Linked List: August 2025

Thursday, 28 August 2025

Trump Fires CDC Director, Anti-Vax Wingnuts Now Running Asylum ★

Shelby Talcott, reporting under the euphemistic headline “White House Fires CDC Director Over Vaccine Disagreements”:

A showdown at the CDC culminated in the White House formally firing its director, Susan Monarez, on Wednesday night.

Monarez was ousted earlier in the day, after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked her to step down amid disagreements over changing vaccine policies, The Washington Post reported — and HHS confirmed her departure.

But Monarez’s lawyer, Mark Zaid, pushed back. Zaid said in a statement later that a White House staffer had delivered the news, and given that Monarez is a Senate-confirmed officer, “only the president himself can fire” her. “For this reason, we reject the notification Dr. Monarez has received as legally deficient and she remains as CDC Director,” Zaid said.

Four other top CDC directors also resigned Wednesday. “These high profile departures will require oversight by the” Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, panel chair Bill Cassidy, R-La., posted on X.

The “White House” didn’t fire Monarez. Donald Trump did. And while technically, she was fired over “vaccine disagreements”, yes, those disagreements weren’t scientific or medical. It was science on one side, and abject quackery on the other. We really needed the CDC five years ago. We’re in big trouble if we need them again before the US electorate ousts these wingnuts.

Here’s a headline, and coverage, from The Guardian that captures the situation with clarity and without mincing words: “CDC Chief ‘Targeted’ for Refusing to ‘Rubber-Stamp Unscientific, Reckless Directives’, Lawyers Say”

How AirPods Work ★

Truly phenomenal video from Real Engineering about a genuinely phenomenal product. In my review of the AirPods 2 in 2023 — a year after they originally shipped, when the cases were changed to use USB-C — I called them “the best single expression of Apple as a company today”. That remains true. AirPods exemplify everything that sets Apple apart: miniaturization, “it just works” ease of use, opinionated design (you get them in any color you want, so long as it’s white), and, most of all, joyfulness.

It occurs to me that Apple doesn’t brag enough about its engineering accomplishments these days. Under their previous CEO, they’d spend more time in product introduction explaining how things work, like a lecture in a 101 college course. I miss that. This Real Engineering video fills in those gaps.

Wednesday, 27 August 2025

Masimo Sues U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Over Apple Watch Blood Oxygen Ruling ★

Christopher Yasiejko, reporting last week for Bloomberg Law:

CBP exceeded its authority in an Aug. 1 internal advice ruling that overturned its own January decision without notice or input from Masimo, the medical-device maker said in a complaint filed Wednesday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. Masimo brought claims under the Administrative Procedure Act and the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause.

The CBP ruling is available here. As I read the CPB ruling, Apple’s argument goes something like this:

Masimo’s patents (the validity of which Apple disputes, but that’s neither here nor there for this ruling) cover a non-invasive device worn on the user’s body, that reads blood oxygen levels by shining light of various wavelengths through the skin, computes the reading on the device, and shows the result on device. With Apple’s workaround for watches sold in the US, the computation and the display of results occur off-device (on the paired iPhone), and thus the “redesigned” blood oxygen feature doesn’t violate Masimo’s patents.

The CBP’s investigation centered around whether the Masimo patents were “limiting” — which seems to mean a device that does all these things: the sensors, the computation of results, and the display of results. Masimo argued that the patents weren’t limiting, and apparently made no argument for how the import ban on Apple Watches should stand if the patents were found by CBP to be limiting. The CBP asked the International Trade Commission — the outfit that instituted the import ban — whether they considered the Masimo patents to be limiting, and the ITC responded yes, they did, that that was the entire basis of the import ban.

Masimo’s new complaint against the CBP makes mention of Apple’s Trump-pleasing series of announcements related to investments in US manufacturing, leaving it to the reader to interpet the implication that there’s a quid pro quo at play with the CBP ruling. But the CBP ruling’s timeline makes clear that much of the investigation took place during the Biden administration in 2024. It reads to me like that same decision would have been made, at the same time, if Kamala Harris had won last year’s election. But that’s the problem with a pay-to-play corrupt government like Trump’s, and Tim Cook’s willingness to play along to any degree, no matter how mild. By currying favor with Trump, it now looks like any decision from the U.S. government that goes in Apple’s favor might be because Apple curried favored with Trump. I genuinely do not believe that’s the case here. The ITC ruling was based an interpretation of Masimo’s patents that they were limited to user-worn devices that read, compute, and display blood oxygen levels non-invasively, and given that U.S. Apple Watches no longer compute or display the results, they no longer violate Masimo’s patents.

Tuesday, 26 August 2025

The Talk Show: ‘Weird Turtle Fake Out’ ★

Matthew Panzarino returns to the show. Topics include 007 logo creator Joe Caroff’s death at 103, Google’s weird “Made by Google” event hosted by Jimmy Fallon, the UK supposedly dropping its demand for an iCloud encryption backdoor, and Apple’s workaround for the Apple Watch blood oxygen sensor patent stalemate.

Sponsored by:

Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow.
Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Get 3 months and 150,000 errors free.
Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box.

MacSurfer Returns Under New Ownership ★

After a 25-year run, the website MacSurfer closed in 2020. But, as brought to my attention two weeks ago by Nick Heer, MacSurfer quietly returned in June. No one seemed to notice until this month.

The original MacSurfer was a bit of a weird site. Content-wise it was a daily headline aggregator, with no original news or commentary. That made a lot of sense in 1995 and for a few years thereafter, when the web was new. I remember reading it somewhat regularly back then. But one never really “read” MacSurfer — you scanned it. Even the name harks back to the very early web, when, somehow, the idiom “surfing the Internet” took hold. (Thus leading to the name “Safari” for a web browser.) But MacSurfer stopped making as much sense with the advent of RSS, when it became easy to create your own custom aggregated collection of website sources. I didn’t want to dance on MacSurfer’s grave when it closed shop in 2020, but at the time, I couldn’t believe it hadn’t closed long before.

The revived MacSurfer hasn’t changed the concept, so I’m not sure who will read it now either. A firehose has a purpose, but it’s not for drinking.

The other thing that always struck me as strange about MacSurfer is that it was anonymous. There was no credit as to who was behind it. MacDailyNews is similar: longstanding and anonymous, and, to a lesser degree than MacSurfer, a bit of a firehose. But MacDailyNews’s unnamed author adds commentary to his posts. Crackpot wingnut commentary, oftentimes, but commentary nonetheless. Pseudonyms have a long, storied history. But I think it’s weird — and somewhat suspicious — not to put any name at all on your work.

The new MacSurfer, like the old one, remains unsigned. But after Eric Schwarz started blogging about the mysterious return of the site after its half-decade absence, the new owner, Ken Turner, reached out and agreed to an interview.

Apple to Debut TechWoven Cases for iPhone 17 Lineup ★

Supply chain leaker Majin Bu has the scoop, including photos of the cases and their packaging, of Apple’s second attempt at a fabric-based successor to leather iPhone cases. Apple’s first attempt two years ago, FineWoven, was so unpopular that they didn’t even offer a premium level of Apple-branded cases last year with the iPhones 16.

Apple dropped all use of leather two years ago, including watch bands and wallets. FineWoven was kind of shitty for those too — it just wasn’t a durable material, but Apple put it to use on products that demand durability. I mean that’s the entire point of an iPhone case in particular. These new TechWoven cases look good, and I doubt Apple will make the same durability mistake twice. The new cases have metal buttons (yay) but also a bottom lip on the case (boo). No word yet on whether Apple will replace FineWoven with TechWoven for Apple Watch bands and MagSafe Wallets too, but I bet they will. I doubt we’ll ever hear the word “FineWoven” again.

(Majin Bu has leaked photos of Apple’s new silicone cases, too.)

Elon Musk Bullshit Watch ★

Elon Musk, Friday:

Join @xAI and help build a purely AI software company called Macrohard. It’s a tongue-in-cheek name, but the project is very real!

In principle, given that software companies like Microsoft do not themselves manufacture any physical hardware, it should be possible to simulate them entirely with AI.

If it’s “a purely AI software company” why do they need to hire anyone?

