By John Gruber

• Archive
• The Talk Show
• Dithering
• Projects
• Contact
• Colophon
• Feeds / Social
• Sponsorship

‘Vote to End the Trump Era’ ★

The New York Times editorial board, making deft use of good old-fashioned hypertext, has published a powerful endorsement on the eve of the election that covers so much ground, yet fits entirely in a single concise paragraph. In its entirety:

You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.

Harrison Ford Endorses Kamala Harris ★

Harrison Ford:

The truth is this. Kamala Harris will protect your right to disagree with her. About policies, or ideas. And then, as we have done for centuries, we’ll debate them. We’ll work on them together. And we’ll move forward. The other guy? He demands unquestioning loyalty. Says he wants revenge.

I’m Harrison Ford, I’ve got one vote, same as everyone else — and I’m going to use it to move forward. I’m going to vote for Kamala Harris.

Ford’s message is a powerful framing of the authoritarian, anti-democracy dynamic in this election. Short, gruff, and to the point. Worth sharing to anyone you think might still be on the fence.

See Also: Same video, on X, if that’s easier for you to share.

Nilay Patel: ‘A Vote for Donald Trump Is a Vote for School Shootings and Measles’ ★

Nilay Patel, endorsing Kamala Harris at The Verge:

But look beyond the locked-in message discipline to her approach to campaigning, and it is clear Harris is deeply, meaningfully committed to solving collective action problems. She has assembled a politically diverse group of people to support her that range from AOC to Liz Cheney to Mark Cuban, and most of her claims about how she’ll run the country differently than Biden come down to putting Republicans in her Cabinet and reaching across the aisle more. She has, for better or worse, made approaches to the crypto community while championing restrictions on price gouging and regulations on banks. She had antimonopoly Senator Elizabeth Warren onstage at the Democratic National Convention while having Google antitrust defense lawyer Karen Dunn serve as her debate advisor.

You might not agree with some of the depressingly averaged-out policy positions produced by this unnervingly big tent. You might have some serious problems with, say, her proximity to the current administration and its approach to the war in Gaza. But this is what happens when the other party in our two-party system can only generate policy ideas that amount to AI-generated blood libel and RETVRN memes on X. Trump and the MAGA movement have stripped the Republican Party of the ability to govern democratically, so that process has moved inside the Harris coalition.

In many ways, the ecstatic reaction to Harris is simply a reflection of the fact that she is so clearly trying. She is trying to govern America the way it’s designed to be governed, with consensus and conversation and effort. With data and accountability, ideas and persuasion. Legislatures and courts are not deterministic systems with predictable outputs based on a set of inputs — you have to guide the process of lawmaking all the way to the outcomes, over and over again, each time, and Harris seems not only aware of that reality but energized by it. More than anything, that is the change a Harris administration will bring to a country exhausted by decades of fights about whether government can or should do anything at all.

I still see some friends on the left who are uneasy with Liz Cheney’s full-throated endorsement of Harris. And even more so by her father’s. Back in September, when Liz Cheney declared her endorsement of Harris, I wrote:

But (lowercase ‘d’) democratic politics ought to be viewed very much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are in psychology. Some things matter more than others. And nothing — not climate change or the environment, not reproductive rights, and certainly not fucking tax rates — nothing matters more than support for democracy itself and the rule of law. The only way we’re going to get those other things right — which are really, really important — is through democratic governance and the rule of law.

Everyone who supports democracy, who understands the stakes, who sees who Trump is with clear eyes, is on one side in this election. That side is with Kamala Harris. It certainly makes for some strange bedfellows on the sort of policy disagreements most U.S. elections are waged over. It is terrifying and depressing that so many Americans are seemingly on the other side. But make no mistake, those are the stakes.

The Message That Works: the Republicans Who Know Trump Best Refuse to Endorse Him ★

Bill Kristol, writing last month for The Bulwark:

The Democratic polling and messaging firm Blueprint recently tested the effectiveness of several closing messages for the Harris campaign. (This was before Kelly’s new remarks.) Here’s one message the group put before voters:

Donald Trump doesn’t have the character it takes to be president. He’s erratic and can’t control himself. He denied the results of an election just because he lost and is a threat to the fundamental American principle of democracy. He instigated a riot at the Capitol that left three police officers dead.

This general (and true) statement barely moved the needle on voters’ preferences. It presumably simply sounds like a reiteration of things voters have heard before.

What did move the needle was this message:

Nearly half of Donald Trump’s Cabinet have refused to endorse him. When Trump learned during the Capitol riot that his supporters were threatening to kill his own vice president, he said ‘so what?’ and refused to do anything to assure the vice president was safe. Republican governors, senators, and House members have all said the same thing: We can’t give Trump another four years as president.

As soon as the message turned from an abstract argument against Trump into an unambiguous case that Trump’s own former allies were making against him, it became the single most persuasive line tested by Blueprint. It was stronger even than abortion rights and Social Security. In other words, hearing about Trump’s unfitness from people who worked with him, and from Republicans one would expect to defend him, seems to make a difference.

Sunday, 3 November 2024

Nomorobo ★

My thanks to Nomorobo for sponsoring this week at DF. It’s perfect timing, especially if, like me, you live in an election swing state. The one thing all voters (and, now that I think about it, surely non-voters alike) agree on is annoyance at political robocalls and robotexts.

While every candidate, campaign, PAC, and political party uses robocalls and texts, Nomorobo is tracking them and gives you control over who you want to hear from, and who you don’t.

Use Nomorobo’s powerful but very easy-to-use tools to identify, block, and report the calls and texts you don’t want to receive anymore, and they’ll handle the rest. Nomorobo integrates with iOS’s built-in functionality for filtering calls and text messages. I’ve been a paying customer of Nomorobo since 2017. My iPhone doesn’t even ring when a call comes in from a known robocaller. It’s a great app and it really works. If you wish you had better options for screening out robocalls and texts, try Nomorobo.

Iowa Poll From ‘Best Pollster In Politics’: Kamala Harris Ahead 47-44 ★

The Des Moines Register:

Kamala Harris now leads Donald Trump in Iowa — a startling reversal for Democrats and Republicans who have all but written off the state’s presidential contest as a certain Trump victory.

A new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows Vice President Harris leading former President Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters just days before a high-stakes election that appears deadlocked in key battleground states. The results follow a September Iowa Poll that showed Trump with a 4-point lead over Harris and a June Iowa Poll showing him with an 18-point lead over Democratic President Joe Biden, who was the presumed Democratic nominee at the time.

“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.” [...]

The poll shows that women — particularly those who are older or who are politically independent — are driving the late shift toward Harris.

No poll guarantees anything, of course, but this one stands out. If it holds up, Harris is on her way to a clear victory. It also explains Harris’s increasingly sunny demeanor down the stretch and Trump’s increasingly erratic and desperate antics, like dressing up as a garbage man last week. Selzer is widely regarded as one of the best pollsters in America, if not the best. Her eve-of-election 2016 Iowa poll was an outlier, predicting Trump would beat Hillary Clinton by 7 points; Trump won Iowa by 9 points that year. In 2020, Selzer’s closing poll had Trump ahead of Biden by 7; he won the state by 8.

The explanation for Harris’s surprise strength in Iowa — that women have had enough of Trump and his shithead revanchist misogynist party — holds water. If this poll is wrong, I still like Harris’s chances. If this poll is right, it’s in the bag for Harris.

