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Source: http://daringfireball.net/index.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<title>Daring Fireball</title>
<subtitle>By John Gruber</subtitle>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/" />
<link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://daringfireball.net/feeds/main" />
<id>https://daringfireball.net/feeds/main</id>
<updated>2024-12-11T05:36:45Z</updated><rights>Copyright © 2024, John Gruber</rights><entry>
<title>Bankruptcy Judge Rejects The Onion’s Bid to Buy Infowars</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/bankruptcy-judge-rejects-onions-bid-buy-alex-jones-infowars-rcna183453" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vxn" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/11/judge-kibosh-onion-infowars" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41387</id>
<published>2024-12-11T05:26:07Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-11T05:36:45Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
David Ingram, reporting for NBC News:
<blockquote>
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez said after a two-day hearing that The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, had not submitted the best bid and was wrongly named the winner of an auction last month by a court-appointed trustee. 
“I don’t think it’s enough money,” Lopez said in a late-night ruling from the bench in a Houston court. “I’m going to not approve the sale.”
</blockquote>
It’s not over ’til it’s over. 
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Bankruptcy Judge Rejects The Onion’s Bid to Buy Infowars’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/11/judge-kibosh-onion-infowars"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>The Spectacular Typography of the Sanborn Fire Maps</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://sanbornfiremaps.com/" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vxm" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/10/the-spectacular-typography-of-the-sanborn-fire-maps" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41386</id>
<published>2024-12-10T17:19:14Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-10T17:19:15Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Brandon Silverman:
<blockquote>
It was September of 2011 and I saw a link on kottke.org to a
<a href="https://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2011/02/sanborn-fire-insurance-map-typography.html">small collection of incredible typography</a> from something
called the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. I had never seen them
before and they blew my mind. I immediately became a massive fan
and in fact, when I got married, my wife and I designed our
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzxpFSbhTIY">wedding invitation</a> based off of them.
However, there has never been a place to see all of the art from
the maps in one place. Until now.
This website is a free archive dedicated exclusively to creating
a one-stop shop for all the incredible typography and art of the
Sanborn maps. It includes almost 3,500 unique decorative titles,
all drawn before 1923. While large portions of the original maps
have been digitized and archived in various places both online and
offline, there has never been a comprehensive collection of all of
the decorative titles from the Sanborn maps. I hope you enjoy!
</blockquote>
I just love this style of turn-of-the-century typography and graphic design. (The last turn of the century, that is.) In our era, this style has been used to wonderful effect by <a href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/Chris-Ware/author/B001JOJLJ2?tag=df-amzn-20">the great Chris Ware</a>.
Via, no surprise, <a href="https://kottke.org/24/12/the-arresting-typography-of-the-sanborn-fire-insurance-maps">Kottke</a>. What comes around goes around.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘The Spectacular Typography of the Sanborn Fire Maps’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/10/the-spectacular-typography-of-the-sanborn-fire-maps"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>Daring Fireball T-Shirts and Hoodies Are Back</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://store.daringfireball.net/" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vxl" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/09/daring-fireball-shirts-and-hoodies-are-back" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41385</id>
<published>2024-12-10T04:55:30Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-10T04:55:31Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
<a href="https://store.daringfireball.net/" class="no_underlines">
<img
class="roundrect"
src="/members/images/2024/classic-976.png"
alt="Thumbnail of a classic Daring Fireball logo t-shirt."
height="445"
width="445"
/>
</a>
Finally, Daring Fireball t-shirts and hoodies are back. Order now, and we’ll start printing shirts at the end of this week. U.S. domestic orders placed by the end of the day Wednesday should arrive before Christmas. International orders — even those ordered by our good neighbors in Canada — most likely will not.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Daring Fireball T-Shirts and Hoodies Are Back’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/09/daring-fireball-shirts-and-hoodies-are-back"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://sophiestication.com/CoverSutra/?utm_source=df&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=df-sponsorship-dec2024" />
<link rel="shorturl" href="http://df4.us/vxk" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/2024/12/coversutra" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/feeds/sponsors//11.41384</id>
<author><name>Daring Fireball Department of Commerce</name></author>
<published>2024-12-09T23:53:33Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-09T23:53:34Z</updated>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
It is the Night of the Living App!
After over a decade, CoverSutra is back — reimagined as a sleek, standalone music player for your Mac.
CoverSutra lives in your menu bar, giving you seamless access to your music library. Instantly search by album, artist, or song—all without breaking your workflow.
What’s New?
<ul>
<li>Standalone music player: No Music app required.</li>
<li>Instant music search: Find tracks anytime, anywhere.</li>
<li>Global keyboard shortcuts: Control playback from any app.</li>
</ul>
Available now on the Mac App Store for just $4.99. Free upgrade for CoverSutra 3.0 customers!
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘CoverSutra’" href="https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/2024/12/coversutra"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
<title>[Sponsor] CoverSutra</title></entry><entry>
<title>Gurman: Apple and Sony Are Working to Bring PlayStation VR Hand Controller Support to Vision Pro</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-12-08/apple-sony-talk-playstation-vr-ps-vr2-hand-controller-support-for-vision-pro" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vxi" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/08/gurman-apple-sony-vr-controllers" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41382</id>
<published>2024-12-08T23:00:00Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-10T00:49:10Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Mark Gurman, in his Power On column for Bloomberg:
<blockquote>
Apple is now working on a major effort to support third-party hand
controllers in the device’s visionOS software and has teamed up
with Sony Group Corp. to make it happen. Apple approached Sony
earlier this year, and the duo agreed to work together on
launching support for the PlayStation VR2’s hand controllers on
the Vision Pro. Inside Sony, the work has been a monthslong
undertaking, I’m told. And Apple has discussed the plan with
third-party developers, asking them if they’d integrate support
into their games. [...]
One hiccup is that Sony doesn’t currently sell its VR hand
controllers as a standalone accessory. The company would need to
decouple the equipment from its own headset and kick off
operations to produce and ship the accessory on its own. As part
of the arrangement, Sony would sell the controllers at Apple’s
online and retail stores, which already offer PS5 versions.
</blockquote>
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Gurman: Apple and Sony Are Working to Bring PlayStation VR Hand Controller Support to Vision Pro’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/08/gurman-apple-sony-vr-controllers"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>1Password and Charging for SSO</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://1password.com/daringfireball" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vxj" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/08/1password-and-charging-for-sso" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41383</id>
<published>2024-12-08T21:55:23Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-08T21:55:23Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
My thanks to 1Password — which, earlier this year, <a href="https://www.kolide.com/blog/1password-acquires-kolide">acquired frequent DF sponsor Kolide</a> — for sponsoring last week at DF. Imagine if you went to the movies and they charged $8,000 for popcorn. Or, imagine you got on a plane and they told you that seatbelts were only available in first class. Your sense of outraged injustice would probably be something like what IT and security professionals feel when a software vendor hits them with the dreaded SSO tax — the practice of charging an outrageous premium for Single Sign-On, often by making it part of a product’s “enterprise tier”. The jump in price can be astonishing — one CRM charges over 5000% more for the tier with SSO. At those prices, only very large companies can afford to pay for SSO. But the problem is that companies of all sizes need it.
Until outraged customers can <a href="https://ssotax.org/">shame vendors into getting rid of the tax</a>, many businesses have to figure out how to live without SSO. For them, the best route is likely to be a password manager, which also reduces weak and re-used credentials, and enables secure sharing across teams. And a password manager is likely a good investment anyway, for apps that aren’t integrated with SSO. <a href="https://blog.1password.com/explaining-the-backlash-to-the-sso-tax/">To learn more about the past, present, and future of the SSO tax, read 1Password’s full blog post</a>.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘1Password and Charging for SSO’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/08/1password-and-charging-for-sso"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>Dithering</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://dithering.fm/" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vxg" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/06/dithering" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41380</id>
<published>2024-12-07T04:00:00Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-09T23:56:00Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
<a href="https://dithering.fm/" class="noborder">
<img
src = "https://daringfireball.net/misc/2024/12/dithering-cover-dec-2024.jpeg"
alt = "December 2024 cover art for Dithering, depicting a young lad tooting his new trombone next to the tree on Christmas morning."
width = "500"
/></a>
While there is no subscription offering for Daring Fireball (never say never <a href="https://daringfireball.net/2004/06/something_daring">again</a>), I am <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/03/the-verge-launches-a-subscription">reminded</a> this week to remind you that, if you enjoy podcasts, you should subscribe to Dithering, the twice-weekly 15-minutes-on-the-button podcast I do with Ben Thompson. Dithering as a standalone subscription costs just $7/month or $70/year. People who try Dithering seem to love it, too — we have remarkably little churn.
Recording the show often helps me coagulate loose ideas into fully-formed thoughts. Both my <a href="https://daringfireball.net/2024/12/andy_grove_was_right">Tuesday column on Intel’s decline</a> and <a href="https://daringfireball.net/2024/12/dont_throw_the_baby_out_with_the_generative_ai_bullshit_bathwater">today’s on using generative AI for research</a> were inspired by our discussion on the show the night before. I toss a lot of takes out on Dithering that never make it here, though. If you’re on the fence, subscribe for a month and you’re only out $7 — but I bet you’ll stick around. Trust me. And thanks to everyone who’s already subscribed.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Dithering’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/06/dithering"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>Times New Dumbass</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://timesnewdumbass.co/" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vxh" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/06/times-new-dumbass" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41381</id>
<published>2024-12-06T23:41:31Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-06T23:41:31Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Late-breaking candidate for best new font of 2024.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Times New Dumbass’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/06/times-new-dumbass"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/2024/12/dont_throw_the_baby_out_with_the_generative_ai_bullshit_bathwater" />
<link rel="shorturl" href="http://df4.us/vxf" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024://1.41379</id>
<published>2024-12-06T18:13:11Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-07T01:28:39Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<summary type="text">If I had wanted to write a column about presidential pardons, I’d find ChatGPT’s assistance a far better starting point than I’d have gotten through any general web search. But to quote Reagan: “Trust, but verify.”</summary>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Elizabeth Lopatto, writing for The Verge, “<a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/5/24313222/chatgpt-pardon-biden-bush-esquire">Stop Using Generative AI as a Search Engine</a>”:
<blockquote>
Now, a defender of AI might — rightly — say that a real
journalist should check the answers provided by ChatGPT; that
fact-checking is a critical part of our job. I agree, which is why
I’ve walked you through my own checking in this article. But these
are only the public and embarrassing examples of something I think
is happening much more often in private: a normal person is using
ChatGPT and trusting the information it gives them.
A mistake, obviously.
One advantage old-school Google Search has over <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/30/24230975/openai-publisher-deals-web-search">the so-called
answer engines</a> is that it links directly to primary sources.
Answer engines just give you an answer, and it’s often unclear
what the source is. For me, using ChatGPT or Google’s AI function
creates extra work — I have to go check the answer against a
primary source; old Google Search just gave me that source
directly.
</blockquote>
Lopatto’s piece was prompted by a spate of historical bullshit people have been inadvertently propagating, after their asking generative AI systems for historical examples of presidents granting pardons to family members. Most notably, <a href="https://archive.ph/lZ6H6">a column by Charles P. Pierce</a> at Esquire this week — <a href="https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a63082689/neil-bush-george-hw-bush-presidential-sons/">now fully retracted</a> — the entire premise of which was a supposed pardon granted by George H.W. Bush to his <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Bush">black-sheep son Neil Bush</a>. No such pardon was granted.<a href="#fn1-2024-12-06">1</a>
Lopatto’s piece is excellent, particularly the way she shows her own work. And the entire premise of her piece is that people are, in fact, embarrassing themselves (in Pierce’s case, spectacularly) and inadvertently spreading misinformation by blindly trusting the answers they’re getting from generative AI models. But I think it’s wrong to argue flatly against the use of generative AI for research, as she does right in her headline. I’ve been late to using generative AI as anything other than a toy curiosity, but in recent months I’ve started using it for work-related research. And now that I’ve started, I’m using it more and more. My basic rule of thumb is that if I’m looking for an article or web page, I use web search (<a href="https://kagi.com/">Kagi</a>); if I’m looking for an answer to a question, though, I use ChatGPT (4o). I direct (and trust) ChatGPT as I would a college intern working as a research assistant. I expect accuracy, but assume that I need to double-check everything.
Here’s how I prompted ChatGPT, pretending I intended to write about this week’s political controversy du jour:
<blockquote>
Give me a list of U.S. presidential pardons granted to family
members, friends, administration officials, and cronies. Basically
I’m looking for a list of controversial pardons. I’m interested in
the totality of U.S. history, but particularly in recent history,
let’s say the last 100 years.
</blockquote>
ChatGPT 4o’s response was good: here’s <a href="https://chatgpt.com/share/67533207-a040-8011-9a99-d59ff824a64c">a link to my chat</a>, and <a href="https://daringfireball.net/misc/2024/12/chatgpt-presidential-pardons.html">an HTML transcript</a> and <a href="https://daringfireball.net/misc/2024/12/chatgpt-presidential-pardons.png">a screenshot</a>. (Only the screenshot shows where ChatGPT included sources.) I’m quite certain ChatGPT’s response is completely true, and it strikes me as a fair summary of the most controversial pardons in my lifetime. My biggest quibble is that it omits <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/19/politics/steve-bannon-pardoned-by-trump/index.html">Trump’s pardon of Steve Bannon</a>, a truly outrageous pardon of a genuine scumbag who was an official White House advisor. (<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/former-trump-adviser-steve-bannon-turns-new-york-state-charges-rcna46662">Bannon was indicted for a multi-million dollar scheme</a> in which he scammed thousands of political donors into believing they were contributing funds to help build Trump’s fantasy “border wall”.) However, my asking “Any more from Trump?” as a follow-up resulted in a longer list of 13 pardons, all factual, that included Bannon.<a href="#fn2-2024-12-06">2</a>
I want to make clear that I don’t think Lopatto is in any way a head-in-the-sand Luddite. But all of the arguments being made today against using generative AI to answer questions sound exactly like the arguments against citing web pages as sources in the 1990s. The argument then was basically “Anyone can publish anything on the web, and even if a web page is accurate today, it can be changed at any time” — which was true then and remains true today.<a href="#fn3-2024-12-06">3</a> But it’s just a new technology — one that isn’t going anywhere because it’s incredibly useful in ways nothing else is, but its inherent downsides will force us to adapt and learn new ways of sourcing, citing, and verifying information. The rise of the web didn’t make libraries go away. Generative AI won’t make web search go away.
If I had wanted to write a column about presidential pardons, I’d find ChatGPT’s assistance a far better starting point than I’d have gotten through any general web search. But to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify">quote an adage Reagan was fond of</a>: “Trust, but verify.”
