By John Gruber
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Bobby Allyn, reporting for NPR, under the dreadfully incorrect headline “Trump Signs Executive Order to Pause TikTok Ban, Provide Immunity to Tech Firms”:
According to the order, the law will be paused for 75 days and companies that work with TikTok will not be liable for doing so.
I take profound issue with this framing. The order does not pause the law, because executive orders can’t “pause” laws. The order pauses enforcement of the law. The order itself even says so. Quoting from the order:
Accordingly, I am instructing the Attorney General not to take any action to enforce the Act for a period of 75 days from today to allow my Administration an opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward in an orderly way that protects national security while avoiding an abrupt shutdown of a communications platform used by millions of Americans.
Imagine a city council that passes a law banning all motor vehicle traffic on one of the town’s main streets. The law is very unpopular with many people who previously drove on that street. The law went into effect the day before a newly elected mayor takes office. The mayor gets sworn in and he just tells the police chief — who is a political appointee of the mayor — not to enforce the law for 75 days. That’s what Trump has done. He’s just telling the police (the Justice Department) not to enforce the law. Popular demand has no legal bearing.
This is very much in-character for Donald Trump. This isn’t a rug-pull or about-face on Trump’s part. Give him credit: this is exactly how he said he’d act (or, perhaps, to choose a more provocative verb, rule) if re-elected. But let’s not mince words or pretend for a moment this is even vaguely normal. The name of the town in my allegory above is Banana Republicville. The order doesn’t change the law; it says to ignore the law.
And remember: it’s not like PAFACA was a partisan Democratic bill or a Biden initiative. PAFACA had broad bipartisan support: it passed in the House of Representatives 360-58, and was agreed to by the Senate 79-18. The two main proponents of the bill in the Senate are Republicans Tom Cotton and Pete Ricketts. Cotton is the chairman of the powerful Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Are they just going to sit back and accept this? Maybe! But maybe not. It’s going to be a very telling test of Republicans in both houses of Congress. There’s no ambiguity here: Trump is asserting a de facto after-the-fact veto power over a law that was already passed, in direct contravention of the plain language of Article II Section 3 of the Constitution.
Back to Allyn at NPR:
“Essentially with TikTok I have the right to sell it or close it,” Trump said from the Oval Office after signing the executive action on Monday. “We may have to get approval from China. I’m not sure. I’m sure they’ll approve.”
Let’s not mince words on this either: this man is a proud ignoramus. He relishes in his ignorance. ★
Apple Support document, which is linked from the App Store if you search for any of the apps from ByteDance:
Apple is obligated to follow the laws in the jurisdictions where it operates. Pursuant to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, apps developed by ByteDance Ltd. and its subsidiaries — including TikTok, CapCut, Lemon8, and others — will no longer be available for download or updates on the App Store for users in the United States starting January 19, 2025. [...]
If you already have these apps installed on your device, they will remain on your device. But they can’t be redownloaded if deleted or restored if you move to a new device. In-app purchases and new subscriptions are no longer possible.
Users in the United States won’t receive updates for these apps, which could potentially impact performance, security, and compatibility with future versions of iOS and iPadOS, and some app functions might become limited or stop working since the app can’t receive updates.
My take from Sunday on Trump’s reprieve-by-executive-fiat seems correct: it has no bearing on the law. Really, all his executive order does is instruct the Justice Department (or as he would call it, his Justice Department) not to enforce the law for 75 days, and to promise any company that violates the PAFACA law that they won’t be prosecuted for it. There’s really no question about it: Oracle and Akamai are violating the law by providing services to TikTok users in the United States. They’re simply taking Trump at his word that the law will not be enforced and they will not face penalties for violating it during Trump’s completely arbitrary 75-day grace period.
That’s not like a pardon. Trump’s executive order yesterday carries no more legal weight than a Monopoly “Get Out of Jail Free” card. I don’t think it will happen but there’s nothing that would stop the Trump Justice Department from changing its mind and prosecuting Oracle and Akamai for these violations. It’s up to Trump. There’s also nothing that would stop a future Justice Department under a post-Trump administration from holding them accountable for this.
Apple and Google are both sticking with the actual law.
Good takes on some unpleasant current events, and one of the best brief eulogies for Jimmy Carter I’ve heard.
Wesley Hilliard, writing for AppleInsider regarding Edits, Meta’s pre-announced mobile-first video editing app:
Despite that, many apps and features on iPhone toe the line between fun tool and social platform. One of those tools was Clips, which arrived in 2017 to little fanfare and has been forgotten since.
Meta and ByteDance have a reason to push their respective video editing apps — brand synergy. More users mean more data, more content, and more ad revenue. Apple, however, doesn’t have the same motivation.
While Apple would likely love to see users flock to Clips, it would mean entering a race to satisfy a wave of several million customers in an app and interface that was never really more than a proof of concept. It would be a money pit with very little reward as Apple doesn’t have a social platform to drive users to or a way to monetize the app.
I completely agree with Hilliard that the announcement of Edits is the perfect time to mention Clips. I completely disagree with him that Apple has no motivation to dedicate itself to the task of making Clips incredible.
A mobile-first video editor isn’t a “money pit”. It’s an app. Apple makes a lot of apps, and they could easily afford to assign a team to make Clips truly great. It’s no different than 20–25 years ago, when Apple dedicated itself to making iMovie and Final Cut both great apps. It’s no different than the motivation to create GarageBand. The monetization wouldn’t be direct; it would be downstream of the general idea that if you’re editing videos for social media on your phone, the best app to do it with is from Apple and it’s exclusively available on iPhone. The idea is that Apple doesn’t just make the best computing devices for artists, writers, and creators, but they also make some of the best apps for those fields too.