Iowa doesn’t get counted as a “swing state”, perhaps because Trump won it by such significant margins in 2016 and 2020, but in recent elections has swung back and forth by large margins:

• 2020: 🟥 Trump by 8.2
• 2016: 🟥 Trump by 9.5
• 2012: 🟦 Obama by 5.8
• 2008: 🟦 Obama by 9.5
• 2004: 🟥 W. by 0.7
• 2000: 🟦 Gore by 0.3
• 1996: 🟦 Clinton by 10.4
• 1992: 🟦 Clinton by 6.0

And if you want to go back to what’s effectively now electoral pre-history, Mike Dukakis won Iowa by 10.2 points in 1988.

Keep the faith. Be sure to vote.

Trump, His Remaining Shreds of Both Dignity and Sanity Slipping Away in the Face of Impending Loss, Tells Rally He ‘Shouldn’t Have Left’ White House in 2020 ★

The New York Times:

Reflecting on the state of border security at the end of his tenure, Mr. Trump said he regretted ever leaving office.

“I shouldn’t have left, I mean, honestly,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “we did so well, we had such a great — ” and then cut himself off. He then immediately noted “so now, every polling booth has hundreds of lawyers standing there.”

I wish he wouldn’t have left the White House on his own (which he did like the complete turd that he is, refusing to attend his successor’s inauguration). Biden was prepared for that, and we’d have all gotten to enjoy seeing him marched out by the military after watching Biden take the oath of office.

No Minced Words From Senator John Fetterman ★

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, on CNN today:

My version of being a man is like, hey, I like rib-eyes, I like Motörhead, and I’m never going to pick on trans kids and gay kids. […] It doesn’t make you tough. It doesn’t make you a man to pick on trans or gay kids. It just makes you an asshole.

Friday, 1 November 2024

Fantastical for Windows — A Glass of Ice Water for Calendar Users in Hell ★

Flexibits:

We’ve spent the last 4 years making Fantastical better than ever across Apple devices, and with version 4.0 we decided to go even bigger by finally bringing the world’s best calendar app to a Windows PC near you. [...]

The best news is that Fantastical for Windows is included in your Flexibits Premium subscription so there are NO extra purchases required!

All the main Fantastical features are there, including the Mini Window with which I pretty much live my calendaring life. On the Mac, the Mini Window lives in the menu bar; on Windows, the system tray.

Flexibits took a lot of arrows in their back when they switched from traditional per-major-version purchasing to subscription-only, but they promised at the time that the predictable, steady revenue from subscriptions would enable them to continue adding value to a Flexibits subscription over time. That started when they added Cardhop, a terrific Mac and iOS contact management app. Now it includes a full-fledged native Windows version of Fantastical.

I’m not sure which is more surprising in this week’s news from first-rate indie Mac apps — Pixelmator getting acquired by Apple, or Fantastical shipping for Windows. I’m trying to think of a similar app — a serious Mac-assed Mac app that eventually was ported to Windows — and I’m coming up empty. It just doesn’t happen. I might go all the way back to Apple bringing iTunes to Windows. Or maybe Instagram expanding to Android after a long initial stretch as iPhone-only.

But even iTunes was oft-criticized by Windows users for lack of adherence to Windows idioms. Especially as the years went on, it seemed like iTunes was used begrudgingly by Windows users (who needed to use it for syncing music, media, and data with their iPods, and later, iPhones), not happily. But the reaction to Fantastical seems overwhelmingly positive from the PC media:

• David Pierce at The Verge.
• Romain Dillet at TechCrunch.
• Jared Newman at FastCompany (“Fantastical is one of the best examples of what a native iOS or Mac app should be. Now, after 13 years of Apple exclusivity, it’s also available for Windows.”)
• Laurent Giret at Thurrott.com.
• Pradeep Viswanathan at Neowin.

Pixelmator Acquired by Apple; Future of Their Apps Uncertain ★

The Pixelmator blog:

Today we have some important news to share: the Pixelmator Team plans to join Apple. [...]

Pixelmator has signed an agreement to be acquired by Apple, subject to regulatory approval. There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time. Stay tuned for exciting updates to come.

Pixelmator is their longstanding image editor — more or less, a Photoshop competitor. I first wrote about Pixelmator when it was pre-announced at the end of May 2007, and it looked so good I was dubious it would actually ship in a form resembling the amazing app they previewed. But ship it did, at the end of September that year. I have linked to and referenced Pixelmator dozens of times since. It’s a great app, part of the “Best Mac Apps in the World” firmament.

Photomator is more recent, and arguably more ambitious — if it’s possible to be more ambitious than directly competing with Adobe Photoshop. It’s more like a Lightroom competitor, specifically targeting photo editing and photo library management and batch editing. But unlike Lightroom, Photomator builds atop your iCloud photo library, not its own discrete library. That puts Photomator in competition with a few other excellent third-party apps, like Darkroom and Nitro Photo. These are apps for photographers who want the benefits of storing their photos in Apple’s system photo libraries (convenience, cross-app integration, secure and reliable iCloud sync) but with more powerful editing features than Apple Photos provides.

Both Pixelmator and Photomator are the sort of native third-party apps Apple loves to celebrate. Pixelmator won an Apple Design Award in 2011, and Photomator (at the time named Pixelmator Photo) won an ADA in 2019. A year ago Apple named Photomator the App Store’s Mac App of the Year. Pixelmator has also oft been demoed by Apple during event keynotes, as an exemplar of the functional and performance benefits of building atop native frameworks.

They don’t just happen to be exclusive to Apple’s platforms — they’re fundamentally architected around Apple’s frameworks. The way that a small engineering team (or in the case of Pixelmator rival Acorn, a one-person engineering team) can compete against the veritable army of engineers Adobe has working on Photoshop is by building atop the rich, deep frameworks Apple provides in AppKit and UIKit. And from a design perspective, Pixelmator and Photomator already look like Apple’s own “pro” apps. From the get-go, the Pixelmator team hasn’t just followed Apple’s own trends and guidelines for UI design, they’ve helped define those trends.

Does Apple want to fold these advanced features into Photos? Or do they once again see the need for separate consumer/professional first-party apps? Logic, for example, was an acquisition — but that was all the way back in 2002. If Apple keeps Photomator as an actively developed product, it would be a return to the same genre they walked away from when they discontinued Aperture in 2014. And if Apple keeps Pixelmator going, it would be the first time they go head-to-head against Photoshop itself.

Tucker Carlson Claims He Was Mauled by a Demon While He Slept ★

Isaac Schorr, reporting for Mediaite (with video, in case you don’t believe the following was claimed in all seriousness, which it was):

Asked by his interlocutor, John Heers, if he thought “the presence of evil is kickstarting people to wonder about the good?” Carlson answered “That’s what happened to me,” before recounting the story.

“I had a direct experience with it,” said Carlson.

“In the milieu of journalism?” asked Heers.

“No, in my bed at night,” replied Carlson. “And I got attacked while I was asleep with my wife and four dogs and mauled, physically mauled.”

“In a spiritual attack by a demon?” inquired Heers.

“Yeah, by a demon,” affirmed Carlson. “Or by something unseen that left claw marks on my sides.”

Carlson, of course, was a headline speaker at Trump’s Madison Square Garden “lovefest” last weekend. As recently as last night, Carlson appeared alongside Trump on stage in Arizona — an event at which Trump suggested Liz Cheney should face a firing squad.

Carlson was never hooked up right. And eventually when you’re not hooked up right and you don’t get help, the loose screws start falling out.

Thursday, 31 October 2024

The Talk Show: ‘His Most Pro Shirt’ ★

Dan Moren returns to the show to discuss this week’s introductions of the first M4 Macs: iMac, Mac Mini, and MacBook Pros.

Sponsored by:

• WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS — free up to 1 million monthly active users.
• 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.

