The Talk Show: Live From WWDC
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Linked List: June 2026

Friday, 5 June 2026

Laura Hazard Owen, writing for Nieman Journalism Lab back in April:

I used Claude to help me scrape the 200 most recent tweets from 18 large publishers’ X accounts and track the engagement (likes + comments + retweets) on each. Six of those publishers have paywalls: Bloomberg, CNN, Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Nine don’t: Al Jazeera English, AP, BBC, Breitbart News, CBS News, Daily Wire, Fox News, NBC News, and Reuters. The last three accounts I looked at — Leading Report, unusual_whales, and Globe Eye News — are not news publishers, but aggregate breaking news in tweets without links. (Here, for example, is an example of a Leading Report tweet: “BREAKING: Iran has halted direct talks with the US, per WSJ.” They’re sometimes referred to as engagement-maxing accounts.

These charts make it pretty clear that links in tweets hurt engagement. The connection was so apparent in my analysis that a graph including all 18 publishers is almost unreadable: The traditional, link-loving publishers are clustered in the bottom left corner (lots of links, little engagement) in a nearly indistinguishable mass of bubbles, no matter how large their followings are.

Musk’s Twitter/X is not an aggregator for news. It’s a walled garden. But the type of garden where you need to keep your eyes open and your hand on your wallet. Sometimes it’s fun to visit a seedy neighborhood. But let’s not pretend it isn’t a seedy neighborhood just because, long ago, it used to be nice.

Elon Musk’s X Is a Freak Show 

Nate Silver, back in April, under the headline “Social Media Is Turning Into a Freak Show”, where by “social media” he mostly discusses Twitter/X:

But what does that remaining traffic consist of? I recently came across a bubble chart depicting the Twitter accounts that had received the most “engagement” in February 2026. It was depressing: most of the top accounts were extremely low-quality and highly partisan. I hadn’t even heard of many of them and only follow a handful of the top accounts. So I tracked down the original data myself and, with help from Claude, made my own improved version of the chart. Here, voilà, are the Twitter accounts with the most engagement so far in 2026:

Data from Cluvio showing most engagements among X accounts from Jan. 1 to Apr. 4, 2026.

It’s not hard to notice that Twitter has become extremely right-leaning. But I’d argue there’s an equally important trend: the top accounts are of incredibly low quality. Elon, with the algorithmic boost he built in for himself, is at the eye of the storm, of course. But “Catturd” literally gets far more engagement than the New York Times, for instance.

There’s a common argument from proponents of the Musk-era X that the only problem is that left-leaning people have abandoned the platform. That the X algorithm is a contest and if only right-leaning accounts are playing, of course they’re winning. This is nonsense. The whole thing is rigged. Elon Musk’s outsized prominence as the most-engaged-with account is proof of that. Twitter existed for 16 years before Musk bought it. He wasn’t even close to the biggest account during that era. Then he bought it. Now his account is the biggest.

As Silver’s data analysis shows, Musk’s X is not just dominated by right-wing accounts, it’s dominated by “who the hell is that?” right-wing slop accounts.

The only way not to lose a rigged game is to refuse to play. X is still a thing. A lot of people, companies, and organizations still post there — treat it like their blogs — exclusively. I still wind up linking to posts on X because that’s where they are. That’s a whole separate discussion. But anyone who’s trying to “compete” there with subject matter that is even vaguely political has no chance of success unless what they’re posting is what Elon Musk wants to see promoted. It’s not like his thumb is on the scale, it’s like an anvil is on the scale. The conundrum is that there are still a lot interesting people posting interesting things there.

Checking in on Perplexity 

Yours truly, last August:

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.

Perplexity is still occasionally in the news (often not in good ways), but it seems to me they’ve slipped into the “afterthought” tier of AI startups — which is exactly why they started leaning into clownish stunts last year. Everyone who previously suggested Apple should — or even might — buy them has gone silent.