<div class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1-2024-12-06">
Worth noting this from Lopatto: “I emailed Hearst to ask if Esquire writer Charles P. Pierce had used ChatGPT as a source for his article. Spokesperson Allison Keane said he hadn’t and declined to say anything further about how the error might have occurred.” I find it unlikely that generative AI wasn’t involved somewhere in the chain of this falsehood that Bush pardoned his son, but whatever Pierce referenced to come upon it, he fucked up good. <a href="#fnr1-2024-12-06" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩︎</a>
</li>
<li id="fn2-2024-12-06">
One small curiosity is that ChatGPT’s list, while mostly chronological, swapped Carter and Ford. One small amusement is that the only supposedly controversial pardon ChatGPT came up with for Ronald Reagan <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/20/us/steinbrenner-pardoned-by-reagan-for-72-election-law-violations.html">was New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner</a>. A complicated man, The Boss was. <a href="#fnr2-2024-12-06" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.">↩︎︎</a>
</li>
<li id="fn3-2024-12-06">
Who’s to say <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-most-reprinted-new-yorker-cartoon-breaks-record-at-auction-for-a-single-panel-comic-180983135/">a dog</a> doesn’t have useful information to provide? <a href="#fnr3-2024-12-06" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text.">↩︎︎</a>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
]]></content>
<title>★ Don’t Throw the Baby Out With the Generative AI Bullshit Bathwater</title></entry><entry>
<title>Festivitas — Holiday Lights for Your Mac Menu Bar and Dock</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://festivitas.app/" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vxc" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/05/festivitas" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41376</id>
<published>2024-12-06T02:54:00Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-07T00:19:51Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Purely fun, pay-whatever-you-think-fair app for the Mac from Simon Støvring (developer of numerous fine apps such as <a href="https://runestone.app/">Runestone</a> and <a href="https://scriptable.app/">Scriptable</a>):
<blockquote>
Festivitas automatically adds festive lights to your menu bar and
dock upon launch and you can tweak their appearance to match your
preferences.
</blockquote>
There is something very core to the Mac’s origins about not just making a software toy like this, but putting effort into making everything about it really nice. Harks back to Steven Halls’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_Moose">The Talking Moose</a> and, of course, the undisputed king of the genre, Eric Shapiro’s <a href="https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/The_Grouch">The Grouch</a>. Oh, and of course (thanks to <a href="https://512pixels.net/2024/12/festivitas/">Stephen Hackett for the reminder</a>), <a href="https://www.macintoshrepository.org/739-holiday-lights">Holiday Lights</a>.
Update, Friday 6 December: Today’s 1.1 update brings several improvements, including making the lights look way cooler if your Dock is on the left or right (as god intended).
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Festivitas — Holiday Lights for Your Mac Menu Bar and Dock’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/05/festivitas"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>‘Appeasement in the New Age of Trump’, MSNBC Edition</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/12/appeasement-new-age-trump/680871/?gift=f35zZN0v_gDFE8xNwlQAHaR_aG-uEILvzAygwDvOvHo" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vxe" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/05/frum-msnbc" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41378</id>
<published>2024-12-06T02:52:45Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-06T02:52:45Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
David Frum, writing at The Atlantic, regarding his jarring appearance as a guest on MSNBC’s Morning Joe:
<blockquote>
Before getting to the article, I was asked about the nomination of
Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense — specifically about an NBC
News <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/pete-hegseths-drinking-worried-colleagues-fox-news-sources-tell-nbc-ne-rcna181471">report</a> that his heavy drinking worried colleagues
at Fox News and at the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/pete-hegseths-secret-history">veterans organizations</a> he’d
headed. [...] I answered by reminding viewers of some history:
<blockquote>
In 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated John Tower,
senator from Texas, for secretary of defense. Tower was a very
considerable person, a real defense intellectual, someone who
deeply understood defense, unlike the current nominee. It emerged
that Tower had a drinking problem, and when he was drinking too
much he would make himself a nuisance or worse to women around
him. And for that reason, his nomination collapsed in 1989. You
don’t want to think that our moral standards have declined so
much that you can say: Let’s take all the drinking, all the
sex-pesting, subtract any knowledge of defense, subtract any
leadership, and there is your next secretary of defense for the
21st century.
</blockquote>
I told this story in pungent terms. It’s cable TV, after all. And
I introduced the discussion with a joke: “If you’re too drunk for
Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed.”
At the next ad break, a producer spoke into my ear. He objected to
my comments about Fox and warned me not to repeat them. I said
something noncommittal and got another round of warning. After the
break, I was asked a follow-up question on a different topic,
about President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son. I did not revert to
the earlier discussion, not because I had been warned, but because
I had said my piece. I was then told that I was excused from the
studio chair. Shortly afterward, co-host Mika Brzezinski read an
apology for my remarks.
</blockquote>
Jesus. The abject obsequiousness is staggering. Yes, it’s a joke at Fox News’s expense. But Fox News — on-air — has indeed been backing Hegseth’s nomination, even though it’s quite obvious that everyone who works there knows he has an alcohol problem. <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/pete-hegseths-drinking-worried-colleagues-fox-news-sources-tell-nbc-ne-rcna181471">From that NBC News report</a> (note that despite their names, the MSNBC and NBC News newsrooms are no longer associated):
<blockquote>
Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for defense
secretary, drank in ways that concerned his colleagues at Fox
News, according to 10 current and former Fox employees who spoke
with NBC News. Two of those people said that on more than a dozen
occasions during Hegseth’s time as a co-host of Fox & Friends
Weekend, which began in 2017, they smelled alcohol on him before
he went on air. Those same two people, plus another, said that
during his time there he appeared on television after they’d heard
him talk about being hungover as he was getting ready or on set.
One of the sources said they smelled alcohol on him as recently
as last month and heard him complain about being hungover this
fall. None of the sources with whom NBC News has spoken could
recall an instance when Hegseth missed a scheduled appearance
because he’d been drinking. “Everyone would be talking about it
behind the scenes before he went on the air,” one of the former
Fox employees said.
</blockquote>
Note too that Fox & Friends Weekend airs at 6:00 in the morning.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘‘Appeasement in the New Age of Trump’, MSNBC Edition’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/05/frum-msnbc"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>Owner Patrick Soon-Shiong Is Tanking the LA Times’s Credibility</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.status.news/p/los-angeles-times-patrick-soon-shiong" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vxd" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/05/owner-patrick-soon-shiong-is-tanking-the-la-times" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41377</id>
<published>2024-12-06T01:24:01Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-06T02:31:45Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Oliver Darcy, in a well-sourced report at Status (paywalled, alas, but with a preview of the article if you sign up for the free version of his newsletter, which I agree is sort of a “Yeah, no thanks” offer):
<blockquote>
Patrick Soon-Shiong is tightening his grip over the Los Angeles
Times. The MAGA-curious owner, who drew controversy when he
blocked the newspaper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris,
has waded further into its operations since the November
election, according to new information I have learned and public
remarks the billionaire made Wednesday during a media appearance
with right-wing personality Scott Jennings. [...] Several
veteran staffers told me that morale has never been lower, with
some people even wondering whether the newspaper will be
disfigured beyond recognition under this new era of
Soon-Shiong’s reign. [...]
One disturbing example came after the newspaper <a href="https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-11-06/elon-musk-donald-trump-tesla-spacex">published an
opinion piece</a> in November about Elon Musk that Soon-Shiong
did not care for, people familiar with the matter told me. The
piece, written by Times opinion contributor Virginia Heffernan,
carried the headline, “Elon Musk bought himself a starring role in
Trump’s second term. What could go wrong?”
While the headline seemed innocuous, Soon-Shiong expressed dismay
over it, according to the people familiar with the matter. The
headline was allowed to remain unchanged. But, as a result, the
people said, a new rule was put into place: Prior to publishing
opinion stories, the headlines must be emailed over to
Soon-Shiong, where he can then choose to weigh in. While it is
normal for newspaper owners to influence the opinion wing of a
newspaper, it is highly unusual for an owner to have article
headlines sent to them ahead of publication for review.
</blockquote>
That also seems like a lot of work for a busy billionaire. Wonder how he might handle that?
<blockquote>
Speaking to Jennings as the latter hosted a radio show Wednesday,
the billionaire revealed that, behind the scenes, he is working on
developing a “bias meter” powered by artificial intelligence that
will be placed on both opinion and news stories. Soon-Shiong
said that the hope is to roll out the new feature, which will use
the technology to seemingly warn readers that his own reporters
are biased, as early as next month. [...]
Suffice to say, but when the journalists at the Times heard the
“breaking news” that Soon-Shiong delivered to Jennings, they
spiraled even further. “People are now deeply fucking concerned,”
one staffer bluntly told me Wednesday night.
</blockquote>
What could go wrong?
In response, <a href="https://latguild.com/news/2024/12/5/lat-guild-statement-our-commitment-to-journalistic-integrity">the LAT Guild issued a statement</a>, concluding:
<blockquote>
The statements of Dr. Soon-Shiong in the press and on social media
reflect his own opinions and do not shape reporting by our
member-journalists.
Our members — and all Times staffers — abide by a strict set of
<a href="https://www.latimes.com/local/readers-rep/la-rr-la-times-updates-newsroom-ethics-guidelines-20140618-story.html">ethics guidelines</a>, which call for fairness, precision,
transparency, vigilance against bias, and an earnest search to
understand all sides of an issue. Those longstanding principles
will continue guiding our work.
The Guild has secured strong ethics protections for our members,
including the right to withhold one’s byline, and we will firmly
guard against any effort to improperly or unfairly alter our
reporting.
</blockquote>
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Owner Patrick Soon-Shiong Is Tanking the LA Times’s Credibility’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/05/owner-patrick-soon-shiong-is-tanking-the-la-times"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>What’s Good for the Goose, AI Training Edition</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openais-latest-rivals-are-getting-help-from-openai" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vxb" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/05/whats-good-for-the-goose-openai" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41375</id>
<published>2024-12-05T21:28:30Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-05T21:28:40Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Stephanie Palazzolo, writing for The Information (paywalled, alas):
<blockquote>
Researchers at OpenAI believe that some rival AI developers are
training their reasoning models by using OpenAI’s o1 reasoning
models to generate training data, according to a person who has
spoken to the company’s researchers about it. In short, the rivals
can ask the o1 models to solve various problems and then use the
models’ chain of thought — the “thought process” the models use
to solve those problems — as training data, the person said.
You might be wondering how rival developers can do that. OpenAI
has explicitly said it hides its reasoning models’ raw chains of
thought due in part to competitive concerns.
But in answering questions, o1 models include a summarized version
of the chain of thought to help the customer understand how the
models arrived at the answer. Rivals can simply ask another LLM to
take that summarized chain of thought and predict what the raw
chain of thought might have been, the person who spoke with the
researchers said.
</blockquote>
And I’m sure these OpenAI researchers are happy to provide this training data to competitors, without having granted permission, in the same way they trained (and continue to train) their own models on publicly available web pages, without having been granted permission. Right?
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘What’s Good for the Goose, AI Training Edition’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/05/whats-good-for-the-goose-openai"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>From the Department of Bringing Receipts to the Interview</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://stanfordreview.org/levin-interview/amp/" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vxa" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/04/from-the-department-of-bringing-receipts-to-the-interview" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41374</id>
<published>2024-12-05T02:27:12Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-05T02:27:13Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
From The Stanford Review editor-in-chief Julia Steinberg’s interview with university president Jonathan Levin:
<blockquote>
Stanford Review: What is the most important problem in the world right now?
President Levin: There’s no answer to that question. There are too many important problems to give you a single answer.
Stanford Review: That is an application question that we have to answer to apply here.
</blockquote>
(<a href="https://bsky.app/profile/cjciaramella.bsky.social/post/3lcii3ieuks2c">Via CJ Ciaramella on Bluesky</a>.)
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘From the Department of Bringing Receipts to the Interview’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/04/from-the-department-of-bringing-receipts-to-the-interview"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>Jeff Bezos on Trump’s Second Term: ‘I’m Actually Very Optimistic This Time Around’</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/4/24313549/bezos-trump-optimistic-dealbook-summit-doge" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vx9" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/04/bezos-trump" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41373</id>
<published>2024-12-05T01:44:01Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-05T16:28:31Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Alex Heath, writing at The Verge:
<blockquote>
“I’m actually very optimistic this time around,” Bezos said of
Trump during a rare public appearance at The New York Times
DealBook Summit on Wednesday. “He seems to have a lot of energy
around reducing regulation. If I can help him do that, I’m going
to help him.”
Trump railed against Bezos and his companies — Amazon, Blue
Origin, and The Washington Post — during his 2016 term. Bezos
defended himself but it did little to help his reputation with
Trump. Now, his companies have a lot at stake in the coming
administration, from the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon to
Blue Origin’s efforts to compete with SpaceX for government
contracts.
Onstage at the DealBook Summit on Wednesday, Bezos called Trump
“calmer this time” and “more settled.” He said he will try to
“talk him out of” the idea that the press, which includes The
Washington Post, is an enemy of the people.
“You’ve probably grown in the last eight years,” he said to
DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. “He has, too.”
</blockquote>
Next up after Bezos at DealBook Summit was Charlie Brown, who professed optimism regarding his next attempt at kicking a football held by Lucy Van Pelt. What the fuck did they <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/davelee.me/post/3lcihnfqwy42c">put in the water at this conference</a>?
Or, perhaps, these very smart guys are also craven, and these nonsensical remarks, which are quite obviously <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/03/opinion/kash-patel-trump-fbi.html">contrary</a> to <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/pete-hegseths-secret-history">reality</a>, are simply <a href="https://daringfireball.net/2024/10/profiles_in_cowardice_bezos_lewis_washington_post">additional</a> exhibits of shameful cowardly compliance.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Jeff Bezos on Trump’s Second Term: ‘I’m Actually Very Optimistic This Time Around’’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/04/bezos-trump"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>Shame on Google for Their Description of Google Messages’s Encryption Support</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.messaging" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vx8" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/04/shame-on-google-messages" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41372</id>
<published>2024-12-04T23:31:32Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-05T01:18:34Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
While writing <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/04/us-official-urge-use-of-e2ee">the previous item</a> regarding the FBI encouraging the use of E2EE text and call protocols, I wound up at the Play Store page for Google Messages. It’s shamefully misleading regarding Google Messages’s support for end-to-end encryption. As I wrote in the previous post, Google Messages does support E2EE, but only over RCS and only if all participants in the chat are using a recent version of Google Messages. But <a href="https://daringfireball.net/misc/2024/12/google-messages-play-store-e2ee.png">the second screenshot in the Play Store listing</a> flatly declares “Conversations are end-to-end encrypted”, full stop. That is some serious bullshit.
I realize that “Some conversations are end-to-end encrypted” will naturally spur curiosity regarding which conversations are encrypted and which aren’t, but that’s the truth. And users of the app should be aware of that. “RCS conversations with other Google Messages users are encrypted” would work.
Then, in the “report card” section of the listing, it states the following:
<blockquote>
Data is encrypted in transit 
Your data is transferred over a secure connection
</blockquote>
Which, again, is only true sometimes. It’s downright fraudulent to describe Google Messages’s transit security this way. Imagine a typical Android user without technical expertise who takes the advice (now coming <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/04/us-official-urge-use-of-e2ee">from the FBI</a>) to use end-to-end encryption for their messaging. A reasonable person who trusts Google would look at Google’s own description of Google Messages and conclude that if you use Google Messages, all your messages will be secure. That’s false. And depending who you communicate with — iPhone users, Android users with old devices, Android users who use other text messaging apps — it’s quite likely most of your messages won’t be secure.
Just be honest! The E2EE between Google Messages users using Android phones that support RCS is completely seamless and automatic (I just tried it myself using my Android burner), but E2EE is never available for SMS, and never available if a participant in the chat is using any RCS client (on Android or Apple Messages) other than Google Messages. That’s an essential distinction that should be made clear, not obfuscated.
While I’m at it, it’s also embarrassing that Google Voice has no support for RCS at all. It’s Google’s own app and service, and Google has been the world’s most vocal proponent of RCS messaging.
