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‘Lumon Takes Grand Central’ ★

Parker Ortolani works near Grand Central and wrote a great post about the in-character Severance experience on Wednesday, replete with photos, both early in the day when the diorama was largely empty and Parker Ortolani works nearby, and wrote a great post about the experience, replete with photos, both early in the day when the diorama was empty, and later in the day, when it was swarmed with fans and general onlookers because the actors and director Ben Stiller were there. Blogging at its best.

iOS 18.3 Beta 3 Has Several Changes to Apple Intelligence Notification Summaries ★

Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac:

Here are the changes included in iOS 18.3 for Apple Intelligence notification summaries:

• When you enable notification summaries, iOS 18.3 will make it clearer that the feature — like all Apple Intelligence features — is a beta.

• You can now disable notification summaries for an app directly from the Lock Screen or Notification Center by swiping, tapping “Options,” then choosing the “Turn Off Summaries” option.

• On the Lock Screen, notification summaries now use italicized text to better distinguish them from normal notifications.

• In the Settings app, Apple now warns users that notification summaries “may contain errors.”

Additionally, notification summaries have been temporarily disabled entirely for the News & Entertainment category of apps. Notification summaries will be re-enabled for this category with a future software update as Apple continues to refine the experience.

Using italics for summarized notarizations is a really clever design. It feels literary. Italics sounds like a different voice to me, which is exactly what these Apple-generated summaries are. Seems so obvious now that I’m seeing it in use, I’m kicking myself for not having suggested it.

And while I can’t blame Apple for temporarily disabling notification summaries for news apps, after just one full day on beta 3, I already miss them. The mistakes were embarrassing, no question, but overall the summaries were useful for me.

Nintendo Switch 2 Joy-Con Might Double as a Mouse ★

Maddy Myers, writing for Polygon:

But the weirdest part of the reveal video, in my opinion, is the implication that the Joy-Cons can be used as a mouse.

This was already rumored, and if I hadn’t seen those rumors, then I might not have understood what I was looking at during the portion of the teaser that depicts the Joy-Cons sliding around on a hard surface like a cute lil’ mouse. Because of those rumors, though, I’m now convinced that this is a thing and the Switch 2 will include this feature. The video specifically shows the Joy-Con mouse position as perpendicular to the surface its on. The new Joy-Con mechanic is further cemented by the part of the video that shows a Joy-Con on its side with a section that really looks like an optical mouse light. [...]

But this is Nintendo, and Nintendo consoles almost always have a gimmick. The gimmick isn’t always good. Although there were a couple of games that made excellent use of the Wii’s motion controls, I can think of plenty more that were deeply un-fun. Then again, the Wii U’s gimmick — its tablet — paced the way to the first Nintendo Switch, the super-adaptable console we all know and love. So you really never know.

I’ll just say that Nintendo’s controller gimmicks are usually good, so if the new joy-cons can be used like mice, I’ll bet it’s in an unexpected way.

‘He Was Not Interested in Answers Because He Understood That Questions Are the Drive That Make Us Who We Are’ ★

Kyle Maclachlan, remembering his friend and longtime collaborator David Lynch, on Instagram:

What I saw in him was an enigmatic and intuitive man with a creative ocean bursting forth inside of him. He was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could get to.

Our friendship blossomed on Blue Velvet and then Twin Peaks and I always found him to be the most authentically alive person I’d ever met.

David was in tune with the universe and his own imagination on a level that seemed to be the best version of human. He was not interested in answers because he understood that questions are the drive that make us who we are. They are our breath.

Thursday, 16 January 2025

Severance Balloon Generator ★

Another fun promo for Severance season 2.

And a promo on Apple’s homepage featuring a computer made by another company. And a free in-universe book, The Lexington Letters, at Apple Books. (Update: Ah, the book came out in March 2022, as part of season 1. Still: fun! Apple Books does not make the publication date prominent.)

David Lynch Dies at 78 ★

Brian Tallerico, writing for RogerEbert.com:

David Lynch saw my dreams. As a teenager growing up in suburban America in the ’80s, “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks” hit like a bolt of lightning. Not only did they capture something about the sinister, surreal underbelly of life under the picket fences, but they said something directly to anyone who thought they could be an artist: You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing.

Lynch was one of those creative voices who found his own octave, doing for film what people like David Bowie or Prince did for music, shattering expectations of what a piece of art could be. Even when his work missed the mark, which was rare, Lynch was never anything less than a singular artist, a creator who never once succumbed to the desire to please that derails so much potential in his industry. When people point to Lynch works like “Mulholland Dr.” or “The Straight Story” or even those of us who love “Lost Highway,” it’s not just that specific film that speaks to them — it’s the sense that the potential of the form is limitless as long as people like Lynch are involved. The entire art form was shifted by him and is now lessened by his absence. We owe it to him to burst through the doors he opened. [...]

Lynch’s fifth film, 1990’s “Wild at Heart” would be one of his most divisive — it’s often pointed to as Lynch at his most excessive — but it was what he did on television that same year that rocked the entertainment world: “Twin Peaks.” I could write a book about what “Twin Peaks” meant to a 15-year-old entertainment junkie. To summarize, it exploded the potential of the form. People who watch “Twin Peaks” over three decades later need to understand the TV landscape on which it landed. I’m not saying there wasn’t quality TV in the ’80s, but there was less risk-taking than in the 2020s, and watching the saga of Laura Palmer next to formulaic dramas or laugh-track-heavy sitcoms felt like a true shock to the system. For more on “Twin Peaks” and why it mattered, check this out.