Tulsi Gabbard Says the U.K. Government Has Backed Down From Its Demand for an iCloud Backdoor ★

Tulsi Gabbard — who, believe it or not, is the US director of national intelligence — on X last week:

Over the past few months, I’ve been working closely with our partners in the UK, alongside @POTUS and @VP, to ensure Americans’ private data remains private and our Constitutional rights and civil liberties are protected.

As a result, the UK has agreed to drop its mandate for Apple to provide a “back door” that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens and encroached on our civil liberties.

BBC News:

The BBC understands Apple has not yet received any formal communication from either the US or UK governments. “We do not comment on operational matters, including confirming or denying the existence of such notices,” a UK government spokesperson said.

Back in February, Apple pulled the Advanced Data Protection feature of iCloud from the UK, in what it deemed a necessary move to comply with the UK demand. Until and if Apple restores the ADP feature in the UK, I wouldn’t consider this over. I hope it’s true, but a Trump official tweeting that it’s true doesn’t make it true.

‘Less Fun Than a Barrel of Crackers’ ★

John McCoy, on the supposedly controversial Cracker Barrel rebranding:

But just because I doubt that these choices were motivated by politics doesn’t mean the detractors don’t have a point: something basic is being lost here. In both cases the companies have discarded character and context in an effort to streamline their identity. I have written previously about the often misguided penchant art directors have towards simplifying their brands. I suspect that the lion’s share (ha) of this tendency is simply following trends, and the current fashion in corporate design is simple, flat typography and short (often single-word) brand names. To the extent that someone actually gave this a thought, the rationale is to remove any attributes that might complicate a consumer’s attitude towards the brand. It also reflects the desire of new executives to mark their territory by peeing on it — see HBO’s constant rebranding, or Elon Musk destroying the only part of Twitter that had any value, its name recognition.

If you want to be charitable, and I try to be when I can, the move towards brand simplification also reflects a longstanding adage in design — be it visual art, design, writing, or engineering: “less is more.” This saying, often misattributed to Mies van der Rohe, emphasizes clarity and utility. The goal is to focus on what is essential. Practitioners of this belief make outsized claims about the effects of this approach.

This is via Jason Snell at Six Colors, and, on the presumption that all of you have the good sense to read Six Colors regularly, I’d let you encounter McCoy’s post there, but for my need to make a few side points, gleaned from Threads:

The “controversy” is regarding the removal of the Uncle Herschel mascot (the cracker) and the barrel. But Josh Williams argues that the lettering itself is nicely done in the new mark, and I agree. But I also agree with McCoy’s larger point that minimalistic rebrandings are simply trendy and Cracker Barrel is very late to the trend, which, like all trends, will surely soon reverse.
That it’s a controversy at all is the work of activist investor Sardar Biglari, CEO of midwest chain Steak ’n Shake. (Biglari’s father was a general under the Shah of Iran, and the family had to flee after the revolution.) Biglari has been trying to take over Cracker Barrel, Carl Icahn corporate-raider-style, for 15 years. That’s why Steak ’n Shake has been stoking the supposed controversy about Cracker Barrel on its X account. And Steak ’n Shake, under Biglari’s leadership, has been all-in as a MAGA brand whilst closing over 200 restaurants in the last 7 years. You can like or dislike the Cracker Barrel rebranding, but it’s not “woke”. It’s just minimal. The idea that it’s “woke” is just nonsense promulgated by Biglari to get the result we’re actually seeing, where pro-Trump media outlets (like Fox News) pick up on the rebranding as somehow “woke”, Cracker Barrel gets bad publicity and their stock price suffers, and maybe Biglari gets a chance to take over the chain, which is all he cares about.
Last word goes to Gregory Wieber.

Update, 27 August: Cracker Barrel cries uncle.

Apple Event on September 9: ‘Awe Dropping’ ★

Right on schedule: second Tuesday of September, so long as that second Tuesday doesn’t fall on September 11. (Last year’s event went on Monday 9 September, probably because the Harris-Trump debate was already scheduled for Tuesday the 10th.) There’s an interactive animated version of the “heat map” event logo on Apple’s homepage. (A little bit odd that the second item below the event announcement, after a back-to-school promotion, is a “Meet the iPhone 16 family” promotion.)

Expected announcements for this event include:

iPhones 17 (regular, Pro, Air)
Apple Watch Series 11 and Ultra 3
AirPods Pro 3

Calvinball Makes the Supreme Court ★

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, on page 17 of her dissent in National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Association:

In a broader sense, however, today’s ruling is of a piece with this Court’s recent tendencies. “[R]ight when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law’s constraints,” the Court opts instead to make vindicating the rule of law and preventing manifestly injurious Government action as difficult as possible. This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules.⁶ We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.

The footnote refers to the OED’s entry for “Calvinball”.

Saturday, 23 August 2025

Phoenix.new ★: My thanks to Fly.io for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Phoenix.new, their new AI app-builder. Just describe your idea, and Phoenix.new quickly generates a working real-time Phoenix app: clustering, pubsub, and presence included. Ideal for multiplayer games, collaborative tools, or quick weekend experiments. Built by Fly.io, deploy wherever you want. Just try it, and see how far you can go.

Friday, 22 August 2025

Base 3.0 ★: Nice update to Menial’s excellent SQLite developer tool for the Mac. Worth the wait.

Thursday, 21 August 2025

Apple TV+ Subscription Price Increasing From $10 to $13 Per Month, but the Annual Price Remains Unchanged at $99 ★

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

Apple today announced that the monthly price of Apple TV+ is rising in the United States and some international markets. From today, the monthly subscription will cost $12.99, up from $9.99.

Existing subscribers will see the price change 30 days after the next renewal date. The pricing for yearly TV+ subscriptions and the Apple One services bundle remains unchanged.

The annual price for a standalone TV+ subscription — unchanged, as Mayo reports — remains $99. The usual rule-of-thumb for subscriptions of any sort seems to be to charge 10× the monthly rate for an annual subscription. That’s exactly where the TV+ month/annual prices were before today. Now, the annual subscription price isn’t just a little bit cheaper than 12× the monthly price ($156), but a lot cheaper.

This seems to be a clear sign that streaming services are different than most subscriptions. People subscribe to newspapers or blog/newsletters and they stay subscribed, because they want to read regularly. Same for a music subscription, like Spotify or Apple Music — people want to listen to music all the time. Churn is just naturally higher with streaming video — people subscription hop. Subscribe, catch up on all the exclusive content you’ve missed, then unsubscribe. Subscribe again when there are a few more exclusive shows you’ve missed again. Unsubscribe again. And Apple TV+ has been reported to have higher than average churn. So I think today’s price hike, affecting only the monthly price, is about dealing with that. If you want to subscription hop, Apple TV+ is going to cost a bit more. If you want to stay subscribed to Apple TV+, you really ought to subscribe annually (or subscribe to Apple One and get Music, Arcade, and additional iCloud storage bundled together).

Fox One Streaming Service Launches ★

Fox (capitalization verbatim):

Fox Corporation today announced the official launch of FOX One, a bold new streaming service that brings together the full portfolio of FOX’s News, Sports and Entertainment branded content — all in one place, both live and on demand.

Available today across major web, mobile and connected TV platforms, FOX One is priced at $19.99/month with a 7-day free trial or $199.99/year, with the option to add-on B1G+ or bundle FOX Nation for an even greater value. Starting October 2, customers will also have the opportunity to bundle FOX One with ESPN DTC Unlimited for $39.99/month.

I just mentioned yesterday, re: MS NOW’s idiotic backronym, that Fox often styles its name in all caps without pretending the f-o-x letters stand for anything. Anyway, $20/month seems steep, but Fox carries a lot of sports.

Apple is promoting the launch prominently in the App Store (including Fox’s preferred all-caps styling), no doubt because Fox — unlike certain well-established streaming services — offers its subscriptions via IAP.

Meta’s Ray-Bans Have Sold 2 Million Pairs, Total, as of February ★

Sean Hollister, reporting for The Verge back in February:

Two weeks ago, we exclusively reported Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks on how many pairs of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses the company had recently sold and might theoretically sell: 1 million pairs in 2024, with the possibility of reaching 2 million or even 5 million by the end of 2025.