Lastly, I also think it’s a bad idea that Google Messages colors all RCS message bubbles with the exact same colors (dark blue bubbles with white text, natch). SMS messages, at least on my Pixel 4, are pale blue with black text. Google Messages does put a tiny lock in the timeline to indicate when an RCS chat is secure, and they also <a href="https://support.google.com/messages/answer/10252671?hl=en">put a lock badge on the Send button’s paper airplane icon</a>, so there are visual indications whether an RCS chat is encrypted, but because the messages bubble colors are the same for all RCS chats, it’s subtle, not instantly obvious like it is with Apple Messages, where green means “SMS or RCS, never encrypted” and blue means “iMessage, always encrypted”.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Shame on Google for Their Description of Google Messages’s Encryption Support’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/04/shame-on-google-messages"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>U.S. Officials Urge Americans to Use Encrypted Apps, for Texting and Calls, in Wake of Chinese Infiltration of Our Unencrypted Telecom Network</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-officials-urge-americans-use-encrypted-apps-cyberattack-rcna182694" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vx7" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/04/us-official-urge-use-of-e2ee" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41371</id>
<published>2024-12-04T19:57:31Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-05T21:17:08Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Kevin Collier, reporting for NBC News:
<blockquote>
Amid an unprecedented cyberattack on telecommunications companies
such as AT&T and Verizon, U.S. officials have recommended that
Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their
communications stay hidden from foreign hackers.
The hacking campaign, nicknamed Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, is one
of the largest intelligence compromises in U.S. history, and it
has not yet been fully remediated. Officials on a news call
Tuesday refused to set a timetable for declaring the country’s
telecommunications systems free of interlopers. Officials had told
NBC News that China hacked AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies to
spy on customers.
A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington did not
immediately respond to a request for comment.
</blockquote>
<a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/10/07/china-calea-back-door-hack">Don’t hold your breath</a>.
<blockquote>
In the call Tuesday, two officials — a senior FBI official who
asked not to be named and Jeff Greene, executive assistant
director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Security Agency — both recommended using encrypted messaging apps
to Americans who want to minimize the chances of China’s
intercepting their communications.
“Our suggestion, what we have told folks internally, is not new
here: Encryption is your friend, whether it’s on text messaging or
if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communication.
Even if the adversary is able to intercept the data, if it is
encrypted, it will make it impossible,” Greene said.
</blockquote>
It seems kind of new for the FBI to call encryption “our friend”, but now that I think about it, their beef over the years has primarily been about gaining access to locked devices, not eavesdropping on communication protocols. Their advocacy stance on device encryption has not changed — they still want a “back door for good guys” there. Their thinking, I think, is that E2EE communications are a good thing because they protect against remote eavesdropping from foreign adversaries — exactly like this campaign waged by China. The FBI doesn’t need to intercept communications over the wire. When the FBI wants to see someone’s communications, they get a warrant to seize their devices. That’s why the FBI <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/about/mission/lawful-access">wants device back doors</a>, but are now encouraging the use of protocols that are truly E2EE. But that’s not to say that law enforcement agencies worldwide <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66716502">don’t still fantasize about mandatory “back doors for good guys”</a>.
Here’s a clunker of a paragraph from this NBC News story, though:
<blockquote>
Privacy advocates have long advocated using end-to-end encrypted
apps. Signal and WhatsApp automatically implement end-to-end
encryption in both calls and messages. Google Messages and
iMessage also can encrypt calls and texts end to end.
</blockquote>
It’s true that both voice and text communications over Signal and WhatsApp are always secured with end-to-end encryption. But Google Messages is an Android app that only handles text messaging via SMS and RCS, not voice. There’s a “Call” button in Google Messages but that just dials the contact using the Phone app — just a plain old-fashioned unencrypted phone call. (There’s a Video Call button in Google Messages, but that button tries to launch Google Meet.) Some text chats in Google Messages are encrypted, but <a href="https://support.google.com/messages/answer/10252671?hl=en">only those using RCS in which all participants are using a recent version of Google Messages</a>. Google Messages does provide visual indicators of the encryption status of a chat. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services">The RCS standard</a> has no encryption; E2EE RCS chats in Google Messages use Google’s proprietary extension and are exclusive to the Google Messages app, so RCS chats between Google Messages and other apps, most conspicuously Apple Messages, are not encrypted.
iMessage is not an app. It is Apple’s proprietary protocol, available within its Messages app. The entire iMessage protocol was built upon end-to-end encryption — all iMessage messages have been E2EE from the start. Apple also offers FaceTime for voice and video calls, and <a href="https://support.apple.com/guide/security/facetime-security-seca331c55cd/web">FaceTime calls are always secured by E2EE</a>.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘U.S. Officials Urge Americans to Use Encrypted Apps, for Texting and Calls, in Wake of Chinese Infiltration of Our Unencrypted Telecom Network’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/04/us-official-urge-use-of-e2ee"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>Andy Grove in 2000: ‘What I’ve Learned’</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a1449/learned-andy-grove-0500/" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vx6" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/03/grove-2006-interview" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41370</id>
<published>2024-12-04T02:31:28Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-04T16:02:22Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
A few nuggets of wisdom from Andy Grove, in an interview with Esquire after he retired as Intel’s CEO, but still served as chairman:
<blockquote>
Profits are the lifeblood of enterprise. Don’t let anyone tell
you different.
You must understand your mistakes. Study the hell out of them.
You’re not going to have the chance of making the same mistake
again — you can’t step into the river again at the same place and
the same time — but you will have the chance of making a similar
mistake.
Status is a very dangerous thing. I’ve met too many people who
make it a point of pride that they never take money out of a cash
machine, people who are too good to have their own e-mail address,
because that’s for everybody else but not them. It’s hard to fight
the temptation to set yourself apart from the rest of the world.
</blockquote>
Grove, still serving as CEO during Intel’s zenith in 1997, didn’t even have an office. <a href="https://www.industryweek.com/leadership/companies-executives/article/21963786/1997-technology-leader-of-the-year-andy-grove-building-an-information-age-legacy">He worked out of an 8x9-foot cubicle</a>.
<blockquote>
What you’re seeing today is a very, very rapid evolution of an
industry where the milieu is better understood by people who grew
up in the same time frame as the industry. A lot of the years that
many of us have spent in business before this time are of only
limited relevance.
</blockquote>
This industry is not like any other. Computers don’t get incrementally more powerful; they get exponentially more powerful.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Andy Grove in 2000: ‘What I’ve Learned’’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/03/grove-2006-interview"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://1password.com/daringfireball" />
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<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/feeds/sponsors//11.41369</id>
<author><name>Daring Fireball Department of Commerce</name></author>
<published>2024-12-04T01:33:47Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-04T01:33:47Z</updated>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Imagine if you went to the movies and they charged $8000 for popcorn.
Or, imagine you got on a plane and they told you that seatbelts were only available in first class.
Your sense of outraged injustice would probably be something like what IT and security professionals feel when a software vendor hits them with the dreaded SSO tax.
The SSO tax is the name given to the practice of charging an outrageous premium for Single Sign-On, often by making it part of a product’s “enterprise tier.” The jump in price can be astonishing — one CRM charges over 5000% more for the tier with SSO. At those prices, only very large companies can afford to pay for SSO. But the problem is that companies of all sizes need it.
In a world where compromised credentials are the number one culprit in breaches, SSO reduces the number of weak, reused passwords flying around. It’s also critical to onboarding and offboarding, since IT only has to manage a single on/off switch, instead of managing access separately for every application.
To be fair, there’s nothing wrong with charging some extra for SSO — it’s not free for vendors to build or maintain — but putting it out of the reach of so many companies is irresponsible, and makes us all less safe.
Still, until outraged customers can <a href="https://ssotax.org/">shame vendors into getting rid of the tax</a>, many businesses have to figure out how to live without SSO. For them, the best route is likely to be a password manager, which also reduces weak and re-used credentials, and enables secure sharing across teams. And a password manager is likely a good investment anyway, for the apps that aren’t integrated with SSO.
<a href="https://blog.1password.com/explaining-the-backlash-to-the-sso-tax/">To learn more about the past, present, and future of the SSO tax, read the full blog post</a>.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘1Password: You Want to Charge How Much for SSO?’" href="https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/2024/12/1password_you_want_to_charge_h"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
<title>[Sponsor] 1Password: You Want to Charge How Much for SSO?</title></entry><entry>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/2024/12/andy_grove_was_right" />
<link rel="shorturl" href="http://df4.us/vx4" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024://1.41368</id>
<published>2024-12-04T00:02:25Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-04T20:35:07Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<summary type="text">Grove’s words don’t read merely as advice — they read today as a postmortem for what happed to Intel over the last 20 years.</summary>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
The Verge’s Sean Hollister penned an excellent high-level summary of Pat Gelsinger’s ignominious ouster from Intel, under the headline “<a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/3/24311594/intel-under-pat-gelsinger">What Happened to Intel?</a>” A wee bit of pussyfooting here, though, caught my eye:
<blockquote>
Just how bad was it before Gelsinger took the top job?
Not great! There were bad bets, multiple generations of delayed
chips, quality assurance issues, and then Apple decided to abandon
Intel in favor of its homegrown Arm-based chips — which turned
out to be good, seriously showing up Intel in the laptop
performance and battery life realms. We wrote all about it in
“<a href="https://www.theverge.com/22597713/intel-7nm-delay-summer-2020-apple-arm-switch-roadmap-gelsinger-ceo">The summer Intel fell behind</a>.”
Intel had earlier misses, too: the company long regretted its
decision <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/16/4337954/intel-could-have-been-inside-the-original-iphone-says-outgoing-ceo">not to put Intel inside the iPhone</a>, and it failed
to execute on phone chips for Android handsets as well. It
arguably missed the boat on the entire mobile revolution.
</blockquote>
There’s no argument about it. Intel completely missed mobile. iPhones never used Intel chips and Apple Silicon chips are all fabbed by TSMC. Apple’s chips are the best in the industry, also without argument, and the only mobile chips that can be seen as reasonable competition are from Qualcomm (and maybe Samsung). Intel has never been a player in that game, and it’s a game Intel needed not only to be a player in, but to dominate.
It’s not just that smartphones are now a bigger industry than the PC industry ever was, and that Intel has missed out on becoming a dominant supplier to phone makers. That’s bad, but it’s not the worst of it. It’s that those ARM-based mobile chips — Apple Silicon and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon lineup — got so good that they’re now taking over large swaths of the high end of the PC market. Partly from an obsessive focus on performance-per-watt efficiency, partly from the inherent advantages of ARM’s architecture, partly from engineering talent and strategy, and partly from the profound benefits of economies of scale as the mobile market exploded. Apple, as we all know, moved the entire Mac platform from Intel chips to Apple Silicon starting in 2020. The Mac “only” has 15 percent of the worldwide PC market, but the entirety of the Mac’s market share is at the premium end of the market. Losing the Mac was a huge loss for Intel. And now <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/04/09/microsoft-surface-event-arm-chips" title="Daring Fireball, April 2024: “Microsoft Preparing New Push for ARM-Powered Windows Laptops”">Qualcomm and Microsoft are pushing Windows laptops to ARM chips too</a>, for the same reasons: not just performance-per-watt, but sheer performance. x86 CPUs are still dominant on gaming PCs, but even there, <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/6/24288948/amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d-review-cpu-processor-benchmark-test" title="Tom Warren writing at The Verge this month: “AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D: The Best Gaming CPU”">AMD is considered the cream of the crop</a>.
Of all companies, Intel should have seen the potential for this to happen. Intel did not take “phone chips” seriously, but within a decade, those ostensibly toy “phone chips” were the best CPUs in the world for premium PC laptops, and their efficiency advantages make them advantageous in data centers too. And Apple has shown that they’re even superior for <a href="https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/">workstation-class</a> <a href="https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/">desktops</a>. That’s exactly how Intel became Intel back at the outset of the personal computing revolution. PCs were seen as mere toys by the “real” computer makers of the 1970s and early 1980s. IBM was caught so flatfooted that when they saw the need to enter the PC market, they went to Intel for the chips and Microsoft for DOS — decisions that both Intel and Microsoft capitalized upon, resulting in a tag-team hardware/software dominance of the entire computing industry that lasted a full quarter century, while IBM was left sidelined as just another maker of PCs. From Intel’s perspective, the x86 platform went from being a “toy” to being the dominant architecture for everything from cheap laptops all the way up to data-center-class servers.
ARM-based “phone chips” did the same thing to x86 that Intel’s x86 “PC chips” had done, decades earlier, to mainframes. Likewise, Nvidia turned “graphics cards for video game enthusiasts” — also once considered mere toys — into what is now, depending on stock market fluctuations, the most valuable company in the world. They’re neck and neck with the other company that pantsed Intel for silicon design leadership: Apple. Creating “the world’s best chips” remains an incredible, almost unfathomably profitable place to be as a business. Apple and Nvidia can both say that about the very different segments of the market in which their chips dominate. Intel can’t say that today about any of the segments for which it produces chips. TSMC, the company that fabs all chips for Apple Silicon and <a href="https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-reportedly-selects-intel-foundry-services-for-chip-packaging-production-could-produce-over-300000-h100-gpus-per-month">most</a> of <a href="https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/tsmc-culitho-computational-lithography/">Nvidia’s leading chips</a>, is 9th on <a href="https://companiesmarketcap.com/">the list of companies ranked by market cap</a>, with a spot in the top 10 that <a href="https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-history-of-the-largest-companies-by-market-cap-1999-today/">Intel used to occupy</a>. Today, Intel is 180th — and on a trajectory to fall out of the top 200.
Intel never should have been blithe to the threat. The company’s longtime CEO and chairman (and employee #3) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove">Andy Grove</a> titled his autobiography <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Only-Paranoid-Survive-Exploit-Challenge/dp/0385483821?tag=df-amzn-20">Only the Paranoid Survive</a>. The full passage from which he drew the title:
<blockquote>
Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the
paranoid survive.
</blockquote>
Grove retired as CEO in 1998 and as chairman in 2005. It’s as though no one at Intel after him listened to a word he said. Grove’s words don’t read merely as advice — they read today as a postmortem synopsis for Intel’s own precipitous decline over the last 20 years.
]]></content>
<title>★ Andy Grove Was Right</title></entry><entry>
<title>The Verge Launches a Subscription</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/3/24306571/verge-subscription-launch-fewer-ads-unlimited-access-full-text-rss" />
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<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/03/the-verge-launches-a-subscription" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41367</id>
<published>2024-12-03T21:32:13Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-03T21:32:14Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Nilay Patel:
<blockquote>
So many of you like The Verge that we’ve actually gotten a
shocking number of notes from people asking how they can pay to
support our work. It’s no secret that lots of great websites and
publications have gone under over the past few years as the open
web falls apart, and it’s clear that directly supporting the
creators you love is a big part of how everyone gets to stay
working on the modern internet.
At the same time, we didn’t want to simply paywall the entire site — it’s a tragedy that traditional journalism is retreating behind
paywalls while nonsense spreads across platforms for free. We also
think our big, popular homepage is a resource worth investing in.
So we’re rethinking The Verge in a freemium model: our homepage,
core news posts, Decoder interview transcripts, Quick Posts,
Storystreams, and live blogs will remain free. We know so many of
you depend on us to curate the news every day, and we’re going to
stay focused on making a great homepage that’s worth checking out
regularly, whether you pay us or not.
Our original reporting, reviews, and features will be behind a
dynamic metered paywall — many of you will never hit the paywall,
but if you read us a lot, we’ll ask you to pay.