A thought that’s been swirling in my head for 30-some years but only today properly crystalized: Lynch is the only artist I love whose work I largely don’t “get”. Nothing exemplifies that more than Twin Peaks — I never stopped thinking that there must be something there that I simply wasn’t getting, but I absolutely loved it. But now I realize that’s a big part of why I loved it. I don’t like to be confused but I do like it when it’s David Lynch confusing me. It’s still hard to believe that show was on commercial network TV.

Like Kubrick, he was quick to embrace new technology as it became available and to see its artistic potential. He sung the praises of digital video and declared himself done with film years ahead of the industry. Lynch called bullshit when he saw it, and he always let you know what he really thought. Also like Kubrick (whom Lynch, unsurprisingly, named first when asked his favorite filmmakers), Lynch’s later years were sparse with new work, but the work he delivered continued to elevate the art form. 2017’s 18-episode Twin Peaks: The Return was so utterly Lynchian — a perfect capstone to a remarkable career.

Bob Uecker, Mr. Baseball, Dies at 90 ★

Ray Ratto, writing for Defector, gets it right. Bob Uecker was just the best:

He was the face and voice of baseball cinema, the man whose line-reading made “Ju-u-u-u-st a bit outside” so good that “iconic” doesn’t remotely cover its impact. Even if you’re not a seamhead, you likely came across Bob Uecker and smiled.

So Thursday’s announcement that Uecker has died at age 90, due to small cell lung cancer, came as a blow. Nine decades is a good long run, but there was never a sense that he was running out of material; Uecker was still a joy to hear on Brewers broadcasts even in Year 54 of being the voice of Wisconsin baseball for two-and-a-half generations. The reaction to his passing was unanimous in the same ways and for the same reasons that the response to Vin Scully’s death was unanimous — it was an outpouring of both sadness at the loss and gratitude for all the time we got to spend with him. In an epochally angry time in America, at a moment when it isn’t hard to find even anti-puppy polemics with a keystroke, Uecker gets a pass from most everyone. Yes he defined baseball, but he also managed to become more than merely Mister Baseball. From the moment of his first appearance on Johnny Carson’s definitive version of the Tonight Show, which Uecker earned merely by mastering the tripartite arts of comedy writing, unabashed self-deprecation, and martini-dry humor, he was recognizable as that rarest of Americans, the guy you’d sit back down to listen to even if you were already halfway out the door. Put another way, Norm Macdonald thought he was one of the funniest men he ever met. Beat that with a stick.

MLB.com has a fine obituary that includes a slew of links and videos. Uecker, 90 years old, was on the call for the Brewers right up until the bitter end of last season, when they fell to the Mets in the 9th inning. His final words as a broadcaster: “I’m telling you. That one — had some sting on it.” So does this one.

If you want to lose a few hours in laughter, head down the rabbit hole of Uecker’s 100-some appearances on Carson. Here’s the first one that just came up for me now, a 1976 appearance where Uecker, utterly deadpan as ever, makes Mel Brooks spit out his coffee.

Nintendo Drops Switch 2 Trailer ★

Fun trailer and a smart if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it design. Switch 2 just looks like a slightly bigger Switch. Pure joy.

That it’s just a bigger faster Switch is proof of the genius of the Switch form factor, which has now been widely copied across the industry. The Switch is to handheld + dockable console gaming what the iPhone is to phones. They’re announcing compatibility with existing Switch games, including physical game cards, but with a footnote disclaiming “Certain Nintendo Switch games may not be supported on or fully compatible with Nintendo Switch 2.” I suspect all major games will be fully compatible but some of the half-assed dreck available on the online Switch store might not be.

It’s nothing short of glorious that, thanks to the Switch, Nintendo is thriving. Just about everything currently on my plate and on my mind to write about is some combination of tragic, ugly, hateful, worrisome, more worrisome, spiteful, corrupt, more corrupt, contentious, depressing, or, at best, just plain no fun at all. But here’s Nintendo — perhaps the most humane company in the history of computing, and one that has never allowed either success or failure to distract it from its core mission of creating wholesome, clever, exquisitely well-designed fun games — with a much-anticipated announcement of something new that is purely about adding more joy to people’s lives.

As Mario would say, “Woohoo!”

Wednesday, 15 January 2025

‘Twenty Years of Kraft’ ★

Bryan Bedell, on the Field Notes Dispatches blog:

The anniversary date of “Field Notes” varies a bit, depending on who you ask. Aaron Draplin first used the name (typeset, of course, in all-caps Futura Bold) on a customized one-off red hardcover notebook in 2002. Our “official line” sets the birth of the company in mid-2007, when Coudal Partners and Aaron first printed a batch of 3-Packs for the “Swap Meat,” followed shortly by the establishment of “Field Notes Brand” as an actual thing.

But a good case can be made that the very first Field Notes were made in “early January 2005,” making this, January 2025, an important 20th anniversary. This was the first “big” run (200 books, big for the time!), hand-printed by Aaron on his desktop Gocco silkscreen rig.* This was the first use of a kraft-paper cover. The general look-and-feel, while a bit narrower, is mostly dialed-in. The body is graph paper, even if it’s trimmed-down letter-size dungeon-mapping blue-ruled graph paper.