There are actually a lot of interesting UI ideas in Clips. But if Apple isn’t interested in making Clips truly great for people who actually love editing videos using their phones, they should just abandon it. Make it great or give up. Keeping it around as an also-ran that no one uses is a bad look. This is the sort of thing Apple should pride itself on: best-of-breed creative tools.
I don’t know if Edits is a rip-off of CapCut or not, but it’s definitely not a rip-off of Clips. It’s a good rule of thumb that when Apple succeeds at something, it gets ripped off. The better the Apple product, the more shamelessly it gets copied. Apple should make Clips into an iOS video editing app that everyone rips off shamelessly.
Wes Davis, writing at The Verge, under the headline “Instagram Announces a Blatant CapCut Clone”:
Instagram head Adam Mosseri just announced a video editing app called Edits. Mosseri said the app is meant to rival CapCut, a video editing app that went offline along with TikTok. Edits is available for preorder on the iOS App Store.
I don’t use CapCut (and can’t download it now), so I can’t judge whether the screenshots of Edits indicate that it’s a copycat of CapCut (say that five times fast), which would be pretty funny coming so closely on the heels of Zuckerberg’s claim on Joe Rogan’s show that Apple hasn’t invented anything new since the iPhone, or if it’s just a different take on a video editing app for phones. Adobe InDesign was absolutely designed to make QuarkXPress users feel at home, but it wasn’t a rip-off or clone. It was (and remains) an Adobe take on Quark-style page layout. I’m curious what those familiar with CapCut think.
Glad to see The Verge warming up to calling blatant clones “blatant clones”, though, rather than “not exactly hiding where it got its inspiration from” and “that’s not necessarily a bad thing!”
Interesting selection of Martin Luther King Jr. quotes they’ve chosen for the homepage (PDF archive for posterity):
- “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.”
- “You must decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you.”
- “We cannot preserve self without being concerned about preserving other selves.”
Read into those quotes what you will, given today’s other national significance. I think there’s an implied message here, but it’s subtle. I’ll pick a different quote from King, one that I believe better speaks to the current moment:
“The great majority of Americans are suspended between these opposing attitudes. They are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.”
Tim Cook on X:
Dr. King once said, “Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.” True greatness lies in lifting others, making a difference, and serving with purpose. Let’s honor his legacy by finding ways to serve and create a better world together.
Curious to see if that’s Cook’s only tweet of the day, or if a congratulatory one is forthcoming, after Trump’s oath of office at noon. Update: Here’s the congratulatory tweet, posted at 2:40pm. No exclamation marks this time.
Apple has been dedicating its homepage to MLK on his holiday for at least 10 years, so today isn’t some exception just because it’s also Inauguration Day. But it’s perhaps worth pointing out that few among Apple’s corporate peers are doing this. The homepages of (in market cap order), Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla make no mention of either MLK or Trump’s inauguration. Just another day on the calendar for all of them. But I’m not sure any of those companies ever tend to celebrate holidays on their company homepages.
But the one company that is famous for its holiday “doodles” is Google. And Google’s homepage today makes no mention today of MLK, but does direct visitors’ attention to their hosted livestream of Trump’s inauguration. Not a doodle, just “🇺🇸 Live! Watch President Trump’s Inauguration”, and nothing about MLK. [Update, 2:15 pm: Google.com now has a nice MLK doodle. Perhaps it was a pre- and post-inauguration distinction? Others report seeing the MLK hopscotch doodle all day.]
If you want to argue that all of these companies, and each of their CEOs, suck, today’s your day. But there are degrees of sucking, and one two of these companies are, still, to some degree, not quite like the others.
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Unsurprisingly, time expired without ByteDance selling TikTok, so the U.S. ban went into effect last night at midnight and (also unsurprisingly) it’s been chaotic and confusing. TikTok was down, but now (as I type this Sunday afternoon) it’s back. Sort of.
First, the whole thing has become inextricably tied to Donald Trump’s return to the presidency tomorrow. I’m not sure what the thinking was setting the deadline for divestiture one day prior to the 2025 inauguration, but it sure looks like a bad idea in hindsight. Or maybe a good idea? I don’t know. Here’s soon-president Trump, on Truth Social this morning:
I’m asking companies not to let TikTok stay dark! I will issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security. The order will also confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.
Americans deserve to see our exciting Inauguration on Monday, as well as other events and conversations.
I would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture. By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to say up. [sic] Without U.S. approval, there is no Tik Tok [sic]. With our approval, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars — maybe trillions.
Therefore, my initial thought is a joint venture between the current owners and/or new owners whereby the U.S. gets a 50% ownership in a joint venture set up between the U.S. and whichever purchase [sic?] we so choose.
The law — The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA) — does allow the president to issue a one-time 90-day extension. Trump is saying he intends to do that. I think it’s unclear whether the criteria have been met for such an extension, but let’s just say the extension will happen. It can’t happen until noon tomorrow, because Trump won’t become president again until noon tomorrow, so today the ban is in effect.
Is Trump talking about the United States federal government buying a 50 percent stake in ByteDance? Or just a U.S. company? Who knows? The idea of the U.S. government buying a 50 (not 51?) percent stake in a social media company is nutty, quite overtly socialist (perhaps owning the means of distraction is the new owning the means of production?), but Trump is nutty so who knows what he means here?
TikTok, upon pulling the plug on service, at first greeted users with this message:
Important update from TikTok
We regret that a U.S. law banning TikTok will take effect on January 19 and force us to make our services temporarily unavailable. We’re working to restore our service in the U.S. as soon as possible, and we appreciate your support. Please stay tuned.
This was soon replaced by this patently obsequious “Help us Obi-Wan Trump, you’re our only hope” overt pleading:
Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now
A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use TikTok for now.