Anthropic’s Claude AI Chatbot Now Has a Mac App, But It’s an Electron Turd ★

Emma Roth, reporting for The Verge:

Claude, the AI chatbot made by Anthropic, now has a desktop app. You can download the Mac and Windows versions of the app from Anthropic’s website for free.

Sebastiaan de With, on X:

Big miss from Anthropic releasing a super clunky macOS electron app that feels like a bad wrapper of their website. Very weird non-standard UI all over, choppy and sloppy animations.

OpenAI is really leagues ahead in making good apps (+ has ChatGPT Search rolling out today).

There’s much talk that Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 has pulled ahead of OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4o in terms of chatbot “intelligence”, but as an overall experience ChatGPT wins hands-down. For one thing ChatGPT has been able to search the web for answers for a while now, and it works great. For another, just today OpenAI launched ChatGPT’s dedicated “search” mode. Claude has nothing like it.

But even their respective Mac apps are a stark contrast. The Claude app is a lazy Electron port. Right off the bat, the email field on the login screen doesn’t support autofill. Once you’re logged in, you don’t get any standard MacOS features. And of course because it’s Electron it’s bloated architecturally and uses a lot of memory. If you really want to use Claude as an “app” on your Mac you’d be better off saving a web app with Safari (File → Add to Dock…) than using this.

ChatGPT’s native Mac app, on the other hand, is a truly native Mac app. It looks like a Mac app and feels like a Mac app because it really is a Mac app. I’ve liked it ever since it launched back in May, and it keeps getting better. And I keep using it more and more as my go-to resource for answering questions.

I asked Claude, “What is the best way to engineer a native Mac app? What frameworks and developer tools should one use if the goal is a great Mac experience?” Claude’s answer started by positing it as a decision between SwiftUI and AppKit. Perhaps Anthropic’s Mac engineers should have asked Claude this same question before they built this turd of an Electron app.

The Exception That Proves the Rule: the Walmart M1 MacBook Air Still Has Just 8 GB RAM ★

While it’s true that after this week’s Mac announcements, every new Mac Apple sells now comes with at least 16 GB of RAM, Nick Heer reminds us that there remains a new Mac available with just 8 GB: the rather remarkable Walmart-exclusive $650 M1 MacBook Air.

Apple Q3 FY2024 Results ★

Apple:

The Company posted quarterly revenue of $94.9 billion, up 6 percent year over year, and quarterly diluted earnings per share of $0.97. Diluted earnings per share was $1.64, up 12 percent year over year when excluding the one-time charge recognized during the fourth quarter of 2024 related to the impact of the reversal of the European General Court’s State Aid decision.

Jason Snell (along with his usual assortment of excellent charts illustrating Apple’s results):

The one twist: Apple recognized a one-time charge of $14.8 billion related to Apple finally having lost a long-time tax case in the European Union. That’s a lot of cash — almost exactly half of the quarter’s total income, in fact.

All in all, Apple’s business was relatively flat. iPhone sales were up 6% but flat for the fiscal year; Mac sales were up 2%, which is about how they’ve been all year; Services continues to have reliable double-digit growth, but the rate of growth slowed to 12% year-over-year.

Every product/division did fine.

‘Dodgers Capture World Series by Storming Back in Game 5 to Upend Yankees’ ★

Both teams had stretches of greatness on both sides of the game. Home runs. Clutch hitting in late innings. Freddie Fucking Freeman. Innings of unhittable pitching. There’s no question in my mind these are the two most talented teams in baseball. But one team made a bunch of glaring mistakes, throughout the series (and especially so tonight), and the other team made few mistakes at all.

As a lifelong Yankees fan who watched or listened to every inning of the many American League Championship Series and World Series they’ve played in since 1996, I have some experience with the various emotional results of a deep postseason baseball run. There is a new Netflix documentary devoted to one such series that did not end well for the Yankees. This year is not the worst feeling. It hurts. This sucks. But this is not the worst. These two teams were evenly matched talent-wise, but the Dodgers played much better baseball. Objectively they deserved to win. The years that really hurt are the ones when your side plays as well or even better than their opponent but loses the series anyway (usually in game 7) because there is a significant aspect of high-level baseball that comes down to chance. This was not one of those years for the Yankees.

This was a well-earned championship by the Dodgers.

(And at least they got to celebrate this at a nice ballpark.)

Wednesday, 30 October 2024

Apple Unveils New M4 MacBook Pro Lineup, Including, Hallelujah, a Nano-Texture Display Option ★

Apple Newsroom:

Now available in space black and silver finishes, the 14-inch MacBook Pro includes the blazing-fast performance of M4 and three Thunderbolt 4 ports, starting with 16GB of memory, all at just $1,599. The 14- and 16-inch models with M4 Pro and M4 Max offer Thunderbolt 5 for faster transfer speeds and advanced connectivity. All models include a Liquid Retina XDR display that gets even better with an all-new nano-texture display option and up to 1000 nits of brightness for SDR content, an advanced 12MP Center Stage camera, along with up to 24 hours of battery life, the longest ever in a Mac.

The base model, with the regular M4 chip, is less of a not-so-pro forgotten stepchild now. It gets a third Thunderbolt port, and is available in the same space black as the M4 Pro and Max models — last year the dark version of the plain M3 MacBook Pro was boring space gray.

After the M4 iMacs were announced Monday, my fingers were crossed for a nano-texture MacBook Pro display, and I was rewarded. The option costs just $150 on both the 14- and 16-inch models. Can’t wait to see it in person. Can we get a nano-texture display option for iPhones next year too? Matte’s where it’s at, baby.

See Also: Apple’s 15-minute mini-keynote, with a 2-minute gag at the end.

Russian Court Hits Google With a Fine Larger Than the World’s GDP ★

Joshua Nelken-Zitser, Business Insider:

A legal dispute between Google and Russia over suspended YouTube accounts has led to a fine so large that it exceeds all the money on Earth. Ivan Morozov, a Moscow-based lawyer, told the state-run TASS newswire that a Russian court ordered the tech giant to restore Russian media accounts on YouTube, a Google-owned company.

He said that Google’s failure to do so has resulted in a fine that had been regularly doubling for years. There is no cap on the total, the lawyer said. Morozov, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, said that the cumulative amount has now reached 2 undecillion rubles — an almost unfathomable figure.

At the current exchange rate, the fine is equivalent to about $20.6 decillion. A decillion is a figure followed by 33 zeros — which, in this case, puts the fine at $20,604,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

This certainly makes the EU’s fines based on a percentage of companies’ global revenue seem fair and reasonable.

Sidenote of the Week: All MacBook Air Models Now Start With 16 GB RAM ★

Joe Rossignol, reporting for MacRumors:

Apple today in its new MacBook Pro press release announced that the MacBook Air lineup now starts with 16GB of RAM, up from 8GB previously. This change applies to the 13-inch model with the M2 chip, the 13-inch model with the M3 chip, and the 15-inch model with the M3 chip. In the U.S., the MacBook Air lineup continues to start at $999, so there is no price increase associated with the boost in RAM.

We all know Apple Intelligence has steep memory requirements, which is one factor why it’s only available on iOS devices with 8 GB or more of RAM. But 8 GB of RAM on a Mac is, practically speaking, less than 8 GB of RAM on an iPhone or iPad, because of the profound differences in how memory is managed and application life cycles work on MacOS. On MacOS, every app that looks like it’s running is actually running. And there’s no hard limit on how many apps you can run. Even if your Mac runs out of actual memory, MacOS will use swap files to handle the overflow. iOS doesn’t work that way. iOS freezes apps in the background, freeing up memory — and while M-series-based iPads do support a limited form of virtual memory swap, A-series-based iOS devices (including all iPhones) do not.