</blockquote>
This sounds like an extremely well-considered balance between keeping much of the site open to all, allowing metered access to a limited number of premium articles free of charge, and creating a new sustainable revenue stream from subscribers. Bravo.
Count me in as a day one subscriber.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘The Verge Launches a Subscription’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/03/the-verge-launches-a-subscription"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>Google Search Is Already in Decline</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/googling-is-for-old-people-thats-a-problem-for-google-5188a6ed" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vx2" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/02/google-search-decline-mims" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41366</id>
<published>2024-12-02T23:13:17Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-02T23:13:18Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Christopher Mims, writing for The Wall Street Journal (<a href="https://apple.news/A1Dk4WVHSSHqAaXcKL2Z03g">News+</a>):
<blockquote>
The company’s core business is under siege. People are
increasingly <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/jeff-bezos-bets-on-a-google-challenger-using-ai-to-try-to-upend-internet-search-0859bda6">getting answers from artificial
intelligence</a>. Younger generations are using <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-and-metas-advertising-dominance-fades-as-tiktok-netflix-emerge-11672711107">other
platforms to gather information</a>. And the quality of the
results delivered by its search engine is deteriorating as the web
is <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/its-the-end-of-the-web-as-we-know-it-2ab686a2">flooded with AI-generated content</a>. Taken together,
these forces could lead to long-term decline in Google search
traffic, and the outsize profits generated from it, which prop up
its parent company Alphabet’s money-losing bets on things like its
Waymo self-driving unit.
The first danger facing Google is clear and present: When people
want to search for information or go shopping on the internet,
they are shifting to Google’s competitors, and advertising dollars
are following them. In 2025, eMarketer projects, Google’s share of
the U.S. search-advertising market <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/online-ad-market-google-tiktok-9599d7e8">will fall below 50% for the
first time since the company began tracking it</a>.
</blockquote>
<a href="https://daringfireball.net/misc/2024/12/wsj-us-search-advertising-share.png">The accompanying chart</a> (“Estimated share of U.S. search advertising revenue”) suggests Google’s decline has been Amazon’s gain. Basically, Google may still dominate the market for general web search, but people more and more are searching using apps and services that aren’t (or aren’t only) general web search engines. And the reason why is that Google web search has gotten worse.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Google Search Is Already in Decline’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/02/google-search-decline-mims"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>The Talk Show: ‘A Good Duck Butt’</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/12/02/ep-415" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vx1" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/02/the-talk-show-415" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41365</id>
<published>2024-12-02T19:59:24Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-02T19:59:24Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Special guest Allen Pike joins the show to talk about the state of generative AI and how Apple Intelligence measures up (so far). Also: some speculation on Apple’s pending acquisition of the ever-difficult-to-pronounce Pixelmator.
<audio
src = "https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/daringfireball/thetalkshow-415-allen-pike.mp3"
controls
preload = "none"
/>
Sponsored by:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://workos.com/">WorkOS</a>: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS — free up to 1 million monthly active users.</li>
</ul>
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘The Talk Show: ‘A Good Duck Butt’’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/02/the-talk-show-415"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>Steep Discounts on M3 MacBook Air Models at Amazon</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DLHQGGN5?tag=df-amzn-20" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vx0" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/02/steep-discounts-on-m3-macbook-air-models-at-amazon" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41364</id>
<published>2024-12-02T18:03:19Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-02T18:04:47Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Amazon is running a holiday discount on M3 MacBook Airs, but it’s tricky — you need to click around through various color choices and watch the prices and ship dates. My main link on this post goes to the config that looks like their best deal for price-conscious gift buyers: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DLHQGGN5?tag=df-amzn-20">the 13-inch M3 MacBook Air in space gray, with 24 GB RAM and 512 GB of storage for $1,299</a>, a $200 discount from the list price, with delivery in a few days. They’ve also got the same configuration, at the same price, with the same delivery window in silver. Starlight only has “5 remaining in stock” (and that was at 8 just a few minutes ago, so they’ll likely be gone by the time you read this), and midnight is already out of stock.
The <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CX246FNZ?tag=df-amzn-20">13-inch configuration with 16 GB RAM and 512 GB storage is just $1,099</a>, but delivery dates are in early January. They’ve got <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DLHY19N3?tag=df-amzn-20">the configuration with 16 GB RAM and 256 GB storage for just $899</a>, but only in midnight and starlight, and with delivery windows of “1 to 2 months”.
The best option for 15-inch M3 MacBook Airs is <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DLHN9WYG?tag=df-amzn-20">the configuration with 24 GB RAM and 512 GB storage for $1,424</a> — a $275 discount from the regular price of $1,699. That’s available at that price, with next-week delivery, in all four colors. They’ve also got $200 discounts on <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DLJ4J78G?tag=df-amzn-20">various</a> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CX24BN3L?tag=df-amzn-20">configurations</a> with 16 GB RAM, but delivery on those models is out in January.
Needless to say, all of these links are using my make-me-rich affiliate code. And Amazon <a href="https://amzn.to/4fRPvJR">still has USB-C AirPods Pro 2 for just $154</a>, almost $100 off the regular price.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Steep Discounts on M3 MacBook Air Models at Amazon’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/02/steep-discounts-on-m3-macbook-air-models-at-amazon"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger Retires; Bloomberg Reports He Was Forced Out by Board</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-02/intel-ceo-pat-gelsinger-retires-amid-chipmaker-s-turnaround-plan" />
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<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/02/intel-gelsinger-forced-out" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41363</id>
<published>2024-12-02T17:16:35Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-02T22:53:44Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Ian King, Liana Baker, and Ryan Gould, reporting for Bloomberg:*
<blockquote>
Intel Corp. Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger was forced out
after the board lost confidence in his plans to turn around the
iconic chipmaker, adding to turmoil at one of the pioneers of the
technology industry.
The clash came to a head last week when Gelsinger met with the
board about the company’s progress on winning back market share
and narrowing the gap with Nvidia Corp., according to people
familiar with the matter. He was given the option to retire or be
removed, and chose to announce the end of his career at Intel,
said the people, who declined to be identified discussing
proceedings that were not made public.
Intel Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston
Holthaus are serving as interim co-CEOs while the board searches
for Gelsinger’s replacement, <a href="https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1719/intel-announces-retirement-of-ceo-pat-gelsinger">the company said in a statement</a>.
Frank Yeary, independent chair of the board of Intel, will serve
as interim executive chair.
</blockquote>
See also: <a href="https://www.techmeme.com/241202/p21#a241202p21">Techmeme’s roundup</a>.
* Bloomberg, of course, is the publication that published “<a href="https://daringfireball.net/2018/10/bloomberg_the_big_hack">The Big Hack</a>” in October 2018 — a sensational story alleging that data centers of Apple, Amazon, and dozens of other companies were compromised by China’s intelligence services. The story presented no confirmable evidence at all, was <a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/10/what-businessweek-got-wrong-about-apple/">vehemently denied</a> by <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/setting-the-record-straight-on-bloomberg-businessweeks-erroneous-article/">all companies</a> involved, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2018/10/22/your-move-bloomberg/">has not been confirmed by a single other publication</a> (despite much effort to do so), and has been <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/10/09/big-hack-doubts">largely discredited by one of Bloomberg’s own sources</a>. By all appearances “The Big Hack” was complete bullshit. Yet Bloomberg has issued no correction or retraction, and <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/02/12/bloomberg-big-con">their only ostensibly substantial follow-up</a> contained not one shred of evidence to back up their allegations. Bloomberg seemingly hopes we’ll all just forget about it. I say we do not just forget about it. Everything they publish should be treated with skepticism until they retract “The Big Hack” or provide evidence that any of it was true.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger Retires; Bloomberg Reports He Was Forced Out by Board’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/12/02/intel-gelsinger-forced-out"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>Streaks and Little Streaks</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://streaks.app/" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vwy" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/30/streaks-and-little-streaks" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41362</id>
<published>2024-11-30T23:47:42Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-30T23:47:43Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
My thanks to Crunchy Bagel — the company of developer Quentin Zervaas — for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Streaks, their excellent app for iPhone and Apple Watch. Streaks is a to-do list that helps you form good habits. The point is to motivate you to tackle the things you want to do: anything from daily exercise goals, learning a new language, taking your vitamins, or quitting a bad habit. Anything. I’ve brushed my teeth daily since I was a child but I’ve never been good about flossing — until, generally, a few days before a scheduled dental cleaning. I’ve been using Streaks lately to groove a daily flossing habit. (I expect a pat on the back the next time I’m at the dentist.)
Streaks first sponsored DF back in 2016 and everything <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/06/03/streaks">I wrote about it then</a> remains true today. It’s a brilliant design, both visually and conceptually. I’ve tried a few apps like this over the years — including a few new ones in recent years — and what kills most of them is friction. If it takes too many fiddly steps to mark off the things you do, you stop using the app. Streaks makes it incredibly simple and fast to mark things done. For anything activity-related, you don’t have to do anything at all — it just tracks information from HealthKit (with your permission, of course) automatically. And in terms of the visual design, Streaks is both highly distinctive and very iOS-y — it doesn’t look like a stock iOS app, but it very much looks and feels like a good native iOS app. That’s a combination that takes a great eye to pull off. (Unsurprisingly, Streaks won an Apple Design Award a few years ago, and has often been <a href="https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=67dti69d">featured by Apple in the App Store</a>.)
iOS has not been standing still over the last 8 years and neither has Zervaas. Streaks supports all the latest stuff you’d hope for in an iOS app, including interactive widgets. Streaks’s interactive widgets reduce even further the friction of marking things done — interactive widgets were practically made for apps like Streaks. Streaks also has a great Apple Watch companion app.
I only accept sponsorships for products or services that I’m proud to support. But Streaks is so good that I want to go out of my way to draw attention to it (again). I’m not praising it with superlatives because it’s my sponsor; I’m doing so because it’s superlatively good. It’s a one-time purchase, and the latest update has added seasonal themes, just in time for Christmas (and your New Year’s resolutions).
If you have any sort of interest in an app to help reinforce daily habits (or an interest in great UI design), <a href="https://streaks.app/">go check Streaks out</a>.
If you have young children, be sure to also try <a href="https://littlestreaks.com/">Little Streaks</a>. It’s a great way to help kids focus on routines: meal time, bedtime, learning to ride a bike, brushing their teeth (and flossing!) — anything. Little Streaks is free for one routine, or use code “DARING” for 50% off the first year of a subscription for unlimited routines.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Streaks and Little Streaks’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/30/streaks-and-little-streaks"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>‘Building LLMs Is Probably Not Going to Be a Brilliant Business’</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://calpaterson.com/porter.html" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vwx" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/29/cal-paterson-llms-as-businesses" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41361</id>
<published>2024-11-29T23:28:03Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-30T16:56:20Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Cal Paterson:
<blockquote>
Large language models (LLMs) like Chat-GPT and Claude.ai are
whizzy and cool. A lot of people think that they are going to be
The Future. Maybe they are — but that doesn’t mean that building
them is going to be a profitable business.
In the 1960s, airlines were The Future. That is why old films have
so many swish shots of airports in them. Airlines though, turned
out to be an unavoidably rubbish business. I’ve flown on loads of
airlines that have gone bust: Monarch, WOW Air, Thomas Cook,
Flybmi, Zoom. And those are all busts from before coronavirus -
times change but being an airline is always a bad idea.
That’s odd, because other businesses, even ones which seem really
stupid, are much more profitable. Selling fizzy drinks is,
surprisingly, an amazing business. Perhaps the best. Coca-Cola’s
return on equity has rarely fallen below 30% in any given year.
That seems very unfair because being an airline is hard work but
making Coke is pretty easy. It’s even more galling because
Coca-Cola don’t actually make the Coke themselves - that is
outsourced to “bottling companies”. They literally just sell it.
</blockquote>
This is such a crackerjack essay. Clear, concise, and uncomplicated. I find it hard to argue with. I’ve <a href="https://daringfireball.net/2023/07/apple_gpt_bloomberg">repeatedly</a> <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/04/18/meta-ai">mentioned</a> an internal paper that leaked out of Google last year, titled “<a href="https://semianalysis.com/2023/05/04/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither/">We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI</a>”. The fact that OpenAI has lobbied for stringent AI regulation around the globe suggests that they fear this too — their encouragement of regulation <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/20/regulation-altman">could be explained by seeking a regulatory moat</a> because there is no technical or business model moat to be had.
Paterson, expounding on his comparison to the airline industry, observes that commercial airlines have only two suppliers: Boeing and Airbus. He continues:
<blockquote>
LLM makers sometimes imply that their suppliers are cloud
companies like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, etc. That
wouldn’t be so bad because you could shop around and make them
compete to cut the huge cost of model training.
Really though, LLM makers have only one true supplier:
NVIDIA. NVIDIA make the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopper_(microarchitecture)">chips</a> that all models are
trained on — regardless of cloud vendor. And that gives
NVIDIA colossal, near total pricing power. NVIDIA are more
powerful relative to Anthropic or OpenAI than Airbus or
Boeing could ever dream of being.
</blockquote>
<a href="https://companiesmarketcap.com/">At this moment</a>, there are three companies in the world with market caps in excess of $3 trillion: Apple, Nvidia, and Microsoft. There are only two more with market caps in excess of $2 trillion: Amazon and Google. Engineering, training, and providing LLMs isn’t the business with a moat. The business with a moat is making the cutting-edge computer hardware that trains LLMs, and that belongs to Nvidia.
I have more to say about Paterson’s essay, but I really just want you to read it for now.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘‘Building LLMs Is Probably Not Going to Be a Brilliant Business’’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/29/cal-paterson-llms-as-businesses"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>Welcome to Aperture 3</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.apple.com/welcomescreen/aperture3/#gettingstarted" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vww" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/29/welcome-to-aperture-3" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41360</id>
<published>2024-11-29T21:26:07Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-29T21:26:08Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Kind of wild that this entire sub-site is still standing on Apple.com, including working video. (Fingers crossed that my linking to it doesn’t bring it to the attention of someone who decides to 404 it.)
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Welcome to Aperture 3’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/29/welcome-to-aperture-3"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>Nathan Edwards Reviews the iMac M4 for The Verge</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.theverge.com/24303351/apple-imac-m4-review-expensive-beautiful-niche" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vwv" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/29/edwards-imac-m4-review" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41359</id>
<published>2024-11-29T20:50:40Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-30T01:35:20Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
From Nathan Edwards’s 6/10 review of the M4 iMac for The Verge:
<blockquote>
I also do not love that the stand has no height adjustment, and
you can’t swap it for a more ergonomic option without buying an
entirely different computer. Apple sells <a href="https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/imac-vesa">a version of the iMac
with a VESA mount</a>, but it doesn’t come with a stand at all,
and most height-adjustable VESA mounts are not as pretty as the
iMac. The Studio Display has a height-adjustable stand option, so
we know Apple can make one it’s willing to put out into the
world. It just hasn’t done so here. But whatever. I have hardcover
books. It’s fine.
</blockquote>
It wasn’t Edwards, but Nilay Patel, who <a href="https://www.theverge.com/22981744/apple-studio-display-5k-monitor-webcam-speakers-review">reviewed the Studio Display for The Verge</a>, but in that review the $1,600 cost — which called out the $400 surcharge for the optional adjustable stand — was one of the three bullet items under “The Bad”. So it’s not hard to guess that if the M4 iMac had an optional adjustable stand, it would still be listed a con, because surely that option, from Apple, would cost at least $300.
