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

Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:

Apple TV+ is set to be available to stream for free from Saturday, January 4 to Sunday, January 5, providing its full catalog with no subscription fee. Following a series of teasers, Apple today confirmed the free weekend on social media, building anticipation for new releases early in 2025 such as the second season of Severance. Simply open the Apple TV app to watch for free.

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

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

Monday, 30 December 2024

DF Sponsorships ★

Speaking of sponsorships, the Q1 schedule is filling up, but I’ve still got this week and next open. If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch.

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

James Fallows, in a 2023 piece for The Atlantic, written when Carter entered hospice care:

Jimmy Carter survived to see many of his ambitions realized, including near eradication of the dreaded Guinea worm, which, unglamorous as it sounds, represents an increase in human well-being greater than most leaders have achieved. He survived to see his character, vision, and sincerity recognized, and to know that other ex-presidents will be judged by the standard he has set.

He was an unlucky president, and a lucky man.

We are lucky to have had him. Blessed.

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

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

An upcoming version of the Magic Mouse with voice control for AI would “make sense,” Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said today, though he claimed that he has heard no rumors about the feature so far.

Alongside the voice-input mouse, it’d make just as much sense to bring back some of that see-through 1998 iMac aesthetic by switching MacBooks to transparent aluminum.

52 Things Kent Hendricks Learned in 2024 ★

Fun and interesting list overall (via Kottke), but #7 caught my attention:

Walking speed on the streets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia has increased 15% since 1979. (“Shifting Patterns of Social Interaction: Exploring the Social Life of Urban Spaces Through A.I.”)

Not sure what made the researchers pick those three cities, but in my experience they’re the only three cities in America where people walk at a reasonable clip.

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

Sunday, 29 December 2024

Due ★

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jimmy Carter Dies at 100 ★

The New York Times:

While his presidency was remembered more for its failures than for its successes, his post-presidency was seen by many as a model for future chief executives. Rather than vanish from view or focus on moneymaking, he established the Carter Center to promote peace, fight disease and combat social inequality. He transformed himself into a freelance diplomat traveling the globe, sometimes irritating his successors but earning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

OpenAI’s Board, Paraphrased: ‘To Succeed, All We Need Is Unimaginable Sums of Money’

Sunday, 29 December 2024

From an un-bylined post from OpenAI’s board of directors on Friday:

The hundreds of billions of dollars that major companies are now investing into AI development show what it will really take for OpenAI to continue pursuing the mission. We once again need to raise more capital than we’d imagined. Investors want to back us but, at this scale of capital, need conventional equity and less structural bespokeness.

My take on OpenAI is that both of the following are true:

OpenAI currently offers, by far, the best product experience of any AI chatbot assistant.
There is no technical moat in this field, and so OpenAI is the epicenter of an investment bubble.

Thus, effectively, OpenAI is to this decade’s generative-AI revolution what Netscape was to the 1990s’ internet revolution. The revolution is real, but it’s ultimately going to be a commodity technology layer, not the foundation of a defensible proprietary moat. In 1995, investors mistakenly thought investing in Netscape was a good way to bet on the future of the open internet and the World Wide Web in particular. Investing in OpenAI today is a bit like that — generative AI technology has a bright future and is transforming the world, but it’s wishful thinking that the breakthrough client implementation is going to form the basis of a lasting industry titan.

There’s even a loosely similar origin story. Netscape started life as Mosaic, a free-of-charge browser that debuted in January 1993 and instantly revolutionized the nascent-but-still-obscure World Wide Web by adding support for images. Mosaic was developed and released by a team led by Marc Andreessen at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). A year later Andreessen and his team left NCSA and, with Silicon Graphics founder James Clark, founded Netscape Communications Corporation, using the Mosaic browser as the foundation for Netscape Navigator. OpenAI’s whole “forget about this being a public-benefit thing, let’s make it a for-profit thing” transition is very reminiscent of the Mosaic-to-Netscape transition.

The biggest difference is that Netscape went public quickly, and that’s when the investment money poured in. NCSA Mosaic debuted in January 1993 and Netscape’s IPO was just 2.5 years later, in August 1995. OpenAI has raised tens of billions of dollars already — $13 billion from Microsoft alone — while still in this uncertain transition from an ostensibly not-for-profit foundation to a totally-for-profit company.

