Linked List: October 16, 2026

Friday, 16 October 2026

The Late Charlie Munger on Elon Musk and Tesla ★

Re: my post today on the still-vaporware Tesla Roadster and Benedict Evans’s maxim that “Elon Musk is a bullshitter who delivers”, a reader sent me this YouTube short of Charlie Munger’s answer to a question at Daily Journal’s 2020 shareholder meeting regarding Tesla’s volatility and Musk’s self-promotion. Munger said:

My thoughts are two. I would never buy it, and I would never sell it short.

[Audience laughs.]

I have a third comment. There was a man out in Los Angeles for years named Howard Ahmanson. He once said something that I’ve taken to my heart: “Never underestimate the man who overestimates himself.” I think Elon Musk is peculiar and he may overestimate himself, but he may not be wrong all the time.

Apple: ‘Strengthening App Review Guidelines Against Nonconsensual Intimate Imagery and Bait-And-Switch Apps’ ★

Apple Developer News:

As outlined in our App Review Guidelines, pornographic material has long been prohibited on the App Store — this includes apps that generate nudity or sexually explicit imagery, such as “nudification” apps that create sexually explicit images of real individuals without their consent. Apps that host user-generated content are required to filter objectionable material, give users a way to report offensive content, and let users block abusive accounts. Apps containing hidden or undocumented features are also prohibited on the App Store, including apps that misrepresent their purpose during review and only reveal harmful capabilities — such as “nudification” — after approval, a tactic commonly known as bait-and-switch.

Their post includes the specific changes to the guidelines. Let’s hope the guideline changes are accompanied by better enforcement.

Of course, it’s worth noting that the best known perpetrator of AI-generated non-consensual nudification is X, which (checks notes) is where Apple executives do all their social media posting, and which, yes, I argue once again marks the spot in the zeitgeist. The zeitgeist is not clean.

Apple TV Started at $69 in 2015 ★

Joe Rossignol, reporting for MacRumors back on 9 March 2015:

Apple CEO Tim Cook on Monday at the “Spring Forward” media event in San Francisco announced that Apple TV will now cost $69, discounted from its regular price of $99. The new price for the set-top box arrives on the heels of the announcement of HBO Now for Apple TV. The new price appears to apply to the third-generation Apple TV, as the company did not announce a new set-top box on stage at the Yerba Buena Center this afternoon.

Basic Apple Guy posted a short clip of Tim Cook, on stage, announcing the price reduction. Cook said:

And it’s got a very attractive entry level price of $99. But today, we would like to make it even more accessible for more people so they can take advantage of this great new content. So we are lowering the price today to $69.

The audience greeted this with whoops and cheers. (This, despite it being a smaller media event — Apple always packs the front of the house with employee ringers. Whoops and cheers are one of the things Apple is missing out on with their post-COVID pre-filmed keynotes.)

Apple continued selling the 3rd-gen Apple TV (not to be confused with “Apple TV 4K”, which restarted the generation counting in 2017 alongside the introduction of the iPhone X) for $69 until October 2016.

Inflation adjusted, a $69 Apple TV box today would cost a little under $99. Even if we only consider the $99 price in 2015 dollars, that’s about $137 in today’s dollars. Round that up to $150 and it would still be half the price of the only Apple TV hardware Apple now sells: this week’s new 4th-gen Apple TV 4K.

The new Siri Remote, with precision Find My support (and a speaker), is compatible with all prior generations of Apple TV 4K. So if you just want the new remote you can just buy the new remote. But it costs $59, which is almost as much as an entire Apple TV (with remote, of course) did in 2015.

Strange Times Make for Strange Bedfellows ★

Mark Zuckerberg, on X:

Muse Spark Open — weights releasing today — runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple.

John Ternus, replying:

Congrats to the team! Amazing to run a model of Muse Spark Open’s caliber and scale this efficiently, right from your desk. Mac Studio keeps pushing the boundaries of on-device AI!

You will recall that the M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 512 GB RAM is set to ship by “the end of October”, and we’re midway through the month. You will also recall, from that same announcement, that multiple Macs can be clustered together via Thunderbolt — four Mac Studios can be connected to each other.

For Ternus, I could do without the second exclamation mark. For Zuckerberg, it’s fascinating that he had to post this on X, despite owning Threads, because no one at Apple uses Threads.

Zuckerberg has been posting somewhat regularly to X for months now, particularly regarding AI. Alex Heath asked him about it on his Sources podcast a month ago. From that one-minute clip:

Threads is doing great. I think it’s actually ... either bigger than X at this point, or it’s like very soon about to be. But, I mean, look, there are different communities in the different places. There’s a lot of AI folks on X, and I think part of what you try to do with social media is just communicate where people are, right?

Lastly, there’s this “1984” spoof posted by Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief of AI and mulletry, which I find both amusing and painful.

How They Got Duo Support in NetNewsWire ★

From the NetNewsWire blog:

The latest version of NetNewsWire for iOS supports iPhone Duo, which is very much a novel iPhone with toolbars running up the side and all kinds of behavior.

How we did it: we didn’t do any work at all. We built the app using Xcode 27.1 and the default iOS SDK that comes with it, and that’s it.

Here’s the thing, though: we were already using standard controls — toolbars, navigation controllers, split views, etc. — and we were paying attention to size classes and such (as opposed to just looking at device type).

Develop your app the right way and, depending on the app, it might literally be no work at all to produce a great version for the Duo. Develop your app the wrong way and it might take months. NetNewsWire is one of my most-used apps. I keep it in my home screen dock, alongside Messages, Notes, and Safari. It would drive me nuts to use a Duo without a version of NetNewsWire that adapts to the Duo’s novel display sizes.

Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, Says AI Researchers Have Started Smoking Because They’re Convinced AI (Claude, Probably) Is Going to Cure Cancer ★

From the transcript of Sunday’s Face the Nation on CBS:

Shyam Sankar: You know, I take — I think there’s a profound truth to Pascal’s saying that every human has a god-shaped hole in their heart, and it’s important to understand that many of these folks in Silicon Valley who are building this technology have filled that hole with the machine God of AGI. And I mean, there’s so many interesting stories around this. Like, for example, so many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI. I believe so much — (CROSSTALK)

Margaret Brennan: What? That makes no sense. What do you think —

Shyam Sankar: I believe so much in AI that it’s going to cure cancer. So I will — I’m showing you my chips are all in. So there is kind of this mass psychosis, social delusion around it, and I think it’s getting in the way of actually what is happening with AI.

Sankar doesn’t name anyone, alas, but if there’s any truth to this (and good god do I hope there is) it’s got to be Anthropic researchers specifically. They’re the religious kooks who believe they’re creating an AI god and hold the psychotic belief that Claude is already conscious. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, you crazy fucks.

Via Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion, who notes that the nation’s finest news source was on this story 13 years ago.

iPhone Duo Pre-Orders Launched, and Three Hours Later It’s Sold Out Through the End of January ★

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

If you were hoping to surprise someone with an iPhone Duo for Christmas, you might be out of luck, as Apple’s online store in the U.S. is already showing an estimated shipping date of January 25 for all configurations following the start of pre-orders today.

It is possible that some Apple Stores will have the iPhone Duo available for walk-in customers on Friday, October 23 launch day, but it seems likely that inventory will be very tight.

I suspect it’s a combination of high demand and low supply but I doubt we’ll get any insight on that from Apple itself. It’s in their interest to let people think demand is simply very high, and not draw attention to their production limits.

I feel for the folks on the West Coast who woke up for a 5:00am start and still got stuck with December or even January ship dates. This is one of those times where it’s frustrating that, per Apple’s consistent schedule, pre-orders always start before reviews appear. People are left to guess whether they’re going to like it without any word from people who’ve used it.