(I’ve used a Studio Display with the pricey options for nano-texture and adjustable height ever since it came out, and consider both options well worth the cost.)
But the weird thing about Edwards’s review is that the whole thing is predicated on his not seeing the appeal of an all-in-one computer. I feel the same way, personally. My primary computer is a MacBook Pro that I connect, lid-closed, to the aforementioned-in-parenthetical-aside Studio Display most of the time. If I were to buy a dedicated desktop Mac I’d get either a Mac Mini or Mac Studio and connect that to a Studio Display. But the iMac is obviously intended for people who want an all-in-one.
It makes for a very strange, dare I say pointless, review. It’s like a bicycle review from someone who admits that they only ever walk or drive a car and don’t see why anyone else doesn’t walk or drive everywhere. In theory, someone who doesn’t care for genre X can write a review of something from genre X, and their dislike of the genre might provide a unique perspective. (David Foster Wallace wrote a masterpiece of the genre with the title essay in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Supposedly-Fun-Thing-Never-Again/dp/0316925284/?tag=df-amzn-20">A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again</a> regarding a weeklong Caribbean cruise.) But the review still needs to gauge the product accordingly, for what it is. Does anyone make a better all-in-one PC than the iMac? If so, who? If not, why is this a 6/10?
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Nathan Edwards Reviews the iMac M4 for The Verge’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/29/edwards-imac-m4-review"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>Space/Time: Black Friday Mac Apps Collection 2024</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://unclutterapp.com/bundle/" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vwu" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/29/space-time-mac-apps-collection" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41358</id>
<published>2024-11-29T17:04:29Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-29T17:04:30Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Holiday shopping bundle of 13 excellent Mac Apps, with two ways to buy. Get the whole bundle of 13 apps for $74 (a 76 percent discount from the combined regular prices), or, pick and choose a la carte and buy apps at 50 percent off.
Included in the promotion is Stairways Software’s astonishingly powerful and useful <a href="https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/">Keyboard Maestro</a>, which <a href="https://mastodon.social/@KeyboardMaestro/113563288506705045">almost never goes on sale</a>. There are many longstanding Mac apps and utilities that I enjoy, appreciate, and recommend. There are very few that I can say I’d feel lost without. Keyboard Maestro is one of those.
Other apps in the Space/Time bundle that I use: <a href="https://textsniper.app/">TextSniper</a> (instantly OCR any text you see on screen), <a href="https://daisydiskapp.com/">DaisyDisk</a> (disk space visualizer/cleanup), <a href="https://cleanshot.com/">CleanShot X</a> (advanced screenshot utility), and <a href="https://www.macbartender.com/">Bartender</a> (menu bar item manager).
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Space/Time: Black Friday Mac Apps Collection 2024’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/29/space-time-mac-apps-collection"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>The UX of Lego Interface Panels</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://interactionmagic.com/UX-LEGO-Interfaces/" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vwt" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/28/the-ux-of-lego-interface-panels" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41357</id>
<published>2024-11-28T18:17:50Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-29T00:52:31Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Fun interaction design treatise from George Cave.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘The UX of Lego Interface Panels’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/28/the-ux-of-lego-interface-panels"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>AirPods Pro 2 for Just $154 at Amazon</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://amzn.to/4fRPvJR" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vws" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/27/airpods-pro-2-amazon" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41356</id>
<published>2024-11-27T20:00:08Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-28T17:33:23Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Borderline incredible discount on AirPods Pro 2 at Amazon. This is just short of $100 off the retail list price of $249. (Buy through this link and I’ll get rich on the affiliate commission.)
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘AirPods Pro 2 for Just $154 at Amazon’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/27/airpods-pro-2-amazon"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>John Siracusa’s Review of Delicious Library 1.0</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2004/11/delicious-library/" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vwr" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/27/siracusa-delicous-library" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41355</id>
<published>2024-11-27T19:14:21Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-27T19:16:59Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
John Siracusa, in his inimitable style, reviewed Delicious Library 1.0 upon its release, 20 years ago this month:
<blockquote>
Part of what makes the Mac community so special is that so many
Mac developers have itches — and, more importantly, corresponding
talents — that have little or nothing to do with computers. I
invite you to look again at some of the screenshots and artwork in
this application. Someone loved those graphics. Someone sweated
over every pixel of that application window. Someone knows what it
means to be a lover of art, music, books, video games. This is in
addition to (not instead of) the ability to write great code.
All of these human facilities and experiences have been harnessed
to create not just a mere “program”, “application” or (God forbid)
“executable”, but a digital love letter to collectors. Delicious
Monster, from its products to its <a href="http://www.delicious-monster.com/">web site</a>, exudes a
spirit of passion and fun. “I’ve never been happier at work”, Wil
Shipley told me in an email. “I think it shows in the finished
product.”
I think so too. It may only be version 1.0, but it’s delicious.
</blockquote>
Re-reading this review — which I first linked to, <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2004/11/08/siracusa">with little comment</a>, upon publication — reminded me of several things. First, Siracusa is one of the few writers I’ve ever felt competitive with in this racket. This whole thing is so fucking good, and touches upon so many subtle points that are so hard to convey in words. (In some ways it’s better to read <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20041109024552/http://arstechnica.com/index.ars">in its original multi-page layout</a>, via Internet Archive, but those archived versions are inexplicably missing some, but not all, of the screenshots, and for a review of an app as visually ambitious as Delicious Library, the screenshots are essential. But the current Ars Technica version of the review, although it has all the inline images, is missing <a href="https://daringfireball.net/misc/2024/11/main-window-big.jpeg">this “larger version” of Delicious Library’s main window</a>. Open the version I’m hosting in a tab for reference. Note too that “larger version” meant something different 20 years ago — it’s only 183 KB, but is the largest image in the review.)
Second, I had forgotten just how ambitious Delicious Library 1.0 was, right out of the gate. I remembered that Delicious Library eventually supported barcode scanning via webcams, but that feature was in fact present in version 1.0. It worked incredibly well. And the feature was so far ahead of its time. In 2004, <a href="https://everymac.com/systems/by_year/macs-released-in-2004.html">no Mac had yet shipped with a built-in camera</a>. Instead, we all bought <a href="https://512pixels.net/2016/07/the-isight-camera/">Apple’s standalone $150 iSight camera</a>, which connected via FireWire. (What a gorgeous device.) By the end of his effusive review, Siracusa (unsurprisingly) has a wishlist of additional features, but what was in Delicious Library 1.0 comprised far more than a “minimal viable product”. It exemplified Apple’s — and Steve Jobs’s — own ethos of debuting with a bang, right out of the gate. It made you say “Wow!” And then you’d think, “Oh, but it’d be cool if it...” and, it turns out, it did that too.
Delicious indeed.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘John Siracusa’s Review of Delicious Library 1.0’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/27/siracusa-delicous-library"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>The End of the Line for Delicious Library</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://mastodon.social/@wjs/113539330521476328" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vwq" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/26/delicious-library-eol" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41354</id>
<published>2024-11-27T03:10:34Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-27T04:09:42Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Wil Shipley, on Mastodon:
<blockquote>
Amazon has shut off the feed that allowed Delicious Library to
look up items, unfortunately limiting the app to what users
already have (or enter manually).
I wasn’t contacted about this.
I’ve pulled it from the Mac App Store and shut down the website so
nobody accidentally buys a non-functional app.
</blockquote>
The end of an era, but it’s kind of surprising it was still functional until now. (<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/wilshipley/">Shipley has been a full-time engineer at Apple</a> for three years now.)
It’s hard to describe just what a sensation Delicious Library was <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130429014759/http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/news/2005/01/66276">when it debuted</a>, and <a href="https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2006/11/06/the-delicious-generation/">how influential it was</a>. Delicious Library was simultaneously very useful, in very practical ways, and obsessed with its exuberant UI in ways that served no purpose other than looking cool as shit. It was an app that demanded to be praised just for the way it looked, but also served a purpose that resonated with many users. For about a decade it seemed as though most popular new apps would be designed like Delicious Library. Then Apple dropped iOS 7 in 2013, and now, no apps look like this. Whatever it is that we, as an industry, have lost in the now decade-long trend of iOS 7-style flat design, Delicious Library epitomized it.
They were even clever and innovative <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2006/06/26/delicious-gamblers">in the ways they promoted the app</a>. <a href="https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/2008/12/delicious_library_2.php">The first time</a> Delicious Monster sponsored Daring Fireball for a week, their sponsorship message read, in its entirety:
<blockquote>
Organize the shit you like. 
Get rid of the shit you don’t. 
Delicious Library 2.
</blockquote>
When they created an iPhone version of Delicious Library, they announced it via <a href="https://lonelysandwich.com/post/122013190/delicious-video">this delightfully intricate but decidedly lo-fi stop-motion-animated video</a>.
20 years go by and there’s some inevitable nostalgia looking back at any art form. But man, Delicious Library exemplified an era of indie app development that, sadly, is largely over. And make no bones about it: Delicious Library was a creative work of art.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘The End of the Line for Delicious Library’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/26/delicious-library-eol"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>‘It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty to Endanger the Lives of as Many Trans People as Possible’</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://theonion.com/it-is-journalism-s-sacred-duty-to-endanger-the-lives-of-1850126997/" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vwp" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/26/onion-trans-endangerment" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41353</id>
<published>2024-11-26T22:49:17Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-27T04:08:50Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
The Onion Editorial Board:
<blockquote>
All great journalists, and even those lesser journalists who don’t
work for The Onion, eventually ponder why we do what we do. Is the
point of reporting to illuminate the world around us, so that we
may make meaning of it? Or is it to cause people in minority
groups to question their humanity and persuade others to demonize
them? We know where we stand, proudly dreaming of genitals.
Research shows that trans people are over four times more likely
than cisgender people to be the victim of a violent crime. We
salute our colleagues across the media who are working tirelessly
to make that number even higher.
</blockquote>
This was published in 2023, but seems particularly apt post-election.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘‘It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty to Endanger the Lives of as Many Trans People as Possible’’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/26/onion-trans-endangerment"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>OpenAI Might Be Making a Web Browser</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-considers-taking-on-google-with-browser" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vwo" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/26/openai-browser" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41352</id>
<published>2024-11-26T18:30:55Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-29T18:20:39Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Erin Woo, Sahil Patel, and Amir Efrati, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas):
<blockquote>
OpenAI is preparing to launch a frontal assault on Google. The
ChatGPT owner recently considered developing a web browser that it
would combine with its chatbot, and it has separately discussed or
struck deals to power search features for travel, food, real
estate and retail websites, according to people who have seen
prototypes or designs of the products. [...]
Making a web browser could help OpenAI have more control over a
primary gateway through which people use the web, as well as
further boost ChatGPT, which has more than 300 million weekly
users just two years after its launch. It isn’t clear how a
ChatGPT browser’s features would differ from those of other
browsers.
In a signal of its interest in a browser, several months ago
OpenAI hired Ben Goodger, a founding member of the Chrome team at
Google. Another recent hire is Darin Fisher, who worked with
Goodger to develop Chrome.
But OpenAI isn’t remotely close to launching a browser, multiple
people said.
</blockquote>
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bengoodger_excited-to-share-that-ive-joined-the-supremely-activity-7206837692494483456-dMzn/">Goodger</a> and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/darin-fisher-7059ab/">Fisher</a>’s hirings weren’t secret — both keep up-to-date profiles on LinkedIn — and just because two people have previously created new web browsers (even multiple times) that their new gig is creating a new web browser. But it sure feels like a good guess.
Fisher most recently was at <a href="https://thebrowser.company/">The Browser Company</a> for two years, working on <a href="https://arc.net/">Arc</a>, an innovative browser that I admire for its originality but which simply did not click for me at all. The Browser Company is in flux, too, working both on Arc 2.0 <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/24/24279020/browser-company-ai-browser-arc">and an as-yet-unnamed second project</a> that might be a more traditional web browser.
Combine this with regulatory pressure on Apple’s Safari and especially Google’s Chrome, and it’s an exciting time for web browsers. It’s kind of wild how every few years the web browser market gets shaken up. The pattern that’s repeated several times is that just when the browser market seems settled — like the markets for, say, spreadsheets and word processors — there’s a period of flux and new entries shake up the market. There was a point when it seemed like Internet Explorer would be dominant forever; today it doesn’t even exist. There was a point when Firefox seemed entrenched on Windows; <a href="https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwide/2023">today it’s an afterthought</a>. Today <a href="https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwide/2023">Chrome seems entrenched, as dominant as IE once was</a>. Maybe not?
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘OpenAI Might Be Making a Web Browser’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/26/openai-browser"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>Apple TV’s Hardware Situation Is Fine</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-11-24/apple-should-build-fire-tv-chromecast-rival-llm-siri-plans-oura-glucose-push-m3vnimbg" />
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<published>2024-11-26T01:19:02Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-29T18:25:16Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Mark Gurman, in his weekly Power On column:
<blockquote>
The best scenario for Apple in TV hardware would be a cheap stick
(perhaps with no physical remote — use your iPhone instead). It’s
an idea that Apple marketing executives detest, but it would help
the company quickly expand its presence. If consumers want more
power and storage, they can opt for the current box.
At the top of the line, Apple could offer something like the new
Mac mini, providing the best streaming quality and gaming options.
For this exercise, let’s call these three tiers the Apple TV SE,
Apple TV and Apple TV Max. It would use the same “good, better,
best” strategy employed by the iPhone, Mac, iPad, AirPods, Apple
Watch and even the Apple Pencil.
</blockquote>
Neither of these suggestions makes any sense. The only interesting thing about either idea is trying to decide which one is worse.
Streaming sticks are crap, and Apple doesn’t make crap. I also think streaming sticks are fast going the way of the dodo — they were a stopgap low-cost solution for when TV sets didn’t have “smart” experiences with built-in integration for major streaming platforms. Those built-in integrations obviate the need for streaming sticks, and <a href="https://support.apple.com/guide/tvplus/welcome/web">Apple TV is now built into TVs from all major brands</a>, including Samsung, Sony, LG, and Vizio. That’s the Apple TV app, not the full Apple TV tvOS platform, but that serves Apple’s needs. I don’t think it’s possible to provide a full-fidelity tvOS experience via a stick-sized computer that draws power from an HDMI port, and it’s certainly not possible to do so by omitting the goddamn remote control. Arguing that Apple needs to or even ought to build a cheap TV stick today is like those dumb columns from 2009 <a href="https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/why-apple-must-do-a-netbook-now/">arguing that Apple needed to make a netbook</a> to compete against shitty $300 laptops. Apple TV is to set top boxes as the Mac is to PCs — it’s never going to get a large share of the overall market, but it dominates the high-end of the market catering to people who actually care.
As for Gurman’s high-end hardware idea, a Mac Mini starts at $600. What would be the point of connecting such hardware to your TV? A Mac Mini wouldn’t offer better streaming quality than the existing Apple TV 4K offers. 4K is 4K, and even older Apple TV hardware streams it perfectly. And while in theory an M4-powered Mac-Mini-caliber Apple TV could offer better gaming than the iPhone-13-era A15 Bionic chip in the current Apple TV 4K hardware, there are zero tvOS games today that target hardware like that, and there’d be little reason for game developers to target such an “Apple TV Pro” device because almost no one would buy one. Whatever the reasons are for gaming not being a big deal on tvOS today, the lack of a “pro” $500 or $600 hardware tier is not one of them.