We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!
And, now that TikTok has returned to service, they show the following message upon launch, before giving you access to actual content:
Welcome back!
Thanks for your patience and support. As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!
You can continue to create, share, and discover all the things you love on TikTok.
But all of this is a bit performative. Trump hasn’t done anything yet other than say what he might do tomorrow. PAFACA is still the law, the most Trump can do tomorrow is execute a 90-day reprieve, and most importantly, there remains no sign that the Chinese government has any willingness to sell ByteDance, and no sign that Republicans in Congress are backing down from supporting the ban if China refuses to sell. (Also note that TikTok has been waging a largely successful propaganda campaign to describe the law as a ban on TikTok, not a forced divestiture in which the ban is merely a consequence of non-compliance.)
Also this morning, I think partly in response to Trump’s blathering, came this: “Cotton, Ricketts Statement on TikTok Being Removed From App Stores” (both senators, notably, are Republicans):
Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Senator Pete Ricketts (R-Nebraska) issued the following statement in response to the news that Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft were among the U.S. companies to remove TikTok from their app stores in accordance with the bipartisan law passed by Congress.
“We commend Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft for following the law and halting operations with ByteDance and TikTok, and we encourage other companies to do the same. The law, after all, risks ruinous bankruptcy for any company who violates it. Now that the law has taken effect, there’s no legal basis for any kind of ‘extension’ of its effective date. For TikTok to come back online in the future, ByteDance must agree to a sale that satisfies the law’s qualified-divestiture requirements by severing all ties between TikTok and Communist China. Only then will Americans be protected from the grave threat posed to their privacy and security by a communist-controlled TikTok.”
Notably, TikTok — at least, again, as I type this — is not available from either Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store. Making the app available would clearly violate the law and subject the app store owner to a fine of $5,000 per user; the Cotton-Ricketts statement wasn’t exaggerating that the fines are potentially ruinous. Apple and Google, seemingly, are following the law, not Trump’s good-as-gold word and pinkie-swear promise that they won’t be held liable for violating it. But Oracle and Akamai seemingly are going with Trump’s word. The Verge reports:
TikTok’s hosting provider, Oracle, and its CDN partner, Akamai, have restored service and are relying on Trump’s promise, according to NPR’s Bobby Allyn and The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell.
However, the app’s return is happening without support from Apple and Google, as it remains unavailable in the App Store and Google Play. Those companies may still not be comfortable with the risk of breaking the law banning TikTok, which remains in effect and levies steep fines on those who break it.
Both app stores currently display messages explaining why the app isn’t available if you’re searching for TikTok.
University of Minnesota law professor Alan Rozenshtein:
These “service providers” have lost their minds. There’s no assurance that Trump, who’s not even the president yet, can provide. I look forward to the shareholder suits — Oracle is rapidly accruing tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars of liability.
And here’s Bobby Allyn’s post, quote-posting Rozenshtein’s:
this @alanrozenshtein.com take seems to be the consensus view among legal scholars.
back-end providers, including Trump ally Larry Ellison’s Oracle, taking Trump’s word over the letter of the law and Apple and Google saying yyeeahhhh that ain’t good enough
I’m told TikTok’s host (Oracle) and CDN (Akamai) brought it back online today because Trump assured them they’d not be subject to penalties — something he can’t entirely promise.
Whatever one’s feelings on the ban’s merit, they’re defying federal law based on a not-yet-president’s word. Huge gamble.
Basically: is the law the law, or is Donald Trump’s word the law? Oracle and Akamai are seemingly good with the latter.
Lastly, it’s worth pointing out that the immediate public clamor is about whether the app works or not, not whether it’s available to download or update in app stores. Once Oracle and Akamai started restoring service, the headlines went up that “TikTok is back”, even though it’s not back in app stores. But in addition to being a more sensible take legally, Apple and Google’s wait-and-see approach is also under far less pressure from public — and political — opinion. ★
Tom Warren, The Verge:
Earlier this month you could search for “Google” on Bing and get a page that looked a lot like Google, complete with a special search bar, an image resembling a Google Doodle, and even some small text under the search bar just like Google search.
The misleading UI no longer appears on the Google search result of Bing this week, just days after it was originally discovered by posters on Reddit.
So much for my praise for Microsoft still having it in them to rat-fuck without shame. They’ve gone soft.
Update: OK it’s not so much that Microsoft has stopped the trickery, but more like they’ve just turned the dial down a little bit. The Google-Doodle-style illustration is still there, but on desktop browsers, at least, they’ve stopped the autoscrolling that hides the Bing branding and site navigation at the top of the page. But if you have Mobile Safari set to use Bing as its default search and search for “Google” from the location field, you get the Google-lookalike layout with the Bing branding scrolled out of view. I’d say Microsoft’s dirty trick is still in place. Good for them.
Tim Hardwick, last week for MacRumors, “Apple Smart Home Hub Launch Possibly Delayed Until Later in Year”:
Apple’s long-rumoured smart home hub or “command center” may not arrive in the spring as previously expected, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. [...]
Apple originally planned to introduce the home hub in March 2025. However, writing in his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman says that the device “may take longer to reach consumers,” owing to the operating system’s heavy reliance on App Intents features that won’t be ready until iOS 18.4 and iOS 19. This in itself means “it’s plausible that the hardware itself will ship later,” adds Gurman.
Here’s Gurman in his own words:
Then there’s the brand-new smart home hub. This device has a roughly 7-inch screen and can help manage household tasks, run apps and conduct video calls. Consumers will be able to hang it on a wall or place it on a countertop — perhaps in a few spots around the home.