Thursday, 4 June 2026

Some People Rooted for The Empire in ‘Star Wars’, Too 

Ed Morrissey, writing for Hot Air, thinks Scott Pelley got what he deserved and Bari Weiss is doing a good job running CBS News:

And Pelley forgot the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. Instead, Pelley convinced himself of his own virtue and torched his own position — and if Bilton’s letter is accurate, in as mean-spirited and conceited a manner as possible. Pelley could have chosen a dignified resignation under protest, but instead pulled a power move in an attempt to intimidate Bilton, Weiss, and Ellison, only to discover that no one feared his absence. In fact, they’re probably happy to cut him loose.

There’s always at least one person in these situations who thinks they’re untouchable. A wise executive knows to start by making an example of that person, and then see how many other people think they’re indispensable. It’s not as if TV news jobs are expanding these days, after all. Pelley’s going to find out the hard way that no one’s paying $5 million a year to emote into a camera from other people’s copy.

It doesn’t even enter this man’s little mind that Pelley wasn’t concerned about his job, wasn’t concerned about his salary, but was concerned only with the integrity of the institution to which he’d committed decades of his career, and that he saw as his duty the need to stand up for his remaining and former colleagues. That Pelley himself has integrity. To the Trump lickspittles, everything is performative. They don’t just lack integrity, they don’t believe integrity is real.

Katie Notopoulos:

The Scott Pelley story to me is a lesson in how if you work hard enough in your career to get Fuck You Money, the real reward is the day you need to say it, you can.

The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2026: Tuesday in San Jose 

Location: The California Theatre, San Jose
Showtime: Tuesday, 9 June 2026, 7pm PT (Doors open 6pm)
Special Guest(s): For sure
Price: $45

The annual live audience episode of The Talk Show during the week of WWDC. If you can make it, you should come. You’ll even enjoy the prelude, mingling with fellow DF readers and listeners.

‘The Insider’ 

All this Sturm und Drang surrounding 60 Minutes has me thinking about a re-watch of The Insider, Michael Mann’s great 1999 movie. Letterboxd’s synopsis: “A research chemist comes under personal and professional attack when he decides to appear in a 60 Minutes exposé on Big Tobacco.” It’s a great movie, and feels apt AF at the moment. Here’s the original segment on 60 Minutes, which ran an entire half hour.

What’s going on today is like if — instead of getting shady, threatening, and litigious — the tobacco companies had just purchased CBS, purged the staff at 60 Minutes, and hired a bunch of pro-cigarette stooges to replace them.

‘Microsoft and OpenAI Broke Up — Now They’re Ready to Fight’ 

Hayden Field and Tom Warren, writing for The Verge (gift link):

This year’s Build had the vibe of a freshly single divorcée posting a thirst trap on Instagram. “It’s always fun to be at developer conferences in times of great change,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said onstage Tuesday, adding that events like this are about “coming to grips with the new opportunity.”

AI chief Mustafa Suleyman, in an interview with The Verge, put it even more bluntly.

“The goal is to prove that we can become one of the top four labs in the world,” Suleyman said. “There’s three labs that matter, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. We are not one of them at the moment, and that’s always been my intention. It’s why I came here. I want to build the very best frontier models in the world, fully multimodal, and in order to do that, we have to prove that we can do everything that we need to from the ground up, and we’re not just going to take from others.”

Refreshingly blunt.

But hasn’t that been Microsoft’s plan for Bing since it was announced in 2009? I mean I guess you can say that Bing is one of the top four search engines in the world. Maybe you can even say it’s one of the top two. But it’s irrelevant and uncompetitive with Google Search.

Lingon and Lingon Pro 10 

Peter Borg:

Lingon makes scheduling apps, scripts, shortcuts, and commands feel simple. Create a task in minutes, run it on a schedule, and stay in control.

Lingon helps you run whatever you want whenever you want without living in Terminal. Schedule apps, scripts, shortcuts, and commands with a clear, friendly UI.

Run tasks at specific times, on intervals or at login. Optional notifications make it easy to keep control.

Two separate apps. Lingon is the simpler Mac App Store version and free to use, while Lingon Pro is the advanced one-time purchase with extra power.

Lingon and Lingon Pro are great apps. I’ve been meaning to recommend them for a while.