But glasses giant EssilorLuxottica, which produces those glasses for Meta, has now publicly revealed 2 million pairs of Meta Ray-Bans have sold since their October 2023 debut, and that it’s aiming to produce 10 million Meta glasses each year by the end of 2026.

I mocked a report from Counterpoint Research this week for its Bezos Numbers on smart glasses sales growth. Here are some real numbers from the current market leader. For context, Steve Jobs’s stated goal for the iPhone, at launch in mid-2007, was 10 million iPhones sold by the end of 2008 — a goal they reached before the holiday quarter of 2008 even started.

I feel close to certain that smart glasses are going to be a big product category. But they’re not there yet. A few million units is something, but it’s not a hit. Given the current capabilities — a camera on your face, speakers on the temples, and a microphone for talking to the system — I don’t see how they currently beat a smartphone and wireless earbuds. If you already carry a phone and earbuds everywhere you go, when would you want Meta Glasses? For taking lower-quality photos and videos, and listening to lower-quality audio? I don’t think the product category is going to take off until there’s a visual HUD in the lenses, and that still seems years away, at any price.

Herdling ★

New video game, just out:

Herdling is a brand new adventure from Okomotive, creators of the atmospheric and acclaimed FAR games, and Panic, publishers of Firewatch.

Looks absolutely beautiful. Painterly. Darth says it’s good.

Available now for Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Epic Games Store. Not (yet?) in the Mac App Store — not because of any hassles regarding the App Store, but because there’s not (yet?) a Mac port of the game, period.

‘Micro-Soft’ ★

Added this footnote just now to yesterday’s piece on MSNBC’s rebranding to “MS NOW”:

Historical pedantry: from 1975–1979, Microsoft spelled its name “Micro-Soft”, with, yes, an uppercase S. But that’s not camel-case, and that hyphenated spelling is as much a footnote to Microsoft’s brand history as the woodcut Isaac-Newton-under-a-tree logo is to Apple. Microsoft’s logo from that era was very disco-’70s and kind of cool — but while “Micro” and “Soft” were broken across two lines, there’s no hyphen in the logotype.

Wednesday, 20 August 2025

Claim Chowder: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Five Months Ago ★

Kwan Wei Kevin Tan, reporting for Business Insider five months ago:

Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI startup Anthropic, said on Monday that AI, and not software developers, could be writing all of the code in our software in a year.

“I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code,” Amodei said at a Council of Foreign Relations event on Monday.

Complete bullshit, but, I guess he still has one month to go. (Via Dave Winer on Threads.)

‘No Frame Missed’ ★

Five-minute short film from Apple, about people with severe hand tremors from Parkinson’s disease using the iPhone’s Action mode to shoot steady video — including filmmaker Brett Harvey, who was diagnosed at the way-too-young age of 37. There’s also a brief short with Harvey explaining the settings to shoot in Action mode by default, or to use voice controls to avoid needing to tap buttons.

Apple at its very best. If this doesn’t hit you, you’re not hooked up right.

Tuesday, 19 August 2025

‘American’ ★

Kieran Healy on, just now — amidst all this — becoming an American citizen:

When I sat down to write something about becoming a citizen, I was immediately tangled up in a skein of questions about the character of citizenship, the politics of immigration, and the relationship of individuals to the state. These have all been in the news recently; perhaps you have heard about it. These questions ask how polities work, how they impose themselves upon us, how power is exercised. They are tied up with deep-rooted principles, claims and myths — as you please — about where authority comes from and how it is or whether it ever has been justly applied. These are not easy matters to understand in principle or resolve in practice. Nor can they simply be dismissed. But I am not writing this note because I want to take on these questions, even though I acknowledge them. I am writing this because I do not want to forget how I felt yesterday.

Beautiful.

Monday, 18 August 2025

Bezos Numbers of the Week: Counterpoint Research on ‘Smart Glasses’ ★

Counterpoint Research, in a report titled “Global Smart Glasses Shipments Soared 110 Percent YoY in H1 2025, With Meta Capturing Over 70 Percent Share”:

The global smart glasses market grew by 110% YoY in H1 2025, fueled by robust demand for Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses and the entry of new players such as Xiaomi and TCL-RayNeo.

Meta’s share of the global smart glasses market rose to 73% in H1 2025, driven by strong demand and expanded manufacturing capacity at Luxottica, its key production partner.

Not a single absolute sales number in the whole report, not even estimated. Just percentages. Pure Bezos Numbers — which is not quite the same thing as a Bezos Chart, which has no numbers at all. How do you compute percentage change without the underlying numbers? What goes unsaid is that surely any reasonable estimate of “smart glasses” sales numbers is tiny. If you go from 1 to 2 that’s 100 percent growth!

Sunday, 17 August 2025

Dekáf Coffee Roasters ★

My thanks to Dekáf Coffee Roasters for sponsoring last week at DF. Dekáf believes that people who drink coffee for its flavor are the true connoisseurs. While other roasters treat decaf as a side project, they’ve made it their entire mission. They’re dedicated to creating exceptional decaffeinated coffee that stands toe-to-toe with the world’s finest caffeinated beans.

I drink coffee every single day. I literally can’t remember the last day I didn’t have coffee in the morning. A few years ago, though, age started catching up to me and I stopped drinking coffee after lunch or so, lest it screw with my sleep. I really missed my afternoon coffee though. Why I didn’t think to try decaf I don’t know, but Dekáf sent me a few samples when they first sponsored DF back in April, and it’s been a revelation. In addition to fully decaffeinated roasts, they also have some half-decaffeinated roasts, and they’re absolutely delicious — my style of roast, for sure — and they don’t leave me jolted into the evening. Maybe you like tea, but I don’t. I like coffee, and I love being able to have a cup or two late in the afternoon again. It’s so good.

Also, I’m a big believer that you can judge a book by its cover. Just look at the Dekáf brand. It’s perfect. Color, typography, artwork — so cool, so spot-on for what they do.

Dekáf offers 9 single origins, 6 signature blends, and 4 Mizudashi cold brews (perfect for summer). All shipped to you within 24 hours of roasting. No shortcuts. You won’t believe it’s decaf. That’s the point. Even better, get 20% off with code: DF.

Friday, 15 August 2025

Woz: ‘I Am the Happiest Person Ever’ ★

Steve Wozniak turned 75 (!) and was profiled by John Blackstone for CBS News (also posted to YouTube). Slashdot linked to it, and in the comments, someone gently jabbed at Woz for having sold, rather than hoarded, his stock in Apple. Woz himself chimed in, with this comment for the ages:

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

Apple never would have existed without Woz, and Woz personified “insanely great” engineering. He never contributed anything technical to Apple after the Apple II in the early 1980s, but, man, so much of his spirit and personality is infused in Apple’s DNA. He’s a hero to so many people who went on to work at Apple, and to so many of us on the outside too. The two Steves were so very different in so many ways, yet at heart, both exemplified that intersection between technology and the liberal arts.

His little comment above describing his philosophy on life brought to mind one of my favorite Woz stories, from Michael Moritz’s long-out-of-print 1984 book The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer, pp. 281–282:

Wozniak, who seemed determined to follow Samuel Johnson’s advice that it was better to live rich than to die rich, was always louder, splashier, and more cavalier about his fortune. As a student and an engineer he had always managed his financial affairs haphazardly and nothing changed as he grew wealthy. He could never keep track of receipts, for months didn’t bother to seek financial advice, and made a habit of filing his tax returns late. Wozniak turned into an approachable teddy bear and a soft touch. When friends, acquaintances, or strangers asked him for a loan he often wrote out a check on the spot.

Unlike Jobs, who guarded his founder’s stock carefully, Wozniak distributed some of his. He gave stock worth $4 million to his parents, sister, and brother and $2 million to friends. He made some investments in start-up companies. He bought a Porsche and fastened the license plates APPLE II to the car. His father found $250,000 worth of uncashed checks strewn about the car and said of his son, “A person like him shouldn’t have that much money.” After Wozniak finally did arrange for some financial advice, he arrived at Apple one day to announce, “My lawyer said to diversify so I just bought a movie theater.” Even that turned into a complicated venture. The theater, located among the barrios on the east side of San Jose, provoked angry community protests after it screened a gang movie, The Warriors. Wozniak attended a few community meetings, listened to the concerns of the local leaders, promised that his theater wouldn’t show violent or pornographic movies, and accompanied by Wigginton, spent a few afternoons in the empty, darkened theater screening movies and playing censor.