Apple has been planning to introduce the home hub in March, but it may take longer to reach consumers. The device’s new operating system — code-named Pebble — is heavily tied to App Intents features coming in iOS 18.4 and iOS 19, so it’s plausible that the hardware itself will ship a bit later.
How many Apple products that miss “expected” ship dates that were announced only by Gurman do we need before MacRumors writers, and the others on the Gurman regurgitation re-blogging beat, start to wonder whether it’s really the case, as Gurman’s reporting would have us believe, that every single product from Apple winds up shipping months or even years later than intended?
Maybe Gurman’s right, and Apple hasn’t shipped a single product on schedule since like maybe the original AirPods back in 2016 (an absolute banger of a scoop, from before Gurman left 9to5Mac for Bloomberg).
Or, and I’m just tossing this out there, maybe the way companies that are good at shipping new products actually ship new products is by setting aggressive, probably impossible, internal milestones to keep the entire team inside the company and manufacturing partners in the supply chain moving with urgency until the thing is actually ready to announce and ship. And that by reporting these milestones as actual expected ship dates, repeatedly, it makes Mark Gurman and Bloomberg News wrong, not the products late, when those dates are missed without the products ever having been announced. Something like that could happen when the incentive structure of a news publication is based on whether the reporting moves stock prices, not whether it turns out to be accurate.
I’m sure it’s just the case, though, that Apple has been unable to ship anything new on schedule for close to a decade.
Joanna Stern, in her weekly Tech Things newsletter for the WSJ:
Despite what my iPhone’s frequent notification summaries report, my husband isn’t messy, he isn’t sad and he definitely didn’t take out the garbage — because, again, I don’t have one. Wife? Yes. Husband? No.
As part of Apple Intelligence, the company rolled out these AI-powered summaries. Instead of scrolling through a mountain of missed alerts, you get little condensed summaries, grouped by app. Great concept, not quite “intelligent” execution.
A few days ago Nokia unveiled their Design Archive at Aalto University in Finland. Fahad X spotted a real gem — an internal confidential slide deck shared within the company the day after Apple had introduced the original iPhone at Macworld Expo in January 2007. To the credit of the team that put this presentation together, they mostly got it:
“iPhone touch screen UI may set a new standard of state-of-art: The new user interface may change the standards of the superior user experience for the whole market”. They quote Avi Greengart (a keen and sharp observer): “visually stunning and incredibly responsive”.
The on-screen keyboard is mentioned only in passing on a deck titled “Other Great Innovations” as “Predictive, corrective input from on-screen qwerty-keypad”. Most of the existing smartphone makers simply could not believe the iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard would work. Steve Ballmer famously laughed his way into getting sacked from Microsoft over the iPhone’s price and lack of a hardware keyboard. BlackBerry was obsessed with hardware keyboards. This Nokia deck is remarkably open to the idea that Apple was onto something. It does have a bullet point, under “iPhone has the biggest impact on the definition of coolness” (true!), that states: “Even though Steve Jobs emphasized iPhone superiority to ‘Buttons’, it is to be expected that the Consumer QWERTY category will continue to succeed.” But still, this deck is remarkable for acknowledging the potential significance of the iPhone’s keyboard.
It’s a swing and a miss regarding third party software: “No mention either of Java support, unusual user input method may be the reason. Lack of Java would shut out a big mass of existing SW.” So close to getting it right. The iPhone’s lack of support for the then-“dominant” Java ME (Micro Edition) platform did shut out all existing mobile software. But all of that software sucked, big time. Sucked to develop, sucked to distribute, sucked to install, sucked to use. Not supporting it was a huge win for the iPhone, just like not supporting Flash Player wound up being a huge win for both the iPhone in particular and the mobile web generally.
It’s weird in hindsight that the deck makes mention of Java mobile apps but the only mention of the web is in passing: “Browsing - Safari web browser – (reportedly most advanced ever) Full screen with touch zoom-in functionality.” This speaks to Nokia’s pre-iPhone mindset that mobile platforms were not really internet-first devices but instead were mostly for running shitty software from carriers (for consumers) or corporate IT departments. The iPhone’s excellent day-one version of Mobile Safari, with support for the “real internet”, not the “baby internet” (to use Steve Jobs’s own terms). It’s so easy to get blinded by the way things currently work and to assume they’ll keep working that way.
The Nokia team nailed the remarkable and potentially industry-changing nature of Apple’s relationship with Cingular:
- Cingular got multi-year exclusivity to iPhone. In exchange it gave up to Apple in many respects:
- Cingular has allowed Apple to launch a device with WLAN and inbuilt services
- The Yahoo and Google experiences are built in to the Apple phone
- iTunes synch is done in cradle, no OTA
- The multi-year exclusivity of the Cingular — Apple arrangement makes one ask if Apple gets a share of data revenues or Cingular iTunes revenues?
- This may be a start for the whole market to change
- iPhone will be sold both in Apple stores and Cingular stores
- This is a marriage of convenience built on mutual distrust and recognition that each has assets the other needs
Nokia concluded, “Other US operators need desperately something against Cingular and Apple” and advised that Nokia should “work very closely especially with T-Mobile.”
The most prescient line in the whole deck was this, recognizing that the iPhone was a UI breakthrough and that the entirety of Nokia’s offerings were far behind:
Nokia needs to develop the touch UI to fight back. S60 should be focus. Maemo platform is critical strength due to openness. Nokia needs a Chief UI architect to re-energize Nokia’s UI innovation across platforms and businesses.
I’d translate that as the presentation team imploring Nokia’s leadership to recognize that Apple’s primary priority was creating and delivering a great experience, both hardware and software, and Nokia had no such institutional value placed on design quality — on coolness — and would need to reinvent itself to prioritize the same ideals if it was going to compete.