I think Apple should get the entry price down to $99 (currently $129), and sooner or later they need to update the hardware, if only to support Apple Intelligence. (Perhaps to the A18 or A18 Pro next fall — the current A15 Bionic Apple TV 4K models <a href="https://everymac.com/systems/apple/apple-tv/index-appletv.html">came out one year after the chip debuted in the iPhones 13</a>.) But the hardware story for Apple TV is fine.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Apple TV’s Hardware Situation Is Fine’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/25/apple-tvs-hardware-situation-is-fine"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>Perhaps Acquiring Pixelmator Is Not About Competing With Photoshop and Lightroom, Per Se, but the Adobe Creative Cloud Bundle</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://9to5mac.com/2023/05/09/final-cut-pro-logic-ipad-subscription-price/" />
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<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41349</id>
<published>2024-11-25T19:18:18Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-26T02:50:55Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Zac Hall, writing at 9to5Mac back in May 2023:
<blockquote>
Now that Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPad are
<a href="https://9to5mac.com/2023/05/09/final-cut-pro-logic-ipad/">official</a>, let’s talk about pricing. These apps coming out
on a random day in May is surprising. Subscription pricing? Not so
much. Nevertheless, pricing for these long overdue apps is
interesting when you consider their Mac counterparts and the Apple
One bundle.
First, let’s address the Mac apps.
How would Apple price Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for Mac if they
were released today? In the era of service revenue, Apple would
almost certainly charge a subscription fee for access rather than
a one-time fee.
Mac users have had years of free updates to Logic and Final Cut
Pro after paying once for each app. In fact, Logic Pro X will be a
decade old in July, and Final Cut Pro X turns 12 next month. The
price of Logic Pro for Mac today ($199.99) is the same as four
years of subscribing to Logic Pro for iPad, and Final Cut Pro for
Mac ($299.99) will equal six years of paying for the iPad version.
</blockquote>
The iPad versions of <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/final-cut-pro-for-ipad/id1631624924">Final Cut Pro</a> and <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/logic-pro-for-ipad/id1615087040">Logic Pro</a> are both priced the same: $5/month or $50/year. There is no bundle to get both at a discount.
I was a little surprised when Apple <a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/11/final-cut-pro-11-begins-a-new-chapter-for-video-editing-on-mac/">announced Final Cut Pro 11 for Mac two weeks ago</a> and didn’t announce a switch to subscription pricing. Instead, it remains a $300 one-time purchase, and for existing users version 11 is a free upgrade. Whether you like it or not, subscription pricing is no longer the future, it’s the present, and it’s the dominant model for professional creative tools today.
Adobe made this switch years ago, with a particular emphasis on <a href="https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html">the Creative Cloud bundle</a> that includes their entire suite of apps — Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, Audition, Acrobat Pro, and more. You get access to Adobe’s entire suite for $90/month, or $60/month if you pay annually ($720/year). They currently offer a first-year 50 percent discount if you pay annually. A la carte, subscriptions to each app cost $20–$23/month, so the Creative Cloud bundle is a good deal if you use three of them, and a great deal if you use more than three.
Apple clearly understands the appeal of subscription bundles too, <a href="https://www.apple.com/apple-one/">with Apple One</a>. Despite the fact that Apple didn’t switch to subscription pricing for Final Cut Pro 11 for Mac, I still expect them to sooner rather than later, and if they do, I further expect a bundle. Apple is never going to offer a swath of creative tools as broad as Adobe’s, but the biggest missing pieces right now would be alternatives to Photoshop and Lightroom. My gut feeling is <a href="https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/apple_tends_to_do_right_by_apps_it_acquires">that’s why</a> they <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/01/pixelmator-apple">acquired Pixelmator and Photomator</a>. They could sell a bundle for, just spitballing here, $20/month or $200/year that would include the Mac and iPad versions of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator, and possibly Photomator. Maybe throw in some extra iCloud storage.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Perhaps Acquiring Pixelmator Is Not About Competing With Photoshop and Lightroom, Per Se, but the Adobe Creative Cloud Bundle’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/25/apple-creative-cloud"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>WorkOS</title>
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<published>2024-11-24T19:34:35Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-24T19:34:35Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. 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.
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.
Check out WorkOS’s <a href="https://workos.com/launch-week/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=q42024">Launch Week announcements</a> to see their latest.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘WorkOS’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/24/workos"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/apple_tends_to_do_right_by_apps_it_acquires" />
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<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024://1.41347</id>
<published>2024-11-24T19:32:00Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-27T02:58:44Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<summary type="text">Pondering the future of Pixelmator by looking at the history of Apple’s app acquisitions.</summary>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
My post this week <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/22/shazam-hits-100-billion-song-recognitions">about Shazam’s history</a> got me thinking about Apple’s track record with acquired apps. <a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/09/apple-acquires-shazam-offering-more-ways-to-discover-and-enjoy-music/">Apple acquired Shazam in 2018</a>, and soon integrated its capabilities into Siri. But they’ve also kept the <a href="https://apps.apple.com/app/shazam/id284993459">Shazam app</a> going, including <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shazam.android&hl=en_US">the Android version</a>. They even still have <a href="https://www.shazam.com/">a standalone Shazam website</a>. I’d say this has been an acquisition that’s made everyone happy: existing users still have a great Shazam app, and the core “What song is this?” feature has been made more available and accessible.
At the moment, outside Cupertino (<a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1701920365">and Lithuania</a>) we’re left with uncertainty over the future of Pixelmator and Photomator <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/01/pixelmator-apple">after their announcement of Apple’s pending acquisition</a>. In broad strokes, let’s consider the strategic reasons Apple might acquire an existing popular app — or in this case, apps.
<ul>
<li>Keep the app going under Apple’s ownership — Examples of this include <a href="https://www.apple.com/logic-pro/">Logic</a>, which Apple acquired by <a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2002/07/01Apple-Acquires-Emagic/">purchasing parent company Emagic in 2002</a>, and going back even further, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileMaker">FileMaker</a>.</li>
<li>Shut down the app and bake the underlying technology into the OS — Examples: Siri and Dark Sky. Siri debuted as a standalone iPhone app in February 2010. <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/28/apple-siri-200-million/">Apple purchased the parent company two months later</a>, and Siri appeared as “beta” software built into iOS with the iPhone 4S in fall, at which point Apple pulled the standalone Siri app from the App Store. I don’t recall Siri, as a standalone app, ever being all that popular. And whatever you think of Siri’s quality and utility over the intervening years, it’s the sort of thing that makes more sense as a system-level feature than as a standalone app. A lot of people have a lot of wishes for Siri, but I’ve never seen anyone say “I wish Siri were still just a standalone app.”
Dark Sky is more complicated. After acquiring it, Apple kept Dark Sky going as a standalone (and cross-platform) app, but only for a transition period. The purpose of the acquisition was to integrate some of Dark Sky’s forecasting technology into Apple’s own Weather app and the WeatherKit system framework available to third-party apps. <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/dark-sky-weather-app-apple-meteorologists-rip.html">Die-hard Dark Sky fans</a> miss it, and some swear that WeatherKit’s warnings about imminent precipitation aren’t as accurate as Dark Sky’s were, but it’s hard to argue that Apple did Dark Sky users dirty.</li>
<li>Acquihire the developers and designers but scrap the app — This happens in the industry, but not with Apple. I can think of many examples of talented indie developers and designers closing up shop and going to work for Apple, but I can’t think of any good examples of a great popular app being shut down for this. The most tragic acquihire I can think of was when Facebook (now Meta) <a href="https://pushpoppress.com/about/">acquired Push Pop Press</a>, an astonishingly talented team that had made a publishing tool for the modern age that might have been <a href="https://daringfireball.net/2011/02/push_pop_press">the most impressive software I’ve ever seen in my life</a>. And, poof, the whole thing was just shuttered when the Push Pop team joined Facebook. Inside Facebook that same team created <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq6-b9_V9lA">Facebook Paper</a>, which espoused many of the principles that made Push Pop’s interactive publishing tool remarkable, but Facebook Paper, alas, was not long for this world. Facebook Paper was so good, so forward-thinking, so innovative, that it almost got me to create a Facebook account for the first time.</li>
<li>Buy the app out of anti-competitive spite simply to shut it down — The software industry is rife with acquisitions whose only purpose was to quash competition,<a href="#fn1-2024-11-24">1</a> but I can’t recall a single example of Apple doing so. And in the case of Pixelmator and Photomator, it doesn’t make any sense — neither competes against anything Apple makes, and they’re exclusively available as apps on Apple platforms.</li>
</ul>
The bottom line is that what we, as users, hope for after a big company acquires a beloved app is for an outcome where the users of that app remain happy. That might mean just keeping the app going, like with Logic. Or it might mean scrapping the standalone app, but bringing the core features of the app into the OS itself, like with Dark Sky. Sometimes it’s a mix, though, like with Shazam. Another example like that is Workflow — which began life as a third-party automation utility for iOS, <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/03/22/workflow-shortcuts-five-years">but which Apple acquired in 2017 and turned into Shortcuts</a>. Anyone who liked Workflow surely loves Shortcuts — it’s far more powerful and capable as an OS-level technology from Apple than it ever could have hoped to have been as a third-party app.
Other examples:
<ul>
<li>Beats, which Apple acquired for $3 billion in 2014, remains the largest acquisition by price in Apple’s history.<a href="#fn2-2024-11-24">2</a> Beats Music became the foundation for Apple Music.</li>
<li>Speaking of music, iTunes began life as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundJam_MP">SoundJam MP</a>, a third-party MP3 player for the Mac. iTunes was more than just a rebranding — it was a complete redesign and rethinking of SoundJam — but it basically served the same purpose that SoundJam did. (The other option Apple considered <a href="https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/">was purchasing Panic</a>, whose Audion was SoundJam’s arch-rival.)</li>
<li>Final Cut was an acquisition — Apple bought it from Macromedia in 1998. But it’s a weird one, because <a href="https://nofilmschool.com/2011/12/avid-apple-excerpt-timeline-history">Apple purchased it and hired the team before it had even shipped</a>. The acquisition wasn’t just the foundation for the <a href="https://www.apple.com/final-cut-pro/">Final Cut Pro</a> we know today, but for iMovie too.</li>
<li><a href="https://developer.apple.com/testflight/">TestFlight</a> was <a href="https://www.theverge.com/apps/2014/2/21/5434060/apple-buys-maker-of-the-ios-testing-platform-testflight">an acquisition</a>, and like Siri and Workflow/Shortcuts, is the sort of concept that requires being a first-party product to achieve its goals.</li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shake_(software)">Shake</a>, a professional video compositing tool, is a rare sad trombone. Apple acquired parent company Nothing Real in 2002, but discontinued Shake in 2009. Some features live on in Final Cut Pro but it does not seem like a successful acquisition for anyone who loved Shake.<a href="#fn3-2024-11-24">3</a></li>
<li>In 2021 <a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/08/apple-acquires-classical-music-streaming-service-primephonic/">Apple purchased Primephonic</a>, and <a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/03/apple-music-classical-is-here/">turned it into Apple Music Classical in 2023</a>. Seems like a complete win for Primephonic fans.</li>
<li>Apple made a slew of small acquisitions that have all been funnelled into
improving Apple Maps. E.g., <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2013/08/22/apple-acquires-embark-another-mapping-app-with-transit-information/">Embark</a>, which was a standalone app for transit information and seems to be the foundation for Apple Maps now having good transit features.</li>
</ul>
<hr />
It’s commonplace in the industry for a large company to acquire a small company that makes a very cool app, and then somehow ruin that app. Sometimes by transmogrifying it beyond recognition, but oftentimes through disinterest or neglect. And Apple is a very large company, and Pixelmator is a small company with two very cool apps. But an examination of Apple’s acquisition history doesn’t give me any reason for alarm. Apple really does tend to do right by cool app acquisitions.
Apple respects the art of making great apps. Pixelmator in particular is simply too good to scrap, and Apple hasn’t made its own bitmap image editing application since, I think, MacPaint. Something like Pixelmator really would slot right in next to Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro as an Apple “pro tool”. Whether they’ll keep the name, I don’t know, but I think the app will be released under Apple branding as a Photoshop competitor, for Mac and iPad. (Pixelmator for iOS currently runs on both iPads and iPhones, but Apple’s own pro tools, Final Cut and Logic, are iPad only.)
I’m less sure if Apple has the appetite to keep Photomator going, to compete directly against Lightroom — a market Apple simply walked away from when they discontinued Aperture 10 years ago. But perhaps they now regret walking away from Aperture. I’m just not sure how close Photomator is to being a credible alternative to Lightroom.
The other path would be to retire both apps and fold the best features and technology (like their <a href="https://support.pixelmator.com/photomator-user-guide/ai-editing-tools/super-resolution">ML Super Resolution</a> upsizing) into Photos, and/or into the system-level <a href="https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreimage">Core Image framework</a> available to all apps on all of Apple’s platforms. I can see how the best of Photomator could make its way into Photos. That’s not true for Pixelmator. The acquisition just doesn’t make sense to me unless Apple wants to make Pixelmator an Apple-branded pro tool. We’ll find out next year.
<div class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1-2024-11-24">
I still can’t fully forgive Adobe for doing this with FreeHand when they <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/technology/adobe-buys-macromedia-for-34-billion.html">acquired Macromedia in 2005</a>. Macromedia was Adobe’s arch-rival in creative design tools, and FreeHand was Illustrator’s arch-rival in the vector graphics market. FreeHand made sense to me in a way that Illustrator never did. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93zXC-jCKuo">It was so good</a>. <a href="#fnr1-2024-11-24" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩︎</a>
</li>
<li id="fn2-2024-11-24">
The largest acquisition by importance in Apple’s history, of course, was their $400 million deal to reunify the company with NeXT at the end of 1996. That’s beyond dispute. That was arguably the most impactful acquisition in the entire history of computing. But I’d also argue that it’s almost beyond dispute that <a href="https://appleinsider.com/articles/08/04/23/apple_buys_chip_designer_pa_semi_for_278_million">the acquisition of PA Semi for $278 million in 2008</a> was far more important than the Beats acquisition. That paved the path for Apple Silicon, an initiative whose importance to Apple’s success in the years since would be hard to overstate. <a href="#fnr2-2024-11-24" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.">↩︎︎</a>
</li>
<li id="fn3-2024-11-24">
How’s this for an eye-opener on how the market for professional software has changed, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shake_(software)">quoting from Wikipedia</a>: “Version 2 was released in early 1999 for Windows NT and IRIX, costing $9,900 US per license, or $3,900 for a render-only license. Over the next few years, Shake rapidly became the standard compositing software in the visual effects industry for feature films. In 2002, Apple Computer acquired Nothing Real. A few months later, version 2.5 was released, introducing Mac OS X compatibility. To strengthen the Mac’s position in production studios, the Mac version held a price of $4,950 (equivalent to $8,385 in 2023), and users of the non-Mac operating systems were given the offer of doubling the number of licenses at no extra cost by migrating to Mac OS X.” $5,000 a seat as a 50 percent discount! <a href="#fnr3-2024-11-24" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text.">↩︎︎</a>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
]]></content>
<title>★ Apple Tends to Do Right by Apps It Acquires</title></entry><entry>
<title>Shazam Hits 100 Billion Song Recognitions</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/11/shazam-hits-100-billion-song-recognitions/" />
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<published>2024-11-22T22:21:58Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-23T18:15:25Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Apple Newsroom:
<blockquote>
Shazam has now officially surpassed over 100 billion song
recognitions since it launched. To help put that into perspective:
<ul>
<li>That’s equivalent to 12 songs identified for every person on
Earth.</li>
<li>A person would need to use Shazam to identify a song every
second for 3,168 years to reach 100 billion.</li>
</ul>
Shazam launched in 2002 as an SMS service in the UK, and back
then, music fans would dial 2580, hold up their phones to identify
music, and receive the song name and artist via text message.