Back in 2023 I wrote about a problem I was having with Maestral, the incredible “works like Dropbox in the old days” open-source Dropbox client, where Maestral would just silently crash once in a while and I wouldn’t notice for a while. Then I would notice, manually re-launch Maestral, and have to wait while Maestral synced. Or, worse, I’d put a podcast recording in a shared folder and walk away from my computer, and my editor would never get the file because Maestral wasn’t running. My write-up described how I solved the problem with a Keyboard Maestro macro that runs once an hour — it checks if Maestral is running, and if it isn’t, launches it (and writes to a log, to satisfy my own curiosity). Borg wrote to me after I posted that and — very politely — explained that Lingon would make that much simpler.

In addition to creating your own scripts and rules that run periodically, Lingon is great for inspecting all the login items and background agents on your system — whether they’re from Apple or third parties. Poking around at everything Google Gemini installed is what made me think to recommend Lingon today. At the very least you should install the free regular version. It’s just a great Mac utility from a great Mac developer. There’s nothing else like it.

Remember When Chrome Went Bad on MacOS? 

Loren Brichter, back in 2020:

Short story: Google Chrome installs an updater called Keystone on your computer, which is bizarrely correlated to massive unexplained CPU usage in WindowServer (a system process)[1], and made my whole computer slow even when Chrome wasn’t running. Deleting Chrome and Keystone made my computer way, way faster, all the time.

Long story: I noticed my brand new 16” MacBook Pro started acting sluggishly doing even trivial things like scrolling. Activity Monitor showed nothing from Google using the CPU, but WindowServer was taking ~80%, which is abnormally high (it should use < 10% normally).

Doing all the normal things (quitting apps, logging out other users, restarting, zapping PRAM/SMC, etc) did nothing, then I remembered I had installed Chrome a while back to test a website.

I deleted Chrome, and noticed Keystone while deleting some of Chrome’s other preferences and caches. I deleted everything from Google I could find, restarted the computer, and it was like night-and-day. Everything was instantly and noticeably faster, and WindowServer CPU was well under 10% again.

Not all Mac users, but many, found that just having Chrome installed slowed down their Macs dramatically. Completely uninstalling Chrome — and its pernicious background agents — solved the problem. This years-old “Chrome Is Bad” saga came to mind when I wrote about Google’s Gemini Mac app’s background agents.

It seems as though Google eventually fixed these Chrome bugs — or Apple changed something in a MacOS update that fixed the bugs for them — but I’ve never seen a full explanation of the problem and eventual solution. Does anyone know what happened here?

The main point is it never should have happened in the first place. A third-party app should just be a third-party app — not add components to your system software just so it can update itself when it isn’t running. Background agents and extensions are sometimes necessary to the functionality of a product. Checking for software updates to a browser or AI chatbot, when those apps aren’t running, is not necessary. The golden rule applies: imagine if every app on your system installed its own background agent to check for software updates. Chrome is a popular browser on the Mac, but it’s just a web browser. Other web browsers do just fine checking for updates from the browser itself when they’re running. If the user is actually using an app regularly, it’ll get plenty of chances to check for updates when it’s running. If the user isn’t regularly using an app, why in the world should that seldom-used app have software running all the time in the background?

This sort of chaos is why Apple keeps iOS locked down. There are no third-party login items on iOS that run in the background — let alone ones with no option to disable. No third-party app can do anything that causes the iOS window manager to consume 80 percent of the CPU while ostensibly idle. There are obviously trade-offs here. I rely on a Mac for my workstation because the Mac gives me the power to potentially shoot myself in the foot. But one major reason why iOS is an order of magnitude more popular than MacOS is because you cannot shoot yourself in the foot with it, even though that means you can’t use it to do things that would require that power.

Google’s Gemini Mac App Is Native, in a Distinctly Google Way, But Annoyingly Presumptuous 

Two months ago Google launched a new native Mac app for Gemini. I’ve been trying it, on and off, since. It’s ... not bad. Certainly better than Claude’s Electron shitbox. But the Gemini app isn’t all that good, either. I’m sticking with ChatGPT, which remains far and away the best native Mac client to an LLM. (And ChatGPT is not that great of a Mac app — it’s just the closest to good of the bunch.)

