Linked List: December 30, 2024

Monday, 30 December 2024

DF Sponsorships 

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

James Fallows: ‘Jimmy Carter Was a Lucky Man’ 

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

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

He was an unlucky president, and a lucky man.

We are lucky to have had him. Blessed.

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

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

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

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

52 Things Kent Hendricks Learned in 2024 

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

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

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

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