Shazam’s following and influence continued to grow in the years
that followed, but it was the 2008 debut of the App Store and
introduction of Shazam’s iOS app that brought its music
recognition technology to millions of users. By the summer of
2011, Shazam had already recognized over 1 billion songs.
</blockquote>
I had no idea Shazam started in the pre-iPhone era of mobile phones, getting audio via a phone call, and sending results via SMS. Clever! <a href="https://www.netflix.com/watch/80132946">That takes me back to Moviefone</a> — the service we’d dial in the 1990s to get theater listings and showtimes. You’d call your city’s local Moviefone number — almost certainly using your landline — navigate a menu (“Press 1 if you know the name of the movie you’d like to see...”), and Moviefone would tell you which theaters were showing it, at what times. It sounds archaic but it was great, and they did a great job with the phone menu user interface so you could navigate it quickly.
It also reminds me of the very early days of IMDB, which preceded the web. You could send an email to IMDB with the name of a movie in the subject, and IMDB would email you back with all the information it had about that movie.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Shazam Hits 100 Billion Song Recognitions’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/22/shazam-hits-100-billion-song-recognitions"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>Android Authority Reports Google Has Cancelled the Pixel Tablet 2</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.androidauthority.com/pixel-tablet-2-canceled-3502094/" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vwh" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/22/report-google-cancels-pixel-tablet-2" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41345</id>
<published>2024-11-22T17:31:24Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-22T17:31:25Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Mishaal Rahman, reporting yesterday for Android Authority:
<blockquote>
Android Authority has learned that Google has canceled the Pixel
Tablet 2, the presumed name of Google’s second-generation Pixel
Tablet. This is disappointing for Pixel fans who were waiting for
Google to refresh its first-generation Pixel Tablet with a newer
chipset, a better camera, and, more importantly, an official
keyboard accessory. [...]
Last week, I shared what I <a href="https://www.androidauthority.com/pixel-tablet-2-keyboard-3500081/">learned about the Pixel Tablet
2</a> from a source within Google. I deemed this source to be
very credible given my past history with them as well as the fact
that they were able to share unreleased images of the device with
me (which I obviously did not publish to protect their identity).
After the publication of this article, however, I learned from my
source that Google had decided to cancel its plans to release the
device, citing concerns that the company would lose money on it.
</blockquote>
“Concerns that the company would lose money on it” and <a href="https://9to5google.com/2024/11/21/pixel-tablet-2-canceled/">9to5Google’s framing of the same news</a> as “profitability concerns” are fun euphemisms for “no one wants an Android tablet”.
This comes on the heels of <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/19/chromeos-android-merge-maybe">news just this week</a> that Google is supposedly “fully migrating ChromeOS over to Android” — but somehow not “merging” them — with the specific goal of better competing against the iPad. So a generous read might be that Google is scrapping the Pixel Tablet 2 because that device was planned to run Android (as <a href="https://www.theverge.com/23765921/google-pixel-tablet-review">the existing Pixel Tablet</a> does) but now Google is rejiggering their tablet and laptop hardware roadmaps with the upcoming ChomeOS-migrated-to-not-merged-with-Android OS in mind.
A less generous read is that Google is afflicted with institutional ADHD and generally acts with no apparent strategy. They’ve kept their focus on annual updates to the well-regarded Pixel phones for 8 years now, but haven’t managed to make them hit products. With the rest of their hardware, their strategy has been about as coherent as their <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-of-instability-the-history-of-google-messaging-apps/">comically chaotic efforts in messaging apps</a>.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Android Authority Reports Google Has Cancelled the Pixel Tablet 2’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/22/report-google-cancels-pixel-tablet-2"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>‘The Blurred Line Between X and the Trump Administration’</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-musk-partnership-x-twitter-files-rcna180427" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vwg" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/21/masnick-x-files" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41344</id>
<published>2024-11-21T17:16:49Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-21T17:16:50Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Mike Masnick, writing for MSNBC:
<blockquote>
Turns out for the “Twitter Files” crew, “creeping
authoritarianism” isn’t so creepy when it’s your team doing the
creeping.
Before, we were told that White House officials’ merely reaching
out to social media companies about election misinformation was a
democracy-ending threat. Now, the world’s richest man has openly
used his platform to boost one candidate, ridden that campaign’s
success into the White House himself, and ... crickets. The
silence is deafening.
There isn’t even a suggestion that Musk should have to divest from
his ownership of X. No one expects that. There is no discussion of
how Musk set up <a href="https://x.com/DOGE">an entire account</a> on his own platform for
his own “Department of Government Efficiency” and gave it a “gray”
check mark — denoting it as a verified government entity.
The silence or cheers from “Twitter Files” writers and boosters
over this merging of private and public interests — which they
deemed a threat to Western civilization, when it wasn’t even
happening — is credibility-destroying. They were simply a
convenient political cudgel, quickly abandoned as soon as an
actual government-social media alliance benefited their side.
</blockquote>
A man named <a href="https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservatives-frank-wilhoit.html">Frank Wilhoit coined an oft-cited adage in 2018</a> that I find profound, particularly when it comes to the absurd hypocrisies of the Trump era in American politics: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
But it’s not just laws, although laws are where the stakes are highest. It’s everything, including conventions and norms.
Whatever it is you think the Biden administration did to nudge Twitter (and other social media platforms, but let’s stick to Twitter/X) to clamp down on what the administration perceived as “misinformation”, it pales in comparison to Musk taking ownership of the platform and turning it into a clear pro-Trump platform for this election. I’m not saying that was illegal, or should be made illegal. I’m saying that the entire argument over “The Twitter Files” was that the former leadership of Twitter put their thumb on the scale to comply with the wishes of the Biden administration. I’m with Masnick — I don’t think that even happened, really. But even if you buy into “The Twitter Files” thesis, it was about a thumb on one side of the scale. And then Musk bought Twitter, renamed it X, and dropped an anvil on the other side of the scale. The “Twitter Files” argument wasn’t that the wrong side of the scale was advantaged by a bias, it was that platform owners should scrupulously avoid any vague hint of a bias at all. But now here we are with Elon Musk serving as a de facto member of Trump’s 2.0 administration and none of the same critics even see a problem.
The hypocrisy is baked into their worldview. So however we counter it, it can’t be by merely pointing out their hypocrisy, because they don’t see it and they don’t care. My biggest quibble with Masnick’s piece is in the headline (which, perhaps, he didn’t write): the line between X and the incoming Trump administration hasn’t been blurred — it’s been erased.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘‘The Blurred Line Between X and the Trump Administration’’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/21/masnick-x-files"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/regarding_and_well_against_substack" />
<link rel="shorturl" href="http://df4.us/vwf" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024://1.41343</id>
<published>2024-11-21T03:33:13Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-11T01:41:53Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<summary type="text">My advice to any writer looking to start a new site based on the newsletter model would be to consider Substack *last*, not first.</summary>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Anil Dash, “<a href="https://www.anildash.com/2024/11/19/dont-call-it-a-substack/">Don’t Call It a Substack</a>”:
<blockquote>
We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to
names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book
telling people to “read my Amazon”. A great director trying to
promote their film by saying “click on my Max”. That’s how much
they’ve pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and
your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is
no such thing as “my Substack”, there is only your writing, and a
forever fight against the world of pure enshittification.
</blockquote>
I am upset by the above, but only insofar as I’m jealous that I had never thought to make the analogy to an author telling people to “read my Amazon”. A publication on Substack is no more “a Substack” than a blog on WordPress is “a WordPress”. It’s really quite a nifty — but devious — trick that Substack has pulled to make this parlance a thing.
<blockquote>
Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by
extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by
co-opting well-intentioned creators’ work in service of
cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable. You don’t have to take
my word for it; Substack’s CEO explicitly said they won’t ban
someone who is explicitly spouting hate, and when confronted with
the rampant white supremacist propaganda that they are profiting
from on their site, they took down... four of the Nazis. Four.
There are countless more now, and they want to use your email
newsletter to cross-promote that content and legitimize it. Nobody
can ban the hateful content site if your nice little newsletter is
on there, too, and your musings for your subscribers are all the
cover they need.
</blockquote>
I know quite a few people whose opinions I admire who feel the same way as Dash here. I’ll disagree. I think Substack sees itself as a publishing tool and platform. They’re not here to promote any particular side. It makes no more sense for them to refuse to publish someone for being too right-wing than it would for WordPress or Medium or, say, GitHub or YouTube. Substack, I think, sees itself like that.
You might disagree. Like I said, I know a bunch of good, smart people who see Substack like Dash does, and refuse to pay for any publication on Substack’s platform because of their “Hey we’re just a neutral publishing platform, not an editor, let alone a censor” stance. What I can say, personally, is that I read and pay for several publications on Substack, and for the last few weeks I’ve tried using their iOS app (more on this in a moment), and I’ve never once seen a whiff of anything even vaguely right-wing, let alone hateful. Not a whiff. If it’s there, I never see it. If I never see it, I don’t care.<a href="#fn1-2024-11-20">1</a>
What I object to isn’t their laissez faire approach to who they allow to publish on their platform, but rather how they present all publications. People do call the publications on Substack “Substacks”. And Substack publications do all look the same, most of them right down to that telltale serif typeface, <a href="https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Spectral">Spectral</a>,<a href="#fn2-2024-11-20">2</a> which is kerned so loosely it looks like teeth in need of orthodontia. It’s not an ugly font, per se, but it is very distinctive, which contributes, I think significantly, to the blurring of the branding line between Substack publications as discrete standalone independent entities or as mere sections under “Substack” as an umbrella publication.
Substack, very deliberately, has from the get-go tried to have it both ways. They say that publications on their platform are independent voices and brands. But they present them all as parts of Substack. They all look alike, and they all look like “Substack”. I really don’t get why any writer trying to establish themselves independently would farm out their own brand this way. It’s the illusion of independence.
I absolutely despise that a Substack publication’s home page is, typically, nothing more than a sign-up field for your email address to get the publication by email, and a small “No thanks” link to actually read the damn thing. Half the time when I see that page, I just close the tab out of spite. In what world is “No thanks” a good link to convey the meaning “Let me read the thing I came here to read”?
<a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/substack/id1581650857">Substack’s app</a>, along with <a href="https://substack.com/">the company’s home page</a>, defaults to presenting itself as a Twitter-like short-form posting platform. As if what we need right now is another Twitter-like platform. But especially: why would anyone want to participate in a social platform tied to one specific publishing platform? It doesn’t make any sense to me, as a reader, nor do I see the appeal to writers on the platform. It only makes sense strategically from Substack’s own perspective. If, as a writer, your feedback and social interaction with your audience is tied to Substack’s own social graph, your publication is tied to Substack, too. It’s so transparently a lock-in play that it’s almost hard to object to it. It’s right there on the tin. But it’s not hard at all to just not use it.
Substack no longer even hosts a majority of the newsletter-style writers I subscribe to. <a href="https://www.platformer.news/why-platformer-is-leaving-substack/">Casey Newton moved Platformer</a> from Substack to <a href="https://ghost.org/">Ghost</a> in January. Craig Calcaterra moved his excellent baseball-focused-but-with-heavy-dashes-of-politics-and-pop-culture <a href="https://www.cupofcoffeenews.com/">Cup of Coffee</a> <a href="https://cupofcoffee.substack.com/p/cup-of-coffee-has-moved-to-beehiiv">from Substack to Beehiiv</a> in January as well.<a href="#fn3-2024-11-20">3</a> Molly White runs <a href="https://www.citationneeded.news/">Citation Needed</a> on Ghost. My newest paid subscription is to CNN expat Oliver Darcy’s new media-industry focused <a href="https://www.status.news/">Status</a>, for which he chose Beehiiv. And of course there’s my friend and <a href="https://dithering.fm/">Dithering</a> co-host Ben Thompson, whose <a href="https://stratechery.com/">Stratechery</a>, running on his own platform <a href="https://passport.online/">Passport</a>, not only long predates Substack <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/16/substack-sinocism-launch/">but served as their model to replicate</a>. (Substack’s pitch deck was “Stratechery in a box.”) All of these sites look distinctive, with their own brand. All of them offer much better subscription and delivery management interfaces than Substack.
My advice to any writer looking to start a new site based on the newsletter model would be to consider Substack last, not first. Not because Substack is a Nazi bar, which I don’t think it is at all, but simply because there are clearly better options, and the company’s long term goal is clearly platform lock-in.
<div class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1-2024-11-20">
I feel the same way about social media platforms. Are there people I find objectionable on Mastodon, Bluesky, Instagram, and Threads? Definitely. On YouTube? Even more definitely. Do I care? No, because I tend never to see their posts, and when one pops up, I can block or mute them, and I never see them again. That’s in contrast with X, the former Twitter, where the top replies to many posts are from first class shitbird trolls. More and more I simply find X an unpleasant place to devote any of my attention, and so I go there less and less. I don’t eat at restaurants whose food I dislike, and the food at X tastes bad and is only getting worse. <a href="#fnr1-2024-11-20" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩︎︎</a>
</li>
<li id="fn2-2024-11-20">
A free Google font, which says something about Substack. <a href="#fnr2-2024-11-20" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.">↩︎︎</a>
</li>
<li id="fn3-2024-11-21">
Coincidentally, <a href="https://cupofcoffee.beehiiv.com/p/cup-of-coffee-november-21-2024">Calcaterra is moving Cup of Coffee from Beehiiv to Ghost</a> this coming week. Mainly out of some frustrations with email delivery reliability at Beehiiv, but also because Ghost seems more flexible. <a href="#fnr3-2024-11-21" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text.">↩︎︎</a>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
]]></content>
<title>★ Regarding — and, Well, Against — Substack</title></entry><entry>
<title>Apple Is Selling Apple News Ads Directly for the First Time</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.axios.com/2024/11/19/apple-news-ads-direct-sales-publishers" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vwe" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/20/apple-selling-apple-news-ads" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41342</id>
<published>2024-11-20T18:58:54Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-20T20:28:24Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Sara Fischer, reporting for Axios:
<blockquote>
Apple has started selling its own advertising inventory for Apple
News, two sources familiar with the effort told Axios. It’s
pitching new ad units that it hopes will maximize revenue for
itself and its publishing partners. [...]
<ul>
<li>Publishers will get a 70% cut of the ad revenue sold by Apple
within their articles.</li>
<li>They will get a percentage of the ad revenue sold by Apple
within the Apple News feed, dependent on engagement with their
content.</li>
<li>Apple News publishers will continue to receive 100% of the
revenue from the advertising that they sell against their
content in the app.</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
Apple News+ is a really good product. Scanning its main Today tab in the morning has become my modern-day equivalent of scanning the front page of a printed newspaper — a way to get a sense of what’s going on in world news. There’s a level of editorial curation and presentation in Apple News that I don’t think has a peer. Apple News itself doesn’t publish or report anything, but there’s clearly a talented, level-headed editorial team that is picking and choosing the most important and most interesting (which are often very different things) stories from a wide variety of sources. So maybe a better analogy to the bygone era of print isn’t scanning the front page of a newspaper, but rather stopping at a good big-city newsstand where you could scan the front pages of a slew of newspapers from around the country (and world).
