By John Gruber

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Wednesday, 22 January 2025

Southern California Wildfire Relief: Consider Donating to the Red Cross Through Apple ★

Apple:

Click the amount you wish to contribute, then click Donate and Apple will transfer 100% of your contribution to the American Red Cross in support of people impacted by the 2025 Southern California wildfires.

Apple has prominent links to its Red Cross donation form on the web and in the App Store. They’ve been doing this after catastrophes and disasters around the world for a long time. On the surface, it’s great because it’s so easy. Apple already has your saved credentials so it takes just a few taps or clicks to donate. You can measure the time to donate in seconds, not minutes.

But an under-appreciated aspect of Apple acting as a front-end to the Red Cross is that your donation remains completely private. There’s quite a lot of small print on the donation screen, which starts:

Because Apple is not sharing your personal information with the American Red Cross, the American Red Cross is unable to further acknowledge your donation. You will receive an email receipt from Apple, which will serve as the only record of your donation. The donation will also appear on your credit card statement as a transaction with Apple. You do not purchase any goods or receive any services from Apple by making a donation. Any donation collected by Apple is collected in the name, and on behalf, of the American Red Cross. This donation may not qualify for any tax deduction or other tax benefits. By donating through Apple, you acknowledge that any tax consequences to you in making the donation (including, but not limited to, ensuring you have sufficient documentation to claim any applicable tax deduction) shall be your responsibility. Apple Account credit cannot be used to make a donation. Apple will transfer 100% of your contribution to the American Red Cross in support of people impacted by the 2025 Southern California wildfires (including Los Angeles, San Luis Obispo, Kern, Santa Barbara, Ventura, San Bernardino, Orange, Riverside, San Diego and Imperial Counties).

This sounds like a bunch of ignorable legalese but what it really means is quite interesting. You’re not giving to the Red Cross through this. You’re giving money to Apple, and Apple will then transfer 100 percent of it to the Red Cross. I’m almost certain, for example, that Apple is covering the cost of the card transaction fees.

By donating this way, you will never get junk mail, email, or text messages from the Red Cross, or from any “partner” of the Red Cross, soliciting additional donations, because the Red Cross will never get your name, address, or number. All they get is your money.

Back in August I wrote about how my political solicitations via SMS had gotten so out of control, so downright annoying, that my wife and I had scaled back our donations to political campaigns, because it was obvious that previous campaigns we had donated to had shared or sold our information. We’d been put on a Suckers List.

The same thing, sadly, happens with charities. People generally don’t want to admit to selfishness, but I will. When I give money to a charitable cause, I always look for the checkboxes to opt out of being contacted by them in the future. When it happens anyway, I get annoyed, and I become reluctant to give to that charity again. And because it has happened repeatedly, it’s made me at least somewhat more reluctant to give to any charitable cause in the first place. I know I’m not alone in feeling that way.

When you donate to the Red Cross via Apple, that concern is off the table. Apple won’t emphasize that aspect of this, because they don’t want to throw the Red Cross under the proverbial bus, but I will. An underrated aspect of privacy is the desire simply not to be annoyed.

The Ship That Leaks From the Top Is Back ★

From a multi-byline profile of Stephen Miller in The New York Times last week:

Mr. Miller told Mr. Zuckerberg that he had an opportunity to help reform America, but it would be on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s terms. He made clear that Mr. Trump would crack down on immigration and go to war against the diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., culture that had been embraced by Meta and much of corporate America in recent years.

Mr. Zuckerberg was amenable. He signaled to Mr. Miller and his colleagues, including other senior Trump advisers, that he would do nothing to obstruct the Trump agenda, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting, who asked for anonymity to discuss a private conversation. Mr. Zuckerberg said he would instead focus solely on building tech products.

Mr. Zuckerberg blamed his former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, for an inclusivity initiative at Facebook that encouraged employees’ self-expression in the workplace, according to one of the people with knowledge of the meeting. He said new guidelines and a series of layoffs amounted to a reset and that more changes were coming.

This account of the meeting clearly leaked from Trump’s side, not Meta’s side. The tone of it is that Miller told Zuckerberg to jump, and that Zuck obsequiously and gladly responded “How high?”