The thing that really turns me off about the Gemini Mac app is Google’s gall. The Gemini app installs a background helper named “GeminiAppLauncher” in your login items. It also installs “GoogleUpdater” as a process with the privilege to launch in the background whenever it wants. Gemini never asks for permission to install either of these, and, most arrogantly, if you, as an informed user, remove either of them, the Gemini app silently adds them back. There is no setting in Gemini to disable this. There’s a mindset from some big companies that your system is theirs to play with at the system software level. Fuck that. Michael Tsai’s post on the Gemini Mac app links to this thread on MacRumors regarding this pernicious auto-installed and auto-reinstalled login item. Here’s another on Reddit.

Google’s approach to its Mac software is disrespectful and entitled.

I’d have been happy to keep the Gemini app installed if it just sat in my Applications folder when I wasn’t using it. But it doesn’t, and Google shows no signs of caring, so I just deleted it and uninstalled its background launch agents (in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/). Feels great, like I took a much needed shower.

(Sidenote: The Gemini Mac app is a native Mac app, but it is ... weird. Gus Mueller poked around at it and found that it’s the product of a Java-to-Objective-C converter that Google made, and much of it was originally written for Android.)

The AI-Driven Resurgence of Native Mac App Development 

Jason Snell at Six Colors, looking ahead to WWDC next week:

These days, I’m getting emails pitching me for an endless stream of new Mac apps. It’s quite remarkable because there was a period five or ten years ago when it seemed like all app development on Apple’s platforms was focused on iOS. Even more interesting, these are all indie Mac apps that seem to be built using native Mac frameworks, not the product of big corporations that are just rolling their cross-platform development system out everywhere. These apps seem to have a point of view and are focused on the Mac.

Of course, it’s happening because of AI. [...]

Mac users — some of them developers, some of them people who have never written software in their lives — are building apps that fulfill their imaginations.

We now live in an era where, if you can dream an app, you can probably build it. Especially Mac utilities. And who cares more about native Mac software than Mac users? Certainly not those companies that gave up on Mac development and focused all their energies on giant cross-platform code bases to attract venture investment and big payouts.

There are pros and cons to everything, but on the whole, AI-assisted programming has rejuvenated Mac development. It wasn’t moribund, but it was stagnant. And stagnation is the first step toward decline. Now it’s resurgent, and that’s a fun thing to see. And, I think, genuinely important for the future of the platform. I’ve been concerned for years that the biggest problem the Mac faces is that so many new apps for the platform weren’t Mac apps. The Mac has never faced a decline in popularity, but truly native Mac application development (and the skills) did. Now it’s turning around. Mac users are thirsty for Mac apps, and with AI, they can quench their own thirst and tell the dullards promulgating Electron bundles to pound sand.

(And Snell, it turns out, has joined the party.)

Wednesday, 3 June 2026

Another Gem From the Annals of Nick Bilton Jackassery 

I look forward to pseudoscience like this finally getting some airtime on 60 Minutes. For 58 long years the program has been hopelessly biased toward actual science.

If There’s One Thing Nick Bilton Knows, It’s Television 

Back in 2011, when he was a tech columnist at The New York Times, Nick Bilton figured out that Apple was soon going to launch an Apple branded-television set, with no remote control. You’d just talk to it. This made no sense of course, as I pointed out.

Bilton closed his column thus:

The company is now close enough that it could announce the product by late 2012, releasing it to consumers by 2013.

It is coming though. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.

Maybe it’ll launch in time for Bilton’s first season at the helm of 60 Minutes this fall, with his all-new lineup of correspondents.

Scott Pelley on Leaving ‘60 Minutes’: ‘Incompetence and Unprofessionalism in the New Management Have Wreaked Havoc’ 

Scott Pelley, in a statement posted on Instagram (which I’ll quote in full, as the original is locked behind a dickwall if you’re not signed in to an Instagram account):

There has never been anything in America like 60 Minutes.

The Sunday tradition is the most successful program of any kind in history. For more than a decade, its innovative growth on every major online platform has extended its reach to countless millions around the world. This spring, at the end of our 58th season, 60 Minutes grew rapidly with an unheard-of 9% jump in viewers on CBS.

