Linked List: August 13, 2025

Wednesday, 13 August 2025

The Annals of Oligarchy, Defense Department Edition 

Alexandra Alper, reporting for Reuters:

Donald Trump’s Navy and Air Force are poised to cancel two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined to develop, work initially aimed at overhauling antiquated human resources systems.

The reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including Salesforce and billionaire Peter Thiel’s Palantir, to have a chance to win similar projects, which could amount to a costly do-over, according to seven sources familiar with the matter.

I don’t want to be a ninny about this, but why is Reuters flatly describing the Navy and Air Force as possessions of the president? Did they ever describe them as belonging to Joe Biden, or Barack Obama? I don’t think they did, and a cursory search suggests they did not, but even if they did, it was wrong then. Now is not the time for sloppy language around this.

Anyway, this is both as crooked and stupid as shit.

See also: Jessie Blaeser, reporting for Politico:

The Trump administration’s claim that it is saving billions of dollars through DOGE-related cuts to federal contracts is drastically exaggerated, according to a new Politico analysis of public data and federal spending records.

Through July, DOGE said it has saved taxpayers $52.8 billion by canceling contracts, but of the $32.7 billion in actual claimed contract savings that Politico could verify, DOGE’s savings over that period were closer to $1.4 billion. Despite the administration’s claims, not a single one of those 1.4 billion dollars will lower the federal deficit unless Congress steps in. Instead, the money has been returned to agencies mandated by law to spend it.

The DOGE scam was never about saving money. It was about destroying honest government programs and projects to redirect the firehose of taxpayer money to American oligarchs like Thiel, one of Elon Musk’s “PayPal Mafia” cronies.

Perplexity Is on the Prowl to Buy Web Browsers 

The Information (paywalled, alas):

In December, Perplexity discussed possibly buying the six-year-old The Browser Co. with that company’s leaders, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. Talks with the company, which operates an AI-powered web browser, Dia, did not progress, and no price was discussed.

OpenAI has also spoken to The Browser Co. executives about possibly selling to the ChatGPT creator, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Those discussions went further, to the point of a possible price, but ended after the two sides couldn’t agree on terms.

Then, earlier this summer, Perplexity offered to buy Brave, a San Francisco–based company that runs a privacy-focused web browser and search engine, for around $1 billion, primarily in Perplexity’s stock, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation. But the two sides couldn’t agree on price and the deal discussions didn’t move forward, the person said.

Meanwhile, investors in Perplexity and DuckDuckGo tried to arrange meetings between the two companies’ leaders, according to people close to the companies. Perplexity CEO Srinivas and Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of 17-year-old DuckDuckGo, met and discussed Perplexity’s interest in acquiring browsers as a way of reaching more consumers, one of the people said. The conversations didn’t lead to any offer.

DuckDuckGo is even more privacy-focused than Brave. It’s their entire brand. Perplexity isn’t privacy-focused at all. And Perplexity has already made their own browser, Comet, which is so cool you currently have to pay $200/month to get access to it. Comet is, unsurprisingly, forked from Chromium, and pretty much looks like an uglier version of Chrome. Brave Browser looks almost exactly like Chrome (and is probably my favorite Chromium-based browser).

None of this makes any sense, so it’s no surprise most of these talks didn’t go far, and Brave rejected the supposed $1 billion offer in Perplexity stock, which as far as I’m concerned might as well have been $1 billion in Monopoly money. Why not call Eddy Cue and see if Apple wants to sell Safari?

Update: Just today, Perplexity announced that Comet is now available to $20/month Plus users, not just $200/month Pro users.

Updated Design for Pebble Time 2 Watch 

Eric Migicovsky:

First off, for those who didn’t catch the news from a few weeks ago — we’ve been able to recover the Pebble trademark! Our new watches will change from being called Core 2 Duo → Pebble 2 Duo, and Core Time 2 → Pebble Time 2.

The big news today is that we’re revealing the final design for Pebble Time 2. The design that we showed off back in March were preliminary designs. We’ve been able to tweak and improve the industrial design quite a bit since then. I think it’s turned out fantastically well! I even have a working albeit early engineering sample on my wrist.

These look good. Fundamentally Pebble-y but with smaller-than-ever (for Pebble) screen bezels.

I stand by what I wrote back in March, though. They should make just one new watch, not two. In March I suggested that the one new Pebble watch they should make ought to be the black-and-white display one, to lean into Pebble’s differentiation from Apple Watch and other leading smartwatches. Seeing these new designs for the color display Time 2 — and Migicovsky’s obvious personal enthusiasm for this model — makes me think that this should be the one true new Pebble. They should scrap the black-and-white plastic one.

Even their naming scheme is confusing. The $150 plastic, 1.2-inch black-and-white-display model is the Pebble 2 Duo. The $225 steel, 1.5-inch color-display model is the Pebble Time 2. Why is the “2” in different places? Nothing about the names “Duo” or “Time” suggests which one is higher-end than the other. If anything, “Time” sounds more simplistic to my ears, like maybe it only tells the time — but that’s the nicer one.

Maybe they know something I don’t, and pre-orders are strong for the uglier, plastic, black-and-white-display 2 Duo. But even if that’s true, that’s selling into the existing Pebble fanbase. If they have any hope of expanding to new users, they ought to put all their wood behind one arrow, and that ought to be the clearly superior, better-looking, bigger-display Time 2. The Time 2 costs just $75 more, but seems way more than $75 better.