I carry a Field Notes (or at least Field-Notes-sized — I dally with others, but always come home) notebook in my back pocket wherever I go. And because I’m a pack rat, I number, date, and keep them all. I just filled up volume 114 (9 Dec 2024 – 13 Jan 2025) and started volume 115 yesterday.

Funny enough, I started my pocket notebook habit in 2006, a year before Field Notes became a thing. And I was greatly dissatisfied with the various notebooks I’d tried prior to Field Notes. Hardcover Moleskines were too thick and uncomfortable to sit on, and their softcover notebooks started falling apart at the seams after just a few weeks. And then in 2007 my friend Jim Coudal offhandedly mentioned that he was starting a project with Aaron Draplin called Field Notes, and son of a bitch if the notebooks they were making weren’t exactly what I craved. The rest is history — a lot of ink, a lot of pages. Mostly nonsense, but some occasional gems and fond memories. The first page of my first notebook has a list of strollers to consider for my then-toddler son; he’s now a junior in college. And flipping through volume 4 just now, I came upon this one-page outline from September 2006 for a never-published episode in the Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal Interface Theme saga, wherein Brushed Metal, Aqua, and the just-released iTunes 7 visit a bitter classic Mac OS 9 Platinum theme on his deathbed in the hospital. (Platinum: “You fucked me on iTunes. The two of you.” And: “Steve never loved me, I’m the only one.”)

When in doubt, write it down.

Bloomberg: Tim Cook Plans to Attend Trump’s Inauguration ★

Marko Parker, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook is planning to attend the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump next week, the latest in a wave of Silicon Valley leaders traveling to Washington for the ceremony.

Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, Meta Platforms Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla Inc. who has quickly become one of Trump’s foremost supporters and financial backers, are all also expected to attend.

Rings don’t kiss themselves. But if there’s any consolation in this, it’s that surely none of these guys want to attend this. It’s going to be boring as shit and cold as hell. Imagine Cook stuck sitting between, say, Zuckerberg and Musk all day.

(Via Taegan Goddard.)

Apple Pulled a Fun In-Character Promo Stunt for ‘Severance’ Yesterday at Grand Central Terminal ★

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Ahead of the season two premiere of hit TV show Severance, Apple is marketing the show with a fun Severance pop-up at the Grand Central Terminal in New York City.

Apple has assembled a glass cube with workstations that are identical to the setups that Lumon employees use on the show, complete with employees “working,” doing yoga, playing catch, throwing paper airplanes, sipping coffee, and performing other activities that we’ve seen on Severance.

At 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time, Severance director Ben Stiller made an appearance at the site, with some of the show’s actors visiting as well. Adam Scott, Zach Cherry, Patricia Arquette, Britt Lower, and Tramell Tillman were on hand and spent time in the makeshift office space, with the actors in character as their “innies.”

Super fun idea. Season 2 debuts Friday.

My wife and I watched season 1 when it debuted three years ago, and we both really liked it. I’m more of a sci-fi fan than she is. I often enjoy shows where the clever premise itself is the main appeal; she doesn’t. But while Severance definitely has a clever fundamental premise, it’s really not the main appeal of the show. It’s fundamentally an ensemble character-driven mystery. Such a great cast, all of them playing intriguing, interesting characters. And the direction — especially the five episodes directed by Ben Stiller — is phenomenal. Terrific cinema.

Anyway, when season 1 completed in 2022, my wife and I instantly agreed we’d re-watch before season 2. We started that re-watch just after New Year’s, and holy hell was I reminded how much I don’t just like but love this show. If they sustain the same quality for multiple seasons, Severance will wind up in my count-on-one-hand list of favorite shows ever made. It’s that good.

One true test of a great series is that it’s better on the second watch through. That was true in spades for Severance season 1 — knowing some of the answers from the first watch made it all the more enriching. The first time through, you’re in the dark as much as the protagonists are. The second time through, you know things they don’t know, and that knowledge serves as a jolt of sustained suspense. It’s brilliant storytelling.

My second test of a great series is whether, when I consider who is my favorite character, I not only have a hard time answering, but I have a hard time even eliminating characters from consideration. Multiple great lead characters, and multiple supporting characters who are so interesting I find myself wishing they had bigger roles.

(The only three series I’ve watched in their entirety more than twice: The Larry Sanders Show, The Sopranos, and Mad Men. All three of those shows pass both my tests with flying colors.)

‘TikTok Is Just the Beginning’ ★

Noah Smith, writing at Noahpinion:

As many observers have noted, this tells us two important things. First, it tells us that Chinese officials are the ones calling the shots with regards to TikTok. This should be no surprise, given that ByteDance is legally required to obey CCP directives.

Second, the refusal to sell the app tells us that the Chinese government would rather see TikTok destroyed than see it fall into American hands. Notably, that same government put up little fuss back in 2020 when the U.S. forced a Chinese company to sell the gay dating app Grindr to an American company. Why shut down TikTok and leave untold billions of dollars on the table, instead of just selling the thing like Grindr was sold?