“60” has been the number-one program in America for decades because our beloved audience finds integrity, quality, and humanity in our stories. When stewardship of the program passed to my colleagues and me, our responsibility was to expand energetically into a new age of media technology while preserving the values our audience expects. Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.

The waste is heartbreaking.

Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.

For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them.

Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how honest journalism is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.

At 60 Minutes, we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to “keep up the good fight.” Most of my colleagues at CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.

I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion — a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again — a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.

The ‘60 Minutes’ Purge 

Paramount’s “Press Express” page promoting 60 Minutes still lists all eight correspondents from the 2025–2026 season, the program’s 58th. (Perhaps they fired the person responsible for keeping the cast page up to date.) In the order they appear on Paramount’s listing:

A big part of the brand for 60 Minutes is that the show doesn’t change. Someone who last saw it 40 years ago would instantly recognize it today. There’s no silly fucking theme song. There’s no glossy set. There’s a ticking stopwatch, a logotype set in Microgramma/Eurostile, and correspondents sit against a black background. And correspondents measure their tenure not by years but by decades. Of the original hosts, Harry Reasoner was there for 23 years (and left the cast only upon his death at 68 in 1991), Dan Rather was there for 38 years, Mike Wallace for 40, and Morley Safer for 48. 48 years! Of the current hosts, Lesley Stahl has been there since 1991. I graduated high school that year.

In just six months since David Ellison bought CBS and installed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, they’ve fired or lost half their on-air talent, and of the four who remain, Wertheim and O’Donnell are only part-time (O’Donnell’s title is “CBS News senior correspondent”, not “60 Minutes correspondent”), Whitaker is 74 years old, and Stahl is 84.

Behind the cameras, longtime executive producer Bill Owens resigned in protest of corporate interference a year ago, in the cowardly run-up to Ellison’s acquisition of CBS. Last week Weiss fired Owens’s successor, Tanya Simon, who had been with the program for 30 years, replacing her with Nick Bilton, who not only had never worked at 60 Minutes, but has never worked in TV news period. Weiss also fired executive editor Draggan Mihailovich, who’d been at the show for 28 years.

It seems untenable for Stahl or Whitaker to remain on the show. Pelley called it what it was in Bilton’s ham-fisted staff meeting Monday: the murder of the institution.

CBS News Fires Scott Pelley of ‘60 Minutes’ 

Benjamin Mullin and Michael M. Grynbaum:

In a formal letter to Mr. Pelley, which was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Bilton wrote that the correspondent had been “terminated for cause effective immediately.”

The letter is a must-read. No summary of it can capture just how pathetic a man Nick Bilton is. He disputes nothing Pelley said in the Monday staff meeting, and firing Pelley proves that Pelley was exactly right.

Mr. Pelley, in a telephone interview on Tuesday evening shortly after he was fired, said he had devoted decades of his life to “60 Minutes,” which he said he still cared about deeply.

“I have been in combat in Afghanistan,” Mr. Pelley said. “I have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast.” [...]

Earlier on Tuesday, Mr. Pelley sent a statement to The Times that assailed the new leadership of CBS News, writing that “incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc” at the network.” He added, “The collapse of values at the top has become untenable.” Mr. Pelley also wrote that senior managers at CBS News had pressured him to insert bias into stories for “60 Minutes” this past season, though he did not provide details about specific segments.

I look forward to hearing those segment-specific details. It’s not hard to guess the direction that bias went.

The Underworld Market to Remove the Recording Indicator Light on Meta Glasses 

Joanna Stern, on YouTube:

People across the country are offering a service on Facebook Marketplace to disable the recording light on Ray-Ban Meta glasses. They call it “Stealth Mode.” Joanna paid $100 for the modification and went inside the growing business of turning smart glasses into covert cameras. She investigates who is doing it, whether it’s legal and what some are doing to try and stop it.

Of course there’s a market for this. But the true chef’s kiss is that the market to find people who offer the service is on ... Facebook Marketplace. Using a Meta platform to find people to hack a Meta device so you can surreptitiously record strangers. So perfectly Meta.