Even taking Apple Intelligence out of the equation, Apple’s MacBook lineup was years overdue for a bump in base RAM. A few months ago David Schaub created a graph showing the base RAM of Apple laptops on a logarithmic scale since 1999. Today marks only the second time in the Tim Cook era that base Mac RAM went up. (Schaub made another graph for Mac desktops that goes all the way back to 1984, and the change in slope during the Cook era is even more striking on that chart.) Base RAM on Macs has been stuck at 8 GB since 2017. Even if you count the architecture transition from Intel x86 to Apple Silicon as a de facto bump in base memory — which is arguably fair, given the performance characteristics of an 8 GB Apple Silicon Mac compared to an 8 GB Intel Mac — Macs were still grossly overdue for a bump in base memory.

So I’m not surprised that Apple took this opportunity to double base RAM in the M3 MacBook Air models. I am quite surprised, though, that they went as far as to double the base RAM even in the entry-level $999 M2 MacBook Air. Finally.

Update, 31 October: There’s always an exception to prove a rule.

Tuesday, 29 October 2024

Cancelling Your Amazon Prime Membership to Protest Bezos’s Bootlicking at the Washington Post Is Like Pissing in the Ocean ★

Ellen Cushing, in a well-meaning piece for The Atlantic:

NPR, citing internal Post correspondence, reported that “more than 1,600 digital subscriptions had been cancelled less than four hours after the news broke.”

It was a reasonable impulse. But if Bezos is indeed why the Post is no longer endorsing candidates, and if people are worried about his outsize influence on our society, they should not be canceling their newspaper subscriptions. They should be canceling their Amazon Prime subscriptions.

Cushing wrote that Saturday; NPR yesterday reported that the Post had lost over 200,000 subscribers in the wake of Bezos blocking the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. Today that number has grown to a whopping and still-growing 250,000.

I understand the sentiment but I disagree that it would be, in any way, an effective protest for two reasons. First, the Washington Post did this, not Amazon. Bezos isn’t even Amazon’s CEO anymore. I get it — he’s Amazon’s founder, and his personal wealth is largely based on his Amazon stock. But unsubscribing from the Post right now sends a direct message to the organization that prompted our collective ire.

Second, the number of Post readers and subscribers who are justifiably outraged by this constitute a significant number of the Post’s entire audience. NPR’s story pegged the Post’s pre-protest subscriber base at 2.5 million (including both print and digital). Amazon has about 200 million Prime members.

• 250,000 un-subscriptions from The Washington Post = 10% of their base
• 250,000 un-subscriptions from Amazon Prime = 0.1% of their base

Those of us who care about this constitute no more than a tiny insignificant sliver of Amazon’s Prime subscriber base. 250,000 lost subscribers in a weekend is a shocking slap in the face for The Washington Post. It’s a significant chunk of their entire base. 250,000 lost subscribers to Amazon Prime is like taking a piss in the ocean. It doesn’t matter.

If you feel better personally cancelling your Prime membership, do it. But don’t think for a second it will matter one iota to Amazon’s bottom line. The Post, on the other hand, is reeling.

Apple Unveils Mac Minis With M4 and M4 Pro Chips ★

Apple Newsroom:

With M4 Pro, it takes the advanced technologies in M4 and scales them up to tackle even more demanding workloads. For more convenient connectivity, it features front and back ports, and for the first time includes Thunderbolt 5 for faster data transfer speeds on the M4 Pro model.

The M4 Mac Mini Thunderbolt story is simple not too complicated: the three rear ports on models with the regular M4 are Thunderbolt 4; the three rear ports on models with the M4 Pro are Thunderbolt 5. The front ports are just USB-C, no Thunderbolt, on all Mac Mini models. Why you might care: Thunderbolt 4 supports 40 Gbps symmetrical send/receive; Thunderbolt 5 supports 80 Gbps symmetrical send/receive or 120 Gbps send / 40 Gbps receive (e.g., for displays).

The new Mac mini footprint is less than half the size of the previous design at just 5 by 5 inches, so it takes up much less space on a desk. The super-compact system is enabled by the incredible power efficiency of Apple silicon and an innovative thermal architecture, which guides air to different levels of the system, while all venting is done through the foot.

The new Mini form factor sports a dramatically smaller footprint, but because it’s taller (which ought to be better for thermals), the difference isn’t as great by volume:

	Height	Width	Depth	Area	Volume
M4 Mac Mini	5 cm	12.7 cm	12.7 cm	161 cm2	807 cm3
Previous Mac Minis	3.58 cm	19.7 cm	19.7 cm	388 cm2	1,389 cm3
M2 Mac Studio	9.5 cm	19.7 cm	19.7 cm	388 cm2	3,689 cm3
Apple TV 4K	3.1 cm	9.3 cm	9.3 cm	87 cm2	268 cm3

No cheating either: the power supply remains inside the Mac Mini case. (But as shown above, the Mac Mini remains quite a bit larger than an Apple TV 4K.) One odd detail is the placement of the power button on the bottom of the case.

Base RAM goes from 8 to 16 GB (which appears to be true for all M4-based Macs) and goes up to a maximum of 64 GB with the M4 Pro, and all M4 Mac Minis support up to three displays. See Apple’s Compare page for more details on what’s new and changed.

Also interesting is the announcement format. Rather than one 30–40 minute video announcing all M4 Macs at once, Apple has made separate 10-minute-ish mini keynotes for each. iMacs yesterday, Mac Mini today, and presumably MacBook Pros tomorrow. And rather than shoot inside Steve Jobs Theater, they filmed at the new Observatory building — a smaller setting for smaller announcements.

Lastly: a fun 2-minute stop-motion introduction commercial.

MacRumors: ‘M1 vs. M3 vs. M4 iMac Buyer’s Guide’ ★

Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:

The 2021 and 2023 iMacs have now been discontinued by Apple and prices at third-party resellers are falling. As such, some customers may be weighing up whether to pick up a 2021 or 2023 iMac instead of the latest model, while some existing iMac users may be wondering if it’s now time to upgrade to the M4 model.

The three Apple silicon iMac models share the overwhelming majority of their features, so should you consider buying or sticking with the first- or second-generation models to save money? This breakdown also serves as a way to see all the differences that the 2024 iMac brings to the table.

Super-useful comparison table of what changed between the M1, M3, and now M4 revisions.

Apple’s own ever-handy “Compare” tool on the iMac website is useful too. Here’s a comparison between the new M4 2-port and 4-port models, alongside last year’s 4-port M3 model. One difference: the entry-priced $1,300 2-port model, which has an 8-core CPU (rather than 10-core), ships with a Magic Keyboard that doesn’t have a Touch ID button; all of the 4-port/10-core configurations ship with a Touch-ID–equipped keyboard. Apple charges $150 for the Magic Keyboard With Touch ID and $100 for the one with a “lock button” instead; the bigger one with a numeric keypad is $180. Also, the new USB-C keyboards, mice, and trackpads are only available in white or black — the only way to get the color-matching models is to buy an iMac.

---

---

Monday, 28 October 2024

Jeff Bezos: ‘The Hard Truth: Americans Don’t Trust the News Media’ ★

Jeff Bezos, in an op-ed in his Washington Post:

Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first. Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. [...]

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.

Bezos has always been a good writer, and this piece is no exception. But deciding to change the Post’s policy on election endorsements 12 days before any election, let alone this election, is not “inadequate planning”. Changing the policy, say, this summer, before the Republican National Convention, would be “inadequate planning”. Now though? No.