Zuckerberg scrambled for cover, posting a “Sheryl did amazing work at Meta and will forever be a legend in the industry [...]” tweet to Threads, followed by a coordinated “Thank you, @zuck. I will always be grateful for the many years we spent building a great business together [...]” reply from Sandberg. (Sandberg, who left Meta in 2022, only posted once to Threads in all of 2024. There’s a good chance this will be her only post in 2025.)

Zuckerberg, politically, seems in way over his head. The first Trump administration was infamous for its leaks. They barely hid it. The whole Trump brand is about brazenness. For decades, Trump was known to call reporters in New York under the guise of “John Miller” or “John Barron”, who were ostensibly public relations spokesmen representing Trump. But it was just him — and he didn’t even disguise his voice. He just did it.

So of course Stephen Miller (or Miller’s equivalent of John Barron) leaked the confidential nature of his discussion with Zuckerberg to The New York Times, because it made Miller look dominating and Zuckerberg look dominated. Even though it’s painfully obvious to anyone who sees this story that anything confidential they tell Stephen Miller might get leaked if it makes Miller look good. It’s like a perversion of your Miranda rights, a Miranda wrongs if you will: Anything you say to anyone in the Trump administration can and will be used against you in leaks to the media.

You don’t see stories like this about Cook or Nadella or Bezos, because I think those guys have the good sense to keep their mouths shut and just nod their heads. (Not Musk, though. When Trump and Musk eventually divorce in a spectacular flame-out, we’ll be deluged with stories about what Musk said in supposed confidence.)

Legal Nerdery on Trump’s TikTok Executive Order ★

Alan Rozenshtein, writing for Lawfare:

While Apple and Google maintained their compliance, Oracle and Akamai made the remarkable decision to resume services, despite facing potentially catastrophic liability rates. Shortly after his inauguration on Jan. 20, Trump followed through by issuing an executive order that suspended PAFACAA enforcement for 75 days and attempted to provide retroactive protection for any violations before and during the nonenforcement period.

TikTok’s tech partners face a key executive power question: Can they rely on Trump’s promises not to enforce PAFACAA? If companies continue providing services to TikTok, can Trump later change his mind and pursue enforcement actions against them for all accumulated violations? Could a future administration enforce these violations regardless of Trump’s current promises? The stakes are enormous — nearly a trillion dollars in potential liability. Unfortunately for the companies, established legal doctrine suggests that they are making a remarkably risky bet on both the scope and durability of executive non-enforcement promises.

Here we are on Wednesday and ByteDance apps remain out of both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.

Next Week’s iOS 18.3 and MacOS 15.3 Updates Will Enable Apple Intelligence During Onboarding ★

From Apple’s developer release notes for iOS 18.3, now at release candidate (RC) status:

For users new or upgrading to iOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence will be enabled automatically during iPhone onboarding. Users will have access to Apple Intelligence features after setting up their devices. To disable Apple Intelligence, users will need to navigate to the Apple Intelligence & Siri Settings pane and turn off the Apple Intelligence toggle. This will disable Apple Intelligence features on their device.

Same for MacOS 15.3 Sequoia, which is also at RC status and expected next week.

I have mixed feelings about this decision. It’s pretty obvious that Apple Intelligence has a slew of shortcomings. It’s the nature of the beast, though, that it’s always going to have some shortcomings. Human intelligence, which to date remains the gold standard for intelligence in general, has some pretty glaring shortcomings, so it’s unsurprising that all artificial intelligence systems still do too. (Perhaps that’s a good metric for defining the next inflection point, now that the Turing Test has been passed: When humans need to ask AI systems to explain their own shortcomings, because we’re no longer smart enough to detect them ourselves.)

So the bar shouldn’t be “has obvious shortcomings”. It’s whether Apple Intelligence is good enough. Compared to other systems, like ChatGPT, no, it’s not good enough. But Apple has been enabling Siri by default since 2011. And Siri, today, is arguably worse than it’s ever been when compared to the state of the art. A friend just sent me this screenshot after asking Siri “Who won Super Bowl 13?” and getting this answer: “Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl Lii • Winner”. In addition to wrongly casing the Roman numerals, LII is 52, not 13. The only way Siri could have been more wrong would be if the Eagles hadn’t even won Super Bowl 52. I just tried the same question — “Who won Super Bowl 13?” — on both my iPhone running iOS 18.3 RC1 and my Mac running MacOS 15.1.1, and Siri gave me the same wrong answer, on both devices, both when the question was spoken aloud and when it was typed: “Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl Lii • Winner”. Siri, today, is an unfunny joke.