Tuesday, 2 June 2026

Meta Reportedly Has a Slew of New Smart Glasses Planned for This Year 

James Pero, summarizing for Gizmodo this paywalled report by Jyoti Mann for The Information:

But, wait, there’s more: in addition to the fall releases, The Information reports that Meta also has a pair slated for December, codenamed “Mojito VIP.” There are also two prototypes being tested in the fall, according to the report, including one called “Artemis” and another called “SSG,” which is short for “supersensing glasses.”

The Information previously reported that the “supersensing” pair would have always-on cameras capable of looking at your surroundings without you having to prompt the voice assistant or activate the camera with a button. The idea here is that, with a constant stream of visual information, the smart glasses could be a kind of ambient virtual assistant that remembers where you left your keys or other vision-based reminders.

Spitball: Meta’s entire business is predicated on knowing as much about people as possible. Their interest in building out a virtual “metaverse” world was motivated by the fact they could track everything people do, see, say, and hear there. That didn’t play out so they’re pivoting to building out devices that will let them track everything people do, see, say, and hear in the real world.

Apple, the Anti-‘Metaverse’ VR Company 

One more bit of “metaverse fever dream” follow-up. The one company in the field that Nick Heer doesn’t mention is Apple, makers of the best-known (albeit not best-selling) virtual reality headset. Think and say what you want about the Vision platform (I still think it’s the first inning of a long game), but no one at Apple ever once gave a hint of endorsing “metaverse” hype. In fact, as I’ve noted before, at a 2022 WSJ event, seven months before Vision Pro was announced and over a year before it was released, Joanna Stern asked Greg Joswiak and Craig Federighi:

Stern: You have to finish this sentence, both of you. The metaverse is...

Joz: A word I’ll never use.

“Fever dream” is right.

The Metaverse Was Snake Oil for Isolation 

A follow-up point from my post yesterday linking to Nick Heer’s blockbuster “The Metaverse Fever Dream”. In particular, the connection Heer draws between the rise of “metaverse” hype and the pandemic.

I always sort of knew that metaverse hype roughly coincided with the Covid lockdown and our collective period of isolation and loneliness, a year-plus stretch when we relied mostly on computer platforms for nearly all socializing. But here in 2026 it’s now clear that metaverse hype and lockdown-induced isolation coincided precisely. They didn’t roughly overlap; they exactly overlapped. So much so that I’m now wondering if any of the “metaverse” hype would have happened if Covid hadn’t happened. Facebook still likely would’ve renamed itself, because they’d so poisoned the “Facebook” brand itself, but maybe to something other than “Meta”.

We allowed the necessary initial emergency lockdown to extend indefinitely because it seemed like maybe we could get by for a long stretch using technology. The extended lockdown never would have happened if the Covid pandemic had broken out 20 or more years earlier. In 2020 and 2021, we could squint and say, sure, maybe kids can “go to school” via Zoom. We never would have kept all kids home for an entire year pre-Zoom. But the truth is Zoom “school” wasn’t much better than no school at all. Same for Zoom “work collaboration”, and Zoom “friend gatherings”. It was an illusion that today’s technology is even close to a sufficient substitute for being in each others’ physical presence. The siren call of “the metaverse” was exactly what we craved — technology that would be a sufficient substitute for real-world experiences and socializing. The best audience for snake oil are people with actual ailments. And during Covid, we were all ailing socially.

Scott Pelley Accuses CBS News Boss of ‘Murdering’ ‘60 Minutes’ 

Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):

CBS News faced a fresh wave of turmoil on Monday after Scott Pelley, the “60 Minutes” correspondent, laced into the show’s newly hired executive producer during a staff meeting and accused Bari Weiss, the network’s editor in chief, of “murdering” the longstanding Sunday news program.

In an extraordinary exchange, Mr. Pelley, his newscaster’s baritone sometimes shaking in anger, told Nick Bilton, the new executive producer, that he had “slender” qualifications for his new job and questioned the network’s commitment to the future of the program, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.

The 10 a.m. gathering, held at the program’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters, was intended as a formal introduction to Mr. Bilton, a tech journalist and filmmaker who was appointed last week as part of a major shake-up at “60 Minutes.” CBS fired Tanya Simon, the previous executive producer, and her deputy, along with Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, two of the show’s correspondents — an event that Mr. Pelley referred to as “Black Thursday.”