And how does any of this square with the fact that The Washington Post has an entire editorial and opinion section, that runs bylined opinion columns and commentary from the editorial board every day? You know, the section where this very column by Bezos ran?

As regards trust: declining to endorse a candidate won’t “tip the scales” an iota for Trump supporters who view The Washington Post as “fake news”. All it has done is wipe out large amounts of trust among readers who do — or at least until last week did — put their faith in the publication.

Update: Dr. Drang:

If I’m following Bezos’s logic, he must not just run the Post without letting his other business interests interfere, he must appear to run the Post without letting his other business interests interfere. The easy way to do that would be to keep his hands off the editorial board. I wonder why that didn’t occur to him? (No, I don’t really wonder.)

I wish I’d thought to make that point — Bezos’s own analogy shows how calamitous a decision this was to block an endorsement less than two weeks away from the election.

The Washington Post Has Lost Over 200,000 Subscribers (and Counting) After Trump Bootlicker Jeff Bezos Blocked Endorsement of Kamala Harris ★

David Folkenflik, reporting for NPR:

The Washington Post has been rocked by a tidal wave of cancellations from digital subscribers and a series of resignations from columnists, as the paper grapples with the fallout of owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.

Those former subscribers who, like me, were subscribed through the App Store should already be included in that number. Apple sends developers a server notification upon cancellation, and developers can query the status of the auto-renew toggle at any time.

“It’s a colossal number,” former Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli told NPR. “The problem is, people don’t know why the decision was made. We basically know the decision was made but we don’t know what led to it.”

I misread this statement at first, thinking that Brauchli was saying that we don’t know why so many Post subscribers were cancelling their subscriptions. But I realized after a second read that he’s saying we don’t know why owner Jeff Bezos and publisher/CEO Will Lewis blocked the endorsement, less than two weeks out from Election Day. But we sort of do know. It’s because they’re worried Trump will win and punish, in whatever ways he can, Amazon (which has government contracts for AWS cloud services), Blue Origin (which has contracts with NASA), and Bezos personally. There’s no other explanation for this decision coming when it did, on the cusp of the election.^*

Chief Executive and Publisher Will Lewis explained the decision not to endorse in this year’s presidential race or in future elections as a return to the Post’s roots: It has for years styled itself an “independent paper.” Few people inside the paper credit that rationale given the timing, however, just days before a neck-and-neck race between Harris and former President Donald Trump.

Former Executive Editor Marty Baron voiced that skepticism in an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday.

“If this decision had been made three years ago, two years ago, maybe even a year ago, that would’ve been fine,” Baron said. “It’s a certainly reasonable decision. But this was made within a couple of weeks of the election, and there was no substantive serious deliberation with the editorial board of the paper. It was clearly made for other reasons, not for reasons of high principle.”

It just doesn’t hold water to make a policy change like this 12 fucking days before any election, let alone this election. Part of what is so damaging about this to the entirety of the Post’s institutional credibility — not just its editorial page — is that Lewis’s announcement of the no-endorsement is so laughably false. Lying hurts any person or institution’s credibility. But it’s absolute poison to a news organization. And the publisher/CEO of the Post tried to sell an obvious post hoc justification. It sounds ridiculous but Bezos and Lewis would have been better off just flat out admitting they were blocking the endorsement because they fear backlash from Trump if he wins. At least that would ring true. If you’re going to serve us a pile of dog shit on a plate, tell us it’s a turd. Don’t try to tell us it’s a sandwich.

Credibility is the only true asset a news publication has.

* OK, there’s one other plausible explanation, which is that Jeff Bezos wants to see Trump win. I don’t buy that. Not because I know Bezos’s politics (although Bezos’s statements and charitable contributions on climate change certainly don’t suggest support for Donald “It’s a Hoax” Trump, a man so profoundly ignorant that he’s repeatedly espoused the belief that even if sea levels are rising, it’d be good for the world, because the result, somehow, will be more oceanfront real estate). I just don’t think Bezos would block a Post endorsement of Harris even if he personally were voting and rooting for Trump. Nothing about his stewardship of the Post since purchasing it for $250 million in 2013 suggests he’d do so. He didn’t block the Post from endorsing Hillary Clinton in 2016, nor Joe Biden in 2020. What’s different in 2024 isn’t that Harris offers a different vision than Clinton or Biden, but that Trump has laid clear his agenda of vengeance and retribution against his domestic political enemies, real and imagined, if he returns to the White House.

Apple Introduces M4 iMacs, With Updated Colors, a Nano-Texture Display Option, and USB-C Input Peripherals ★

Apple Newsroom, in the first of what I expect to be a few days’ worth of M4 Mac updates:

The new iMac is available in an array of beautiful new colors, and the 24-inch 4.5K Retina display offers a new nano-texture glass option. iMac features a new 12MP Center Stage camera with Desk View, up to four Thunderbolt 4 ports, and color-matched accessories that include USB-C.

The new colors don’t seem all that different from the old ones, except for green, which seems much more just-plain-green green. The old iMac green was more like teal? It also seems like maybe the new colors are a bit less saturated on the back. The previous pink iMacs looked downright red from the back; the new ones look pink all around.

As a don’t-know-how-I-lived-without-it fan of the nano-texture Studio Display, I’m glad to see a nano-texture option available for the M4 iMacs. (It’s a $200 upgrade.) Fingers crossed that they offer a nano-texture option for the M4 MacBook Pros.

Apple Intelligence Is Available Today, With the Release of iOS 18.1 and MacOS 15.1 ★

Nice rundown of the first wave of Apple Intelligence features from Apple Newsroom. As I wrote last week, my favorite thus far is the notification summaries. The key is not to think of them as a replacement for actually reading the messages — they just serve the same purpose as a well-written Subject line in an email. They just answer — usually quite well — “What’s this stack of notifications about?”

Update: It’s not obvious, especially given Apple’s own hype over Apple Intelligence launching to the public with today’s releases, but you still need to sign up for the Apple Intelligence waitlist to get “early access”. When I signed up during the iOS 18.1 beta cycle, it only took an hour or so before I got in. No idea if that will hold true now that it’s a public release.

(The image generation features (Image Playground, Genmoji, Image Wand) in the next round of Apple Intelligence, in the beta releases of iOS 18.2 and MacOS 15.2 that dropped last week, require a separate waiting list. I signed up for that a few hours after the betas were released last Wednesday, October 23, and I’m still waiting as I type this. The only people I know who have access to the image generation features are those who signed up for it within the first hour — maybe less — of the betas appearing.)

Sunday, 27 October 2024

WorkOS ★

My thanks to WorkOS for, once again, sponsoring the week at Daring Fireball. WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. Start selling to enterprise customers with just a few lines of code. Ship complex features like SSO and SCIM (pronounced skim) provisioning in minutes instead of months.

Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including Perplexity, Vercel, and Webflow.

For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.

---

---

Saturday, 26 October 2024

Joz Teases Mac Announcements Next Week ★

Greg Joswiak, on X:

Mac (😉) your calendars! We have an exciting week of announcements ahead, starting on Monday morning. Stay tuned…

Presumably these will include M4 refreshes of the MacBook Pro lineup (as foretold by those bizarre leaks to Russian YouTubers two weeks ago), iMac, and Mac Mini. And the Mac Mini, reports Mark Gurman, is set to sport an all-new, much-smaller form factor.