Trump’s BLS Pick E.J. Antoni Is – Shocker – a Crackpot Hack ★

Jason Lalljee, reporting for Axios Tuesday:

President Trump’s nomination of Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Monday drew criticism from economists across the political spectrum. Why it matters: The growing negative consensus among conservative economists is unusual given Antoni’s own conservative pedigree.

Here we go with “unusual” as a euphemism for “unprecedented” — or perhaps, most accurately, “crazy” — again. The dichotomy here is that Trump and MAGA have flipped what “conservative” means in US politics. Some legitimate economists are left-leaning, some are right-leaning. It’s a field of study, like the law, that attracts from across the political spectrum. But all legitimate economists believe in trying to objectively measure the economy. MAGA kooks have overrun Republican elected politics, but not so with economics. So of course legitimate conservative economists are objecting to Trump’s nomination of this guy Antoni, who both is a crackpot kook of the paranoid style and looks like one, with crazy eyes and, of all things, a devil beard.

To the commentary:

Antoni’s “work at Heritage has frequently included elementary errors or nonsensical choices that all bias his findings in the same partisan direction,” Stan Veuger, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Axios’ Courtenay Brown and Emily Peck.

Dave Hebert, an economist at the conservative American Institute for Economic Research, wrote in a post on X that he’s worked with Antoni before and implored the Senate to block the nomination. “I’ve been on several programs with him at this point and have been impressed by two things: his inability to understand basic economics and the speed with which he’s gone MAGA,” Hebert said. [...]

Jessica Riedl, a senior Manhattan Institute fellow, shared another example from X, in which Antoni appeared not to know that the BLS’ measure of import prices did not account for the impact of tariffs. “The articles and tweets I’ve seen him publish are probably the most error-filled of any think tank economist right now,” she wrote. “I hope we see better at BLS.”

That’s the take on Antoni from conservative economists.

Threads Now Has DMs, But They’re Not Encrypted and, Contrary to Reports, Not Yet Available on the Web ★

Emma Roth, reporting for The Verge back on July 1 (emphasis added):

Threads’ DMs are currently available to users aged 18 and over on Android, iOS, and the web, but you can only have one-on-one conversations right now. Moving forward, Threads plans to roll out the ability to choose who can send you messages, including people who don’t follow you on Threads and Instagram. You’ll also be able to review a folder dedicated to message requests, similar to what’s offered on X. Threads is working on a group messaging feature and inbox filters, too.

Though the platform says its DMs are “protected by our robust privacy standards, account protections and safety infrastructure,” Threads spokesperson Alec Booker confirmed to The Verge that “Threads will not support end-to-end encryption for messaging.” Booker adds that Meta will “continue evolving DMs on Threads based on feedback from the community.”

The lack of E2EE for a new messaging platform in 2025 is unconscionable. Either don’t offer DMs at all or only offer them using E2EE. That would be for Meta’s benefit, not just its users. They shouldn’t even want the ability to look at private messages.

That said, I found myself chatting with an old friend on Threads last night, using the app on my phone. Somehow we’d never exchanged iMessage credentials. We more or less just used the Threads DM chat to exchange current phone numbers to move the chat to iMessage. Today, at my desk, I wanted to double-check that there was nothing in the Threads chat I’d want to save — and, I couldn’t figure out how to see DMs in Threads’s web app. I found a few articles, like the one above at The Verge, that said it was available on the web, but ... it isn’t. At least not for me, or most people. One never knows how many people are getting an A/B test or early rollout with Meta.

Keep Calm and Delete Your Old Emails to Conserve Water ★

From a press release from the UK’s National Drought Group this week, quoting group chair Helen Wakeham (emphasis added):

“We are grateful to the public for following the restrictions, where in place, to conserve water in these dry conditions. Simple, everyday choices — such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails — also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife.”

To reaffirm that she did not misspeak, from a list of tips for conserving water at home, which includes legit tips like taking shorter showers and turning off the tap while brushing your teeth (Sidenote: Who leaves the water running while brushing their teeth?):

Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.

This is so profoundly stupid and wrong that I don’t even know how to make fun of it. But it sure speaks to how futile it might be to hope that the UK government understands the first thing about end-to-end encryption. (Via Jason Eccles.)

Thursday, 14 August 2025

Bloomberg: ‘Trump Administration Said to Discuss Taking Stake in Intel’ ★

Bloomberg:

The Trump administration is in talks with Intel Corp. to have the US government take a stake in the beleaguered chipmaker, according to people familiar with the plan, in the latest sign of the White House’s willingness to blur the lines between state and industry.

A deal would help shore up Intel’s planned factory hub in Ohio, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. The company had once promised to turn that site into the world’s largest chipmaking facility, though it’s been repeatedly delayed. The size of the potential stake isn’t clear.

The talks come just a week after President Donald Trump had called for the ouster of Intel Chief Executive Officer Lip-Bu Tan, accusing him of being “highly conflicted” because of concerns about his earlier ties to China.

Bloomberg was first (this time), but the WSJ seconded the report shortly after.

No cause for alarm here. Just a bit of a sea change. The Republican Party has always been in favor of social ownership of the means of production. Just like we have always been at war with Eastasia. Sane steady leadership from our 80-year-old dear leader, who is definitely not succumbing rapidly to a dangerous mix of dementia, megalomania, and paranoia.

The Wall Street Journal Marches Toward Pravda With American Characteristics ★

Greg Ip, chief economics commentator for The Wall Street Journal, under the euphemistic headline “The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics”:

A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resemble America’s. Instead, capitalism in America is starting to look like China.

Recent examples include President Trump’s demand that Intel’s chief executive resign; the 15% of certain chip sales to China that Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices will share with Washington; the “golden share” Washington will get in U.S. Steel as a condition of Nippon Steel’s takeover; and the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners Trump plans to personally direct.

This isn’t socialism, in which the state owns the means of production. It is more like state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.

China calls its hybrid “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The U.S. hasn’t gone as far as China or even milder practitioners of state capitalism such as Russia, Brazil and, at times, France. So call this variant “state capitalism with American characteristics.” It is still a sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.

Ip’s piece is, on the whole, a decent factual survey of the Trump 2.0 administration’s economic policies, six months in. (Or, if you prefer, one-eighth over, and a quarter of the way through until the mid-term election.) But I can’t help but feel that if it were any Democrat — Biden, Harris, whoever — whose early presidential term’s stewardship of our capitalist economy could aptly be described as “starting to look like China”, the tone would be less “a sea change” and more “ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME TOTAL FUCKING FREAKOUT”. It’s the same slippery slope of obeying in advance as describing blatantly unconstitutional shakedowns as “unusual agreements”.

There’s grading on the curve and then there’s grading on the curve. Ip knows damn well that if left unchecked, Trump’s mad-king style policies, like firing the economist in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because the jobs report for July was bad, are going to prove disastrous. That move is more like North Korea than China, and everyone who doesn’t have Fox News injected into their veins knows it. Greg Ip is not drinking the MAGA juice, but he’s not calling fair balls and strikes, either. That’s a problem.

Nice Pitch From Dieter Bohn for the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 ★

Dieter Bohn left The Verge to work for Google on their “Platforms & Ecosystems” team. He hasn’t had much of a visible presence since, or least not one that I’ve noticed. But this 90-second video he made showing off the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 is nice. It’s a better pitch for the device than anything I’ve seen from Samsung itself, and it’s a good pitch for Google Gemini too.

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.

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.

Tuesday, 12 August 2025

Cassette 1.0 ★

New app from Devin Davies, developer of the ADA-winning Crouton:

Cassette is an app for iPhone and iPad that helps you enjoy your home videos like the good old days. With a retro interface Cassette auto plays through videos from your devices’ Photo Library. Mirror your device to a nearby Apple TV for a true kick back experience.

The VHS retro pastiche is fun, but don’t get the wrong impression from it. Cassette is not an app that makes your modern videos look like they were shot on an old camcorder. (Rarevision VHS is a fun app for that, if that’s what you’re looking for.)