It’s worth noting that the night before the firings, 60 Minutes won two news Emmys. It’s even more worth noting that 60 Minutes’s TV ratings were up 9 percent year-over-year, and digital video views doubled. In both quality and popularity, the show is thriving, not struggling. (See also: The Late Show With Stephen Colbert was, by far, the top-rated late night talk show.)

“Broadcast is an ice cube that is melting, OK?” Mr. Bilton said, saying the show had to adapt. “Bari loves this institution,” he added. “She loves ’60 Minutes.’”

At that, Mr. Pelley interrupted.

“She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” the correspondent said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

Mr. Pelley added: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”

Oof.

Oliver Darcy obtained a recording of the entire Bilton-Pelley exchange, and transcribed much of it, but it’s behind the (worth it!) Status paywall.

Three Ways to Get Paid 

Jason Zweig, back in 2018:

My father, who died in 1981, was an inexhaustible font of wisdom and wit. I don’t know when he told me this particular three-part rule, but I’ve never forgotten it. I tweeted it three years ago, but people keep asking for it in one place, so here it is.

There are three ways to make a living:

  1. Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.

  2. Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.

  3. Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.

The rest is commentary.

Pairs well with Om Malik’s remarkable line about the success of “the grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things” in his “We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World” essay that I linked to yesterday.

The First-Time-Buyer-Discount Dickover Scheme 

Neil Panchal, on Twitter/X (XCancel link):

Of all the dickovers, the dickover that blueballs you with some first-time buyer incentive. “Sign up and get 10% discount, new accounts only”, the dickover boasts.

Never understood why you’d ever penalize returning customers with a dickover, blue-balling them with 10% off teaser that they’re ineligible for. wtf?

And for first time buyers, they’d always feel left out if they don’t shove their email address in the dickover. The choice is an illusion with a penalty of 10%. But wait… there’s more! You only get a discount code if you, after clicking the confirmation email link, also sign up for their SMS marketing. You just got double dicked.

I fell for this racket once, albeit with my eyes open. Last year I bought a cap from New Era’s website. They offered me some sort of discount for giving them my email address. I knew they were going to get my email anyway because I was going to buy the hat, so I figured why not. Only then — exactly as Panchal describes — did they say I also needed to give them my phone number and grant permission to text me marketing messages. Now I was pissed. I did it anyway, just to see what happened (and get the discount). As soon as I bought the hat, discount applied, I rescinded their permission to send me text messages and marketing emails. (They had already texted me like two marketing messages, in addition to the ones confirming my phone number.) Overall I’d have rather paid a few more dollars than go through the hassle, which is why my standard operating procedure is to decline all such entreaties. A real discount is just offering a lower price. Anything else is a scam of some sort.

But the real problem is that it completely soured my impression of New Era. I am far less likely to purchase from them again. I will eventually buy a New Era cap again — their actual products are excellent, and they are the exclusive maker of official MLB on-field caps — but if I can buy it elsewhere, I will. I’ll go out of my way to avoid buying direct from New Era for the rest of my life.

The marketing shitbirds who press for these schemes — and insist on adding dickovers and dickbars to websites — do so by pointing to data that shows that they do convert some number of users. “It works” they claim, pointing to data. What doesn’t show up in their data are interactions like mine. They don’t have analytics that measure that I now consider their website an antagonist to avoid at all costs.

Monday, 1 June 2026

‘The Metaverse Fever Dream’ 

Nick Heer, at Pixel Envy, last week published a remarkable essay surveying — with copious receipts — the rise and fall of “metaverse” hype:

The obsession with the metaverse seems to have solidified in Silicon Valley after Matthew Ball published an essay in January 2020 in which he forecasted that, at the very least…

…it is likely to produce trillions in value as a new computing platform or content medium. But in its full vision, the Metaverse becomes the gateway to most digital experiences, a key component of all physical ones, and the next great labor platform. [...]

Ball published this essay with darkly fortuitous timing. A week earlier, Chinese health authorities had isolated a new strain of coronavirus aggressively spreading in Wuhan; a day before, they published its genetic sequence. Within a couple of months, the world had turned upside down and many of us were suddenly spending our days in a space that felt more virtual than physical. We may have only been working from home — or, at least, those of us who had the option and were not laid off — and socializing over Zoom, all while remembering the last concert we went to or the last time we ate a meal in a restaurant.

