart. Ownership matters.

There are many types of businesses a wealthy person can own as a mere hobby, in which the business can thrive under such ownership, simply by the owner allowing talented dedicated professionals to run the operation. A wealthy dilettante owner can help many such businesses, by providing the capital to hire great talent. Journalism is not one of those businesses. Profits are important because profits maintain independence and pay for talent. Investigative reporting is expensive. But independence is more important than anything, and there can be no true independence for a publication when the owner is not committed to the cause.

We see it with The Washington Post under Bezos, when he kiboshed the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris so as not to antagonize Donald Trump. We see it with this shithead owner of the LA Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, whose latest dictum is for the paper’s editorial board to, I swear, “take a break” from writing about Donald Trump. Instructing a daily newspaper’s editorial board to take a break from writing about the incoming president of the United States is like telling a bar to take a break from selling beer. It’s the entire point of the establishment.¹

We see it most clearly, perhaps, with Disney’s ownership of ABC News. Disney last week settled a bullshit defamation lawsuit with Trump, for $16 million, that they clearly should have taken to trial, choosing instead to embarrass and humiliate, rather than proudly stand behind, their own talent, George Stephanopoulos. As Josh Marshall eloquently argues, settling that defamation suit on those obsequious, cowardly terms made perfect sense for Disney. It wasn’t worth the risk to Disney’s brand and overall interests. But it was devastating to ABC News’s brand and reputation. The simple truth is that Disney’s core business isn’t journalism. Not even close. It’s not that ABC News’s journalistic integrity doesn’t matter to Disney. It’s that it’s just one small factor to Disney. Disney would fight tooth and nail to defend Mickey Mouse, but George Stephanopoulos’s face isn’t printed on t-shirts at Disneyland.

Say what you want (and there is much to be said) about the Ochs-Sulzberger family’s dynastic ownership and control of The New York Times Company, but whatever their faults, there can be little argument that nothing is more important to them than the Times’s core mission of independent journalism. If The New York Times had been faced with this same defamation lawsuit from Trump for the same reason (whether the word “rape” fairly describes the sexual assault he was found to have committed in E. Jean Carroll’s victorious civil lawsuit against him, in which she was awarded $88 million), they would not have capitulated as Disney did. The New York Times did not hesitate to strongly endorse Kamala Harris. Et cetera.

Even Rupert Murdoch exemplifies this. When News Corp cashed in and sold assets five years ago, Murdoch sold 21st Century Fox — the film and TV assets — and held onto the news assets. And the buyer was Disney, whose core business is aligned with those assets: entertainment. Murdoch’s News Corp, aptly named to describe its primary purpose, still owns The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Times and The Sun in the U.K., and more. And the Murdoch family, of course, owns a controlling share of Fox Corporation, the parent of Fox News. Say what you want about Murdoch too (and I would say, with no hyperbole, that he’s singlehandedly responsible for more of what’s gone wrong in the United States over the last quarter century than any person alive, including Donald Trump, who I believe would never have even run for president, let alone become president twice, without the deeply pernicious and pervasive influence of Fox News), but he built and owns his news media empire because he believes in its core mission, as dastardly as his vision is for what journalism ought to be.

Good intentions aren’t enough. Disney, all things considered, has never wanted ABC News to be anything other than a bastion of quality TV-style journalism. Bezos, heretofore, has been a fine steward at the Post. But it’s easy to be a good owner of a good news outlet when times are normal. It’s when times are hard, whether financially, or more crucially, when truth speaks to malicious power, that it becomes essential for the owner to be in the game first and foremost for the mission of journalism itself. Those are moments of contention and conflict and risk, and like a don’s consigliere, a news publication in conflict with malicious power needs an owner with the stomach for war.

The Washington Post’s own illustrious history speaks to this. In 1971, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department’s internal secret history of the Vietnam War (which Ellsberg had helped write). Per The New York Historical:

The first article on the Pentagon Papers ran on the front page of the Times on June 13, 1971. Two days later, the Nixon administration sued, asking for an injunction to halt any further publication of the papers. U.S. District Court Judge Murray Gurfein issued a temporary restraining order — the first in U.S. history that restrained the press prior to publication. [...]

The court order was still in place on June 16, when the Washington Post’s national editor, Ben Bagdikian, returned from Ellsberg’s home in Boston carrying a partial copy of the Pentagon Papers. The Post’s president and publisher Katharine Graham was faced with the decision: to publish or not? Defying the court order carried significant risk: the Washington Post Company had just gone public, and reporting on the Pentagon Papers meant risking a criminal charge that would imperil its $35 million stock offering and put the paper’s financial future in jeopardy. A criminal conviction would also give the FCC an excuse to strip the Washington Post Company of the licenses to its lucrative television stations, WTOP in Washington, D.C., and Florida’s WJXT. Doing so would stand up for freedom of the press.

On June 17, reporters, editors, and lawyers gathered at executive editor Ben Bradlee’s house to wrangle over the question of whether or not to publish. Meanwhile, Katharine Graham was hosting a farewell party for the paper’s departing business manager in her stately Georgetown home. Interrupted in the middle of her laudatory speech, she was summoned to the phone and asked to make a decision that could, one way or the other, destroy her paper. Though her lawyers opposed publication, her reporters and editors argued that failing to publish would be “gutless” and erode the Post’s credibility. Frightened and tense, as she later wrote in her Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Graham “took a big gulp and said, ‘Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Let’s go. Let’s publish.”

In the face of possible prison time — not only for her staff but for herself — and the risk of financial ruin for the paper and her family, Graham said, “Let’s go. Let’s publish.” Jeff Bezos didn’t even have the intestinal fortitude to allow the Post editorial board to publish an utterly unsurprising election endorsement. Katharine Graham, portrayed by Meryl Streep, was the hero of a great Steven Spielberg film, The Post. In a hypothetical sequel portraying the events that led to Trump’s second term, Jeff Bezos would be portrayed by the actor who played the cowardly lawyer snatched on the can by the T-Rex in Jurassic Park.

For those readers and viewers who enjoy and support Rupert Murdoch’s publications and channels for what they are, he is the best owner imaginable. He stands behind their work and their mission. His media outlets are his life’s work. ABC News doesn’t hold an iota of that value to Disney. The same is true for what The Washington Post means to Jeff Bezos. It’s obvious Bezos does care about the Post. But it’s also now obvious that he does not care nearly enough.

The Washington Post would hold such value to an ownership consortium led by Kara Swisher. Bezos can still be a hero in this story. But his only move is to sell. ★

Soon-Shiong is, in a very obvious yet perhaps easily overlooked way, a very different sort of bad newspaper owner than Bezos. Or than Disney is as owner of ABC News. Neither Bezos nor Disney supports Trump. They’re not trying to turn their outlets into pro-Trump propaganda channels. They’re not meddling in day-to-day editorial decisions. They just don’t want to piss Trump off. They don’t want to fellate him every day à la Fox News or The Wall Street Journal editorial page; just one big public blow job here or there to avoid Trump’s ire. That’s bad enough. It’s shameful, and a dereliction of duty. But Soon-Shiong is seemingly a true believer. He is pro-Trump. But he owns a real newspaper full of real journalists, not propagandists, with a liberal editorial and opinion section. It doesn’t mix. It’s like a flat-earther buying a space company like Blue Origin or SpaceX. His beliefs don’t mix with the existing premise, purpose, and culture of the company he now owns. ↩︎

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.

Dan Moren on Acorn 8 ★

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 a Live Text tool allows you to select and copy text within an image.

For me, the star of the show is the fascinating Data Merge, which is a bit like Mail Merge for images. If you’ve ever needed to create the same image several times but with different information — nametags, for example, or personalized gift cards — this is a life-saver. You open your template image, identify your variables, then hand Acorn a CSV file with the relevant data and it will process through them, assigning text where needed and even putting images in assigned layers. It’s the kind of wild automation tool that might not be something you need every day, but when you do need it, there’s really no replacement.

The rare sweet spot that Acorn hits is that it’s super-approachable to new and casual users, who just need an image editor sometimes, and super-powerful for power users who want to dig in.

MacOS 15.2 Breaks the Ability to Create Bootable Startup Drive Backups ★

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 worked around by ensuring the system was kept awake. But this new bug means, on most systems, there’s no fix. It just fails.

Since Apple took away the ability for 3rd parties (eg, us) to copy the OS, and took on the responsibility themselves, it’s been up to them to ensure this functionality continues to work. And in that, they’ve failed in macOS 15.2. Because this is their code, and we’re forced to rely on it to copy the OS, OS copying will not work until they fix it. [...]

For those who may be working for Apple, or have good contacts, the bug is FB16090831. A fix would be really helpful, folks.

This means Shirt Pocket’s outstanding utility SuperDuper can’t make a bootable clone of your startup drive on a machine running MacOS 15.2.0. It’s worth noting that you can still use SuperDuper (or other backup utilities) to clone all of your data, which is, by far, the most essential data in any backup. But bootable startup-drive clones are an essential part of many people’s data integrity workflows.

This bug seems to affect CarbonCopyCloner and Apple’s own Time Machine, too. A bug like this is always unfortunate, but especially around the holidays, when it might take longer than usual to get fixed, even if the issue is escalated within Apple.

Update: This discussion thread at TidBITS-Talk seems to make clear that whatever might be wrong with Time Machine on 15.2 isn’t the same bug that’s preventing SuperDuper from making bootable clones.

Tuesday, 17 December 2024

Acorn 8.0 ★

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 use machine learning (or A.I. if you prefer) to find the most important parts of your image, and then perform their respective operations. This has been a request for a long time, and while I was doubtful of it’s utility, it’s actually pretty fun to play with and more useful than I figured it would be. So I’m glad I took the time to integrate it.

You can now set your measurement units to inches, centimeter, or pixels, and it shows up across the tools for your image, not just specific ones. This includes the crop palette, shape dimensions, filter settings… well, pretty much everything. This might be the oldest feature request I’ve implemented so far. And then related to this, Acorn 8 now has an on canvas ruler which you can use to measure out distances, straighten your image with, or even redefine the DPI.

Look up Table (LUT) support. LUTs are pretty fun, and they work by mapping one set of colors to another, enabling consistent or stylized visual effects. LUTs are used primarily in photography or filmmaking, and you can download and install new LUTs from various places across the internet.

And more, so much more. The release notes are copious, and for me, always interesting. Acorn remains one of my most-used tools. It’s fast, reliable, powerful, extensible/scriptable, and the interface makes so much intuitive sense. That’s all been true since version 1.0 back in 2007, and that’s why it’s been my go-to image editor since it was in early beta before version 1.0 back in 2007. It’s just faster and more powerful today.

Acorn is, simply put, one of the best Mac apps ever made. It’s that good. You’re nuts (sorry) if you don’t check it out while it’s available for just $20.

Blackmagic Design Now Taking Pre-Orders for Vision-Pro–Optimized Immersive Camera ★

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 Apple Immersive Video early next year, offering professional filmmakers a comprehensive workflow for producing Apple Immersive Video for Apple Vision Pro. Apple Immersive Video is a remarkable 180-degree media format that leverages ultra-high-resolution immersive video and Spatial Audio to place viewers in the center of the action. [...]

Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive features a fixed, custom lens system pre-installed on the body, which is designed specifically to capture Apple Immersive Video for Apple Vision Pro. The sensor delivers 8160 × 7200 resolution per eye with pixel level synchronization and an incredible 16 stops of dynamic range, so cinematographers can shoot 90fps 3D immersive cinema content to a single file. The custom lens system is designed for URSA Cine’s large format image sensor with extremely accurate positional data that’s read and stored at time of manufacturing. This immersive lens projection data — which is calibrated and stored on device — then travels through post production in the Blackmagic RAW file itself.

$30,000 — not cheap, but not crazy. And this isn’t merely 3D in a rectangular frame — it’s 180° 8K 3D.

David Smith:

What really intrigues me about it is when/if it will show up for rental. I have a few tentative ideas in this space I’d love to explore but I don’t think would justify the cost of owning one.

Looks like Lensrentals rents a vaguely similar, traditional Blackmagic camera kit for around $1,000/week ... which would make experimentation much more accessible.

Monday, 16 December 2024

‘The Developers Who Came in From the Cold’ ★

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 of breaking changes introduced by Apple.

During this time, Apple placed an emphasis on improving the security of MacOS, continually locking the operating system down further and further. Though their changes weren’t aimed at the legitimate audio capture we provided our users, they nonetheless made that capture increasingly difficult. We labored to keep our tools functioning with each new version of MacOS. Through it all, we lived with a constant fear that Apple would irreparably break our apps.

In 2020, the disaster foreshadowed literally one sentence ago struck. Beta versions of MacOS 11 broke ACE, our then-current audio capture technology, and the damage looked permanent.

Kafasis is a friend and frequent guest on The Talk Show (and holds his own as a podcast co-host with a combustible collaborator), and I use quite a few apps in Rogue Amoeba’s suite, so I was familiar with the broad outline of this saga. But seeing it all spelled out made clear it was a lot more precarious than I thought.

Google Fi Still Doesn’t Fully Support RCS Either ★

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 fact that Google’s own Google Voice doesn’t support RCS at all.

Turns out Google Fi doesn’t support RCS fully either. Google Fi is Google’s cellular phone service. I actually use it to provide service to my Android burner phone. The prices are excellent and the service is fine for my minimal needs for a phone I barely use. But Google Fi offers something called “call and voicemail sync” that lets Fi users make and answer voice calls through the web. If you enable this, you lose RCS. See Reddit threads here and here with Fi fans complaining about it.

It’s just wild to me that Google would spend years waging a campaign urging Apple to support RCS, yet Google itself doesn’t support RCS in its own products.

Social Media Algorithms Are Cultural Blandifiers ★

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, YouTube, and TikTok).

Last Call for This Batch of DF T-Shirts and Hoodies ★

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 everything from Apple Pay to order tracking), response to this round of classic logo apparel has been great. Orders from last week started going out over the weekend, and hundreds more are shipping today.

It’s too late now to get an order in for Christmas, no matter where you live, but it’s not too late to place an order from this batch of shirts and hoodies. But, we’ll probably close the store to new orders tomorrow (Tuesday), so don’t wait.

Saturday, 14 December 2024

CoverSutra Is Back ★

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 reimagined as a sleek, standalone music player for your Mac that lives in your menu bar, giving you seamless access to your music library. Instantly search by album, artist, or song — all without breaking your workflow. Some of what’s new:

Standalone music player: No Music app required.
Instant music search: Find tracks anytime, anywhere.
Global keyboard shortcuts: Control playback from any app.

Available now on the Mac App Store for just $4.99 — and a free upgrade for CoverSutra 3.0 customers. Five bucks, one time, and it’s yours to keep. And it’s just so polished, so simple, and so nice.

Sponsorship Openings at Daring Fireball, End-of-Year and Q1 2025 Edition ★

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, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. Nerds get bored and want to read interesting stuff.

Q1 2025 weeks are wide open too, but I only just now opened those weeks on the calendar.

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results.

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. ~~And again, this coming week remains open, and the week after.~~ I’m even offering those two weeks at a holiday discount.

On the Accountability of Unnamed Public Relations Spokespeople

Saturday, 14 December 2024

Robby Soave, writing at Reason, “Pete Hegseth’s Acceptance to West Point Is a Story”:

Here’s what happened. On Wednesday, Hegseth posted on X that ProPublica — which he described as a “Left Wing hack group” — was planning to publish a bombshell report contradicting Hegseth’s account that he had been accepted to West Point in 1999.

Hegseth set the record straight by publishing his letter of acceptance, signed by West Point’s superintendent, Lieutenant General Daniel Christman of the U.S. Army.

But that article never materialized.

ProPublica’s editor Jesse Eisinger thus defended his organization’s behavior. “We asked West Pt public affairs, which told us twice on the record that he hadn’t even applied there,” explained Eisinger. “We reached out. Hegseth’s spox gave us his acceptance letter. We didn’t publish a story. That’s journalism.”

Eisinger is correct. ProPublica’s reporter did his job: He checked and double-checked a story. The mistake was made by West Point’s communications department, which twice contended — falsely — that Hegseth had never applied to the military academy.

In a tweet thread, Eisinger explained what happened. First, his reporter contacted the West Point public affairs office to inquire about Hegseth’s claim that he was accepted there. The reporter was told by West Point, in no uncertain terms, that Hegseth had never even applied there.

After being presented with unequivocal evidence to the contrary, West Point backpedaled. “A review of our records indicates Mr. Peter Hegseth was offered admission to West Point in 1999 but did not attend,” said the school in a statement.

There’s an argument being made (including by Soave, as his headline makes clear) that ProPublica should have still published a story about this, but that rather than it being a story about Hegseth having lied about being accepted to West Point in 1999, it should instead have turned into a story about West Point public relations having wrongly told ProPublica that not only had Hegseth not been accepted, that he’d never even applied.

I’m no fan of Hegseth, to say the least, but I concur that this was still a story worth publishing, albeit a very different one. The grievance wing of the current flavor of Republicanism would have you believe West Point PR deliberately lied to ProPublica. That doesn’t make sense to me. I do think it’s rather remarkable, and fortunate for everyone involved, that Hegseth not only kept his letter of acceptance, but had it readily available to scan and post publicly. That put the original story to rest.

But even if Hegseth didn’t have that acceptance letter readily available, and ProPublica had taken West Point PR at its word and published their turns-out-to-be-false story as originally intended — which could have happened simply if Hegseth’s lawyer hadn’t responded within the absurdly tight one-hour window ProPublica offered in their email asking for comment — the truth surely would have come out. ProPublica’s report — if they had published it — would have created a scandal, Hegseth and his supporters would have pushed back, and with the actual truth on their side, it surely would have come out. ProPublica would have had to retract their story, and would have damaged their future credibility, and West Point would have taken even more of a reputational hit.

But even if a West Point PR spokesperson, or even their entire public relations team, had been tempted to lie about Hegseth having been accepted, surely they would have quickly realized that such a lie could not stand for long and would, with certainty, backfire. Both West Point and ProPublica dodged a bullet from this becoming a bigger — and from their mutual perspectives, worse — story than it is now. This only makes sense as a mistake on the part of West Point public relations, not a lie intended to further damage Hegseth’s already deeply-troubled nomination to head the Defense Department.¹

But can I prove it was a mistake, not a lie? No. And even if it was an honest mistake, how did it happen? Who committed it? The answers to those questions would make for a worthwhile story to pursue.² And more specifically, the answer to who isn’t “West Point”. It’s a person or persons who work on West Point’s public relations team. “The Yankees” didn’t drop a routine fly ball that cost them the World Series. Aaron Judge did — and he has taken full responsibility and accountability for it. I think that’s who Judge is — the sort of consummate team player who takes personal responsibility for mistakes and shortcomings, and defers to team credit for his personal accomplishments and successes, not the other way around — but it’s also the simple truth that we all saw it happen. That’s what makes sports so popular. It’s real, and we get to watch it all happen with our own eyes.

When a statement is attributed to “a spokesperson” from a company or institution, the world doesn’t know who that spokesperson is. Only the reporter or writer, and perhaps their editors. There is an explicit lack of accountability attributing statements to an institution rather than to specific people. We even have different pronouns — it’s institutions that do things, but only people who do things. Who is the question.

This whole thing brings to mind The Verge’s policy change on background sourcing three years ago. Nilay Patel wrote then:

The main way this happens is that big companies take advantage of a particular agreement in the media called “background.” Being “on background” means that they tell things to reporters, but those reporters agree to not specifically attribute that information to a person by name. Oftentimes, companies will make things significantly worse and also insist that background information be paraphrased, further obscuring both specific details and the source of those details.

There are many reasons a reporter might agree to learning information on background, but importantly, being on background is supposed to be an agreement.

But the trend with big tech companies now is to increasingly treat background as a default or even a condition of reporting. That means reporters are now routinely asked to report things without being able to attribute them appropriately, and readers aren’t being presented with clear sources of information.

This all certainly feeds into the overall distrust of the media, which has dire consequences in our current information landscape, but in practice, it is also hilariously stupid. [...]

This is bad, so we’re going to reset these expectations as loudly as possible.

From now on, the default for communications professionals and people speaking to The Verge in an official capacity will be “on the record.”

We will still honor some requests to be on background, but at our discretion and only for specific reasons that we can articulate to readers.

I’ve largely agreed with The Verge’s stance on this from the start, but I’ve also thought they’ve taken it to an almost comical extreme, insisting on attaching spokespeople’s names to even the most anodyne company statements. This West Point / ProPublica near-fiasco has me reconsidering my skepticism toward The Verge’s obstinacy on this. It occurs to me now that The Verge’s adamancy on this issue isn’t merely for the benefit of their readers. Putting one’s name on a statement heightens the personal stakes. 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.³

Presume for the moment that I’m correct that this was an honest mistake on the part of someone at West Point. I can’t help but think they’d have been less likely to make the mistake — more likely to have double-checked whatever records West Point keeps about decades-ago applications and acceptance decisions, and thus to discover that Hegseth had in fact been accepted — if their own names were on the line, not just “West Point”. And even if I’m wrong and it was a lie intended to sabotage Hegseth’s nomination, it’s almost impossible to imagine anyone committing that lie with their name attached to it. ★

The fact that West Point is the Army’s service academy, and that Hegseth isn’t just nominated for a major cabinet position, but the cabinet position that’s in charge of all branches of the military, including the service academies, means this makes even less sense as a deliberate lie. It seems pretty likely that whoever was responsible for this at West Point might lose their job now. ↩︎
It would also be worthwhile for a ProPublica story to serve as a credible public record that Pete Hegseth had in fact been accepted to West Point. Any subsequent question over this would be answered by their report. If it would have been worth pointing out that Hegseth lied about having been accepted to West Point, it seems worth putting on the record the truth that he in fact had been accepted. I would not argue that “If it had been a lie, it would be a story, so the fact that it was not a lie should also be a story” is always or even usually a logical conclusion. But in this case I think it is: it’s a matter of public interest whether a nominee for Secretary of Defense applied to and was accepted at the prestigious United States Military Academy. ↩︎︎
Edward Tufte has long preached the value of this — that crediting authorship to work is a sign of responsibility and accountability, and thus a signifier of quality and validity. ↩︎︎

Friday, 13 December 2024

iGeneration Reports Apple Will Stop Selling Lightning-Port iPhones in the EU This Month ★

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. All three of these iPhone models are still equipped with a Lightning port for wired charging.

In a paywalled report today, the website said the iPhone models will no longer be sold through Apple’s online store and retail stores in the European Union as of December 28, which is when the regulation goes into force.

It was never clear to me whether this regulation only applied to new devices, or to existing ones. But I guess it applies to existing ones. Until the expected next-gen iPhone SE ships early next year, the lowest-priced new iPhone in the EU will be the iPhone 15, which starts at $700 in the U.S. and around €860 in Europe. (Apple’s prices vary slightly between EU countries — and the higher prices compared the U.S. largely stem from VAT.)

MarkItDown: Python Tool for Converting Files and Office Documents to Markdown ★

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 metadata, and speech transcription)

HTML (special handling of Wikipedia, etc.)

Various other text-based formats (csv, json, xml, etc.)

The API is simple:
from markitdown import MarkItDown

markitdown = MarkItDown()
result = markitdown.convert("test.xlsx")
print(result.text_content)

Via Stephan Ango (CEO of the excellent, popular Markdown writing and note-taking app Obsidian), who also points out that Google Docs added Markdown export a few months ago. I’ve never used Google Docs other than to read documents created by others, but MarkItDown seems like a library I might make great use of. “MarkItDown” is even a great name. What a world.

Not bad for a 20-year-old syntax.

What’s New in MacOS 15.2 Sequoia ★

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 from both the Mac and iPad in these next software updates.

The omission of Genmoji creation in MacOS 15.2, and the omission of the new AI inbox categorization features in Mail on both iPad and Mac, aren’t surprises — they weren’t in any of the betas for these .2 OS updates. But it is a weirdly glaring omission. Apple itself started promoting screenshots of the Apple Intelligence inbox categorization in Mail for Mac back in October, when the .1 OS updates shipped with the initial round of Apple Intelligence features.

I am reliably informed that the new Mail categorization features are coming soon to iPad and Mac, which I suspect means in the .3 updates. But the first .3 betas aren’t out yet.

What’s New in iOS 18.2 ★

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.

Federico Viticci on Apple Intelligence, With ChatGPT, as a Breakthrough Automation Tool

Friday, 13 December 2024

Federico Viticci, writing at MacStories “Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.2: A Deep Dive into Working with Siri and ChatGPT, Together”:

In testing the updated Writing Tools with ChatGPT integration, I’ve run into some limitations that I will cover below, but I also had two very positive experiences with the Notes app that I want to mention here since they should give you an idea of what’s possible.

In my first test, I was working with a note that contained a list of payments for my work at MacStories and Relay FM, plus the amount of taxes I was setting aside each month. The note originated in Obsidian, and after I pasted it into Apple Notes, it lost all its formatting.

There were no proper section headings, the formatting was inconsistent between paragraphs, and the monetary amounts had been entered with different currency symbols for EUR. I wanted to make the note look prettier with consistent formatting, so I opened the “Compose” field of Writing Tools and sent ChatGPT the following request:

This is a document that describes payments I sent to myself each month from two sources: Relay FM and MacStories. The currency is always EUR. When I mention “set aside”, it means I set aside a percentage of those combined payments for tax purposes. Can you reformat this note in a way that makes more sense?

I hit Return, and after a few seconds, ChatGPT reworked my text with a consistent structure organized into sections with bullet points and proper currency formatting. I was immediately impressed, so I accepted the suggested result, and I ended up with the same note, elegantly formatted just like I asked.

The other day a friend pointed out that using ChatGPT (and the like) for automation purposes is making real the original promise of AppleScript — being able to describe automation tasks using natural language. As I wrote long ago, the idea behind AppleScript was noble, but the truth is that it is a programming language, and in practice it has ultimately frustrated everyone. Programmers find it weird and clumsy compared to scripting languages that don’t attempt to hide that they’re programming languages, and non-programmers find it confusing because it doesn’t really parse natural language at all — it only parses a very specific syntax that happens to look like natural language, but isn’t at all like the way natural language is used or understood.

Here’s the nut of my aforementioned 2005 piece, “The English-Likeness Monster”:

In English, these two statements ought to be considered synonymous:
path of fonts folder of user domain

path to fonts folder from user domain
But in AppleScript, they are not, and rather are brittlely dependent on the current context. In the global scope, the StandardAdditions OSAX wants path to and from user domain; in a System Events tell block, System Events wants path of and of user domain.

The idea was, and I suppose still is, that AppleScript’s English-like facade frees you from worrying about computer-science-y jargon like classes and objects and properties and commands, and allows you to just say what you mean and have it just work.

But saying what you mean, in English, almost never “just works” and compiles successfully as AppleScript, and so to be productive you still have to understand all of the ways that AppleScript actually works. But this is difficult, because the language syntax is optimized for English-likeness, rather than being optimized for making it clear just what the fuck is actually going on. [...]

These prepositional differences are even more exasperating when you consider that of and in are interchangeable in AppleScript. If you can say either of the following to mean the same thing within a System Events tell block:
path of fonts folder of user domain

path in fonts folder in user domain
and you can say this using StandardAdditions:
path to fonts folder from user domain
then it seems rather natural to assume that the “to” and “from” might be interchangeable with other prepositions as well. But you can’t, and if you’re not aware that StandardAdditions’s “path to” is a single token of two words, it seems rather arbitrary, if not downright random, which prepositions are allowed where.

But LLMs really do just parse natural language. None of that seeming nonsense with some common prepositions working in some contexts, but other common prepositions being required in others. That doesn’t mean LLM agents are always capable of doing what you want — far from it — but the best way to try to get them to do what you want is the same, whether you have a computer science degree or have never written a program in your life: describe what you want as clearly as possible in plain natural language. Just try to ask in the most obvious way possible, and that’s the most likely way that it will work, if it can work. That’s remarkable.

Here’s Viticci’s second example:

The second example of ChatGPT and Writing Tools applied to regular MacStories work involves our annual MacStories Selects awards. Before getting together with the MacStories team on a Zoom call to discuss our nominees and pick winners, we created a shared note in Apple Notes where different writers entered their picks. When I opened the note, I realized that I was behind others and forgot to enter the different categories of awards in my section of the document. So I invoked ChatGPT’s Compose menu under a section heading with my name and asked:

Can you add a section with the names of the same categories that John used? Just the names of those categories.

That worked too, leading Viticci to observe:

Years ago, I would have had to do a lot of copying and pasting, type it all out manually, or write a shortcut with regular expressions to automate this process. Now, the “automation” takes place as a natural language command that has access to the contents of a note and can reformat it accordingly.

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.

Not only is using Apple Intelligence for automation more accessible (in every sense) than writing a programming script or creating a Shortcut, it’s also something we’re all much more likely to do for a one-time task. I often create scripts, shortcuts, and macros to automate tasks that recur with some frequency; I seldom do for tasks that I’m only going to do once. But why not use Apple Intelligence and ChatGPT to save a few minutes of tedium? ★

Friday, 13 December 2024

Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Tanking of the LA Times Continues ★

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 given the board’s concerns about some of his picks, and ignore Mr. Trump’s call for so-called recess appointments.

The paper’s owner, the billionaire medical entrepreneur Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, had other ideas.

Hours before the editorial was set to be sent to the printer for the next day’s newspaper, Dr. Soon-Shiong told the opinion department’s leaders that the editorial could not be published unless the paper also published an editorial with an opposing view.

Baffled by his order and with the print deadline approaching, editors removed the editorial, headlined “Donald Trump’s cabinet choices are not normal. The Senate’s confirmation process should be.” It never ran.

I’m not going to keep pointing to the ways Soon-Shiong is debasing the once-great LA Times. Until and if he sells it, which I don’t expect him to do, it’s over. What the LA Times was is gone. That sounds like hyperbole but it’s the obvious truth. One jackass columnist or even a fabulist reporter won’t sink an entire newspaper’s credibility. The Judith Miller reporting on “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq was a disaster for the New York Times 20 years ago, but while that saga did lasting damage to the NYT’s credibility, it didn’t sink the ship. But an owner like Soon-Shiong can sink the ship. The LA Times isn’t really a newspaper anymore — it’s a vanity rag.

I’m just fantasizing here, but someone with money should consider sweeping into Los Angeles and setting up a rival publication, and poaching all the talent from the Times. I’d have suggested Jeff Bezos until recently, but, well, not anymore. Off the top of my head: Marc Benioff (who now owns Time magazine) or Laurene Powell Jobs (whose Emerson Collective is the majority owner of The Atlantic), perhaps?

The newspaper business, alas, isn’t what it used to be. When it was thriving, local competition would have already been in place. Even small cities had at least two rival papers. Now, New York might be the only city in America left with any true competition between newspapers.

Thursday, 12 December 2024

‘Making “Social” Social Again’ — Ev Williams Explains Mozi ★

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 reflection of many people’s real-life relationships. It told you where they lived, who you knew in common, and all kinds of other details.

Another idea that seemed obvious was that, given how deeply social humans are, social products would dominate the internet. Ten to fifteen years ago, this seemed inevitable.

But something else happened instead.

Social networks became “social media,” which, at first, meant receiving content from people you chose to hear from. But in the quest to maximize engagement, the timeline of friends and people you picked to follow turned into a free-for-all battle for attention. And it turns out, for most people, your friends aren’t as entertaining as (god forbid) influencers who spend their waking hours making “content.”

In other words, social media became … media.

To tell you the truth, I think there are positive aspects of this evolution (perhaps I’ll get into that in another post). But we clearly lost something.

This whole piece is so good, so clear. This distinction between social networking and social media is obvious in hindsight, but only in hindsight. Williams posted it on Medium (natch), but Mozi’s website links directly to it for their “About” page. I’m excited about this. I think they’re on to something here. It’s even a great name.

Mozi ★

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 coordinate when you might be in the same area as a friend. From their FAQ:

Why do you need access to my contacts? Will you ever contact people in my phone book?

Never. We ask for access to your contacts so that you can connect with the people you already know on Mozi. In order to see someone on Mozi, you have to both be on Mozi and both have one another saved as iOS contacts. We never send, sell or share any of your information, and we will never contact your people on your behalf. And instead of storing any actual phone numbers, we hash (encrypt) them. This ensures both your number and all your contacts remain anonymized and protected.

I’m in, and so far only have three mutuals. But — all three of them are people whose in-person company I truly enjoy. We’ve all, correctly, got our guards up regarding new “social” platforms that want our personal information, but we’ve collectively become so cynical that I worry people don’t even want to try fun new things like Mozi. Ev Williams is uniquely placed to make something like this happen in a trustworthy way.

I’m mostly rooting for Mozi to succeed because I think something like this could work in a way that has nothing but upsides, and there’s nothing like it today. But I’m also rooting for Mozi to take off just to burst the absurdity of Kevin Roose’s October piece in the New York Times trying to make the case that Apple “killed social apps” by increasing the privacy controls for our iOS contacts. I gladly shared my whole contacts list with Mozi, based on the track record of the team and the FAQ quoted above.

Speaking of the NYT, Erin Griffith wrote a profile of Williams for the launch of Mozi:

“The internet did make us more connected,” he said in an interview in Menlo Park, Calif. “It just also made us more divided. It made us more everything.”

Mozi is meant to be a utility. If a user wants to message a friend in the app to make plans, the app directs them to the phone’s texting app.

Zach Baron Interviews David Letterman for GQ: ‘Interviewing the Interview Master’ ★

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: (laughs uproariously) Yeah, that’s great. I love that.

The Amazing Kreskin Dies at 89 ★

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 feats included divining details of strangers’ personal lives and guessing at playing cards chosen randomly from a deck. And he had a classic trick at live shows: entrusting audience members to hide his paycheck in the auditorium, and then relying on his instincts to find it — or else going without payment for a night.

Somehow his first appearance with Letterman wasn’t until 1990, but after that he was a regular. Just a canonical “late night talk show guest” of that era. He was good at the mentalist tricks, but what made Kreskin great — amazing even — was that he was just such a weird, fun, and funny guy.

Wednesday, 11 December 2024

Daring Fireball T-Shirts and Hoodies ★

In addition to two choices for t-shirts, the new DF Paraphernalia store also has the above hoodies, which are pretty nice, I have to say. I particularly like the drawstrings, which are much more substantial, almost rope-like, than the shoelace-like strings on most hoodies. I wear mine a lot, especially in the winter, as an extra layer. You’d look good in one.

Here’s the thing. The store will not be open year-round. We’re taking orders now, printing to meet demand, and then we’re going to close it down. Order tonight or tomorrow, and if you’re in the U.S., yours should arrive before Christmas. International orders — even those ordered by our good neighbors in Canada — most likely will not.

The Information Suggests, in an Aside, That Apple Scrapped Work on a Quad-Max/Double-Ultra M-Series Chip

Wednesday, 11 December 2024

Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, in a piece today for The Information (paywalled up the wazoo, sadly), “Apple Is Working on AI Chip With Broadcom”:

Apple is developing its first server chip specially designed for artificial intelligence, according to three people with direct knowledge of the project, as the iPhone maker prepares to deal with the intense computing demands of its new AI features. Apple is working with Broadcom on the chip’s networking technology, which is crucial for AI processing, according to one of the people. If Apple succeeds with the AI chip — internally code-named Baltra and expected to be ready for mass production by 2026 — it would mark a significant milestone for the company’s silicon team. [...]

Broadcom typically doesn’t license its intellectual property, choosing instead to sell chips directly to customers. In its arrangement with Google, for instance, Broadcom translates Google’s AI chip blueprints into designs that can be manufactured, oversees its production with TSMC and sells the finished chips to Google at a markup.

But Broadcom appears to be taking a different tack with Apple. Broadcom is providing a more limited scope of design services to Apple while still providing the iPhone maker with its networking technology, one of the people said. Apple is still managing the chip’s production, which TSMC will handle, another person said. Additional details of the business arrangement couldn’t be learned [sic]¹

I’ll go out on a limb and say that it’s Apple choosing to take a different tack with Broadcom than Google did, rather than a choice in any way driven by Broadcom. The Information’s own “arrangement with Google” link above points to this year-ago report that opens: “Google executives have extensively discussed dropping Broadcom as a supplier of artificial intelligence chips as early as 2027, according to a person with direct knowledge of the effort. In that scenario, Google would fully design the chips, known as tensor processing units, in-house, the person said. The move could help Google save billions of dollars in costs annually as it invests heavily in AI development, which is especially pricey compared to other types of computing.” Why would Apple ever agree to an arrangement like that?

The hint of obsequiousness to Broadcom suggests to me, pretty clearly, that it’s sources from Broadcom who provided the leaks for this story.

Anyway, what really caught my eye in this report wasn’t the AI server chips, but rather the following (emphasis to key paragraph added), included seemingly only as an aside even though I thought it was the most interesting nugget in the report (vague shades of Fermat’s Last Theorem):

Apple’s silicon design team in Israel is leading development of the AI chip, according to two of the people. That team was instrumental in designing the processors Apple introduced in 2020 to replace Intel chips in Macs.

Apple this past summer canceled the development of a high-performance chip for Macs — consisting of four smaller chips stitched together — to free up some of its engineers in Israel to work on the AI chip, one of the people said, highlighting the company’s shifting priorities.

To make the chip, Apple is planning to use one of TSMC’s most advanced manufacturing processes, known as N3P, said three people with direct knowledge. That would be an improvement over the manufacturing process used for Apple’s latest computer processor, the M4.

What they’re talking about regarding a cancelled high-end Mac chip would be a hypothetical M-series chip with (effectively) double the specs of an Ultra, which I presume would only be available in a future Mac Pro, and, just pulling adjectives from Apple’s marketing dictionary, I’d bet would be called the “M# Extreme” (where “#” is the M-series generation number). The M1 and M2 Ultra chips are, effectively, two M1/M2 Max chips fused together with something called a silicon interposer that offers extremely high-speed I/O between the fused chips. Performance doesn’t exactly double, but it comes close. A hypothetical quad-Max “Extreme” would effectively double the performance of the same-generation Ultra chips. Such a chip, available exclusively in the Mac Pro, would give the Mac Pro a much more obvious reason to exist alongside the Mac Studio (which, to date, has offered Max and Ultra chip configurations).

But if Apple’s work on that quad-interposed M-series chip was cancelled only “this past summer”, and was for a generation of chips using TSMC’s next-generation N3P process, that would mean it was slated for the M5 or M6 generation, not the M4.² The M4 generation is fabbed using TSMC’s N3E process, and any additional variants beyond the M4 Max, slated for updated Mac Studios and Mac Pros next year, were designed long before this past summer.

I feel like it’s a lock that there will be an M4 Ultra chip next year, with the performance of two M4 Max chips fused together. Or, perhaps the M4 Ultra will be a standalone design, not two Max chips fused. The M-series Max chips have always been their own designs — not two Pro chips fused together. The same could be true for Ultra chips, starting next year, or some generation further into the future.

But I’ve had my fingers crossed that we’ll also see an “M4 Extreme” — or whatever Apple would decide to call a tier above “Ultra” — sooner rather than later. If The Information’s reporting is correct, however, either we’ll see a quad-Max M4 chip next year, and then it will skip a generation because the engineering team was redirected to work on these AI server chips, or, those engineers were working on the first quad-Max M-series chips, and now the first such M-series chips have been punted even further into the future, if ever. Today’s report has me thinking, sadly, that could be a few years off, at the soonest. ★

That sic is for the missing sentence-ending period. I expect better copy editing from a $400/year subscription (soon going to $500) that keeps badgering me, every time I visit the site, to upgrade to a $1,000/year “Pro” subscription tier. But while I’m slagging on The Information for this sentence, the missing period is the least of its problems. “Additional details of the business arrangement couldn’t be learned” is some passive voice bullshit. What they mean is that Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu were unable to learn any additional details, not that additional details of the business arrangement between Apple and Broadcom are some sort of unknowable information — you know, like the answer to why I continue paying so much money to subscribe to a publication that annoys me. ↩︎
Or even the M7 generation. The lead times on chip designs are measured in years, plural. Back in July 2023, just after the release of the M2-generation Mac Studio models (offering the M2 Max and M2 Ultra) and the first — and so far only — Apple silicon Mac Pro (M2 Ultra), Jason Snell and Myke Hurley got the following tidbit from an anonymous listener of their podcast Upgrade (episode 468; transcript). Hurley read it on air, right up front around the 4:00 mark:

I am an Apple engineer working on the GPU team.

It pains me to say that Jason’s speculation is correct. The quad chip has been canned with no plans to return. For context, we are actively developing what will presumably be the M5 chip. And the quad chip was only ever specced for the M1 and removed late in the project. There are no plans to create a quad chip through at least the M7 generation. My understanding is that the quad required too much effort for too small of a market. Something interesting that may come in the M8 and future generations is called multi-die packaging. This allows the CPU and GPU parts of the chip to be fabricated on different dies and packaged together much like how two max chips make an ultra. With this design, it is conceivable that we could have three, four, or five or more GPU dies with one or two CPU for a graphics powerhouse or vice versa for a CPU workstation that doesn’t need as much GPU grunt. However, as far as I know, no such plans exist yet.

Take that with however many grains of salt you think necessary to season a comment from an anonymous person, but it doesn’t hit a single false note to my ears. And if this little Upgrade birdie was legit, that would suggest that the Israeli chip engineers reassigned from an advanced 4× Mac chip this past summer to work on a new AI server chip would have been working on the M6 generation of Apple silicon, for products launching in 2026–2027. ↩︎︎

Wednesday, 11 December 2024

‘Letterman TV’ Launching on Samsung TV Plus ★

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 service, the firms said Wednesday. “I’m very excited about this,” stated Letterman, who glibly added, “Now I can watch myself age without looking in the mirror!”

The output for the 24/7 on-demand channel titled Letterman TV appears to rely heavily on archival clips from his nearly 33-year late-night run, including his CBS Late Show Top Ten lists, “Stupid Tricks” segments, interviews with stars, holiday specials and behind-the-scenes clips along with fresh commentary from Letterman, presumably on all the above.

I don’t know how different this will be from Letterman’s excellent YouTube channel, but honest to god I’d never even heard of “Samsung TV Plus” until reading this.

MacOS Sequoia 15.2 Includes References to Next Year’s M4 MacBook Air Models ★

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 (15-inch, M4, 2025),” confirming that new M4 MacBook Air models are in development and are likely not too far off from launching.

It’s been widely rumored that Apple is working to bring the M4 chips to its entire Mac lineup, and the MacBook Air is expected to get an M4 refresh in the spring of 2025, so sometime between March and June.

Were these references not in the 15.2 betas? If not, what a weird mistake to happen only in the release builds. But regardless, even inside Apple, I’d file this under “no big whoop”. Of course there are going to be M4-based MacBook Airs next year. The only question is when. My guess is March, just like last year.

Update: Via Mr. Macintosh, it appears the leak came from IPSW builds, which contain a list of Mac models the IPSW can be used to restore.

Bankruptcy Judge Rejects The Onion’s Bid to Buy Infowars ★

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 ruling from the bench in a Houston court. “I’m going to not approve the sale.”

It’s not over ’til it’s over.

Tuesday, 10 December 2024

The Spectacular Typography of the Sanborn Fire Maps ★

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 based off of them.

However, there has never been a place to see all of the art from the maps in one place. Until now.

This website is a free archive dedicated exclusively to creating a one-stop shop for all the incredible typography and art of the Sanborn maps. It includes almost 3,500 unique decorative titles, all drawn before 1923. While large portions of the original maps have been digitized and archived in various places both online and offline, there has never been a comprehensive collection of all of the decorative titles from the Sanborn maps. I hope you enjoy!

I just love this style of turn-of-the-century typography and graphic design. (The last turn of the century, that is.) In our era, this style has been used to wonderful effect by the great Chris Ware.

Via, no surprise, Kottke. What comes around goes around.

Monday, 9 December 2024

Daring Fireball T-Shirts and Hoodies Are Back ★

Finally, Daring Fireball t-shirts and hoodies are back. Order now, and we’ll start printing shirts at the end of this week. U.S. domestic orders placed by the end of the day Wednesday should arrive before Christmas. International orders — even those ordered by our good neighbors in Canada — most likely will not.

Sunday, 8 December 2024

Gurman: Apple and Sony Are Working to Bring PlayStation VR Hand Controller Support to Vision Pro ★

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 hand controllers on the Vision Pro. Inside Sony, the work has been a monthslong undertaking, I’m told. And Apple has discussed the plan with third-party developers, asking them if they’d integrate support into their games. [...]

One hiccup is that Sony doesn’t currently sell its VR hand controllers as a standalone accessory. The company would need to decouple the equipment from its own headset and kick off operations to produce and ship the accessory on its own. As part of the arrangement, Sony would sell the controllers at Apple’s online and retail stores, which already offer PS5 versions.

1Password and Charging for SSO ★

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 something like what IT and security professionals feel when a software vendor hits them with the dreaded SSO tax — the practice of charging an outrageous premium for Single Sign-On, often by making it part of a product’s “enterprise tier”. The jump in price can be astonishing — one CRM charges over 5000% more for the tier with SSO. At those prices, only very large companies can afford to pay for SSO. But the problem is that companies of all sizes need it.

Until outraged customers can shame vendors into getting rid of the tax, many businesses have to figure out how to live without SSO. For them, the best route is likely to be a password manager, which also reduces weak and re-used credentials, and enables secure sharing across teams. And a password manager is likely a good investment anyway, for apps that aren’t integrated with SSO. To learn more about the past, present, and future of the SSO tax, read 1Password’s full blog post.

Friday, 6 December 2024

Dithering ★

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 Dithering seem to love it, too — we have remarkably little churn.

Recording the show often helps me coagulate loose ideas into fully-formed thoughts. Both my Tuesday column on Intel’s decline and today’s on using generative AI for research were inspired by our discussion on the show the night before. I toss a lot of takes out on Dithering that never make it here, though. If you’re on the fence, subscribe for a month and you’re only out $7 — but I bet you’ll stick around. Trust me. And thanks to everyone who’s already subscribed.

Times New Dumbass ★

Late-breaking candidate for best new font of 2024.

Thursday, 5 December 2024

Festivitas — Holiday Lights for Your Mac Menu Bar and Dock ★

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 not just making a software toy like this, but putting effort into making everything about it really nice. Harks back to Steven Halls’s The Talking Moose and, of course, the undisputed king of the genre, Eric Shapiro’s The Grouch. Oh, and of course (thanks to Stephen Hackett for the reminder), Holiday Lights.

Update, Friday 6 December: Today’s 1.1 update brings several improvements, including making the lights look way cooler if your Dock is on the left or right (as god intended).

‘Appeasement in the New Age of Trump’, MSNBC Edition ★

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 headed. [...] I answered by reminding viewers of some history:

In 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated John Tower, senator from Texas, for secretary of defense. Tower was a very considerable person, a real defense intellectual, someone who deeply understood defense, unlike the current nominee. It emerged that Tower had a drinking problem, and when he was drinking too much he would make himself a nuisance or worse to women around him. And for that reason, his nomination collapsed in 1989. You don’t want to think that our moral standards have declined so much that you can say: Let’s take all the drinking, all the sex-pesting, subtract any knowledge of defense, subtract any leadership, and there is your next secretary of defense for the 21st century.

I told this story in pungent terms. It’s cable TV, after all. And I introduced the discussion with a joke: “If you’re too drunk for Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed.”

At the next ad break, a producer spoke into my ear. He objected to my comments about Fox and warned me not to repeat them. I said something noncommittal and got another round of warning. After the break, I was asked a follow-up question on a different topic, about President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son. I did not revert to the earlier discussion, not because I had been warned, but because I had said my piece. I was then told that I was excused from the studio chair. Shortly afterward, co-host Mika Brzezinski read an apology for my remarks.

Jesus. The abject obsequiousness is staggering. Yes, it’s a joke at Fox News’s expense. But Fox News — on-air — has indeed been backing Hegseth’s nomination, even though it’s quite obvious that everyone who works there knows he has an alcohol problem. From that NBC News report (note that despite their names, the MSNBC and NBC News newsrooms are no longer associated):

Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, drank in ways that concerned his colleagues at Fox News, according to 10 current and former Fox employees who spoke with NBC News. Two of those people said that on more than a dozen occasions during Hegseth’s time as a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend, which began in 2017, they smelled alcohol on him before he went on air. Those same two people, plus another, said that during his time there he appeared on television after they’d heard him talk about being hungover as he was getting ready or on set.

One of the sources said they smelled alcohol on him as recently as last month and heard him complain about being hungover this fall. None of the sources with whom NBC News has spoken could recall an instance when Hegseth missed a scheduled appearance because he’d been drinking. “Everyone would be talking about it behind the scenes before he went on the air,” one of the former Fox employees said.

Note too that Fox & Friends Weekend airs at 6:00 in the morning.

Owner Patrick Soon-Shiong Is Tanking the LA Times’s Credibility ★

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 newspaper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, has waded further into its operations since the November election, according to new information I have learned and public remarks the billionaire made Wednesday during a media appearance with right-wing personality Scott Jennings. [...] Several veteran staffers told me that morale has never been lower, with some people even wondering whether the newspaper will be disfigured beyond recognition under this new era of Soon-Shiong’s reign. [...]

One disturbing example came after the newspaper published an opinion piece in November about Elon Musk that Soon-Shiong did not care for, people familiar with the matter told me. The piece, written by Times opinion contributor Virginia Heffernan, carried the headline, “Elon Musk bought himself a starring role in Trump’s second term. What could go wrong?”

While the headline seemed innocuous, Soon-Shiong expressed dismay over it, according to the people familiar with the matter. The headline was allowed to remain unchanged. But, as a result, the people said, a new rule was put into place: Prior to publishing opinion stories, the headlines must be emailed over to Soon-Shiong, where he can then choose to weigh in. While it is normal for newspaper owners to influence the opinion wing of a newspaper, it is highly unusual for an owner to have article headlines sent to them ahead of publication for review.

That also seems like a lot of work for a busy billionaire. Wonder how he might handle that?

Speaking to Jennings as the latter hosted a radio show Wednesday, the billionaire revealed that, behind the scenes, he is working on developing a “bias meter” powered by artificial intelligence that will be placed on both opinion and news stories. Soon-Shiong said that the hope is to roll out the new feature, which will use the technology to seemingly warn readers that his own reporters are biased, as early as next month. [...]

Suffice to say, but when the journalists at the Times heard the “breaking news” that Soon-Shiong delivered to Jennings, they spiraled even further. “People are now deeply fucking concerned,” one staffer bluntly told me Wednesday night.

What could go wrong?

In response, the LAT Guild issued a statement, concluding:

The statements of Dr. Soon-Shiong in the press and on social media reflect his own opinions and do not shape reporting by our member-journalists.

Our members — and all Times staffers — abide by a strict set of ethics guidelines, which call for fairness, precision, transparency, vigilance against bias, and an earnest search to understand all sides of an issue. Those longstanding principles will continue guiding our work.

The Guild has secured strong ethics protections for our members, including the right to withhold one’s byline, and we will firmly guard against any effort to improperly or unfairly alter our reporting.

What’s Good for the Goose, AI Training Edition ★

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 models to solve various problems and then use the models’ chain of thought — the “thought process” the models use to solve those problems — as training data, the person said.

You might be wondering how rival developers can do that. OpenAI has explicitly said it hides its reasoning models’ raw chains of thought due in part to competitive concerns.

But in answering questions, o1 models include a summarized version of the chain of thought to help the customer understand how the models arrived at the answer. Rivals can simply ask another LLM to take that summarized chain of thought and predict what the raw chain of thought might have been, the person who spoke with the researchers said.

And I’m sure these OpenAI researchers are happy to provide this training data to competitors, without having granted permission, in the same way they trained (and continue to train) their own models on publicly available web pages, without having been granted permission. Right?

Wednesday, 4 December 2024

From the Department of Bringing Receipts to the Interview ★

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 question that we have to answer to apply here.

(Via CJ Ciaramella on Bluesky.)

Jeff Bezos on Trump’s Second Term: ‘I’m Actually Very Optimistic This Time Around’ ★

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 companies — Amazon, Blue Origin, and The Washington Post — during his 2016 term. Bezos defended himself but it did little to help his reputation with Trump. Now, his companies have a lot at stake in the coming administration, from the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon to Blue Origin’s efforts to compete with SpaceX for government contracts.

Onstage at the DealBook Summit on Wednesday, Bezos called Trump “calmer this time” and “more settled.” He said he will try to “talk him out of” the idea that the press, which includes The Washington Post, is an enemy of the people.

“You’ve probably grown in the last eight years,” he said to DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. “He has, too.”

Next up after Bezos at DealBook Summit was Charlie Brown, who professed optimism regarding his next attempt at kicking a football held by Lucy Van Pelt. What the fuck did they put in the water at this conference?

Or, perhaps, these very smart guys are also craven, and these nonsensical remarks, which are quite obviously contrary to reality, are simply additional exhibits of shameful cowardly compliance.

Shame on Google for Their Description of Google Messages’s Encryption Support ★

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 all participants in the chat are using a recent version of Google Messages. But the second screenshot in the Play Store listing flatly declares “Conversations are end-to-end encrypted”, full stop. That is some serious bullshit.

I realize that “Some conversations are end-to-end encrypted” will naturally spur curiosity regarding which conversations are encrypted and which aren’t, but that’s the truth. And users of the app should be aware of that. “RCS conversations with other Google Messages users are encrypted” would work.

Then, in the “report card” section of the listing, it states the following:

Data is encrypted in transit
Your data is transferred over a secure connection

Which, again, is only true sometimes. It’s downright fraudulent to describe Google Messages’s transit security this way. Imagine a typical Android user without technical expertise who takes the advice (now coming from the FBI) to use end-to-end encryption for their messaging. A reasonable person who trusts Google would look at Google’s own description of Google Messages and conclude that if you use Google Messages, all your messages will be secure. That’s false. And depending who you communicate with — iPhone users, Android users with old devices, Android users who use other text messaging apps — it’s quite likely most of your messages won’t be secure.

Just be honest! The E2EE between Google Messages users using Android phones that support RCS is completely seamless and automatic (I just tried it myself using my Android burner), but E2EE is never available for SMS, and never available if a participant in the chat is using any RCS client (on Android or Apple Messages) other than Google Messages. That’s an essential distinction that should be made clear, not obfuscated.

While I’m at it, it’s also embarrassing that Google Voice has no support for RCS at all. It’s Google’s own app and service, and Google has been the world’s most vocal proponent of RCS messaging.

Lastly, I also think it’s a bad idea that Google Messages colors all RCS message bubbles with the exact same colors (dark blue bubbles with white text, natch). SMS messages, at least on my Pixel 4, are pale blue with black text. Google Messages does put a tiny lock in the timeline to indicate when an RCS chat is secure, and they also put a lock badge on the Send button’s paper airplane icon, so there are visual indications whether an RCS chat is encrypted, but because the messages bubble colors are the same for all RCS chats, it’s subtle, not instantly obvious like it is with Apple Messages, where green means “SMS or RCS, never encrypted” and blue means “iMessage, always encrypted”.