Cassette’s tape-playing pastiche is more about putting you in the right mindset. Instead of watching one video from your Photos library, or two or three, it mimics popping in a tape labelled, say, “2014” and sitting back and watching an entire hour of videos from a decade ago. It just launched today but I’ve been using the beta via TestFlight for a few weeks, and you really have to try it to see how effective it is. Davies made a nice video teaser to pitch the app. It’s good, you should watch it.

The way I’d pitch it is that Cassette is to the videos in your Photos library what the Kodak Carousel was to your 35mm film slides back in the 1960s. Nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent.

Perplexity Made an Offer to Buy TikTok – Well, Half of TikTok – Back in January ★

Haleluya Hadero and Christopher Rugaber, reporting for the AP back on January 26, six days into Trump 2.0:

Perplexity AI has presented a new proposal to TikTok’s parent company that would allow the U.S. government to own up to 50% of a new entity that merges Perplexity with TikTok’s U.S. business, according to a person familiar with the matter. The proposal, submitted last week, is a revision of a prior plan the artificial intelligence startup had presented to TikTok’s parent ByteDance on Jan. 18, a day before the law that bans TikTok went into effect.

They should have added a similar provision to their Chrome offer sheet today. Give 25% to the US Treasury and another 25% to Trump’s future presidential “library”.

Perplexity Jumps the Shark, Makes Clownish $34.5 Billion Stunt Offer to Buy Chrome From Google ★

Katherine Blunt, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a paywall-puncturing gift link; also on News+):

Artificial-intelligence startup Perplexity on Tuesday offered to purchase Google’s Chrome browser for $34.5 billion as it works to challenge the tech giant’s web-search dominance.

Perplexity’s offer is significantly more than its own valuation, which is estimated at $18 billion. The company told The Wall Street Journal that several investors including large venture-capital funds had agreed to back the transaction in full. Estimates of Chrome’s enterprise value vary widely but recent ones have ranged from $20 billion to $50 billion.

Perplexity apparently also told the Journal that the story was theirs exclusively, despite the fact that they also revealed the stunt offer to Bloomberg as well. Prefixing a headline with “Exclusive:” is irresistible catnip to business/investor-oriented publications. The Journal, at least, had the good sense to raise a skeptical eyebrow at the premise in its headline (“Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5 Billion Offer for Chrome”¹). Bloomberg, not so much (“AI Startup Perplexity Makes $34.5 Billion Bid for Google’s Chrome Browser”).

The whole premise is ludicrous. Start with the fact that Perplexity is only valued at $18 billion. Add to that the fact that Perplexity is almost certainly overvalued at that price. I don’t know anyone who uses Perplexity, and Perplexity doesn’t develop or run their own LLMs.

But all of this stuff about Google possibly being forced (as a remedy in the US v. Google antitrust case they lost) to sell Chrome doesn’t consider that Chrome, on its own, divested from Google and thus disconnected from Chrome users’ Google accounts, is likely worth little to nothing. I wrote about this at length back in April. Chrome is tremendously valuable to Google. It has very little value on its own. Chrome generates no revenue on its own — it simply serves as an outlet for Google to show its own lucrative search ads without paying traffic acquisition fees to a browser owned by someone else (like, say, Apple or Mozilla or Samsung). Chromium is open source. Microsoft Edge is forked from it. Brave is forked from it. Opera (remember them?) forked from it over a decade ago. Perplexity (or any actually credible would-be buyer of Chrome) could just start their own fork.

There are two things Chrome has that other Chromium browsers don’t: billions of users, and integration with Google account services. Chrome has those billions of users because of the Google account integration. Severed from Google, Chrome users would lose those essential features — possibly including Google Search — and they’d likely begin switching away in droves.

I wrote just last week that Perplexity looks like a scam. Someone is spreading rumors that Apple is sniffing around at buying them, despite the fact that the two companies are an absurdly bad cultural match. I think what’s happening is that the LLM chatbot field is maturing (exemplified by OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT 5 last week), and Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas is getting increasingly desperate. Desperate moves to seek an edge in product, and desperate moves to seek publicity that Perplexity’s product can’t garner on its meager merits.

Color me mildly surprised that the Journal’s style guide spells longshot closed up. ↩︎

Monday, 11 August 2025

‘The Quid Pro Quo Arrangement Is Unprecedented’ ★

Demetri Sevastopulo and Michael Acton, reporting for the Financial Times:

Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the US government 15 per cent of the revenues from chip sales in China, as part of an unusual arrangement with the Trump administration to obtain export licences for the semiconductors. [...]

The quid pro quo arrangement is unprecedented. According to export control experts, no US company has ever agreed to pay a portion of their revenues to obtain export licences.

But the deal fits a pattern in the Trump administration where the president urges companies to take measures, such as domestic investments, for example, to prevent the imposition of tariffs in an effort to bring in jobs and revenue to America.

This FT report starts out on shaky ground, using the same “unusual agreement” euphemism as the WSJ and NYT reports, but they soon found a little backbone with “The quid pro quo arrangement is unprecedented.”

This is not merely unusual. It is unprecedented. Seemingly, too, plainly unconstitutional.

Quipped a friend: “Nvidia and AMD’s general counsels must be wondering how much of this money they can eventually get back, if we ever reverse the banana republic index.”

‘Unusual Agreements’ ★

Amrith Ramkumar and Robbie Whelan, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices have agreed to give the Trump administration a portion of the sales from their artificial-intelligence chips to China, unusual agreements that deepen their relationships with the U.S. government.

The Trump administration will receive 15% of the sales as part of a deal to approve exports of Nvidia’s H20 AI chip to China, according to people familiar with the matter. That could amount to billions of dollars given demand for the H20 chips and is the latest example of the White House employing novel tactics to raise revenue. The administration has reached the same agreement with AMD for its MI308 chip, the people said. Details of the arrangements and the financial structures are still being worked out.

Tripp Mickle, reporting on the same story for The New York Times (also a gift link):

Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices are expected to pay the United States 15 percent of the money they take in from selling artificial intelligence chips to China, as part of a highly unusual financial agreement with the Trump administration.

On Wednesday, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, met with President Trump at the White House and agreed to give the federal government its 15 percent cut, essentially making the federal government a partner in Nvidia’s business in China, said the people familiar with the deal. The Commerce Department began granting licenses for A.I. chip sales two days later, these people said. [...]

There are few precedents for the Commerce Department agreeing to grant licenses for exports in exchange for a share of revenue. But the unorthodox payments are consistent with Mr. Trump’s increasingly interventionist role in international business deals involving American companies. In June, the administration approved investment by Nippon Steel, a Japanese company, in U.S. Steel in a deal that included a so-called golden share in the company, a rarely used practice where the government takes a stake in a business.

Unusual agreements is quite the euphemism for a shakedown. US companies pay the Treasury a share of their revenue all the time, of course. That’s called taxation. But taxes are laws, written by Congress. There’s no tax here. Congress has played zero role whatsoever in these deals.

CNN, today:

President Donald Trump defended a deal he struck with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to allow the sale of certain semiconductor chips to China in exchange for the company giving the U.S. government 15 percent of the revenue.

“I said, ‘I want 20 percent if I’m going to approve this for you,’” Trump told reporters Monday during a White House press conference. “For the country, for our country. I don’t want it myself. … And he said, ‘Would you make it 15?‘ So we negotiate a little deal.”

The tell here, revealing just how fucked up this whole thing is getting, is that Trump felt the need to say “For the country, for our country. I don’t want it myself.”

Mad King Watch, Intel Edition ★

The president of the United States, on his blog three days ago:

The CEO of INTEL is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately. There is no other solution to this problem. Thank you for your attention to this problem!

The president of the United States, on his blog today:

I met with Mr. Lip-Bu Tan, of Intel, along with Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, and Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent. The meeting was a very interesting one. His success and rise is an amazing story. Mr. Tan and my Cabinet members are going to spend time together, and bring suggestions to me during the next week. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Sane, steady, predictable leadership.

Trump Extends China Tariff Deadline by 90 Days, Again ★

CNBC:

President Donald Trump on Monday delayed high U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods from snapping back into place for another 90 days, a White House official told CNBC. [...]