Just a tremendous piece of writing and reporting from Heer. What a pile of horseshit “the metaverse” as promulgated by Zuckerberg was. To call what Heer has assembled here, in a compelling narrative to boot, “comprehensive” is a vast understatement. These hucksters were selling a bill of goods and now they’re trying to whistle past their own hype:

As for the futurists like Hackl, who confidently proclaimed the metaverse was “for certain”, they have found an out thanks to its flexible definition. Jeff Barrett, of the Shorty Awards’ “It’s No Fluke” podcast, published a glowing profile of “the Godmother of the Metaverse” earlier this year under the headline “Why Cathy Hackl Keeps Getting the Future Right”. “When enthusiasm cooled and narratives collapsed, many distanced themselves from the space”, writes Barrett, noting with seeming approval that “Hackl did the opposite. She reframed it”. Many people — perhaps everyone, come to think of it — could predict the future if they got to retcon their predictions to fit reality.

Bravo.

Follow-up: “The Metaverse Was Snake Oil for Isolation”.

‘If You Take the Weasel Job Then You Must Be the Weasel’ 

Hamilton Nolan, writing at How Things Work:

There are only a few reasons why you might be hired for a prestigious job that you are obviously not qualified for. One is “they have recognized you for the genius that you are.” The urge to conclude that this is, in fact, the reason must be overwhelming, if you are the person in question. But this is rarely the explanation.

Another possibility is “the person who hired you is a fucking idiot.” This happens. A number of current United States cabinet secretaries got their jobs this way.

The most likely reason, though — one that often overshadows the other ones — is, “you are willing to carry out the dirty and distasteful things to come.” This is why weird hirings at the top always provoke dread among all the other employees. Maybe you are a hidden gem, sure, but Occam’s Razor says that you are probably just a hatchet man.

Nick Bilton, a former tech writer for the New York Times and Vanity Fair and maker of a few documentaries, was just hired as the new head of 60 Minutes.

Bilton tried to introduce himself to the (remaining) staff at 60 Minutes this morning and it did not go well.

‘We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World’ 

Om Malik:

The Adventures of Pinocchio was published in serial form in 1881, aimed at Italian children in the way the 19th century aimed things at children, full of suffering, consequence, and moral instruction delivered through catastrophe. The puppet is hanged. He is swallowed by a giant fish. He watches companions degrade into beasts of burden. The world he moves through is predatory at every level, and the institutions that should protect him are either absent, corrupted, or actively hostile to his interests. [...]

Most people remember Pinocchio as a story about lying. The nose grows. You get caught. Lesson learned. But that reading misses almost everything Collodi was actually doing. The book is a close study of a society where deception has gone ambient, woven into every institution, every transaction. Courts punish victims. Authority figures perform competence without exercising it. Experts are decorative. Society holds together through spectacle and habit rather than accountability. Into this environment, a naive creature is released, constitutionally unable to resist a good story about easy reward.

The nose is the least interesting lie in the book. The interesting lies are the ones that work.

I’m not sure which sphere of interest this essay applies better to: post-AI tech, or post-Trump politics. I mean, goddamn, what a paragraph this one is:

The grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things succeed because audiences reward certainty and punish doubt. They honor confidence and resist complication. A clean story about a genius who will fix everything travels faster than a difficult story about tradeoffs. The Field of Miracles stays open because people keep wanting to bury their coins there.

Amazon Made AI Podcasts for Products 

Katie Notopoulos, a month ago at Business Insider:

Amazon has launched a new feature that uses AI to generate a short, podcast-like audio segment where two “hosts” discuss the merits and reviews of a specific product.

I think it could be one of the funniest, closest endpoints to human civilization we’ve seen yet in our new AI-enabled world. If this sounds a little confusing, here’s an example. I tried it out for diaper rash cream, and, voila! A podcast! (Sound on.)

I don’t know what’s worse: that anyone at Amazon thought actual people would really listen to these, or if actual people really are listening to them.