I don’t look to Apple News for anything related to tech. I definitely want to do that via RSS (which for me means <a href="https://netnewswire.com/">NetNewsWire</a>), the web (Safari), and social media. But for national, world, and general interest news, Apple News is really good. I don’t know what it’s like without a News+ subscription, but with one, it’s truly excellent. And a News+ subscription gets you access to a bunch of great publications with paywalls on the web.
If you cemented your opinion of Apple News years ago and tuned out, you should give it a fresh look — especially if you have a “free” News+ subscription via Apple One.
But, my god, the ads suck — low-rent and highly repetitive. <a href="https://www.threads.net/@gruber/post/C9n9qP4Ryex">I posted screen recordings over the summer</a> illustrating this. It seems like recently, though, I’ve seen fewer ads, and they’ve gotten less repetitive. I just spent a few minutes now perusing the Today tab while writing this post, and I read a bunch of articles without seeing any ads at all. For me at least, the Apple News ad experience seems to be getting better already. But there’s still so much room for improvement.
Whenever I write about this, some readers will comment that, to their minds, a paid subscription like Apple News+ should bestow a completely ad-free experience. That’s how streaming video and music subscriptions tend to work, but even there — <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/20/iger-disney-plus-ad-supported">as I just posted regarding Disney+</a> — many people are choosing lower-priced streaming subscriptions subsidized by ads. The economics for ad-free news just don’t work, and never have. News+ isn’t like TV+, where Apple owns or has paid for the rights to all of the content.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Apple Is Selling Apple News Ads Directly for the First Time’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/20/apple-selling-apple-news-ads"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<title>Bob Iger Inadvertently Reveals Percentage of Disney+ Subscribers on Ad-Supported Tier</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://deadline.com/2024/11/bob-iger-hot-mic-disney-earnings-streaming-1236176581/" />
<link rel="shorturl" type="text/html" href="http://df4.us/vwd" />
<link rel="related" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/20/iger-disney-plus-ad-supported" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024:/linked//6.41341</id>
<published>2024-11-20T18:54:01Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-20T18:54:02Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Dade Hayes, reporting for Deadline:
<blockquote>
Fielding a question from a Wall Street analyst about the growth
outlook and pricing strategy of Disney+, Iger divulged how many
Disney+ subscribers take the ad-supported tier in the U.S. (37%)
and globally (30%). The disclosure was unusual in the streaming
sector. Netflix, for instance, has never broken out a similar
percentage, preferring instead to report monthly active users of
its ad tier (as <a href="https://deadline.com/2024/11/netflix-ad-tier-70m-monthly-users-streaming-1236173495/">it did earlier this week</a>).
When the Q&A with analysts moved to the next question and CFO Hugh
Johnston was giving his answer, Iger’s voice suddenly could be
heard on the call. “I don’t know if I was supposed to disclose
those AVOD numbers,” he said, before Johnston continued speaking.
</blockquote>
<a href="https://help.disneyplus.com/article/disneyplus-price">Looking at Disney+’s pricing page</a> (and ignoring the wide assortment of bundle offers), their ad-supported “Basic” tier costs $10/month; their ad-free “Premium” tier costs $16/month or $160/year.
<div>
<a title="Permanent link to ‘Bob Iger Inadvertently Reveals Percentage of Disney+ Subscribers on Ad-Supported Tier’" href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/20/iger-disney-plus-ad-supported"> ★ </a>
</div>
]]></content>
</entry><entry>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/dr_oz" />
<link rel="shorturl" href="http://df4.us/vwa" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024://1.41338</id>
<published>2024-11-20T00:54:51Z</published>
<updated>2024-12-04T00:21:16Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<summary type="text">I met Dr. Oz ten years ago.</summary>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
The Hollywood Reporter, which of course is where one now goes to find news of incoming Executive Branch appointments and nominations, “<a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/politics-news/dr-oz-trump-nominated-medicare-and-medicaid-1236066422/">Trump Nominates Dr. Mehmet Oz to Run Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services</a>”:
<blockquote>
“America is facing a Healthcare Crisis, and there may be no
Physician more qualified and capable than Dr. Oz to Make America
Healthy Again,” Trump said in a statement. “He is an eminent
Physician, Heart Surgeon, Inventor, and World-Class Communicator,
who has been at the forefront of healthy living for decades. Dr.
Oz will work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the
illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases
left in its wake.”
He added, “He won nine Daytime Emmy Awards hosting The Dr. Oz
Show, where he taught millions of Americans how to make healthier
lifestyle choices, and gave a strong voice to the key pillars of
the MAHA Movement.”
</blockquote>
I met Dr. Oz ten years ago. It was after the Apple event on Tuesday, 9 September 2014, at the Flint Center in Cupertino, <a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2014/09/09Apple-Unveils-Apple-Watch-Apples-Most-Personal-Device-Ever/">where Apple unveiled Apple Watch</a> after introducing the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Apple had erected a <a href="https://www.macrumors.com/2014/08/28/apple-flint-center-structure-iphone-6/">startlingly large temporary building</a> in front of the Flint Center, which, post-event, was opened to attending media <a href="https://www.gettyimages.com/editorial-images/news/event/apple-unveils-iphone-6-and-apple-watch/508293051">and celebrities</a> to showcase Apple Watch’s various capabilities. But post-event press briefings were held inside the Flint Center, in a byzantine complex of subterranean rooms beneath the massive ground floor auditorium.
I had a one-on-one off-the-record briefing with Jony Ive. (Fascinating and fun — we spent most of the all-too-brief 30 minutes talking about watch bands and the exquisite packaging and <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/04/trying-on-some-apple-watches-and-getting-the-cushy-edition-treatment/">charging case</a> of the Edition models.) The waiting area for these press briefings was set up to look a bit like a mostly empty Apple Store. The central focus of this waiting area was a large table with a glass top; under the glass were a variety of Apple Watch models. The table was a prototype of <a href="https://www.patentlyapple.com/2016/03/apple-reveals-their-smart-apple-watch-table-designed-with-built-in-cooling-audio-security-systems.html">the ones that Apple would put in its retail stores</a>, for which they obtained multiple patents. While I was waiting for my briefing with Ive, the only other person from the media waiting with me was Oz.
It’s a weird thing to be alone, effectively, with someone of Oz’s celebrity. It’s like being in a room with a million dollars in $100 bills stacked in a perfectly-arranged pyramid. No matter how hard you try to direct your attention, your mind keeps popping back to Holy shit, there’s a million dollars in cash right there. His hair was perfect, his shirt crisply pressed. It was a very nice shirt. He smiled at all times, and seemed genuinely happy to be there, and genuinely interested in Apple Watch, but not for what Apple Watch actually was or could be, but simply because it was a major new thing, and he was a VIP invitee at the introduction of this major new thing. And my mind would pop, for the umpteenth time, Holy shit, that’s Dr. Oz right there.
We spent an unceasingly awkward 10 minutes circling around that table together. He never shut up. He chattered, nonstop, with inane observations, like “Hey, look at that one, it’s orange! What’s that one, leather?” He was not talking to me, nor was he, really, talking to himself. It was like he was talking to a TV camera, as though we were being filmed for B-roll footage for his show — but there was no camera. It was just me and him, standing around that table exhibiting dozens of Apple Watch prototypes that we were unable to touch, with a handful of Apple PR reps hanging around the sides of the room in silence, pecking away on their iPhones, waiting for a notice from one of their colleagues that it was time to escort one of us to our briefing. Oz was called first, thankfully. It gave me a few minutes of silence to gather my thoughts, and study the watches (albeit under glass), without distraction. I sometimes wonder who his briefing was with. (Phil Schiller, perhaps?)
I came away with the impression that Mehmet Oz was, despite his well-deserved medical renown, preternaturally vapid and preening, and, thus, to me, an incongruous figure. Simultaneously a brilliant mind in the field of thoracic surgery, and yet dumb as a rock in everyday human interaction. I spent the first few minutes with him wondering if I should introduce myself. I spent the last few glad I hadn’t, because he was so obviously a staggeringly uninteresting and uninterested man.
I would have much preferred spending those 10 minutes <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/10/04/dr-nick-dr-oz">chatting with Dr. Nick</a>.
]]></content>
<title>★ Dr. Oz</title></entry><entry>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/disambiguating_iphone_model_names_that_have_the_s_suffix" />
<link rel="shorturl" href="http://df4.us/vvt" />
<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2024://1.41321</id>
<published>2024-11-12T23:12:07Z</published>
<updated>2024-11-12T23:54:03Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<summary type="text">Apple’s S suffix for certain iPhone models — 3GS, 4S, 5S, 6S, XS — has always been problematic in this regard.</summary>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/" xml:lang="en"><![CDATA[
Here’s the Apple support page <a href="https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/iphone-models-compatible-with-ios-18-iphe3fa5df43/ios">listing the devices compatible with iOS 18</a>. They’re listed in chronological order, oldest to newest, and the list begins with the iPhone XR and iPhone XS from 2018. But on this support page, Apple styles the “R” and “S” suffixes as small caps. Screenshot:
<img
src = "https://daringfireball.net/misc/2024/11/ios-18-compatible-models.png"
alt = "Screenshot from the linked Apple support page, showing the S in “iPhone XS” and R in “iPhone XR” styled with small caps."
width = 525
style = "border:1px solid #ccc"
/>
Earlier today <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/11/12/find-my-airtags-airlines">I linked</a> to <a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/11/apples-find-my-enables-sharing-location-of-lost-items-with-third-parties/">this Apple Newsroom post</a>, regarding the new “Share Location” feature in Find My in iOS 18.2 beta 3. The Apple Newsroom post contains this sentence on iOS 18 compatibility:
<blockquote>
Share Item Location is available now in most regions worldwide as
part of the public beta of iOS 18.2, which will soon be available
to all users as a free software update for iPhone Xs and later.
</blockquote>
Is that the iPhone XS, styled with a lowercase s? Or are they referring to 2017’s iPhone X, and pluralizing it with the lowercase s? By nature of my work, I know that Apple’s internal style is never to pluralize a product name like “iPhone X” by adding an s; they would write something like “iPhone X models” or “iPhone X devices”. But to the casual reader, it’s ambiguous. I wound up double-checking on Apple’s aforelinked support page for iOS 18 device compatibility, just to be sure. And even there it’s only clear because a small caps R has a distinctive uppercase letterform.
Apple’s S suffix for certain iPhone models — 3GS, 4S, 5S, 6S, XS — has always been problematic in this regard. It’s a particular problem for publications with an all-caps headline style, such as posts here on Daring Fireball. <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/07/18/iphone-supply">This post from July 2008</a>, shortly after the iPhone 3G came out, is headlined “iPhone 3Gs in Short Supply”, but when you see it styled on DF itself, <a href="https://daringfireball.net/misc/2024/11/iphone-3g-plural-s-2008.png">it looks like</a> “IPHONE 3GS IN SHORT SUPPLY”. At the time I wrote that, it wasn’t confusing at all — the iPhone 3G had only started shipping a few weeks prior, so the iPhone 3GS didn’t even exist yet (and with the 3G being the second-ever iPhone model, there wasn’t yet any history of Apple applying an S suffix to a model name). If I had it to do all over again, I’d have used an apostrophe (“iPhone 3G’s in Short Supply”) or just omitted pluralizing it in the first place (“iPhone 3G in Short Supply”).<a href="#fn1-2024-11-12">1</a>
But the letter S has a second ambiguity problem, in addition to pluralization: its upper and lowercase letterforms are distinguished only by size, not shape, in most roman fonts. That means if you try to distinguish it via the use of small caps, it’s to no avail, because a small caps uppercase S looks nearly (if not completely) identical to a lowercase s. And in fact, that’s exactly how Apple tends to style the S and R in “iPhone XS” and “iPhone XR”, as evidenced by the screenshot above showing the device compatibility list for iOS 18.
Viewing the HTML source on Apple Newsroom shows that that’s how they’ve styled “XS” in today’s post:
<pre><code>iPhone Xs and later
</code></pre>
The <code>all-small-caps</code> class is a simple one-rule style defined <a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/styles/site.built.css">in the Apple Newsroom CSS</a>:<a href="#fn2-2024-11-12">2</a>
<pre><code>.all-small-caps {
font-variant-caps:all-small-caps
}
</code></pre>
Here’s where I think Apple could do better. In their HTML markup, they should use an uppercase S inside the <code>span</code> tag delineating the small caps. They should do this:
<pre><code>S
</code></pre>
instead of this:
<pre><code>s
</code></pre>
Both of those will render the s in small caps in the browser. But when a user copies and pastes the text from the rendered output in their browser, they’ll get the S or s in the same case it is in the HTML, because small-caps styling doesn’t carry across copy-and-pasting. Whether the original HTML markup uses an uppercase S or lowercase s inside the <code>all-small-caps</code> span, the rendered output users see in their web browser will be a small caps S. But what the user gets when copying and pasting will fall back to the actual case of the S in the HTML code.
Ideally, Apple wants us to see that S in small caps. But it’s inevitably going to fall back to simple upper or lowercase after copying and pasting, and in that situation (yes, I was tempted mightily to write case there), it’s clearly better to fall back on uppercase, giving copy-and-pasters the unambiguous “iPhone XS”.
Anyway, I’m glad Apple has seemingly abandoned these S-suffixed iPhone names. Next year when the XS and XR age out of support for iOS 19, we might be done writing about them in the present tense.
<div class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1-2024-11-12">
It’s a mistake, and a suggestion of low literacy, to erroneously use the apostrophe-s sequence to pluralize words or names where the proper way to spell the plural is to just add s. E.g., Apple employees are said to bleed six colors, not bleed six color’s. You surely know this. For chrissake you’re reading a footnote in a persnickety post regarding best practices in HTML markup for disambiguating product names in uncommon edge cases. But it’s not true that one should never form plurals using apostrophes. Per <a href="https://www.amazon.com/York-Times-Manual-Style-Usage-dp-1101905441/dp/1101905441/?tag=df-amzn-20">The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage</a>: “Use apostrophes for plurals formed from single letters: He received A’s and B’s on his report card. Mind your p’s and q’s.” <a href="https://daringfireball.net/misc/df-style-guide.text">My own style guide</a> goes further, and endorses apostrophes for plurals of initialisms in headlines (because of DF’s all-caps headline style for short posts), to make clear that in a headline such as, say, “Truckers Are Still Buying CB’s”, that they’re buying two-way radios, not the television network. <a href="#fnr1-2024-11-12" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩︎</a>
</li>
<li id="fn2-2024-11-12">
I, for one, do not care for Apple’s CSS coding style that <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11939595/leaving-out-the-last-semicolon-of-a-css-block">omits the optional trailing semicolon</a> from the last rule in a block. Makes me just a tad itchy when I see that.<a href="#fn3-2024-11-12">3</a> <a href="#fnr2-2024-11-12" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.">↩︎︎</a>
</li>
<li id="fn3-2024-11-12">
While I’m straying way out in the coding-style weeds here, let me also observe that I feel old and grumpy about the fact that Apple’s HTML markup on Newsroom posts wraps body text paragraphs in <code><div class="pagebody-copy"></code> tags, rather than simple semantic <code></code> tags. <a href="#fnr3-2024-11-12" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text.">↩︎︎</a>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
]]></content>
<title>★ Disambiguating iPhone Model Names That Have the ‘S’ Suffix</title></entry></feed>

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