OpenAI’s board now stating “We once again need to raise more capital than we’d imagined” less than three months after raising another $6.6 billion at a valuation of $157 billion sounds alarmingly like a Ponzi scheme — an argument akin to “Trust us, we can maintain our lead, and all it will take is a never-ending stream of infinite investment.” ★

Tuesday, 24 December 2024

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

Kagi founder and CEO Vlad Prelovac joins the show to talk about the business of web search, the thinking behind Kagi’s own amazing search engine, and their upstart WebKit-based browser Orion.

Sunday, 22 December 2024

Jiiiii ★

My thanks to Mochi Development for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Jiiiii, their exquisitely well-crafted app for tracking anime. (Jiiiii — with five i’s — is the onomatopoeia for staring at something, commonly used in Japanese media.) With over 75 shows that aired this past season alone, keeping up with and discovering new anime can be hard, especially across several streaming services. Jiiiii makes that simple by giving you a single schedule to check as you await your favorite’s show’s next episode.

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

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

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

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

Another great Rickey Henderson remembrance, this one from Joe Posnanski:

I’d argue that no player in baseball history was ever more alive than Rickey Henderson, which is why his shocking death just days before his 66th Christmas hits so hard. Rickey played a cautious sport with abandon. Rickey played a timid sport with flash. Rickey irritated and thrilled and frustrated and dominated and left us all wanting more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also from ESPN:

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

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

Saturday, 21 December 2024

Yankees Legend Rickey Henderson Dies at 65 ★

Craig Calcaterra, writing at Cup of Coffee:

To say this is a massive loss is about as big an understatement as is possible. Henderson was the biggest and brightest star of his generation. There may not have been any player in history who was better at more things than Rickey Henderson was.

Henderson was, without question, the greatest leadoff hitter of all time and the greatest base-stealer of all time. He, arguably, possessed the greatest combination of power and speed of any player in the history of the game as well. Perhaps the best characterization of Henderson’s career came from Bill James who once wrote that, “if you could split Rickey Henderson in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers.” [...]

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

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

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

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

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

Journalism Requires Owners Committed to the Cause

Friday, 20 December 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, 19 December 2024

Woody Johnson’s New York Jets ★

Zack Rosenblatt, Dianna Russini, and Michael Silver have written a devastating profile of the most dysfunctional franchise in all of U.S. pro sports, the New York Jets, whose dysfunction has a clear and obvious root cause: meddling idiot owner Woody Johnson (heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune). One example:

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, 18 December 2024

‘Silo’ Renewed for Two Additional Seasons ★

Joe Otterson, reporting for Variety:

“Silo” has been renewed for both Seasons 3 and 4 at Apple TV+, with the fourth season set to be the show’s last.

The renewal news comes as the post-apocalyptic drama is currently airing its second season. The sixth episode of Season 2 is due out on Dec. 20. The season finale is scheduled to debut on Jan. 17.

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

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

Acorn 8’s Documentation ★

One last item on Acorn 8. Whether you are a longtime Acorn user (like me), or a would-be new user, you should set aside some time to actually read Acorn’s documentation. It’s a full user manual, and it not only describes, in detail, what every feature in the app does and how to use them, but also a vast array of “how-to” tutorials, many of them videos.

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

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

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

Dan Moren on Acorn 8 ★

Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors:

The newly released Acorn 8 adds a bunch of great features to the mix. A few of them will be familiar to Apple platform users: subject selection uses machine learning to let you quickly isolate and grab the subject of a picture (there’s also a corresponding “Remove Background” feature to simplify that task) and a Live Text tool allows you to select and copy text within an image.

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

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

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

Dave Nanian, writing on the Shirt Pocket blog:

macOS 15.2 was released a few days ago, with a surprise. A terrible, awful surprise. Apple broke the replicator. Towards the end of replicating the Data volume, seemingly when it’s about to copy either Preboot or Recovery, it fails with a Resource Busy error.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, 17 December 2024

Acorn 8.0 ★

Gus Mueller:

This is a major update of Acorn, and is currently on a time-limited sale for $19.99. It’s still a one time purchase to use as long as you’d like, and as usual, the full release notes are available. I want to highlight some of my favorite things below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blackmagic Design:

Blackmagic Design announced it will start taking pre-orders for the new Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive camera — the world’s first commercial camera system designed to capture Apple Immersive Video for Apple Vision Pro — today with deliveries due to start in early 2025. DaVinci Resolve Studio will be updated to support editing Apple Immersive Video early next year, offering professional filmmakers a comprehensive workflow for producing Apple Immersive Video for Apple Vision Pro. Apple Immersive Video is a remarkable 180-degree media format that leverages ultra-high-resolution immersive video and Spatial Audio to place viewers in the center of the action. [...]

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

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

David Smith:

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

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

Monday, 16 December 2024

‘The Developers Who Came in From the Cold’ ★

Paul Kafasis, on the Rogue Amoeba blog:

Even as our products steadily grew in popularity, our relationship with Apple was almost non-existent. Plenty of individuals inside the company were fans, but we received very little attention from Apple as a corporate entity. We didn’t much mind being outsiders, but it meant that we often had zero notice of breaking changes introduced by Apple.

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

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

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

Google Fi Still Doesn’t Fully Support RCS Either ★

A few weeks ago, in a post primarily complaining about Google’s disingenuous claims about their Messages app’s support for encryption (they suggest, heavily, that it encrypts every message or most messages, but in fact only supports encryption for RCS messages sent between users of Google Messages on Android devices), I also complained about the fact that Google’s own Google Voice doesn’t support RCS at all.

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

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

Social Media Algorithms Are Cultural Blandifiers ★

Excellent five-minute short video from the ever-insightful Kirby Ferguson for The New York Times, exploring why everything looks the same, sounds the same, and seemingly is the same in today’s pop culture. The short answer: that sameness is only pervasive when you only look at what’s promoted by our three-headed social media hegemony (Meta, YouTube, and TikTok).

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

Update: The store is now closed. My sincere thanks to everyone who’s bought one (or in many cases, more than one).

Original post: Unsurprisingly given that I went a few years without selling DF-branded shirts, while I procrastinated on launching a modernized new store (long story short: Shopify is a killer platform — the new store now supports everything from Apple Pay to order tracking), response to this round of classic logo apparel has been great. Orders from last week started going out over the weekend, and hundreds more are shipping today.

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

Saturday, 14 December 2024

CoverSutra Is Back ★

Another week with another outstanding indie developer whom I’m delighted to thank for sponsoring DF. This week, it’s Sophiestication Software promoting the return of CoverSutra — a previous hit from the “delicious” era of Mac apps that is now back and better than ever.

After over a decade, the rejuvenated (reanimated?) CoverSutra has been reimagined as a sleek, standalone music player for your Mac that lives in your menu bar, giving you seamless access to your music library. Instantly search by album, artist, or song — all without breaking your workflow. Some of what’s new:

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

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

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

After being sold out for months, the upcoming sponsorship schedule at DF is wide open at the moment — including the final week of the year. I know sponsors are sometimes hesitant to book weeks around major holidays, but, well, Daring Fireball is never “closed”. And traffic to the site is remarkably consistent even during weeks like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. Nerds get bored and want to read interesting stuff.

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

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

If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch. ~~And again, this coming week remains open, and the week after.~~ I’m even offering those two weeks at a holiday discount.

On the Accountability of Unnamed Public Relations Spokespeople

Saturday, 14 December 2024

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

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

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

But that article never materialized.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, 13 December 2024

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

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Apple plans to stop selling the iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Plus, and third-generation iPhone SE in European Union countries later this month, to comply with a regulation that will soon require newly-sold smartphones with wired charging to be equipped with a USB-C port in those countries, according to French blog iGeneration. All three of these iPhone models are still equipped with a Lightning port for wired charging.

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

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

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

Nifty new convert-to-Markdown library from a small indie development shop named Microsoft:

The MarkItDown library is a utility tool for converting various files to Markdown (e.g., for indexing, text analysis, etc.)

It presently supports:

PDF (.pdf)

PowerPoint (.pptx)

Word (.docx)

Excel (.xlsx)

Images (EXIF metadata, and OCR)

Audio (EXIF metadata, and speech transcription)

HTML (special handling of Wikipedia, etc.)

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

The API is simple:
from markitdown import MarkItDown

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

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

Not bad for a 20-year-old syntax.

What’s New in MacOS 15.2 Sequoia ★

Ryan Christoffel, also at 9to5Mac:

There are two key features that are part of iOS 18.2, but aren’t yet ready for the Mac:

Genmoji

Mail app redesign

Genmoji are an especially unfortunate omission, as they’re available on both iPhone and iPad with iOS and iPadOS 18.2. Meanwhile the Mail app redesign is currently iPhone-exclusive, so it’s missing from both the Mac and iPad in these next software updates.

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

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

What’s New in iOS 18.2 ★

Chance Miller has a good rundown for 9to5Mac:

The update includes major new Apple Intelligence features, upgrades to the Camera Control on iPhone 16, a redesign for the Mail app, and much more.

The new Apple Intelligence features lead the list, and certainly lead Apple’s marketing, but there’s quite a bit else new in 18.2 too.

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

Katie Robinson, reporting for The New York Times:

After President-elect Donald J. Trump announced a cascade of cabinet picks last month, the editorial board of The Los Angeles Times decided it would weigh in. One writer prepared an editorial arguing that the Senate should follow its traditional process for confirming nominees, particularly given the board’s concerns about some of his picks, and ignore Mr. Trump’s call for so-called recess appointments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, 12 December 2024

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

Ev Williams, writing the backstory of, and raison d’être for, Mozi:

And here we are, 20+ years later, with address books full of partial, duplicate, and outdated information. Perhaps the reason for this is that social networks (or the social network) solved this problem — for a while. When Facebook was ubiquitous it was probably a pretty good reflection of many people’s real-life relationships. It told you where they lived, who you knew in common, and all kinds of other details.

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

But something else happened instead.

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

In other words, social media became … media.

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

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

Mozi ★

New app, spearheaded by Ev Williams:

Mozi is a private social network for seeing your people more, IRL. Add your plans, check who’s in town, and know when you overlap.

iOS only at the moment, with “Sign in with Apple” as the only supported authentication method. One clever idea is that you can share travel plans and your location, and Mozi will coordinate when you might be in the same area as a friend. From their FAQ:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One last Letterman link: a new half-hour interview about interviewing with Zach Baron for GQ. I watched the first minute and I’m saving the rest for tonight:

Baron: If you read pieces about you — pieces of press, profile stuff like that — from the ’80s and ’90s, even a little bit in the 2000s, you were often portrayed as miserable.

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

The Amazing Kreskin Dies at 89 ★

The New York Times:

George J. Kresge, who as the entertainer the Amazing Kreskin used mentalist tricks to dazzle audiences as he rose to fame on late-night television in the 1970s, died on Tuesday in Wayne, N.J. He was 89. A close friend, Meir Yedid, said the death, at an assisted living facility, was from complications of dementia.

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

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

Wednesday, 11 December 2024

Daring Fireball T-Shirts and Hoodies ★

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

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

‘Letterman TV’ Launching on Samsung TV Plus ★

Erik Hayden, reporting for The Hollywood Reporter:

For his next move, David Letterman is jumping in to the increasingly crowded free, ad-supported TV channel (FAST) space.

The late-night great’s production company Worldwide Pants has inked a deal with Samsung TV Plus to bring around 4,000 hours of original video to the company’s streaming service, the firms said Wednesday. “I’m very excited about this,” stated Letterman, who glibly added, “Now I can watch myself age without looking in the mirror!”

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

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

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

Juli Clover at MacRumors:

Apple today made a mistake with its macOS Sequoia 15.2 update, releasing the software for two Macs that have yet to be launched. There is a software file for “Mac16,12” and “Mac16,13,” which are upcoming MacBook Air models.

The leaked software references the “MacBook Air (13-inch, M4, 2025)” and the “MacBook Air (15-inch, M4, 2025),” confirming that new M4 MacBook Air models are in development and are likely not too far off from launching.

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

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

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

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

David Ingram, reporting for NBC News:

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez said after a two-day hearing that The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, had not submitted the best bid and was wrongly named the winner of an auction last month by a court-appointed trustee.

“I don’t think it’s enough money,” Lopez said in a late-night ruling from the bench in a Houston court. “I’m going to not approve the sale.”

It’s not over ’til it’s over.

Tuesday, 10 December 2024

The Spectacular Typography of the Sanborn Fire Maps ★

Brandon Silverman:

It was September of 2011 and I saw a link on kottke.org to a small collection of incredible typography from something called the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. I had never seen them before and they blew my mind. I immediately became a massive fan and in fact, when I got married, my wife and I designed our wedding invitation based off of them.

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

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

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

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

Monday, 9 December 2024

Daring Fireball T-Shirts and Hoodies Are Back ★

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