Upton Sinclair’s famed adage is apt, as ever: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ★
Kyle Wiggers, writing at TechCrunch:
Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript, the widely used programming language to make web pages interactive, in order to use Google Search. In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the change is intended to “better protect” Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam, and to improve the overall Google Search experience for users. The spokesperson noted that, without JavaScript, many Google Search features won’t work properly and that the quality of search results tends to be degraded.
The Google spokesperson told TechCrunch that, on average, “fewer than .1%” of searches on Google are done by people who disable JavaScript. That’s no small number at Google scale. Google processes around 8.5 billion searches per day, so one can assume that millions of people performing searches through Google aren’t using JavaScript.
One of Google’s motivations here may be inhibiting third-party tools that give insights into Google Search trends and traffic. According to a post on Search Engine Roundtable on Friday, a number of “rank-checking” tools — tools that indicate how websites are performing in search engines — began experiencing issues with Google Search around the time Google’s JavaScript requirement came into force.
I long ago stopped being a fan (or regular user) of Google Search, but the SEO industry is worse (to keep the Obi-Wan Kenobi quote references going from my headline, you’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than “SEO experts”), so I’m amenable to an argument from Google that this is a justifiable step in their never-ending war with SEO scammers seeking to game search results in their favor.
But the bottom line is that with this change, Google Search is more of an app than it is a website. A website is a server where you can make requests over the HTTP protocol and get results in HTML format. A server that communicates with clients via executable JavaScript is not a website. Whether it’s a justifiable decision or not, I don’t buy for a second that it’s a necessary decision on Google’s part. Thus I find this decision sad, but given the course Google has been on for the last 15 years or so, I’m also unsurprised. Old original Google was a company of and for the open web. Post 2010-or-so Google is a company that sees the web as a de facto proprietary platform that it owns and controls. Those who experience the web through Google Chrome and Google Search are on that proprietary not-closed-per-se-but-not-really-open web.
Requiring JavaScript for Google Search is not about the fact that 99.9 percent of humans surfing the web have JavaScript enabled in their browsers. It’s about taking advantage of that fact to tightly control client access to Google Search results. But the nature of the true open web is that the server sticks to the specs for the HTTP protocol and the HTML content format, and clients are free to interpret that as they see fit. Original, novel, clever ways to do things with website output is what made the web so thrilling, fun, useful, and amazing. This JavaScript mandate is Google’s attempt at asserting that it will only serve search results to exactly the client software that it sees fit to serve. That’s Google’s right. But it’s sad.
Here’s a good thread on Hacker News discussing the change, with some interesting commentary on the state of the no-JavaScript web. Also worth pointing out that Kagi, the best search engine in the world, works fine without JavaScript.
I’ll end with my longstanding hot take, which, as the years go on, seems more and more obviously true and no longer a hot take at all: The web would be better off if browsers had never added support for scripting. The web would be much faster; much better for its original purpose of delivering content to consume, not software to interact with; and much more secure and private. More control would remain in the hands of client software — and thus in the hands of users — than server-side.
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 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.
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 notifications 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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 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, 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.)
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.
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...”
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.
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.)
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:
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.
Just after New Year’s some sort of underground cable screw-up resulted in our home, along with an irregular swath of our neighborhood, losing electricity for 26 hours. We don’t lose power often, and when we do, the outages are usually brief, but 26 hours felt pretty long — especially with the outside temperature below freezing and daylight hours near their calendric nadir. The icing on this particular outage’s frustration cake was that our power company, PECO1, seemingly had no idea what exactly was wrong or how long it might take to fix.
The power went out around 10:30 am on January 2, and soon thereafter PECO was estimating that power would be restored by 2 pm. Then it was 4 pm, then it was briefly 2 pm again (despite the actual time then being after 2 pm — which is when I got the sinking feeling I should get the flashlights out), then they were claiming there were no known outages in our area, until eventually they just stopped providing any estimates at all of when our power might return. I’d have given PECO some credit for honesty if they’d simply replaced the estimated time for power restoration with the shrug emoji.
I was following along with these updates and checking the outage map from my iPhone, on PECO’s website. Which website I wasn’t at all familiar with, because our power really doesn’t go out very often, and my wife takes care of the bill. PECO’s is one of the worst websites I’ve ever had the misfortune to need to use. Among its faults:
Basically, PECO’s mobile website feels like it was developed using and exported from Microsoft Excel. You might say, “Well that makes no sense, because you’ve never been able to build or export websites using Excel.” To which I’d respond, “Yes, exactly.”
So, every time I wanted to see if there was an updated estimate on our power being restored, it took at least a minute or two of waiting for pages to load, signing back in (which was always slow), and poking around their inscrutable site navigation. The website did prompt me, occasionally, to install their mobile app, but I was like “Fuck that, it’s probably just their website in a wrapper.”
It was a cold and dark night, but our power was restored the next day just after noon,2 and it stayed restored, so I metaphorically dusted my hands and thought to myself, “I hope I never need to use that fucking website ever again.”
Last night, our power went out again. This time, thankfully, it was only out for about 80 minutes. When the outage hit, before even once trying PECO’s cursed website, I went to the App Store and installed their iPhone app. It was a revelation. PECO’s iOS app is everything their website is not: fast, well-organized, and, blessedly, it keeps you signed in.3
I’d go so far as to describe PECO’s website, at least as experienced from a phone, as utterly incompetent. I’d describe their native iOS app as — I can’t believe I’m going to use this word — good. It’s hard to believe the website and app are from the same company.
This makes no sense to me. A utility company is the sort of thing where I’d expect most people would access them via the web, even from their phones. Who’d think to install an app from their electric company on their phone? But it’s a night and day difference. I feel like a chump for having suffered through the previous 26-hour outage obsessively checking their terrible, slow-loading (I just can’t emphasize how fucking slow it is), broken website when this app was available.