Monday’s extension is the latest example of how Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs have shifted with little prior notice, a dynamic that has made U.S. trade policy unpredictable for many businesses.

TACO Tuesday, but on a Monday. What a country! America really is great again.

Bonus question for the CNBC copy desk: how much water is the word many carrying in that closing sentence?

AOL Pulls the Plug on Dial-Up Service ★

Mark Tyson at Tom’s Hardware:

AOL, now a Yahoo property, will end its dial-up internet service, the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN)-based internet connectivity service, on September 30, 2025. Its dial-up service has been publicly available for 34 years, and has provided many an internet surfer’s first taste of the WWW. AOL will also end its AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser. RIP slowband.

Thomas Ricker at The Verge:

You might be surprised that the service was still operating. I’m not. At last count, a 2019 US census estimated that 265,000 people in the United States were still using dial-up internet.

Unsurprisingly, I never used AOL, but, I of course did use dial-up service to access the Internet. First for a few years while still a student at Drexel, then through some sort of commercial service here in Philadelphia. I forget the name of the company. But I do remember using IPNetRouter, a terrific classic Mac utility by Peter Sichel/Sustainable Softworks that allowed you to share a dial-up connection with your LAN. (Amazingly, the Sustainable Softworks website is still up, seemingly unchanged for decades.)

So when my now-wife and I moved in together in 1999, I set up a LAN connecting our Macs and my HP LaserJet. My Mac was connected to a modem, which used a second phone line that was just for Internet access. When either of our Macs tried to access the Internet, IPNetRouter, running all the time on my PowerMac 9600/350, would initiate a dial-up connection that both of us could use at the same time. It felt like a pretty nifty setup.

I don’t recall when we first got a broadband connection — DSL for a few years, then cable — but I’m thinking it might have been as early as 2000 or 2001. It certainly wasn’t too long after that. So I think I only ever used dial-up modems for six or seven years. Maybe eight years, tops. But in hindsight those years feel like an entire era of my life. Those connections were just breathtakingly slow. But slow, finicky Internet service in your home was infinitely more amazing and fun and useful than what we were all used to — which was not having any sort of online connectivity at all. We all knew what it was like to have “real” Internet speeds in buildings on our college campuses or, for some of us, in offices where we went to work. So we knew that even the fastest dial-up connection was painfully slow. But we made do. Software was designed to treat bandwidth — each and every request — as a precious, limited resource. It was a deliberate choice, by you, the user, to “go online” to, say, check and send email. Developers took pains to make their apps as small as possible, because downloading even a few megabytes could take a while. Websites eschewed bloat, because if a website was bloated, no one would bother going there. In some ways, overall, things were better because the technology was so much worse. My nostalgia for that era is quite profound — exemplified, of course, by my Pavlovian affection for the distinctive grating sound of a modem initiating its connection.

Sunday, 10 August 2025

WorkOS: Simplify MCP Authorization ★

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week. With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. It provides a complete User Management solution along with SSO, SCIM, and FGA. The APIs are modular and easy-to-use, allowing integrations to be completed in minutes instead of months. WorkOS simplifies MCP authorization with a single API built on five OAuth standards.

Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including Perplexity, Vercel, and Webflow.

For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.

Wednesday, 6 August 2025

OpenAI: ‘Introducing gpt-oss’ ★

OpenAI:

We’re releasing gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b — two state-of-the-art open-weight language models that deliver strong real-world performance at low cost. Available under the flexible Apache 2.0 license, these models outperform similarly sized open models on reasoning tasks, demonstrate strong tool use capabilities, and are optimized for efficient deployment on consumer hardware. They were trained using a mix of reinforcement learning and techniques informed by OpenAI’s most advanced internal models, including o3 and other frontier systems.

The gpt-oss-120b model achieves near-parity with OpenAI o4-mini on core reasoning benchmarks, while running efficiently on a single 80 GB GPU. The gpt-oss-20b model delivers similar results to OpenAI o3‑mini on common benchmarks and can run on edge devices with just 16 GB of memory, making it ideal for on-device use cases, local inference, or rapid iteration without costly infrastructure. Both models also perform strongly on tool use, few-shot function calling, CoT reasoning (as seen in results on the Tau-Bench agentic evaluation suite) and HealthBench (even outperforming proprietary models like OpenAI o1 and GPT‑4o).

Simon Willison:

The long promised OpenAI open weight models are here, and they are very impressive. [...]

o4-mini and o3-mini are really good proprietary models — I was not expecting the open weights releases to be anywhere near that class, especially given their small sizes. That gpt-oss-20b model should run quite comfortably on a Mac laptop with 32GB of RAM.

Tuesday, 5 August 2025

Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 4.1 ★

Anthropic:

GitHub notes that Claude Opus 4.1 improves across most capabilities relative to Opus 4, with particularly notable performance gains in multi-file code refactoring. Rakuten Group finds that Opus 4.1 excels at pinpointing exact corrections within large codebases without making unnecessary adjustments or introducing bugs, with their team preferring this precision for everyday debugging tasks. Windsurf reports Opus 4.1 delivers a one standard deviation improvement over Opus 4 on their junior developer benchmark, showing roughly the same performance leap as the jump from Sonnet 3.7 to Sonnet 4.

Nothing spectacular here, but incremental improvements add up. Mike Krieger — best known as a co-founder of Instagram, now chief product officer at Anthropic — in an interview with Bloomberg:

“In the past, we were too focused on only shipping the really big upgrades,” said Anthropic Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger. “It’s better at coding, better at reasoning, better at agentic tasks. We’re just making it better for people.” [...]

“One thing I’ve learned, especially in AI as it’s moving quickly, is that we can focus on what we have — and what other folks are going to do is ultimately up to them,” Krieger said when asked about OpenAI’s upcoming release. “We’ll see what ends up happening on the OpenAI side, but for us, we really just focused on what can we deliver for the customers we have.”

I’m on board with the idea that Apple need not acquire any of these AI startups, but if they do, Anthropic — not Perplexity — seems the one most aligned with Apple’s values. And I don’t mean values in just an ethical sense, but their entire approach to product development in general.

Google Dunks on Apple Intelligence in New Pixel 10 Ad ★

Tom Warren:

In a new Pixel 10 ad, Google dunks on Apple’s failed promise of Siri AI improvements, with a narrator that suggests you could “just change your phone” if you bought “a new phone because of a feature that’s coming soon, but it’s been coming soon for a full year.”

The 30-second spot appeared on YouTube and X today, teasing the launch of Google’s new Pixel 10 devices on August 20th.

The whole Siri/Apple Intelligence thing has been an enormous self-inflicted embarrassment, but when it comes to Pixel phones, all I can think of is that Mad Men “I don’t think about you at all” GIF.

Lawsuit Alleges That Meta Pirated and Seeded Massive Amounts of Porno for Years to Train AI ★

Ashley Belanger, writing for Ars Technica:

Porn sites may have blown up Meta’s key defense in a copyright fight with book authors who earlier this year said that Meta torrented “at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries” to train its AI models. [...]

After authors revealed Meta’s torrenting, Strike 3 Holdings checked its proprietary BitTorrent-tracking tools designed to detect infringement of its videos and alleged that the company found evidence that Meta has been torrenting and seeding its copyrighted content for years — since at least 2018. Some of the IP addresses were clearly registered to Meta, while others appeared to be “hidden,” and at least one was linked to a Meta employee, the filing said.

According to Strike 3 Holdings, Meta “willfully and intentionally” infringed “at least 2,396 movies” as part of a strategy to download terabytes of data as fast as possible by seeding popular high-quality porn. Supposedly, Meta continued seeding the content “sometimes for days, weeks, or even months” after downloading them, and these movies may also have been secretly used to train Meta’s AI models, Strike 3 Holdings alleged.

The porn site operator explained to the court that BitTorrent’s protocol establishes a “tit-for-tat” mechanism that “rewards users who distribute the most desired content.” It alleged that Meta took advantage of this system by “often” pirating adult videos that are “often within the most infringed files on BitTorrent websites” on “the very same day the motion pictures are released.”

Meta is an empty husk of a company with no values, no beliefs, other than growth and dominance for the sake of growth and dominance.