Jury Finds Masimo Smartwatches Infringed Apple Patents, Awards Apple Just Enough to Buy One Apple Watch SE ★

Reuters:

Apple convinced a federal jury on Friday that early versions of health monitoring tech company Masimo’s smartwatches infringe two of its design patents as part of a broader intellectual property dispute between the companies. The jury, in Delaware, agreed with Apple that previous iterations of Masimo’s W1 and Freedom watches and chargers willfully violated Apple’s patent rights in smartwatch designs.

But the jury awarded the tech giant, which is worth about $3.5 trillion, just $250 in damages — the statutory minimum for infringement in the United States. Apple’s attorneys told the court the “ultimate purpose” of its lawsuit was not money, but to win an injunction against sales of Masimo’s smartwatches after an infringement ruling.

On that front, jury also determined that Masimo’s current watches did not infringe Apple patents covering inventions that the tech giant had accused Masimo of copying.

$250 is just enough for Apple to buy one of its own 40mm Apple Watch SE models. (No sales tax in Delaware.) That’s about all Apple got out of this. This victory doesn’t change the ITC import ban that prevents Apple from enabling the blood oxygen sensor on watches sold in the U.S. after December 2023. It might have, if Apple had been able to win a verdict holding that Masimo’s current watches also infringe patents held by Apple. Florian Mueller, writing at IP Fray:

In order to understand the reason why Apple sued over a product practically no one buys, one has to understand the indirect ramifications for Masimo’s U.S. import ban on Apple Watches with a pulse oximetry feature. Only the indirect implications matter in this case. The short version is that if Masimo couldn’t have continued to sell its own smartwatch, they’d have lost a legally required basis for preventing Apple from selling smartwatches.

---

---

Friday, 25 October 2024

Surgeons Are Wearing Vision Pro to Perform Laparoscopic Procedures ★

Andrew R. Chow, reporting for Time:

Twenty-four years ago, the surgeon Santiago Horgan performed the first robotically assisted gastric-bypass surgery in the world, a major medical breakthrough. Now Horgan is working with a new tool that he argues could be even more transformative in operating rooms: the Apple Vision Pro.

Over the last month, Horgan and other surgeons at the University of California, San Diego have performed more than 20 minimally invasive operations while wearing Apple’s mixed-reality headsets.

The details of this particular use case are largely about ergonomics, and the advantage Vision Pro provides seems profound:

In laparoscopic surgery, doctors send a tiny camera through a small incision in a patient’s body, and the camera’s view is projected onto a monitor. Doctors must then operate on a patient while looking up at the screen, a tricky feat of hand-eye coordination, while processing other visual variables in a pressurized environment. “I’m usually turning around and stopping the operation to see a CT scan; looking to see what happened with the endoscopy [another small camera that provides a closer look at organs]; looking at the monitor for the heart rate,” Horgan says.

As a result, most surgeons report experiencing discomfort while performing minimal-access surgery, a 2022 study found. About one-fifth of surgeons polled said they would consider retiring early because their pain was so frequent and uncomfortable. A good mixed-reality headset, then, might allow a surgeon to look at a patient’s surgical area and, without looking up, virtual screens that show them the laparoscopy camera and a patient’s vitals.

20 percent of surgeons saying they’re considering retiring early because of the discomfort from this is a high number! And the $3,500–4,000 price for Vision Pro isn’t merely acceptable in this context, it’s a downright bargain:

Christopher Longhurst, chief clinical and innovation officer at UC San Diego Health, says that while the Vision Pro’s price tag of $3,499 might seem daunting to a regular consumer, it’s inexpensive compared to most medical equipment. “The monitors in the operating room are probably $20,000 to $30,000,” he says. “So $3,500 for a headset is like budget dust in the healthcare setting.”

Makes me wonder if these high-end professional and industrial use cases are to the Vision platform this decade what desktop publishing was to the Mac in the 80s? Years ahead of mass market appeal, but a revolutionary breakthrough for a longstanding industry. Such a clear value to those in the industry that they’re not just merely ambivalently accepting the new platform, but champing at the bit to switch to them. Something for the platform to build from until boom, there’s a tipping point where it expands into the mass market. I got into graphic design and desktop publishing my sophomore year of college, in 1992, and by that time the industries of graphic design and professional printing were entirely Macintosh-based, yet the platform (counting the LaserWriter) was only 6 or 7 years old.

But in the fall of 1984, the Macintosh was considered a flop.

Wednesday, 23 October 2024

Every New Feature and Change in iOS 18.2 Beta 1 ★

Chance Miller at 9to5Mac has done the yeoman’s work of providing a full illustrated change log for iOS 18.2 beta 1. Here’s one I wasn’t expecting, but which now that I think about it, isn’t surprising:

iOS 18.2 lets users set default apps for Messaging and Calling worldwide. This is managed through a new “Defaults” menu in the Settings app, where you can set defaults for these apps in the US:

• Email
• Messaging
• Calling
• Call Filtering
• Browser App
• Passwords & Codes
• Keyboards

Clearly this wouldn’t be in iOS 18.2 anywhere in the world if the European Commission weren’t demanding it for DMA compliance, but given that Apple had to do it for the EU, why not make it worldwide? This isn’t a “We think this is a bad idea” thing from Apple’s perspective, like, say, alternative app stores. It’s a “We don’t think this is all that important an idea” thing.

DMA compliance features that Apple wouldn’t have otherwise prioritized, but isn’t outright opposed to, are likely to be made available worldwide. Features Apple is opposed to will remain exclusive to the EU. For example, in iOS 18.2 beta 1 in the EU, users can now “delete” apps like Photos and Camera. That’s a spectacularly dumb idea, so it’s only in the EU.

Today’s New iOS and MacOS Developer Betas Allow Developers Worldwide to Test EU-Specific Features ★

Apple Developer News:

Following feedback from the European Commission and from developers, in these releases developers can develop and test EU-specific features, such as alternative browser engines, contactless apps, marketplace installations from web browsers, and marketplace apps, from anywhere in the world. Developers of apps that use alternative browser engines can now use WebKit in those same apps.

I just spent a few minutes trying to figure out how this works, but haven’t found it. If anyone can point me to the answer, let me know. It’s kind of bananas that EU-specific features couldn’t even be tested outside the EU until now.

Stage 2 of the Apple Intelligence Rollout Begins, With Developer Betas of iOS 18.2 and MacOS 15.2 Sequoia ★

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple today seeded the first betas of upcoming iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.2 updates to developers for testing purposes. The betas have been released while Apple is still working on iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, updates that are set to be released next week.

Apple is rolling out Apple Intelligence features in waves, and while the first wave coming next week is relatively small, the next one is pretty big. These first developer betas of iOS 18.2 and MacOS 15.2 include: categorization and priority inbox sorting in Mail, Genmoji, Image Playgrounds (including Image Wand, where a rough sketch in Notes can be transformed into a detailed image), and ChatGPT’s integration for more complex “world knowledge” requests. And, for iPhone 16 users, Visual Intelligence.

These developer betas also contain new APIs for third-party apps: the Writing Tools API (which will allow any text app to support the features only Apple’s first-party apps have access to in iOS 18.1 and MacOS 15.1), Genmoji API (so third-party messaging apps can support them like Messages will), and Image Playground API.

With the initial wave in next week’s public releases of iOS 18.1 and MacOS 15.1, most Apple Intelligence features announced at WWDC are still missing. With these new developer betas, only a few features remain absent: priority notifications, and Siri’s more advanced features like in-app actions and personal knowledge context (the “When’s my mom’s flight arriving?” feature).

Dodgers Legend Fernando Valenzuela Dies at 63, on the Cusp of the First Yankees-Dodgers World Series Since His Star Turn in 1981 ★

Andy McCullough, reporting for The Athletic:

Fernando Valenzuela, the Mexican southpaw who became an icon in Los Angeles during his rookie season with the Los Angeles Dodgers and remained a vibrant part of the franchise’s fabric for the next four decades, died Tuesday, the Dodgers confirmed. He was 63. [...]

In 2023, the Dodgers recognized Valenzuela’s indelible place within franchise lore by altering a club policy in his honor: Valenzuela became the first Dodger to see his number retired without reaching the Hall of Fame. Before the ceremony in August 2023, as his No. 34 took its place at Dodger Stadium in between Sandy Koufax’s No. 32 and Roy Campanella’s No. 39, Valenzuela pronounced himself shocked.

“It never crossed my mind that this would ever happen,” Valenzuela said. “Like being in the World Series my rookie year, I never thought that would happen.”

I’m only barely old enough to remember Fernandomania, but it was a genuine nationwide sensation. Everyone knew who “Fernando” was, even people who cared little to nothing about baseball. Every kid I knew, boys and girls alike, wanted a Fernando baseball card (or sticker — baseball stickers were the thing at the time).

In 1978, Valenzuela — the 12th of 12 children in a poor Mexican farming family — was a 17-year-old, pitching in an obscure Mexican pro league. A Dodgers scout who’d gone to evaluate a shortstop on the opposing team instead found himself captivated by Valenzuela’s pitching. Two years later he was an end-of-season call-up in the Dodgers’ big-league bullpen.

Then came 1981. Thanks to a fluke injury to the Dodgers’ intended starter, Valenzuela was their starting pitcher on opening day. He threw a complete game shutout. He started the season 8-0 with an ERA of 0.50. He pitched all 9 innings in each of those 8 games. His best pitch was a screwball (a breaking ball that curves the “wrong” way) — a bygone pitch no one even throws any more. His physique was more beer league than major league. His windup was comically exaggerated — more like Bugs Bunny than a typical major league pitcher. Down 2 games to 0, he led the Dodgers to victory in game 3 of the 1981 World Series against the Dodgers’ most-despised foe, the Yankees, and the Dodgers won the next 3 games to take the championship. He won both the Rookie of the Year and Cy Young awards. He spoke very little English at the time, but had a charisma that broke any language barrier. He was 20 years old.

I was 8 at the time, and already a very sore loser. Valenzuela was the first athlete I can remember from an opposing team whom I had mixed feelings about. You just couldn’t help but like him.

See More: “Remembering Fernandomania” — a splendid 11-minute short film MLB produced a few years ago. The film does a great job emphasizing how much Valenzuela meant to the Mexican-American community in Los Angeles. His playing heyday was 40 years ago, but his influence on the Dodgers’ relationship to their then-still-kinda-new home city remains palpable today.

And One More: Watch this clip from 2017 and not get goosebumps. I dare you.

Tuesday, 22 October 2024

Intuit’s PR Team Has Seemingly Never Heard of the Streisand Effect ★

Nilay Patel, after interviewing Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi for his Decoder podcast at The Verge:

It’s also not just lobbying: in 2022, a coalition of attorneys general from all 50 states got Intuit to agree to a $141 million settlement that required Intuit to refund low-income Americans who were eligible for free filing but were redirected to paid products. In 2023, the FTC found that TurboTax’s “free” marketing was willfully deceptive, and after the agency won an appeal early this year, Intuit was ordered to stop doing it.

I asked about that, and Sasan disagreed with me, and we went back and forth for a few minutes on it. It’s Decoder; we have exchanges like this all the time, and I didn’t think anything of it.

But then I got a note from Rick Heineman, the chief communications officer at Intuit, who called the line of questioning and my tone “inappropriate,” “egregious,” and “disappointing” and demanded that we delete that entire section of the recording. I mean, literally — he wrote a long email that ended with “at the very least the end portion of your interview should be deleted.”

We don’t do that here at The Verge.

What’s bananas about this is that the contentious segment of the interview ... wasn’t really all that contentious? If not for this controversy generated entirely by Intuit’s own comms chief, I’d have listened to the episode and might not have even thought twice about the whole segment on Intuit’s lobbying against the IRS and tax code being updated to eliminate the need for complicated tax filing. Of course Patel was going to bring this up. It’d have been shocking if he hadn’t. And I think Sasan presented Intuit’s case about as well it can be presented.

But now the episode has been the number one story at The Verge all day, and surely getting way more listens than the average Decoder episode — with listeners primed to pay attention to the segment on Intuit’s anti-tax-reform lobbying and the penalty they were fined for bilking low-income users into paid service they didn’t need.

And the Streisand effect isn’t counterintuitive. It’s obvious human nature. We want to look at and listen to things we’re told not to look at or listen to.

On the Cusp of Apple Intelligence’s Launch, Joanna Stern Interviews Craig Federighi ★

Joanna Stern, writing for The Wall Street Journal (News+):

If you’re expecting AI fireworks, prepare for AI … sparklers. Back in June, at the company’s annual developers conference, executives showed off do-it-yourself emojis, ChatGPT integration and a Siri that can recall the name of a person you met months ago. Apple has even been running ads for some features. None are in this release.

“This is a big lift,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, told me at the company’s headquarters. “You could put something out there and have it be sort of a mess. Apple’s point of view is more like, ‘Let’s try to get each piece right and release it when it’s ready.’”

Yes, while other companies rush out generative-AI tools, sometimes with controversy, Apple is moving cautiously. Federighi denies the company is behind, saying it’s prioritizing privacy and responsibility.

It’s a very good interview, and also available on YouTube.

And yes, the higher-profile, more whiz-bang-y Apple Intelligence features aren’t shipping next week in iOS 18.1 and MacOS 15.1. But as Stern herself points out in the article, the features that are shipping are genuinely useful. Notification summaries are good — the occasional mistakes can be funny, but overall it’s solid, and especially helpful for batches of notifications from the same app or group text. The Clean Up unwanted-object-remover in Photos is great. I still haven’t spent much time trying the writing tools, but Stern has, and finds them useful. These are tools that will be used in everyday situations, in the apps they already use, by normal, non-technical iOS and Mac users. There’s a reason Apple is doing a full-court media press on this.

Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had’ ★

Jeffrey Goldberg, in a must-read, must-share piece for The Atlantic (this is a gift link, which should get you through The Atlantic’s subscriber paywall, and which link I encourage you to share with every potential voter you know):

In their book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported that Trump asked John Kelly, his chief of staff at the time, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Trump, at various points, had grown frustrated with military officials he deemed disloyal and disobedient. (Throughout the course of his presidency, Trump referred to flag officers as “my generals.”) According to Baker and Glasser, Kelly explained to Trump that German generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.” This correction did not move Trump to reconsider his view: “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the president responded.

This week, I asked Kelly about their exchange. He told me that when Trump raised the subject of “German generals,” Kelly responded by asking, “‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” He went on: “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.” Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel. [...]

As president, Trump evinced extreme sensitivity to criticism from retired flag officers; at one point, he proposed calling back to active duty Admiral William McRaven and General Stanley McChrystal, two highly regarded Special Operations leaders who had become critical of Trump, so that they could be court-martialed. Esper, who was the defense secretary at the time, wrote in his memoir that he and Milley talked Trump out of the plan. [...] Trump has responded incredulously when told that American military personnel swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president.

There’s no hope for the deep-MAGA derps who actually cheer this on. Trump’s hope for another electoral victory, however, depends upon large swaths of conservative, or even just conservative-ish, voters who don’t take him seriously, who haven’t paid attention to all the red flags and evidence from his first term, and think he doesn’t mean what he says. He says a lot of crazy shit, yes, but when he talks about what he wants to do, he means it. There’s very little he said he wanted to do in his first term that he either didn’t do, or didn’t try to do.