There’s absolutely no reason the mobile web experience shouldn’t be fast, reliable, well-designed, and keep you logged in. If one of the two should suck, it should be the app that sucks and the website that works well. You shouldn’t be expected to carry around a bundle of software from your utility company in your pocket. But it’s the other way around. I suspect that my instinctive belief that a service company or utility should focus its customer service efforts on the web first, and native apps second, is every bit as outdated as my stubborn belief that invite ought not be used as a noun. (Invitation is sitting right there.)
I won’t hold up this one experience as a sign that the web is dying, but it sure seems to be languishing, especially for mobile devices.4 And the notion that mobile web apps are closing the gap with native apps is laughable. The gulf between them is widening, not narrowing. ★
They were The Philadelphia Electric Company for over a century before changing their official name in 1994. They should have kept the old name rather than rebrand, despite the fact that no one in Philly had ever called them anything but “PECO” for decades. Nobody here ever called Veterans Stadium anything other than “The Vet”, but it would’ve been stupid as hell to officially rename the late great concrete masterpiece of early 1970s brutalism to its nickname. ↩︎︎
In what I’d hold up as yet another proof of Murphy’s Law, the power came back on while I was mostly done with a shower that wasn’t cold, per se, but certainly wasn’t warm, let alone properly hot. ↩︎︎
While writing this column, I installed PECO’s Android app on my Pixel 4 and gave it a whirl. It shares a visual design with the iOS app — I strongly suspect they’re made from a shared code base and one of the various cross-platform frameworks. But where the iPhone app is fast (or at least fast enough), the Android app is slow. But I can’t say how much of that is from the app and how much because my Pixel 4 is five years old. But I also tried the iOS app on my iPhone 12 (four years old), and it felt snappy there too. ↩︎︎
It’s kind of weird that there are now zillions of supposedly technically sophisticated people who, when they use the term “desktop app”, are referring to websites. I’ve personally mostly thought about this usage as a sign of the decline of native Mac apps. But it’s also a sign of the decline of building websites meant to be used on mobile phones. I think maybe what we’re seeing is not that the web, overall, is dying, but the mobile web is. ↩︎︎
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
There were several interesting announcements made at Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s Keynote at CES 2025, including a new RTX 50 generation of gaming GPUs and an upcoming $3,000 Mac-Mini-sized “personal AI supercomputer” called Project Digits. But most interesting to me was the scale of the keynote itself: over 6,000 attendees in an arena at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Just look at it: it resembled a rock concert more than a tech keynote.1
We — yours truly very much (and self-evidently) included — in the Cupertino punditocracy often bloviate about the pros and cons of Apple’s post-Covid pre-filmed keynotes versus the company’s pre-Covid live-audience keynotes. The argument in favor of the new pre-filmed format is that, no matter how big the live audience ever was (and for Apple that capped out around 5,000 for WWDC keynotes at Moscone West and the San Jose Convention Center), several orders of magnitude more people watch on video, so the format ought to be optimized for video, not a live audience.2 The pre-filmed format also lets Apple move through more topics, and bring in more presenters, more quickly. Of course everything just looks better and more polished. And because everything is pre-filmed, demos not only never fail, they never even hiccup. But you can also argue that demos in particular are a con, not a pro, of the new format — as I wrote a few months ago about a few AI demo fails at a Google event, live demos carry real drama, and as I noted in a footnote in September, I miss the drama of live Apple demos in particular.
But what struck me about the venue size and audience enthusiasm of Nvidia’s CES keynote is something much more general about live events than just the drama of live demos. There’s magic in a live audience. It just matters. Taylor Swift’s record-setting stadium-filling Eras tour was a worldwide sensation because it was a shared experience between enthusiastic fans. She’d still be insanely popular if she hadn’t done that tour, but she’s more popular because she did. Attending a live sporting event is profoundly different than watching on TV. And as sports fans learned in 2020, watching sports on TV feels weird and flat and low-stakes if there is not a live audience present at the event.
Apple owned that in the world of tech. Even when Apple was, by market cap and market share, a smaller company, they commanded an outsized share of the world’s attention for live keynotes. That’s partly because Apple has always had fans of its products in ways that no other company in tech does, partly because Apple worked (and works) so much harder at its keynotes than any other company, and partly because Steve Jobs personally was just so spectacularly gifted and charismatic as a stage presence. Until Apple walked away from IDG’s Macworld Expo starting in 2010, Apple singlehandedly made Macworld keynotes a rival, attention-wise, to the entirety of CES. The most famous keynote in history, introducing the original iPhone, was delivered at Macworld Expo in San Francisco on 9 January 2007. Nobody remembers anything at all from the CES 2007 keynote, which Bill Gates delivered the next day in Las Vegas. I’ll bet Bill Gates himself doesn’t remember anything from that keynote.
Until Apple stopped holding live WWDC keynotes, those WWDC keynotes were events. The enthusiasm didn’t wane an iota without Steve Jobs. The answer to the question of which company held the keynotes which attracted the most enthusiastic large live audiences was always Apple. And they just walked away from that. Inviting a few thousand developers to watch the new pre-filmed WWDC keynotes on the lawn at Apple Park is nice, but it’s a different vibe. A live movie-watching event is not a live performance.
There’s clearly a new answer to the question of which company holds the keynotes which attract the most enthusiastic large live audiences: Nvidia. ★
I won’t lie and say I watched the whole Nvidia keynote, but I watched enough of it to get a feel for it. It’s good — primarily because Nvidia is killing it. They’re delivering exciting new products, across several categories, that are the best in the world. And those are categories that enthusiasts, of both gaming and AI, really care about. Project Digits is a genuinely innovative idea. And Jensen Huang is a charismatic presenter. He’s good. But one thing that’s very clear to my eyes is that they didn’t rehearse enough. Or more specifically, they didn’t rehearse nearly as much as Apple did when Apple performed live keynotes. Part of Steve Jobs’s on-stage appeal was that he came across as largely winging it, speaking off the cuff from an outline of prepared Keynote slides. But that was an illusion. Jobs rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed, and then rehearsed some more. Jobs might have been better than anyone else even if he had just winged it, but he still put in the work of rehearsing long hours to be as good as he could be.
Both halves of Penn and Teller have espoused the same sentiment as the only real “secret” of magic. Teller, in a wonderful 2012 profile by Chris Jones for Esquire: “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” Penn Jillette, in a 2011 video interview for Unmasked: “I will tell you the absolute secret of magic, at the most honest level. The secret of magic is you would not be willing to work as hard as we are, and that’s the whole secret.” That’s basically the secret to Apple’s keynotes, both old and new. They don’t just work a little bit harder on them than most companies. They work way harder than any other company, or CEO, would reasonably expect.
Jensen Huang is good and Nvidia’s keynote was good, but they didn’t work as hard or rehearse as much as Apple does, and I don’t think Huang would consider doing so reasonable or a good use of his time and attention. ↩︎
And, as I reported — also in a footnote — back in September, I am very reliably informed that Apple’s keynote streams in recent years have higher viewership numbers than ever, and today dwarf the viewership of Jobs-era keynotes. Which of course is not to say that viewership of Apple keynotes is higher than ever because of the format change from live events to pre-filmed videos. But it might be true that more people enjoy this format, and the change hasn’t hurt. ↩︎︎
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.
Mark Zuckerberg today announced major changes to the way Meta is going to apply content moderation across Facebook, Instagram, and (I presume) Threads. His main announcement is a video, for which there’s an unofficial transcript here. Zuckerberg himself summarized his own points in a thread on Threads, which I’ll annotate below:
1/ Replace fact-checkers with Community Notes, starting in the US.
This sounds ... fine? Just about everything at Twitter/X has taken a turn for the worse under Musk, but community notes seem to be a model that actually works pretty well. My favorite two social platforms right now, by far, are Bluesky and Mastodon. Neither has fact checkers. And I’ve never seen any evidence that Meta’s fact checkers have ever checked a single fact. (Maybe that’s what the team is doing in Macrodata Refinement at Lumon?)
2/ Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.
This too seems fine. Let people spout what they want to spout. The problem has never been about whether users should be allowed to express opinion A about topic Z. The problem has always been about which opinions algorithmic platforms choose to promote. I can frame this specifically about Twitter/X. Under Elon Musk’s ownership, you can express pretty much whatever political opinions you want. That’s great. But, also, in my experience during the Musk era — and I’m not sure anyone would disagree with this — the political opinions that tend to get algorithmically boosted are those that align with the Musk/Trump agenda.
I don’t want to make a hypothetical example. I went to X.com just now, and searched for “Hillary Clinton medal of freedom”. In reverse order, the third tweet in my search results (screenshot) was a congratulatory tweet from the Clinton Foundation account. The second was a tweet from Hillary Clinton’s own account, thanking President Biden, accompanied by a photo of Biden fastening the medal around her neck at the White House. But the first tweet in my results was from “Dr. Clown, PhD”, presenting an AI-generated video of Clinton transmogrifying into a fire-spewing horned demon.
I legit think it’s fine that the esteemed Dr. Clown is permitted to post such a video to X. It doesn’t need to be fact-checked. (Although someone should let Tucker Carlson know it’s not real.) It certainly shouldn’t be forbidden. But I also have zero interest in searching for political news on a platform that would promote such un-clever AI-generated slop when searching for “Hillary Clinton medal of freedom”, let alone promote it to the very top spot in the results, literally above Hillary Clinton’s own tweet about the award.1
The question isn’t what sort of posts Meta is now going to allow, but rather, what sort of posts are their algorithms going to promote, and to whom. I’m not trying to be a Pollyanna here — I’m fully aware that the sort of people who think that Twitter/X has improved, not declined, under Elon Musk’s ownership are the sort of people who not only think their posts should be permitted, but that they should be promoted to a wide audience, and that anything less than wide algorithmic promotion is the result of nefarious “shadow-banning”. If Meta intends to start showing me content from the likes of the esteemed Dr. Clown, well, I’m out. If they simply want to show more Hillary-Clinton-is-a-demon AI slop to those who think that’s clever, that’s fine.
So, let’s see what Meta means here. In a weird way I sort of hope this means Meta’s platforms go full virulent Nazi. I’d love to pay as little attention to another social media platform as I now do to X.
3/ Change how we enforce our policies to remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.
Meta would do well to illustrate this policy change by citing specific examples of content that they have censored, but no longer will. Without specific examples this is meaningless, and could result in anything from Meta’s platforms changing dramatically to not changing at all. Admitting you’ve made mistakes without citing what those mistakes were isn’t really admitting to anything other than a change in vibes. (This largely applies to the entirety of Zuckerberg’s announcements today.)
In an accompanying post on the Meta company blog (still hosted, oddly, at the about.fb.com domain), newly-promoted chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan — a career Republican who served as an administration official for all 8 years of George W. Bush’s two terms — writes:
Over time, we have developed complex systems to manage content on our platforms, which are increasingly complicated for us to enforce. As a result, we have been over-enforcing our rules, limiting legitimate political debate and censoring too much trivial content and subjecting too many people to frustrating enforcement actions.
For example, in December 2024, we removed millions of pieces of content every day. While these actions account for less than 1% of content produced every day, we think one to two out of every 10 of these actions may have been mistakes (i.e., the content may not have actually violated our policies).
