Linked List: September 28, 2024

Saturday, 28 September 2024

Relay for St. Jude Is Approaching $1 Million ★

Every September, the whole extended family at Relay FM raises money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, one of the most amazing institutions in the world. St. Jude is dedicated to curing childhood cancer and helping families affected by it. Since 2019 Relay has raised over $3 million, and their best-ever single month was just north of $775,000.

This year they’re already at $925,000, within earshot of a cool million, with three days to go in the month. Let’s make that happen.

Update, 30 September: And, boom, they hit it: $1,041,913.31 and still counting.

Hidden Pref to Restore Slow-Motion Dock Minimizing on MacOS ★

In the midst of recording last week’s episode of The Talk Show with Nilay Patel, I offhandedly mentioned the age-old trick of holding down the Shift key while minimizing a window (clicking the yellow button) to see the genie effect in slow motion. Nilay was like “Wait, what? That’s not working for me...” and we moved on.

What I’d forgotten is that Apple had removed this as default behavior a few years ago (I think in MacOS 10.14 Mojave), but you can restore the feature with this hidden preference, typed in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock slow-motion-allowed -bool YES

Then restart the Dock:

killall Dock

Or, in a single command:

defaults write com.apple.dock slow-motion-allowed -bool YES; killall Dock

Or, if you prefer a proper app to a command-line invocation, Marcel Bresink’s excellent TinkerTool.

Tom’s Guide iPhone 16 Battery Life Testing Shows Impressive Year-Over-Year Gains ★

Tom Pritchard, writing at Tom’s Guide:

We put the iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro and the iPhone 16 Pro Max through the Tom’s Guide battery test, which involves surfing the web over 5G at 150 nits of screen brightness. The iPhone 16 Pro Max and iPhone 16 Plus have risen to the top with some incredibly impressive results — making our best phone battery life list in the process. Here’s how the new iPhone 16 models’ battery life stacks up against their iPhone 15 counterparts, and rival flagships.

WSJ: ‘Apple Is No Longer in Talks to Join OpenAI Investment Round’ ★

Tom Dotan and Berber Jin, reporting late last night for The Wall Street Journal (News+):

Apple is no longer in talks to participate in an OpenAI funding round expected to raise as much as $6.5 billion, an 11th hour end to what would have been a rare investment by the iPhone maker in another major Silicon Valley company. Apple recently fell out of the talks to join the round, which is slated to close next week, according to a knowledgeable person.

I just observed the other day that the tumultuous (to say the least) leadership situation at OpenAI seems incongruous with Apple’s.

Also surely related, to some degree, is this report on OpenAI’s financials that dropped yesterday from Mike Isaac and Erin Griffith at The New York Times:

OpenAI’s monthly revenue hit $300 million in August, up 1,700 percent since the beginning of 2023, and the company expects about $3.7 billion in annual sales this year, according to financial documents reviewed by The New York Times. OpenAI estimates that its revenue will balloon to $11.6 billion next year.

But it expects to lose roughly $5 billion this year after paying for costs related to running its services and other expenses like employee salaries and office rent, according to an analysis by a financial professional who has also reviewed the documents. Those numbers do not include paying out equity-based compensation to employees, among several large expenses not fully explained in the documents.

Rob Pike, on Mastodon:

OpenAI: We lose a little on every sale but we make it up in volume.