Ghost 6.0 ★

Ghost:

When we announced Ghost 5.0 a few years ago, we were proud to share that Ghost’s revenue had hit $4M — while publisher earnings had surpassed $10M. It felt great to have such a clear sign that our goal to create a sustainable business model for independent creators was succeeding.

Today, Ghost’s annual revenue is over $8.5M while total publisher earnings on Ghost have now surpassed $100M. [...]

Unlike our venture-backed peers obsessed with growth at all costs, we’re structured as a non-profit foundation that serves publishers directly with open source software. We believe independent media cannot be beholden to proprietary tech companies, so Ghost publishers don’t just “own their email list” — they own the entire software stack that underpins their business, end to end.

Not a centralized platform controlled by a single corporation, but open infrastructure that’s shared by everyone.

Aside from my feelings about Substack — clearly the main target of Ghost’s shade-throwing here — it’s just great to see so many indie publishers and writers thriving on Ghost.

Regarding Those Rumors of Apple Pursuing an Acquisition of Perplexity ★

MacRumors, on June 20:

Apple executives have been discussing the possibility of the company making a bid to acquire Perplexity AI, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Perplexity is one of the leading AI startups that has proven popular as an AI-infused web search engine.

From that Bloomberg report by Gurman:

Adrian Perica, the company’s head of mergers and acquisitions, has weighed the idea with services chief Eddy Cue and top AI decision-makers, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The discussions are at an early stage and may not lead to an offer, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private.

Such a deal would help Apple develop an AI-based search engine, part of efforts to cope with the potential loss of a longstanding arrangement with Google. That partnership, which involves making Google the default browser on devices, generates roughly $20 billion a year for Apple — and is now under threat from US antitrust enforcers.

To date, Apple executives haven’t discussed a bid with Perplexity management. Bloomberg News reported earlier Friday that Meta Platforms Inc. tried to buy Perplexity earlier this year.

“We have no knowledge of any current or future M&A discussions involving Perplexity,” the AI startup said in a statement. Apple declined to comment.

I think, reading between the lines of Apple’s prepared remarks and Tim Cook’s and CFO Kevan Parekh’s answers to analyst questions last week after announcing quarterly earnings, that it doesn’t sound like they believe Apple needs to make a big acquisition in this space. Apple could probably acquire Perplexity for a lot less than it would cost to acquire other companies in the space, but that’s partly because Perplexity doesn’t develop or train its own models. Perplexity primarily puts up its own front end atop models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Google, and xAI. I really don’t see what buying Perplexity would gain Apple.

But even putting that aside, it just seems like Perplexity is sketchy. This whole thing where Cloudflare seemingly caught them redhanded ignoring robots.txt directives and masquerading their user-agent makes the company seem like a poor cultural fit for Apple. I can see why Meta, a company without a moral compass, approached Perplexity to sniff around regarding an acquisition. That seems like a good cultural fit.

I can’t see why Apple would want to get involved with a company like this though. Gurman’s report makes it sound like his sources are inside Apple, but man, this “Apple + Perplexity” thing feels more like something Perplexity would be seeding than one that Apple executives would be leaking.

Cloudflare: ‘Perplexity Is Using Stealth, Undeclared Crawlers to Evade Website No-Crawl Directives’ ★

The Cloudflare blog:

We are observing stealth crawling behavior from Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine. Although Perplexity initially crawls from their declared user agent, when they are presented with a network block, they appear to obscure their crawling identity in an attempt to circumvent the website’s preferences. We see continued evidence that Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing their source ASNs to hide their crawling activity, as well as ignoring — or sometimes failing to even fetch — robots.txt files.

The Internet as we have known it for the past three decades is rapidly changing, but one thing remains constant: it is built on trust. There are clear preferences that crawlers should be transparent, serve a clear purpose, perform a specific activity, and, most importantly, follow website directives and preferences. Based on Perplexity’s observed behavior, which is incompatible with those preferences, we have de-listed them as a verified bot and added heuristics to our managed rules that block this stealth crawling. [...]

Our multiple test domains explicitly prohibited all automated access by specifying in robots.txt and had specific WAF rules that blocked crawling from Perplexity’s public crawlers. We observed that Perplexity uses not only their declared user-agent, but also a generic browser intended to impersonate Google Chrome on macOS when their declared crawler was blocked.

Perplexity has responded, accusing Cloudflare of incompetence and publicity-seeking:

Because Cloudflare has conveniently obfuscated their methodology and declined to answer questions helping our teams understand, we can only narrow this down to two possible explanations.

Cloudflare needed a clever publicity moment and we–their own customer–happened to be a useful name to get them one.

Cloudflare fundamentally misattributed 3-6M daily requests from BrowserBase’s automated browser service to Perplexity, a basic traffic analysis failure that’s particularly embarrassing for a company whose core business is understanding and categorizing web traffic.

Whichever explanation is the truth, the technical errors in Cloudflare’s analysis aren’t just embarrassing — they’re disqualifying. When you misattribute millions of requests, publish completely inaccurate technical diagrams, and demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of how modern AI assistants work, you’ve forfeited any claim to expertise in this space.

Perplexity’s response makes it sound like Cloudflare just doesn’t get how leading-edge AI chatbots work, and what users expect of them. But going back to Cloudflare’s post, they specifically cite OpenAI as an exemplar in respecting the directives of website publishers:

When we ran the same test as outlined above with ChatGPT, we found that ChatGPT-User fetched the robots file and stopped crawling when it was disallowed. We did not observe follow-up crawls from any other user agents or third party bots. When we removed the disallow directive from the robots entry, but presented ChatGPT with a block page, they again stopped crawling, and we saw no additional crawl attempts from other user agents. Both of these demonstrate the appropriate response to website owner preferences.

And nothing in Perplexity’s response attempts to explain Cloudflare’s accusation that Perplexity is adopting a false generic user-agent when their own declared user-agents are disallowed. Seems shifty to me.

‘Apple: The First 50 Years’ – New Book by David Pogue, Coming Next Year ★

Coming March 17, 2026:

In time for Apple’s 50th anniversary, “CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent David Pogue tells the iconic company’s entire life story: how it was born, nearly died, was born again under Steve Jobs, and became, under CEO Tim Cook, one of the most valuable companies in the world.

The 600-page book features 360 full-color photos, new facts that correct the record and illuminate Apple’s subversive culture, and 150 fresh interviews with the legendary figures who shaped Apple into what it is today.

Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Has a Rollable Expanding Display ★

Antonio G. Di Benedetto:

Part of me still can’t believe it, but Lenovo did the thing: it took a bonkers concept for a laptop with a rollable screen and built the tech into something you can actually own and use like a normal computer. Except, as conventional as the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 can be, it’s far from a normal computer. It’s a $3,300 laptop with a screen that expands from 14 inches to 16.7 inches at the push of a button.

Oh, and it’s actually good. Not just good, but very good. I still can’t believe it.

Di Benedetto, as you can see, is enthusiastic for the laptop. I think it’s a clever idea, but this first instance seems pretty compromised:

As with a foldable phone, you can see some creases and ripples in the screen’s lower third — the part that rolls up — especially at oblique angles. If I look closely while working on a bright-white document, I can sometimes make out a faint shadowy strip, but I rarely see it, even when staring at that spot. The motorized screen takes about eight seconds to extend or retract, and it’s no louder than the fans on an average gaming laptop. People right near you in a quiet space will hear it, but even ambient sounds like a TV in the background easily mask the motor.

The New York Post Is Expanding to LA, Launching The California Post Next Year ★

Alexandra Steigrad, reporting for The New York Post:

The new publication will be headquartered in Los Angeles and feature a robust staff of editors, reporters and photographers dedicated to covering news, entertainment, politics, culture, sports and business — all with a distinctly California perspective.

The California Post will be supported by the team in New York providing national and international news. The content will appear in a daily print edition and will have its own dedicated homepage for Californians with stories being published across multiple other platforms, including video, audio and social media.

Who says print is dead?

Apple Q3 2025 Results and Charts ★

Jason Snell, at Six Colors:

On Thursday, Apple reported its third-quarter 2025 fiscal results. Revenue was $94 billion (a fiscal third-quarter record), up 10% versus the year-ago quarter. Mac revenue was up 15%, iPhone revenue up 13%, and Services revenue up 13%. The Wearables/Home/Accessories category was down 9% and iPad revenue down 8%.