One possibility is that it’s an attempt to make young Americans angry, in the hopes that they’ll demand that Trump and Congress repeal the 2024 law. But a simpler explanation is that Chinese leaders simply think that TikTok, unlike other apps, is so important that they would rather destroy it than see it escape their control.

TikTok is an ingenious propaganda platform. A mass audience — which skews very young — finds it addictively entertaining. But research studies show that the platform squelches topics that aren’t aligned with the CCP. Smith cites two; here’s the abstract of the second one, which was published just last month:

Three studies explored how TikTok, a China-owned social media platform, may be manipulated to conceal content critical of China while amplifying narratives that align with Chinese Communist Party objectives. Study I employed a user journey methodology, wherein newly created accounts on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube were used to assess the nature and prevalence of content related to sensitive Chinese Communist Party (CCP) issues, specifically Tibet, Tiananmen Square, Uyghur rights, and Xinjiang. The results revealed that content critical of China was made far less available than it was on Instagram and YouTube.

Study II, an extension of Study I, investigated whether the prevalence of content that is pro- and anti-CCP on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube aligned with user engagement metrics (likes and comments), which social media platforms typically use to amplify content. The results revealed a disproportionately high ratio of pro-CCP to anti-CCP content on TikTok, despite users engaging significantly more with anti-CCP content, suggesting propagandistic manipulation.

Study III involved a survey administered to 1214 Americans that assessed their time spent on social media platforms and their perceptions of China. Results indicated that TikTok users, particularly heavy users, exhibited significantly more positive attitudes towards China’s human rights record and expressed greater favorability towards China as a travel destination.

Back to Smith:

In other words, the Chinese government is actively silencing the views of Americans who try to criticize that government. Somehow I doubt that the First Amendment’s protection of free speech was intended to protect the right of foreign governments to silence American individuals from speaking their mind in popular public forums. That would be a very strange definition of “freedom of speech”. Of course, I am no legal scholar, so I’ll have to wait on the Supreme Court to make that judgement, and abide by what they decide.

Tuesday, 14 January 2025

Breakfast With Pete Hegseth ★

Jane Mayer, reporting for The New Yorker:

As recently as the spring of 2023, according to an account shared last week with The New Yorker, Hegseth ordered three gin-and-tonics at a weekday breakfast meeting with an acquaintance in Manhattan. “It was an extremely strange experience,” his companion that morning told me. “We met at Fox News in New York for breakfast, and he suggested we go across the street to a bar. It was, like, ten in the morning. Then he ordered two gin-and-tonics at the same time for himself. To be polite, I ordered one, too. But it was so strong I couldn’t drink it, so I ordered coffee. Then he had a third gin-and-tonic. I don’t know how he could pass a security clearance. But they’re trying to create a culture where whistle-blowers are uncomfortable coming forward.”

Until now, most Americans would have agreed that the secretary of defense ought not imbibe like the president of Russia on a state visit to Washington. A new wrinkle for the 2.0 kakistocracy.

While CTO at Pandora, Tom Conrad Had Them Building Their iPhone App Before the iPhone SDK Was Released ★

Speaking of new (“interim”) Sonos CEO Tom Conrad and Scott Forstall, here’s an interesting anecdote from Tyler Hayes’s terrific piece for Motherboard in 2021, “How Pandora Won Its Royalty Battle but Lost the War to Spotify”:

After pushback on only allowing web apps for the iPhone, Steve Jobs announced that native apps would be coming to the iPhone. In the interim, Apple Senior Vice President Scott Forstall invited Tim Westergren and his CTO, Tom Conrad, over to a local Cupertino lunch spot. The trio talked for hours about what Pandora had learned about streaming audio from putting apps on flip phones, like Motorola’s RAZR, for wireless carriers. The meeting ended with a question for Forstall.

“What, if anything, can we do at Pandora to get ready for the next generation of iPhone that includes an app store and native APIs?” asked Conrad. “Forstall said, it wouldn’t be a waste of your time to jailbreak some iPhones and use the kind of back door toolkits that were being distributed by other people to build a native Pandora app while we get our act together at Apple on something more formal.”

So, Conrad, designer Dan Lythcott-Haines, and many others on the team got to work jailbreaking iPhones and working on a Pandora iPhone app ahead of the official APK release. Then, on day one of the App Store launch, Pandora was the first internet radio app available. Nine months later the Pandora app was installed on 21 percent of iPhones.

I first linked to this article back in 2021, when it was published, but it seemed perfect for a re-link now in light of Conrad’s new role at Sonos. The more I learn about Conrad, the more he sounds like the right man for the job there.

(Via Tyler Hayes himself, on Bluesky, which you should join if you haven’t already.)

Sonos’s Reboot Continues: Chief Product Officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin Is Out Too ★

Sonos interim CEO Tom Conrad, in a company-wide memo obtained by The Verge:

With my stepping in as CEO, the Board, Max, and I have agreed that my background makes the Chief Product Officer role redundant. Therefore, Max’s role is being eliminated and the Product organization will report directly to me. I’ve asked Max to advise me over the next period to ensure a smooth transition and I am grateful that he’s agreed to do that. [...]

I shared this news openly with the Sonos leaders yesterday with the intention that these leaders would share the update as needed with their teams. Unfortunately this news quickly made its way outside the organization. While this is frustrating for all of us, I will not let the possibility of a leak change our ability to communicate openly with one another. So I’m going to keep telling you the truth.