But so I think it’s reasonable to ask whether Apple Intelligence is as good as Siri. I’d say yes, that’s about how good Apple Intelligence is. In fact, I’d say several of the Apple Intelligence features — Clean Up in Photos, and notification summaries — are better than Siri. So if Siri has been on by default for over a decade, sure, Apple should go ahead and turn Apple Intelligence on by default too.

I think there could be significant benefit to turning it on by default, sort of in the spirit of dogfooding. Enabling Apple Intelligence features by default will increase the pressure on Apple to keep improving it at a fast clip. It’s also the case that none of Apple Intelligence’s features, with the possible exception of notification summaries, are in the user’s face at all. You have to invoke them to use them. If you don’t want them — or don’t even know about them — you won’t notice anything different once they’re enabled by default. Apple may or may not be over-indexing on Apple Intelligence, but, thankfully, they’re not shoving it in users’ faces.

But, as I wrote two weeks ago, enabling it by default for all users really puts the lie to their claim that all of Apple Intelligence is “beta”. If it’s not just merely shipping to all users, but now enabled by default, that’s not beta. That’s just buggy.

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Tuesday, 21 January 2025

Apple Support: ‘About Availability of TikTok and ByteDance Ltd. Apps in the United States’ ★

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.

Monday, 20 January 2025

Dave Chappelle’s SNL Monologue ★

Good takes on some unpleasant current events, and one of the best brief eulogies for Jimmy Carter I’ve heard.

Remember Clips? ★

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.

Meta Teases ‘Edits’, an Upcoming Video Editing App to Rival CapCut ★

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!”

Apple Dedicates Homepage to the Leader the U.S. Is Celebrating Today ★

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 Pep-Talks Himself ★

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.

Sunday, 19 January 2025

WorkOS Radar ★

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Does your app get fake signups, throwaway emails, or users abusing your free tier? Or worse, bots attacks and brute force attempts?

WorkOS Radar can block all this and more. Their simple API gives you advanced device fingerprinting that can detect bad actors, bots, and suspicious behavior.

Your users trust you. Keep it that way. Check out WorkOS Radar today.

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Saturday, 18 January 2025

Microsoft Cleans Up Dirty Trick Where Bing Masqueraded as Google — Sort Of ★

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.

Another Never-Announced Product Might Fail to Meet Its Never-Announced Ship Date ★

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’s Imaginary Husband ★

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.

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Saturday, 18 January 2025

Google Search, More Machine Now Than Man, Begins Requiring JavaScript ★

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.

Friday, 17 January 2025

‘Lumon Takes Grand Central’ ★

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

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

Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using italics for summarized 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.

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

Maddy Myers, writing for Polygon:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, 16 January 2025

Severance Balloon Generator ★

Another fun promo for Severance season 2.

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

David Lynch Dies at 78 ★

Brian Tallerico, writing for RogerEbert.com:

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Uecker, Mr. Baseball, Dies at 90 ★

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

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

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

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

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

Nintendo Drops Switch 2 Trailer ★

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

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

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

As Mario would say, “Woohoo!”

Wednesday, 15 January 2025

‘Twenty Years of Kraft’ ★

Bryan Bedell, on the Field Notes Dispatches blog:

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

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

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

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

When in doubt, write it down.

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

Marko Parker, reporting for Bloomberg:

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

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

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

(Via Taegan Goddard.)

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

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

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

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

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

Super fun idea. Season 2 debuts Friday.

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

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

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

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

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

‘TikTok Is Just the Beginning’ ★

Noah Smith, writing at Noahpinion:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to Smith:

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

Tuesday, 14 January 2025

Breakfast With Pete Hegseth ★

Jane Mayer, reporting for The New Yorker:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘47 Years Later, the Palisades Disappeared Overnight’ ★

Mike Davidson:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, 13 January 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Welch, The Verge:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mastodon Team blog:

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

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

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

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

‘Free Our Feeds’ ★

Free Our Feeds:

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

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

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

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

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

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Monday, 13 January 2025

Meta Is Blocking Links to Decentralized Instagram Competitor Pixelfed ★

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

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

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

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

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

Los Angeles Fires: How to Help ★

LA resident Matthew Butterick, in his MB XS newsletter:

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

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

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

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

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

Rory Sykes, Killed in LA Wildfires, RIP ★

Josh DuBose, reporting for KTLA:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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