Two notes from the analyst call and prepared remarks. First, Apple did, for the first time, acknowledge the risk that Judge Amit Mehta, when he issues his remedies in the US v. Google case, might ban Google from making traffic acquisition cost payments, which would cut off at least $20 billion per year in Apple’s revenue. But while Apple is acknowledging there’s a risk, they’re not giving any hint what they plan to do if that happens. From the call:

Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Hi, yes, thank you so much. Tim, I know you said similar growth in Services and that’s predicated with Google payments continuing. Is there any way for us to dimensionalize or maybe just conceptually talk about maybe options if the counter were to happen, if the payments were not allowed in some way? What are some of the things that Apple could do given that it is a significant chunk of profitability?

Tim Cook: Yeah, Wamsi, I don’t really want to speculate on the court ruling and how they would rule and what we would do as a consequence of it.

Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: OK, I guess we’ll wait for that ruling to come out.

Yes, I guess we will.

Similarly, on AI strategy and which aspects Apple sees as commodities and which it deems as essential and proprietary:

Krish Sankar, TD Cowen: Tim, I’m curious about your thoughts on AI for edge devices. You know, there’s like some people who think that LLM could be a commodity in the future. Do you see a scenario where LLMs become a core part of your iOS, or is the SLM the way to go, and how to think about evolution of edge devices in a futuristic AI world, and is smartphone going to be the choice of device? I’m curious your thoughts on it, broadly speaking.

Tim Cook: The way that we look at AI is that it’s one of the most profound technologies of our lifetime, and I think it will affect all devices in a significant way. What pieces of the chain are commoditized and not commoditized, I wouldn’t want to really talk about today because that gives away some things on our strategy, but I think it’s a good question.

These quarterly calls are better than nothing, but when it comes to anything not in their prepared statements, Apple seldom reveals anything at all.

Sunday, 3 August 2025

Hello Weather ★

My thanks to Hello Weather for sponsoring last week at DF. Regular readers know that I am an inveterate aficionado of weather apps. I’m not really much of a meteorology nerd, but I’m a pedestrian in a city with widely varying seasons. But even more so, I find weather apps to be a true playground for UI design and the presentation of quantitative information. Different weather apps take very different approaches, and I find the differences fascinating.

I first recommended Hello Weather back in 2021, and it’s been in my regular rotation of weather apps ever since. Back at the beginning of summer when they booked the sponsorship for this week, I started using the new version 4.0 (now up to 4.1.4) as my daily driver. I love it. It even has one of my favorite features for hot humid summers — a preference to set “feels like” as the primary temperature display (including in places like widgets). Hello Weather remains, as ever, attractive and useful in its design. And it offers everything you want in an iOS weather app: widgets for the home screen and Lock Screen, a Watch app, notification options (precipitation, severe storms, morning/evening forecast reports), and, wow, a veritable slew of forecast data providers to choose from.

Hello Weather’s privacy story is perfect: they collect zero user data, have no tracking or ads, and their privacy policy is written by humans for humans.

I highly recommend you download Hello Weather and start a 7-day free trial.

How to Leave Substack ★

Simple single-page website with (a) reasons to leave Substack; (b) links to comprehensive step-by-step instructions for how to move to other platforms, such as Ghost, Buttondown, and Beehiiv; and (c) links to several popular publications that moved and are glad they did.

Google Reverses Course, Will Keep goo.gl Links Redirecting ★

Google:

While we previously announced discontinuing support for all goo.gl URLs after August 25, 2025, we’ve adjusted our approach in order to preserve actively used links. We understand these links are embedded in countless documents, videos, posts and more, and we appreciate the input received.

Nine months ago, we redirected URLs that showed no activity in late 2024 to a message specifying that the link would be deactivated in August, and these are the only links targeted to be deactivated. If you get a message that states, “This link will no longer work in the near future”, the link won’t work after August 25 and we recommend transitioning to another URL shortener if you haven’t already.

All other goo.gl links will be preserved and will continue to function as normal. To check if your link will be retained, visit the link today. If your link redirects you without a message, it will continue to work.

Nice!

Saturday, 2 August 2025

Ana Marie Cox on the Shaky Foundation of Substack as a Business ★

Ana Marie Cox, who knows a thing or two about indie publishing and journalism, on her AMC All the Time blog about a month ago:

My take is more dire, because I’m not sure about “savvy and stamina” as the distinguishing characteristics of those who might be able to migrate elsewhere. I think plenty of smart folks might find themselves stuck.

Substack is rickety. It’s as unstable as a SpaceX launch, as overpromised as a Stephen Miller marriage.

Substack does not have a clear future as a newsletter business, I’m not the first to notice that. But it doesn’t have to fail outright to be a disaster. It just has to keep trying to become a life-sized map of the internet: maximum content, maximum churn. The center cannot hold — especially not for newsletters, a format that depends on intimacy and long-standing trust.

The Substack bust will not just take out a few hot-take merchants and media dilettantes. It’s going to take down a lot of working journalists who’ve built modest, sustainable incomes as well as the fragile public sphere we’ve been piecing together in the ashes of Twitter and the twilight of traditional journalism.

Taylor Lorenz’s scoop today on Substack’s Nazi notification oopsie reminded me that I’ve been meaning to link to this post from Cox casting a serious stink eye at Substack’s business. As she says up front, “Let’s set Substack’s ‘Nazi problem’ aside for a moment. What if the bigger issue is being stranded on a collapsing platform ... with a bunch of Nazis?”

Substack pitches itself to would-be independent writers as a thriving platform that’s fundamentally about independent blog publishing and email newsletter distribution. That could be a great business. But it would be a relatively small business compared to Substack’s fund raising (over $100 million so far, and currently looking to raise more) and the implied valuation that fund raising implies (at one point, they were pitching investors that they were worth $1 billion, which is about as realistic as El Gringo Loco Anaranjado’s promises that Mexico will pay for a US border wall).

Ghost is a platform and business that’s actually built for independent writers. So is Buttondown (which Cox uses for her site). Beehiiv too. There’s a whole cottage industry of creator-oriented blog-cum-newsletter platforms. Substack, on the other hand, is a trap. It breaks my heart to see great writers as disparate as Paul Krugman and Michael Chabon set up their ostensibly independent presences on Substack. Writers check in, but — if Substack gets their way — they won’t check out.

Looking at the numbers Cox lays out, Substack’s future looks even worse than I thought. Before they go under, though, their investors will put the screws to them, and Substack will take its heel turn.

Substack Sends Notification Promoting Nazi Blog ★

Ashley Belanger, writing for Ars Technica:

After Substack shocked an unknown number of users by sending a push notification on Monday to check out a Nazi blog featuring a swastika icon, the company quickly apologized for the “error,” tech columnist Taylor Lorenz reported. [...]

Substack has long faced backlash for allowing users to share their “extreme views” on the platform, previously claiming that “censorship (including through demonetizing publications)” doesn’t make “the problem go away — in fact, it makes it worse,” Lorenz noted. But critics who have slammed Substack’s rationale revived their concerns this week, with some accusing Substack of promoting extreme content through features like their push alerts and “rising” lists, which flag popular newsletters and currently also include Nazi blogs.

Gizmodo reports:

The publication in question, NatSocToday, describes itself as a “National Socialist weekly newsletter featuring opinions and news important to the National Socialist and White Nationalist Community.” The newsletter’s image header is a Nazi flag, and its latest post, as of Wednesday, was an article that includes the sentence: “We demand the return of all territory currently occupied by jews and non-Whites in historically White homelands.” It does not appear to be a particularly popular blog, and currently has fewer than a thousand subscribers.

A mantra of “we host all views, but don’t promote or endorse all views” doesn’t hold much water when you promote a blog whose logo is a straight-up Nazi swastika.

Friday, 1 August 2025

The Talk Show: ‘Michigan-Starred Fine Dining’ ★

Special guest Louie Mantia joins the show to talk about Liquid Glass, the various OS 26 updates, and the worrisome state of Apple’s UI design overall. Also: sandwiches.

Sponsored by:

Quip: A supercharged clipboard manager and text expander for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
Notion: The best AI tool for work, with your notes, docs, and projects in one space.
Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow.