The author lightly covers in the FAQ at the bottom:

What program did you use to justify the text?

None. I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up on the right hand side. Everything was done with an ASCII editor.

I’m sharing this mostly as a curiosity; some rewrites for physical books are par the course to avoid widows and orphans, but you don’t see them as much in onscreen writing.

The FAQ reads pretty well, but to my ear, there’s something obviously off about it. The justification gimmick is very fun and the fact that the prose reads as well as it does is quite the feather in rs1n’s cap. He tried something very difficult and pulled it off with aplomb. And I’m sure many people have read the FAQ without even noticing the accomplishment, or considering just how difficult it is to write with such an unyielding constraint. There were many FAQs and other documents from the plain-text era that were full-justified, using extra spaces between words and paragraphs and occasional hyphenation to achieve the effect. rs1n’s FAQ achieves the effect with no trickery, and the result looks so natural that it doesn’t call attention to itself. It just looks nice.

But it doesn’t read entirely naturally. It’s stilted, as though written by someone for whom English is their second language. Which, for all I know, is true for rs1n, but I doubt it — I think the ESL-like stiltedness is just the result of making word choices to fit the line length, not simply for meaning and tone.

The line-length constraint brings to mind lipograms, “writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided”. Ernest Vincent Wright published an entire novel in 1939, Gadsby, without using the letter e. The Wikipedia page for lipograms lists more examples. That’s a hell of a trick, but there’s a reason why Gadsby is almost unheard-of, and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby remains famous. Gadsby is miserable to read. Wright was obviously a fine writer. Gadsby’s “Introduction” is written without the no-e’s constraint — and largely about the no-e’s constraint — and it reads just fine. But the text of the novel is a goddamn laborious slog. I couldn’t get through more than two paragraphs before deciding that my point was proven. It’s a fun challenge to compose lipograms but it’s no way to actually write. The gimmick necessarily becomes the highest priority of your word choices, not clarity or meaning.

So too, goes my thinking, regarding the “watermarking” of AI-generated text through word choices alone. Fitting words into the watermarking pattern surely results in prose far less stilted than omitting the letter e, and surely also less stilted than rs1n’s hard-wrapped-at-75-characters-per-line Super Metroid FAQ, but it’s necessarily stilted to some degree. It’s sophistry to argue that one can write within a constraint without the constraint affecting the quality of the writing.

Bonus Quibble

Wichary opens his post with the following:

I don’t think anyone particularly enjoys typesetting in monospace.

I disagree! I think typesetting in monospace is fun — or at least satisfying. I think it’s part of the appeal of Markdown that you can make a document look just right. What you see reading Markdown is what I saw writing it. And just look at the fun people still have printing “large type” banners using ASCII punctuation characters or fancier box-drawing Unicode glyphs. When you format something in plain text, you know exactly how it’s going to look everywhere.

I didn’t mind the reduced pace of the NBA broadcast, which toggled between cameras under each basket, but Stratechery’s Ben Thompson felt strongly that the best option would’ve been a single camera at mid-court, to completely eliminate the disorienting cuts and replicate being at the game in person.

Apple’s approach with baseball, at least based on Friday’s game, seems to lean toward Thompson’s preferred approach — and it does benefit from it. Each half inning was shown from a single camera on the dugout rail next to the on-deck circle, giving a great view of pitcher and hitter and the infield, as well as the goings on right in front of the dugout in foul territory. The camera switched between innings, so you were always viewing from the perspective of the at-bat team’s dugout.

Making it all work better was Apple’s addition of a “virtual jumbotron” floating in the sky, a scoreboard with graphics and a video feed of the standard 16:9 telecast on Apple TV. It was easy to look up and catch a replay or even get a better view of something happening in the far-off outfield, without getting in the way of my view of the game itself.

I concur with Snell’s review. The camera placement was terrific. You watched each team bat from the perspective of its own dugout. Perfect. A few other thoughts:

• The whole thing was legit exciting. Vision Pro continues to get a bad rap because Apple hasn’t sold many of them, and isn’t going to sell many of them until they come out with new models that are cheaper and lighter and less fussy. But there’s no denying that these immersive experiences are fucking cool. And an immersive live experience adds something else. It’s ineffable. Hard to say why, but feeling like you’re at another place watching something happen live is magic. Just a few years ago it would have required literal magic. It wasn’t possible. Now it is.

• The immersive audio was terrific. It really sounded like being at Yankee Stadium, and truly added to the you-are-there feel of the experience. It seems corny to say this, but I really had the urge to stand during the national anthem, and it felt slightly wrong not to take the “hat” off my head (where the “hat” was the Vision Pro). It’s exciting to feel 43,000 fans roar around you. Baseball is a slow game but when the crowd roars, it erupts. That never comes across on regular TV broadcasts. It did here.