Goldberg:

On separate occasions in 2020, Trump held private conversations in the White House with national-security officials about the George Floyd protests. “The Chinese generals would know what to do,” he said, according to former officials who described the conversations to me, referring to the leaders of the People’s Liberation Army, which carried out the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. (Pfeiffer denied that Trump said this.) Trump’s desire to deploy U.S. troops against American citizens is well documented. During the nerve-racking period of social unrest following Floyd’s death, Trump asked Milley and Esper, a West Point graduate and former infantry officer, if the Army could shoot protesters. “Trump seemed unable to think straight and calmly,” Esper wrote in his memoir. “The protests and violence had him so enraged that he was willing to send in active-duty forces to put down the protesters. Worse yet, he suggested we shoot them. I wondered about his sense of history, of propriety, and of his oath to the Constitution.” Esper told National Public Radio in 2022, “We reached that point in the conversation where he looked frankly at General Milley, and said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?’” When defense officials argued against Trump’s desire, the president screamed, according to witnesses, “You are all fucking losers!”

There’s some hope our military leadership would resist such orders again. But there won’t be any civilian leaders like John Kelly or Mark Esper in a second Trump administration. It’d be sycophants all the way down.

Former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator ★

Michael S. Schmidt for The New York Times:

He said that, in his opinion, Mr. Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law. [...]

When Mr. Kelly left the White House in 2019, he decided he would speak out on the record only if Mr. Trump said something that he found deeply troubling or involved him and was wildly inaccurate. Mr. Trump’s recent comments about using the military against what he called the “enemy within” were so dangerous, he said, that he felt he had to speak out.

“And I think this issue of using the military on — to go after — American citizens is one of those things I think is a very, very bad thing — even to say it for political purposes to get elected — I think it’s a very, very bad thing, let alone actually doing it,” Mr. Kelly said.

Mr. Kelly said that Mr. Trump was repeatedly told dating back to his first year in office why he should not use the U.S. military against Americans and the limits on his authority to do so. Mr. Trump nevertheless continued while in office to push the issue and claim that he did have the authority to take such actions, Mr. Kelly said.

Regarding Trump’s praise for Adolf Hitler:

“He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,’” Mr. Kelly said Mr. Trump told him. [...]

“First of all, you should never say that,” Mr. Kelly said that he told Mr. Trump. “But if you knew what Hitler was all about from the beginning to the end, everything he did was in support of his racist, fascist life, you know, the, you know, philosophy, so that nothing he did, you could argue, was good — it was certainly not done for the right reason.”

Mr. Kelly said that would usually end the conversation. But Mr. Trump would occasionally bring it up again.

In his first term Trump had guardrails. He hadn’t expected to actually win in 2016 and while his administration was staffed with hard-right Republicans, they were men who respected the Constitution and rule of law. There is much to criticize about Trump’s attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr. But both were exactly the sort of people you’d expect as attorney general under any Republican president. In fact, Barr had previously served as attorney general, under George H.W. Bush from 1991–1993 — not exactly a time of tumult or growing fascism in the United States. For attorney general in a possible second administration, ABC News is reporting that Trump is considering Aileen Cannon, the apparatchik Florida judge — utterly unqualified for the federal bench but nominated by Trump in 2020 — who threw out Trump’s stolen classified documents case this summer. To call her decision unfounded in law and seemingly based on fealty to Trump personally is putting it mildly.

---

---

Tuesday, 22 October 2024

Rudy Giuliani Is Losing Everything to the Georgia Election Workers He Defamed ★

Katelyn Polantz, reporting for CNN:

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered former Donald Trump attorney and New York mayor Rudy Giuliani to turn over all his valuable possessions and his Manhattan penthouse apartment to the control of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the Georgia election workers he defamed and to whom he now owes $150 million.

Judge Lewis Liman of the federal court in Manhattan said Giuliani must turn over his interest in the property to the women in seven days, to a receivership they will control. The judge’s turnover order of the luxury items is swift and simple, but the penthouse apartment will have its control transferred so Freeman and Moss can sell it, potentially for millions of dollars.

The women, who counted Georgia ballots after the 2020 election, will also be entitled to about $2 million in legal fees Giuliani has said the Trump campaign still owes him, the judge ruled.

In addition to the Trump campaign fees and the New York apartment, Giuliani must also turn over a collection of several watches, including ones given to him by European presidents after the September 11, 2001, attacks; a signed Joe DiMaggio jersey and other sports memorabilia; and a 1980 Mercedes once owned by the Hollywood star Lauren Bacall. Additionally, the judge ordered that Giuliani turn over his television, items of furniture and jewelry.

Liman hasn’t yet decided if Giuliani will be able to keep a Palm Beach, Florida, condominium he also owns, or the four New York Yankees World Series rings he has, which Giuliani’s son contends his father gave him.

Donald Trump has numerous super powers. One of them is the way that — to date — he’s suffered few consequences for crimes committed in his name. Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg didn’t just do time, he served hard time in Rikers Island. Former White House official Peter Navarro? Prison. Steve Bannon? Prison. Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen? Prison. The list goes on.

Now, as a result of his efforts on behalf of Trump to attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, Rudy Giuliani is seemingly destitute. Rightly so. The whole “America’s Mayor” schtick was unearned, but he had it. He had respect and wealth. Now he doesn’t even own a fucking television. His whole life thrown away in disgrace to do the bidding of Donald Trump, who at this point surely wouldn’t even answer a phone call from Giuliani, let alone actually help him.

Trump, meanwhile, is a nerve-rackingly close election away from escaping unscathed.

Monday, 21 October 2024

EU Considers Calculating X Corp Fines by Including Revenue From Elon Musk’s Other Firms ★

Gian Volpicelli and Samuel Stolton, reporting for Bloomberg^*:

Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, the bloc can slap online platforms with fines of as much as 6% of their yearly global revenue for failing to tackle illegal content and disinformation or follow transparency rules. Regulators are considering whether sales from SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI and the Boring Company, in addition to revenue generated from the social network, should be included to determine potential fines against X, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public. [...]

X is a private company under Musk’s sole control. In considering revenue from his other companies, the commission is essentially weighing whether Musk himself should be regarded as the entity to fine as opposed to X itself, the people said. Tesla Inc.’s sales would be exempt from this calculation because it’s publicly traded and not under Musk’s full control, one of the people said. The commission hasn’t yet decided whether to penalize X, and the size of any potential fine is still under discussion, the people said.

It’d be one thing if X had been split off into a subsidiary of a larger original company, specifically to decrease the size of any potential revenue-based penalty. Like, say, if Apple suddenly decided to break off “iOS” into an independent company that licensed software to Apple to include on iPhones. But we all know that’s not what X is. X was Twitter, which was a publicly-traded company that Musk had no stake in, and which he then bought and made private.

If the EU actually decides to include revenue from SpaceX and Musk’s other companies in calculating a penalty against X, it would effectively be playing a one-sided form of Calvinball, where the rules just get made up out of whole cloth as they go along. (Except in “real” Calvinball, both sides get to change the rules as they see fit.) They’re the ones who chose percentage-of-global revenue as the basis for potential penalties. It’s not Musk’s fault that X Corp generates embarrassingly little (and decreasing) revenue. Wait, actually, that is his fault. He bought a bad business and made it a lot worse. It’s just not his fault that running X Corp into the ground financially means that he can pay any potential revenue-based penalty out of his pocket change.

* You know.

Display Preferences

Copyright © 2002–2024 The Daring Fireball Company LLC.