With millions of examples and, supposedly, a 20 percent false positive rate, there should be plenty of examples they could cite. But Kaplan cites not a one. It could be empty posturing. It could be a lurch to promote outright right-wing viewpoints. Only their actual actions will reveal the answer.
Back to Zuckerberg:
4/ Bring back civic content. We’re getting feedback that people want to see this content again, so we’ll phase it back into Facebook, Instagram and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.
On the surface this seems to translate as, roughly, “We’ve downplayed political content in recent years, most conspicuously in 2024, an election year, and now that the election is over and Trump is coming back into office, sure, let’s bring political content back.” Which seems like the wrong timing, to me, but whatever. I don’t see this timing as Zuckerberg putting his thumb on the scale in favor of Trump. Meta has been de-prioritizing all political content, and if they’re really going to re-prioritize it now, that would apply as much to Trump’s critics as his supporters.
Consider if the timing had been reversed, and Meta’s platforms had been a political free-for-all throughout 2024, with political takes promoted to the top of everyone’s feeds, and today, two weeks before Trump takes office again, Zuckerberg announced that Meta was going to reduce the heat in the proverbial kitchen by de-emphasizing “civic content” across all its platforms. Those determined to view any decision he makes as being in the bag for Trump — which may or may not be correct — would be jumping up and down today arguing that Zuckerberg is shamelessly attempting to silence Trump’s critics on the cusp of his second inauguration.
What to me seems obvious is that in recent years, Meta made a decision to eschew controversial content even at the cost of engagement. How they think they can re-prioritize political (or in Zuck’s euphemistic phrasing, civic) content while “keeping the communities friendly and positive”, I don’t see. Nothing is going to be “friendly and positive” in our political discourse so long as Trump remains a national figure, and he hasn’t even re-taken office yet. What the whole thing primarily highlights is that Zuckerberg has no guiding principles — zero, zilch, nada — behind any of Meta’s platforms other than “success” in and of itself. Is it about you and your closest friends and family? Or about following celebrity influencers? Politics yes, or politics no? The answers were all different a few years ago, and they’re likely to be different again a few years from now.
5/ Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.
First, California and Texas are roughly counterbalanced political opposites, but Texas is slightly less red than California is blue. Consider the recent election.
Texas is a big state, though. If Meta is moving its content moderation team to Austin, they’re moving to a county that voted for Kamala Harris 69–29, significantly more “blue” than California as a whole.
But this is all performative. Zuckerberg’s geographic explanation makes no sense so long as Meta itself is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Are we to believe that any biases in Meta’s content moderation are determined by the moderators themselves — who are largely, if not entirely, contractors who work for third party companies? In 2019, Casey Newton wrote a spectacular piece at The Verge profiling several of the “800 or so” employees working as Facebook content moderators for a vendor named Cognizant at a site in Tampa, Florida. (Florida’s 2024 election results were nearly identical to Texas’s, 56–43 for Trump.)
It’s the algorithms that drive discourse on Meta’s platforms, and the engineers who steer them work in California. But really, whether the entire staff of the company works in Wyoming or Vermont doesn’t matter. Ultimately, everyone at Meta answers to Zuckerberg.
6/ Work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.
Mark Cuban’s theory on how this could work, in a reply to Zuckerberg on Threads:
Translation: Americans are going to see Tariffs on products from countries you believe censor Meta services as a means of pressuring them into removing any restrictions that impact your profitability in those countries.
Also: You’ll have carte blanche to take posts that no longer have restrictions, making them a more explicit representation, and train your AI Models
Also: Bluesky is now the only moderated social media platform with tools that allows the user to control their own experience
To me, this just seems like Zuckerberg donning a MAGA cap and saying “Fuck yeah, Trump!” to please the boss. I don’t see the Trump administration altering its tariff plans for the EU based on the EU’s content moderation and data privacy policies for U.S. social media companies. And I certainly don’t see the EU changing its content and privacy regulations based on Trump-imposed tariffs on unrelated physical goods. But who knows? Nobody. Trying to predict what Trump might actually do is like trying to predict the shuffle of a fair deck of cards.
And ultimately, that’s where Zuckerberg and Meta seem most aligned with Trump. My take on Trump post-election has been to stop paying attention, as best I can, to anything he says. I’m only paying attention to what he does. With any other national leader, there’s a correlation between their words and their eventual actions that makes paying attention to what they say worthwhile. With Trump, there’s almost no correlation, and his endless stream of outrageous proclamations amounts to nothing but a distraction.
The same goes for Meta. Remember their “Oversight Board”? It’s still there, supposedly. They even piped up today, with a pathetic “Hey Mark, remember us? We’re still here” statement. Turns out they’re a complete joke with no actual influence, let alone authority, over the company’s platforms. Shocker. But much of the news media fell for the idea that the Oversight Board was in any way a serious endeavor hook, line, and sinker over the years of its pantomime existence.
Today’s Meta announcements sound significant, but so too does the notion that the U.S. military might invade Greenland to claim its territory. Don’t get distracted by blather. Let’s see what happens. ★
That said, my top result on X for a search for “Donald Trump sentencing” is this tweet with an animated GIF rendering Trump as a whiny crying baby, so perhaps X’s algorithmic bias is more toward Elon Musk’s insipid sophomoric sense of humor, not his political agenda. And a search for “Donald Trump inauguration” shows top three results of (1) a Whoopi Goldberg clip from yesterday’s episode of The View; (2) a November 3 tweet about a random couple who, when they voted, dressed up as Donald and Melania Trump; and (3) a 2017 @FoxNews tweet about Trump’s first inauguration. So maybe X just sucks at search. ↩︎