• Like Snell though, I felt Apple’s commentators were too chatty. I’d love an option to toggle the commentary on and off, to just experience the natural audio of the ballpark.¹

• The only thing missing was aroma. Cement, grass, dirt, sweat, beer, peanuts, hot dogs with the works. Ballparks smell like fun. (Even Fenway.) But the you-are-there experience was so visceral I swear I could almost smell it. It’s like my brain was filling in the missing sensation. It didn’t feel like watching a 3D TV broadcast. It didn’t feel like a better version of TV broadcasting. It felt like something new and different. Something at least as different from watching on TV as watching on TV is different from merely listening on radio. It’s profound. TVs are small — laptops, tablets, and phones are even smaller. Yankee Stadium is huge. Watching this game immersively felt huge. Awesome, in the literal sense.

• I love how you could look around and see how filthy everything really is in baseball: the on-deck mats, the interior of the dugouts, the tiny bits of schmutz on the warning track. It’s a lot of dirt and quite a bit of spit. That’s baseball, Suzyn.

• There’s a resolution and/or depth of field limitation with the cameras, exacerbated by the fact that Vision Pro’s displays are, compared to reality, low resolution. They’re the highest-resolution VR displays on the market but I still couldn’t see the ball once it left the infield. When balls were hit to the outfield you just kind of had to judge what was happening by what the infielders and baserunners were doing. Ben Rice hit a double in the first inning and I thought the Sox outfielder caught it and I was confused why Rice was running to second base. Turns out the outfielder stopped running because Rice hit the ball over his head and he was waiting to play the carom off the left field wall. I was happy to be wrong. A few years from now, with better cameras and better Vision headset displays, these problems will be solved. But in the meantime, the outfield is fuzzy.

• The best part about the immersive perspective compared to a traditional broadcast is watching how complex infield play really is. It’s fun to quickly look around the whole infield right before the pitch. You really see how much more stressful it is for the pitcher once there’s a runner on base — let alone more than one. It’s what I love about going to the ballpark — so much more complexity and intricacy is revealed — and watching this immersive broadcast enables the same thing. You can see the whole game, at all times, not just the pitcher, catcher, and batter.

• The virtual “jumbotron” is a fine idea but I wish you could move it a bit higher, and it would be even better if you could configure it with the stats you want to see. But positioning it higher is my big request.

• I have to admit I hadn’t used my Vision Pro in quite a few weeks before last night’s game. One thing that really struck me, almost certainly because baseball is a long game, is how heavy it is. My chin wants to droop and my face wants to look down when I’m wearing it. It’s the weight more than the isolation that makes it tiresome for anything other than short-form content, for me at least.

The whole thing was a great success. I’m writing these notes on Saturday afternoon while watching the old flat broadcast of game 2 of this 4-game series, and it feels ... well, boring. And small. Bodes well for the future of sports.

Mac Mini M6

12-core CPU, 12-core GPU: $900
  RAM:
       16 GB      $0
       24 GB    $200
       32 GB    $400
  SSD:
      256 GB      $0
      512 GB    $200
        1 TB    $500
        2 TB   $1000

Mac Mini M5 Pro

15-core CPU, 16-core GPU: $1,700
18-core CPU, 20-core GPU: $1,900
  RAM:
       24 GB       $0
       48 GB     $600
       64 GB    $1000
  SSD:
      512 GB       $0
        1 TB     $300
        2 TB     $800
        4 TB    $1800
        8 TB    $3800

Mac Studio M5 Max

18-core CPU, 32-core GPU: $2,500
  RAM:
       36 GB       $0
18-core CPU, 40-core GPU: $3,100
  RAM:
       48 GB       $0
       64 GB     $400
      128 GB    $2000
  SSD:
      512 GB       $0
        1 TB     $300
        2 TB     $800
        4 TB    $1800
        8 TB    $3800

Mac Studio M5 Ultra

30-core CPU, 64-core GPU: $5,500
36-core CPU, 80-core GPU: $6,800
  RAM:
       96 GB       $0
      256 GB    $4000
      512 GB   “Coming late October”
  SSD:
        1 TB       $0
        2 TB     $500
        4 TB    $1500
        8 TB    $3500
       16 TB    $7500

Notes

• Ethernet: Across all Mac Mini models, upgrading from 2.5 gigabit to 10 gigabit is $100. On Mac Studio, 10 gigabit is standard on all models.

• If you configure an M6 Mac Mini with 2 TB of storage, the SSD upgrade ($1,000) costs more than the entire base model computer ($900). So too with the 4 TB SSD upgrade for the M5 Pro Mini ($1,800 upgrade for a $1,700 computer).

• Both Mac Mini and Mac Studio are available in a wide array of cool color choices, including silver.

• It kind of stinks that there are no RAM options for the M5 Ultra Studio between the 96 GB base and the $4,000 256 GB upgrade. There “should be” a 128 GB tier, but if you squint you can see why they did it this way.

• The best currently-available-to-order Mac Studio (36/80 cores, 256 GB RAM, 16 TB SSD) costs $18,300. But if you’re OK with the base 30/64-core chip and just 8 TB storage, you can cut the price to a smooth $13,000.

• “Coming late October” = “Bend over”.

A report from Irish Independent detailed the European Commission’s response to Apple’s new business terms for the EU. They share that they welcome the changes and will monitor Apple’s implementation of the terms.

Here is the EC’s full statement:

“The Commission welcomes Apple’s changes to their business terms, which follow a close dialogue between the Commission and Apple after the Commission issued a non-compliance decision related to Apple’s steering terms as well as preliminary findings related to alternative app distribution, both in April 2025,” the spokesperson said.

“Following today’s announcement, the Commission will monitor Apple’s effective implementation of the new terms. Under the DMA, users in the EU have a right to full and effective choice of alternative app distribution channels.”

The point of the DMA was to open up competition and choice for developers, which the EC seems to believe Apple’s terms have accomplished.

I don’t think that was ever the point of the DMA. It’s what a lot of developers who themselves wanted more competition and choice — and freedom — on iOS presumed to be the point of the DMA. The European Commission paid lip service to these ideals, which encouraged people to think these ideals were the point of the DMA. But what I’ve consistently argued is that the only actual point of the DMA is for the European Commission to impose unnecessary bureaucracy and inconvenience on major markets where it previously had no footprint. They had no noble goal. They just wanted to erect a bureaucratic structure that clearly shows “The European Commission was here and did something.” Impose copious fines on Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta; inconvenience those companies and their users in the EU; all to show that something has been done. (And to cash the checks from the fines they eventually collect.)

That’s why the text of the DMA itself is so hard to read and understand. There is no clear intent of “opening up competition and choice” hidden in the murky, impenetrable prose of the DMA. The murky impenetrableness of the law is a reflection of its actual intent: murky impenetrable bureaucracy.¹

Here’s a commenter on Hacker News (via Michael Tsai’s roundup) who can’t believe it:

This is bonkers, I can’t believe the EU Commission agreed to it. The main issue that the DMA was about still remains: Apple retains ultimate control over app developers’ dealings with users.

The status quo that the EU should have pushed for, and which Article 6(7) of the DMA requires, is one where a developer can distribute iOS apps to users without ever entering into any contractual relationship with Apple. The OS APIs that most apps use are already paid-for by the user when they buy the device. Apple wants to double-dip and charge developers for the value that the users already have by virtue of owning their iDevices with all the necessary iOS paraphernalia in them.

If you believed that the point of the DMA was to open up competition, choice, and freedom for developers, yeah, I bet it does seem bonkers that the European Commission has signed off on compliance where Apple charges 15 percent commissions on links to the web from apps distributed on the App Store, and that Apple will collect a 5 percent Core Technology Commission even for apps distributed on third-party app marketplaces, using third-party payment processing. But if you believe, as I do, that the point of the DMA is to impose obvious regulatory burdens and bureaucracy upon Apple (and Google, and Microsoft) — and upon the EU citizens who use those companies’ “gatekeeping” platforms — then it is completely unsurprising that the European Commission “welcomed” these changes. The Commission has gotten everything it wanted from Apple:

• Third-party app marketplaces (no matter if almost no one uses them).
• A growing list of features withheld from the EU, like iPhone Mirroring and Siri AI (this shows that the DMA “works” and they’ve done something).
• A bunch of fines.

I’m sure some of you think I’m all wet in my argument that the point of the DMA was merely to impose ongoing bureaucratic complexity. But my view jibes with the reality of how it’s worked out. Compare and contrast with the Mobile Software Competition Act in Japan. Apple complied with the clearly stated requirements of the MSCA with no drama, Japanese users aren’t missing out on features like iPhone Mirroring, and the only delay for Siri AI in Japan is language support. Japanese iOS users get all the “good parts” of Apple’s regulatory compliance that EU users do, with none of the rather severe hindrances.

I noticed this morning that the bot that auto-posts new articles to the DF Mastodon account hadn’t posted since Tuesday night. But it wasn’t the Mastodon posting bot that was broken. It was a different automated task that updates the RSS and JSON feeds. That’s what broke sometime between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. The Mastodon posting bot reads the RSS feed, and if there’s nothing new in the RSS feed, there’s nothing for the bot to post. Still though, I thought it was weird that no one who follows DF from the feeds had emailed, texted, or @replied to me to complain that new articles on the website had stopped appearing in the feeds. No one.

Then, I remembered that the DF website home page is generated from ... the RSS feed.¹

So, yeah, pretty much no one but me realized that I’d written seven new posts after the last update Tuesday night. Oops. Needless to say, it no longer seems surprising at all that I haven’t heard anything from readers in a few days. My apologies for delivering most of this week’s output all at once. We can pretend today that DF is a weekly newsletter.

Apple today announced changes to its business terms for apps in the European Union, following close collaboration with the European Commission. These changes resolve Apple’s disagreements with the Commission over business terms and alternative distribution. They also reduce complexity by moving every developer that distributes apps in the EU to a single set of business terms. Developers can sign the new terms today, and changes will go into effect on October 1. [...] Under the new terms:

• For App Store apps using Apple In-App Purchase, the commission will be 26 percent. For the vast majority of developers, including those in the App Store Small Business Program, Mini Apps Partner Program, or Video Partner Program, and for auto-renewing subscriptions after their first year, it will be 15 percent.

• For App Store apps using alternative payment processing, the commission will be 20 percent. Developers in the programs mentioned above will pay a reduced rate of 10 percent.

• For App Store apps that link out of the app to complete purchases, the commission will be 15 percent. Developers in the programs mentioned above will pay a reduced rate of 10 percent.

• For apps distributed via alternative app marketplaces or the web, Apple will charge a 5 percent Core Technology Commission.

This is a near-total victory for Apple. The only real concession is that for apps in the App Store using Apple’s own payment system (the default), the main commission drops from 30 percent to 26 percent in the EU. That’s the deal the EU squeezed out of Apple for EU developers: going from 30 to 26 percent for purchases and the first year of subscriptions.

All apps have to pay at least the 5 percent Core Technology Commission, even if they’re distributed outside the App Store. I could collect a lot of claim chowder from people who told me that Apple’s CTC was never going to pass muster. Maybe it wouldn’t have under the old EC regime of the crusading hypocrite Margrethe Vestager and the buffoonish Thierry Breton, but the European Commission is under new, more temperate leadership.

Ben Thompson, in a subscriber-only Stratechery update, works out the implied values from these fees:

• The implied value of Apple’s APIs is 5% of an app’s revenue
• The implied value of App Store distribution is 10% of an app’s revenue
• The implied value of in-app payment APIs is 5% of an app’s revenue
• The implied value of in-app purchase using Apple’s payment processing is 6% of an app’s revenue

Now take these numbers with a grain of salt — given the fact the European Commission appears to have blessed these figures, they were almost certainly a matter of negotiation — but they do seem directionally correct: being in the App Store is the most valuable (thus 10%), and then 5% was ascribed to Apple’s APIs in their various forms; of these, the “Core Technology Commission” is obviously more valuable than the APIs used for in-app payment processing by third parties, but you can see how they landed at the same spot.

The interesting number is the implied 6% for Apple’s payment processing. The fully loaded cost for credit card fees — which have both a swipe fee and a percentage fee — refunds, disputes, etc. is pretty close to 6%; in other words, it appears that the European Commission has decided that Apple shouldn’t make anything for actually charging money. And again, I can see how they got there: anyone can charge money, but Apple did actually make the various APIs developers use, along with the App Store.

The 6 percent no-profit fee for payment processing is where the difference between the global 30% and the new EU 26% falls. Given its druthers, it seems clear Apple would charge 10%, not 6%, for payment processing, to give itself some margin on payment processing.

Don’t take my word that this agreement is a sweeping victory for Apple — with the company conceding only the reduction from 30 to 26 percent for App Store payments — and a capitulation by the EC. Here’s Epic Games, posting on Twitter/X:

Apple announced new junk fees in the EU that do nothing to open up the mobile app ecosystem to competition, as required by Digital Market Act. [sic] [...]

The law makes it clear that Apple must allow developers to offer link outs to the web for purchases “free of charge” and has to allow “effective use” of competing stores. Apple’s terms deliberately violate the Digital Markets Act. If the Commission accepts the terms and drops their ongoing enforcement actions, the law will become meaningless and consumers and developers will not experience the benefits it was designed to provide.

I don’t think Epic understands that the Commission has accepted these terms, and they’re a result of negotiations. It’s over.

Another way to see how clearly this is a win for Apple is to go back and imagine an entirely different DMA. Consider if the DMA had simply stated that 30 percent is too high a commission for app stores on “gatekeeping” platforms, and the one and only purpose of the DMA was to set a new, more reasonable maximum commission rate. If that had been the case, there’s no way the rate would have been 26 percent. It almost certainly would have been 20 percent at the most, perhaps something more like 15 percent. Thanks to the DMA’s sprawling scope, complexity, and overreach, Apple came out of this conceding only 4 percent of the App Store’s 30 percent commission, and no reduction at all to the 15 percent for subscriptions after the first year.

The very funniest thing Apple could do now would be to drop the baseline commission everywhere else in the world from 30 to 25 percent.