I know this is a lot of change to absorb in two days and I want to thank you for your resilience, continued commitment to Sonos and support of each other during this time.

Starting to sound like Conrad is as much “interim” CEO as Steve Jobs was in 1997.

Nick Wingfield on Sonos as an Acquisition Target (and a Juicy Tidbit Regarding a Former Apple Exec Who Wanted to Acquire Them) ★

Nick Wingfield, writing today’s The Briefing column for the paywalled (alas) The Information:

Sonos has always been a bit of an odd duck. There aren’t that many consumer electronics startups of its size created in the last quarter century (Sonos was founded in 2002) that have survived as independent companies. Its products are expensive relative to the wireless speakers that have flooded the market from big-name tech rivals like Amazon and no-name competitors from China. And yet, Sonos held on partly because it had a commitment to high-quality sound and an Apple-like dedication to user experience, both of which gave it a passionate fan base.

The events of the last year seem to have ruptured that relationship with many of its customers. Today, Spence’s replacement — Tom Conrad, a Sonos board member, who is now interim CEO — reportedly told staff he’s focused on repairing those relations. If he’s unsuccessful, it’s fair to wonder whether Sonos — whose market capitalization is around $1.7 billion — might be better off selling itself to a bigger rival like Amazon, Google or Apple.

Years ago, a former senior Apple executive told me he once begged Steve Jobs, who was then Apple’s CEO, to buy Sonos. Jobs wasn’t interested. A lot has changed since then, but the Sonos brand still might have enough cachet to interest a more powerful suitor.

A tidbit like that immediately set my mind racing as to who that “former senior Apple executive” was. It took me only a few seconds to make my guess: Scott Forstall. There are a few other senior Apple executives who I can imagine might have pushed Jobs to pursue an acquisition of Sonos, but none of them are “former”. They’re all still at Apple.

The only other possibility I can think of is Tony Fadell, but Fadell is a hardware guy and a builder by nature. He even titled his book Build. I think he’d have wanted to spearhead the creation of Apple’s own lineup of Sonos-like audio kit under the iPod brand, not acquire them. But Fadell is a maybe.

No one else really fits the bill. Bob Mansfeld? Bertrand Serlet? Nah. Jony Ive? Doesn’t sound right. Jon Rubinstein? He left Apple in April 2006, which I think predates Wingfield’s time covering Apple for The Wall Street Journal.

Update: Well, my first guess was wrong, but my second was right. I asked Tony Fadell and he confirmed to me it was him, saying it was back in the very earliest days of Sonos, when Sonos was set to debut with a device featuring an obviously iPod-like scroll wheel for input. Jobs wanted to sue (of course). But Fadell, after meeting with the founders, wanted to buy them, and made his case to Jobs, to no avail, several times circa 2003. Fadell said his pitch was basically “Seriously, we are all about music. Customers want this. I want this.” And Jobs’s response was, according to Fadell, “No one wants what they are selling.”

(Here in 2025, there are an awful lot of Apple users who also own an awful lot of Sonos devices who would disagree with Jobs on that.)

‘47 Years Later, the Palisades Disappeared Overnight’ ★

Mike Davidson:

I grew up on Iliff Street, right in the middle of the ashes that up until a few nights ago, was a sunkissed neighborhood known as Pacific Palisades.

It was 1978, and I remember my dad climbing up on our roof with a garden hose. Every couple of hours, he would wet the house down, top-to-bottom, and everything surrounding it. I don’t remember everybody doing this, but my Dad is a Meteorologist, and back then he worked at the SCAQMD, the regional agency charged with studying, regulating, and improving air quality in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. Because of his specific remit and where we lived, he had a deep understanding of the Santa Ana winds and their effect on the Palisades.

When my dad explained what he was doing, he would point northeast to the hills behind us and tell us that if the winds didn’t die down, the fire miles in the distance would come towards our tiny little house and there would be trouble. As a small child, I don’t actually remember being scared about any of this. Every year there was a fire, the smoke was always so far away and so barely visible that it just seemed like anything else in life at the time. And besides, dads are superheroes to their children, so of course there was no danger.

What a remarkable piece of writing this is. Part memoir, part call to action, entirely engaging.

Volume 1 of Jack Smith’s Special Counsel Report Flatly States Trump Would Have Been Convicted in Election Case ★

Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage, reporting for The New York Times:

Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted President-elect Donald J. Trump on charges of illegally seeking to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, said in a final report released early Tuesday that the evidence would have been sufficient to convict Mr. Trump in a trial, had his 2024 election victory not made it impossible for the prosecution to continue.

“The department’s view that the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a president is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government’s proof or the merits of the prosecution, which the office stands fully behind,” Mr. Smith wrote.

He continued: “Indeed, but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.”

The Times includes a link to the full 174-page first volume of the report. Without having read it yet, I’ll just say this. It should go without saying that Trump’s actions are Trump’s responsibility. Trump is the already convicted felon of far lesser crimes, and he should have been (and perhaps, years from now, will be) the convicted felon of the grave crimes against the nation itself that Jack Smith’s special counsel team investigated and charged him with.

But Joe Biden deserves blame for the fact that Trump wasn’t tried before the 2024 election. I take no pleasure in saying it because I like Biden, a lot, and in most other ways I agreed with his policies and his numerous accomplishments over the last four years. But with regard to Donald Trump, Biden just fucking blew it. It’s that simple. Biden wrongly believed that after the 2020 election, and exacerbated by Trump’s embarrassing refusal to accept defeat and his ham-fisted attempt at a coup-by-morons on January 6, that Trump was finished, politically. Like Nixon after Watergate, but with even deeper ignominy. Biden thought his own election was proof that the MAGA fever had broken, and the American electorate had returned to some sort of pre-Trump “normalcy”. So Biden appointed Merrick Garland, a feckless cowardly fool, as Attorney General, and under Biden and Garland’s direction the Justice Department slow-walked the pursuit of justice against Trump for his crimes, thinking it would be better for the nation — a nation, again, that Biden plainly but wrongly assumed was ready to put Donald Trump in the ash heap of history — not to aggressively prosecute Trump as though time was of the essence, so as to remove any possible appearance that they were pursuing his prosecution for political reasons.

What a grave mistake. I hope it winds up not mattering much in the grand scheme of history, but there’s a pit in my stomach telling me it will. Jack Smith wasn’t appointed Special Prosecutor by Garland until 18 November 2022. Smith was the right man for the job, but he should have been appointed at the very start of the Biden administration in early 2021. That year and a half of abject dithering was the difference between putting Trump on trial and convicting him of the crimes we literally watched him commit on TV, and seeing Trump run out the clock with procedural delays until he had the chance to be reelected, which he was. And now here we are on the cusp of Trump serving a second term in the White House without ever standing trial for his serious crimes against the nation. The urgency was dire, but Biden and Garland acted as though they had all the time in the world, until they realized their mistake far too late.

If Trump 2.0 goes mostly like Trump 1.0 — a daily stream of chaotic talk, but very little chaotic action to speak of, leaving an electorate to quickly tire of his antics and turn against him in the midterms two years hence — the dark mark on Biden’s historical legacy will likely be his stubborn refusal (and/or cognitive inability) to recognize that age had caught up to him, leading him to run for a reelection and drop out only after embarrassing himself in a debate, leaving Democrats no time to hold a proper primary election to choose a popularly-elected candidate for 2024. But if Trump 2.0 is unlike Trump 1.0, and is filled with actions that leave a lasting mark on the nation and the world, history will remember Biden for allowing Trump to get off the hook for obvious crimes against democracy itself.

Biden is like the protagonist in a horror movie who defeats the villain but doesn’t finish him off, congratulates himself, and turns his back on his foe and starts walking off into the sunset. All the while, with the audience screaming, “Finish him off! He’s getting back up! Turn around! Oh god, I can’t watch...”

Monday, 13 January 2025

Bananas Bloomberg Report: ‘China Weighs Sale of TikTok’s US Operations to Elon Musk’ ★

No byline, which is really weird, just “Bloomberg News”:

Chinese officials are evaluating a potential option that involves Elon Musk acquiring the US operations of TikTok if the company fails to fend off a controversial ban on the short-video app, according to people familiar with the matter.

But here’s Todd Spangler, reporting (with his name) for Variety:

TikTok denied a report that China is looking at potentially facilitating a sale of the app to tech billionaire Elon Musk to keep TikTok operational in America amid a looming U.S. government ban.

“We can’t be expected to comment on pure fiction,” a TikTok rep said in reply to Variety‘s request for comment.

It could be no one is wrong here. Maybe ByteDance’s owners, the Chinese government, know what’s going on, and the dupes at TikTok don’t.

Sonos Canned CEO Patrick Spence, Who Spearheaded Disastrous App Launch ★

Chris Welch, The Verge:

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence is resigning from the job today, effective immediately, with board member Tom Conrad filling the role of interim CEO. It’s the most dramatic development yet in an eight-month saga that has proven to be the most challenging time in Sonos’ history.

The company’s decision to prematurely release a buggy, completely overhauled new app back in May — with crucial features missing at launch — outraged customers and kicked off a monthslong domino effect that included layoffs, a sharp decline in employee morale, and a public apology tour. The Sonos Ace headphones, rumored to be the whole reason behind the hurried app, were immediately overshadowed by the controversy, and my sources tell me that sales numbers remain dismal. Sonos’ community forums and subreddit have been dominated by complaints and an overwhelmingly negative sentiment since the spring. [...]

But three months later, Sonos’ board of directors and Spence have concluded that those steps weren’t enough: the app debacle has officially cost Spence his job. No other changes are being made today, however. So for now, chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin, who some employees have privately told me deserves a fair share of the blame for recent missteps, will remain in his role.

If they don’t fire that rube too, Sonos is likely continuing down the path to irrelevance and bankruptcy that Spence started them down. The problem wasn’t a bad or ill-considered app rewrite. The bad app rewrite was a symptom of leadership with no appreciation for product and experience design, when Sonos’s entire raison d’être is to deliver a superior product and acoustic experience. Their customer demographic is people with great taste and high standards. Sonos is basically Apple, but just for audio, but in a market where Apple itself is a major player. Yet somehow the company wound up being run by a leadership team with no taste.

Here’s a surprise tidbit that gives me hope Conrad might be the right man for the job:

Conrad’s career includes a 10-year tenure as chief technology officer at Pandora and two years as VP of product at Snapchat. He worked on Apple’s Finder software during the ’90s. Most recently, Conrad served as chief product officer for the ill-fated Quibi streaming service.

(To be clear, I’m talking about the ’90s Finder part, not the Quibi part. The classic Finder was one of the all-time best apps ever made.)

Mastodon Is Transferring Its Ownership to a New Non-Profit ★

The Mastodon Team blog:

Simply, we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.

When founder Eugen Rochko started working on Mastodon, his focus was on creating the code and conditions for the kind of social media he envisioned. The legal setup was a means to an end, a quick fix to allow him to continue operations. From the start, he declared that Mastodon would not be for sale and would be free of the control of a single wealthy individual, and he could ensure that because he was the person in control, the only ultimate decision-maker.

Though there’s a lot going on right now in the social media space, with Meta’s policy zig-zag last week still reverberating, this change seems like it’s more in response to avoiding what’s going on with WordPress and Matt Mullenweg, where “WordPress” is open source and the trademarks are owned by a foundation, but that foundation has licensed the WordPress commercial trademarks exclusively to Mullenweg’s for-profit company Automattic, to protect and wield as he sees fit.

The big difference is that WordPress is almost unfathomably popular, and Mastodon is a niche platform for sophisticated social networking users.

‘Free Our Feeds’ ★

Free Our Feeds:

With Zuckerberg going full Musk last week, we can no longer let billionaires control our digital public square.

Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control.

But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech — the AT Protocol — into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart.

Free Our Feeds will build a new, independent foundation to help make that happen.

An open consortium built around consensus is exactly what’s needed to move fast and take advantage of the current moment’s opportunity. And with a team of “technical advisors and custodians” that includes both the executive director and the president of the Mozilla Foundation, I suspect this initiative might prove as successful as Firefox.

Monday, 13 January 2025

Meta Is Blocking Links to Decentralized Instagram Competitor Pixelfed ★

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized Instagram competitor. On Facebook, the company is labeling links to Pixelfed.social as “spam” and deleting them immediately.

Pixelfed is an open-source, community-funded and decentralized image sharing platform that runs on Activity Pub, which is the same technology that supports Mastodon and other federated services. Pixelfed.social is the largest Pixelfed server, which was launched in 2018 but has gained renewed attention over the last week.

Bluesky user AJ Sadauskas originally posted that links to Pixelfed were being deleted by Meta; 404 Media then also tried to post a link to Pixelfed on Facebook. It was immediately deleted.

True free speech is the freedom to avoid seeing alternatives to Instagram.

Los Angeles Fires: How to Help ★

LA resident Matthew Butterick, in his MB XS newsletter:

Easy answer — donate money! A good friend of mine works in California disaster relief. He recommends these nonprofits because they have a strong local impact:

• The California Community Foundation is seeking donations for its wildfire recovery fund.

• The Center for Disaster Philanthropy is seeking donations for its California Wildfires Recovery Fund.

• Pasadena Humane is seeking donations for its emergency wildfire relief fund.

Donations of physical items are politely discouraged because they impose extra logistics and handling that relief and shelter organizations can’t support right now.

Rory Sykes, Killed in LA Wildfires, RIP ★

Josh DuBose, reporting for KTLA:

In an emotional interview, Shelley Sykes, the mother of former child actor Rory Sykes who died in their Malibu home amid the Palisades Fire, shared her harrowing story and grieved the devastating loss of her son. Shelley fought back tears recalling the final moments with 32-year-old Rory, who was born blind and lived with cerebral palsy.

On Jan. 7, when the Palisades Fire broke out, the mother and son stayed behind at their Malibu home believing they were safe. Overnight, though, as the wind-driven fire escalated and sent embers flying onto their property, a massive flare up trapped Rory, who has difficulty walking, inside his cottage.

“I drove up to the top of his cottage, turned on the hose pipe and no water came out of it,” Shelley explained. “I raced back down and dialed 911 but 911 wasn’t working and all the lines were down for emergencies.”

Despite her best efforts, she says Rory locked himself in his cottage and told his mother to save herself instead.

Shelley said that she grabbed her peacocks and drove down to try and get help, but when firefighters returned, the cottage as well as the main were completely destroyed by fire. Officials have yet to retrieve the former child star’s remains from the charred rubble of the cottage.

Sykes is one of 24 people known to have died so far, but at least 16 others remain missing. His mother, announcing his death on X, emphasized that he was an avid gamer and an Apple enthusiast. Turns out he was also apparently an avid Daring Fireball reader. Rory’s own X feed was full of links to DF posts, right up until the day before he died.

It’s an unusual relationship I have with you, my readers. All of you know me, to the extent that my writing and podcasting reveals who I am. I know relatively few of you. But when a friend pointed me to Sykes’s sad story — and my god, his poor mother, who couldn’t save him — and his X feed, it hit me.

I can’t say I knew Rory. It doesn’t seem like he ever emailed me, nor do we seem to have interacted on Twitter/X. But I’m glad my writing was a part of his life — and I’m glad it’s part of all of yours, too. I don’t know what more to say about it other than that this whole wildfire catastrophe is heartbreaking and awful, and a reminder of how fleeting and delicate everything in life is.

Saturday, 11 January 2025

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

CNBC:

Google donated $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration fund, becoming the latest major tech company to try and curry some goodwill with the incoming administration.

“Google is pleased to support the 2025 inauguration, with a livestream on YouTube and a direct link on our homepage. We’re also donating to the inaugural committee,” Karan Bhatia, Google’s global head of government affairs and public policy, told CNBC in a statement.

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

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

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

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

Mike Isaac, Sheera Frenkel, and Kate Conger, reporting for the NYT in the best-sourced piece I’ve seen on Meta’s big policy changes this week (gift link):

The entire process was highly unusual. Meta typically alters policies that govern its apps — which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads — by inviting employees, civic leaders and others to weigh in. Any shifts generally take months. But Mr. Zuckerberg turned this latest effort into a closely held six-week sprint, blindsiding even employees on his policy and integrity teams.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good piece and great headline by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic:

The social-media hall monitors have been so restrictive on “topics of immigration and gender that they’re out of touch with mainstream discourse,” Zuckerberg said with the zeal of an activist. He spoke about “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech” following “nonstop” concerns about misinformation from the “legacy media” and four years of the United States government “pushing for censorship.” It is clear from Zuckerberg’s announcement that he views establishment powers as having tried and failed to solve political problems by suppressing his users. That message is sure to delight Donald Trump and the incoming administration. But there’s one tiny hitch. Zuckerberg is talking about himself and his own policies. The establishment? That’s him.

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

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

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

Friday, 10 January 2025

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

Chance Miller listened so we don’t have to:

Zuckerberg also took issue with AirPods and the fact that Apple wouldn’t give Meta the same access to the iPhone for its Meta Ray-Ban glasses:

They build stuff like AirPods, which are cool, but they’ve just thoroughly hamstrung the ability for anyone else to build something that can connect to the iPhone in the same way.

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

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

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

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

Miller concludes:

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

Yeah but other than that they invented a lot.

James Thomson on the Origins of the MacOS Dock ★

James Thomson:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, 9 January 2025

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

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

In a support guide, Apple says that the AirPods Pro may play a sound every so often while in the case to ensure the microphones and speakers are working as intended. From Apple:

To help ensure that your AirPods microphones and speakers are operating at their best (for example, to help provide high-quality hearing test results), your AirPods may periodically play a quiet chime when they’re in their charging case.

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

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

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

I first linked to Breathable back in 2021 when Murray released the first version, writing then:

The entire point of Breathable is to offer widgets — the app itself just lets you configure how the widgets look. Brilliantly simple, and in a way, fun, with its clever “emoji scale”. I started using it last week after Murray pinged me about it, but only because I was interested in the idea of a widget-only weather app — Philadelphia generally doesn’t have air quality issues. I should have known better. Turns out, the whole world now has air quality issues.

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

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

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

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

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

Microsoft’s Recent History of Dirty Tricks With Edge ★

Following up on yesterday’s item regarding Bing masquerading as Google to trick Edge users into searching with it, this Mastodon post from Timo Tijhof lists a few other such subterfuge tactics they’ve pulled recently. My favorite was this one from last year: when users opened a tab for “bard.google.com”, Edge inserted an ad in the tab bar encouraging the user to “Compare answers with the AI-powered new Bing”. Ads in the tab bar, jeebus.

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

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

Wednesday, 8 January 2025

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

Tom Warren, The Verge:

Microsoft is pulling yet another trick to get people to use its Bing search engine. If you use Bing right now without signing into a Microsoft account and search for Google, you’ll get a page that looks an awful lot like... Google.

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, 7 January 2025

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

2006 post from yours truly that applies perfectly to Apple Intelligence today:

The sentiment here is that it’s somehow unfair to developers to treat software labeled “beta” with the same critical eye as non-beta software. That’s true, in the case of actual beta software, where by “actual beta” I mean “not yet released, but close”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I mentioned earlier today Casey Newton’s remarkable 2019 piece for The Verge, “Bodies in Seats”, an eye-opening look at the lives of content moderators at a large Facebook contractor in Tampa. When I linked to it, I wrote:

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

In practice, it’s a disaster.

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

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

Holds up.

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

Antonio G. Di Benedetto, reporting for The Verge:

The tech industry’s relentless march toward labeling everything “plus,” “pro,” and “max” soldiers on, with Dell now taking the naming scheme to baffling new levels of confusion. The PC maker announced at CES 2025 that it’s cutting names like XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision, and OptiPlex from its new laptops, desktops, and monitors and replacing them with three main product lines: Dell (yes, just Dell), Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max.

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

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

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

Monday, 6 January 2025

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

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

So what can Apple do now? A non-apology and the promise of a warning label isn’t enough. The company should either give all apps the option of opting out of AI summaries, or offer an opt-out to the developers of specific classes of apps (like news apps). Next, it should probably build separate pathways for notifications of related content (a bunch of emails or chat messages in a thread) versus unrelated content (BBC headlines, podcast episode descriptions) and change how the unrelated content is summarized. Perhaps a little further down the road, news notifications should be summarized based on the full text of the news article, rather than generating a secondhand machine summary of a story already summarized by a human headline writer.

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

Update: Guy English:

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

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

Monday, 6 January 2025

Listen Later ★

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

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

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

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