By John Gruber

• Archive
• The Talk Show
• Dithering
• Projects
• Contact
• Colophon
• Feeds / Social
• Sponsorship

WorkOS Radar:
Protect your app against AI bots, free-tier abuse, and brute-force attacks.

Saturday, 1 March 2025

Matthew Green: ‘Dear Apple: Add “Disappearing Messages” to iMessage Right Now’ ★

Matthew Green:

If you install WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Snap or even Telegram (please don’t!) you’ll encounter a simple feature that addresses this problem. It’s usually called “disappearing messages”, but sometimes goes by other names.

I’m almost embarrassed to explain what this feature does, since it’s like explaining how a steering wheel works. Nevertheless. When you start a chat, you can decide how long the messages should stick around for. If your answer is forever, you don’t need to do anything. However, if it’s a sensitive conversation and you want it to be ephemeral in the same way that a phone call is, you can pick a time, typically ranging from 5 minutes to 90 days. When that time expires, your messages just get erased — on both your phone and the phones of the people you’re talking to.

A separate feature of disappearing messages is that some platforms will omit these conversations from device backups, or at least they’ll make sure expired messages can’t be restored. This makes sense because those conversations are supposed to be ephemeral: people are clearly not expecting those text messages to be around in the future, so they’re not as angry if they lose them a few days early. [...]

To recap, nearly every single other messaging product that people use in large numbers (at least here in the US) has some kind of disappearing messages feature. Apple’s omission is starting to be very unique.

I do have some friends who work for Apple Security and I’ve tried to talk to them about this. [...] When I ask about disappearing messages, I get embarrassed sighs and crickets. Nobody can explain why Apple is so far behind on this basic feature even as an option, long after it became standard in every other messenger.

I can only speculate why iMessage doesn’t offer this feature. Perhaps Apple doesn’t want to imply that “disappearing messages” are in any way guaranteed to be ephemeral, which would be impossible. Who’s to say the recipient hasn’t screenshotted them? And if Messages were to impose a software block against capturing a screenshot of a “disappearing message” (like the way you can’t capture screenshots of DRM-protected video), who’s to say the recipient hasn’t used another device to take a photograph of the display showing the ostensibly-ephemeral message? E2EE is a mathematical guarantee. There’s no way to offer such a guarantee regarding ephemerality, and perhaps that gives Apple pause.

But I think that would be letting a desire for perfection get in the way of offering a feature that’s useful and good enough. People who use disappearing messages on other platforms — and as Green points out, all of iMessage’s rivals offer the feature — understand the risks. Vanishingly few people understand the difference between “encrypted in transit” and “end-to-end encrypted”. But just about everyone intuitively understands that even a “disappearing message” might be screenshotted, photographed, or otherwise recorded. There’s an implicit trust between sender and recipient.

The other angle I can think of is complexity. Messages is one of Apple’s most-used apps, and in many ways it exemplifies Apple’s approach to software design and computing in general. Where critics see an app that is popular despite offering fewer features than its rivals, Apple (and I) see an app that is popular and beloved to some degree because it offers fewer features. All new features necessarily add some complexity, and disappearing messages would quite a bit. Can you have two chats with the same person/group, one standard and one ephemeral? If so, now you’ve raised the specter of accidentally sending what’s intended to be a disappearing message to the non-ephemeral chat with that person or group. If not, how do you send a brief disappearing-message exchange with someone with whom you have a long archive of messages you want to keep forever? (Perhaps the idea of private browsing in Safari could serve as an inspiration for disappearing messages in Messages — an entirely separate mode with a distinct visual state.)

The basic idea of disappearing messages is pretty trivial and easily understood. A good design for implementing them in Messages is not trivial. Solving these hard design problems is what makes Apple Apple, though. They’ve added some rather superficial features to Messages (Genmoji and message effects for example), so I agree with Green that they ought to tackle disappearing messages and that surely they can find a way to do it where the added complexity doesn’t create confusion. It’s a hard challenge, to be sure, but a worthy one. Apple’s designers could really have some fun with this too, with novel ways to present “disappearingness” visually.

Friday, 28 February 2025

Meta Apologizes for Error That Flooded Instagram With a Bit of the Old Ultra-Violence ★

Meghan Bobrowsky and Jeff Horwitz, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

Meta apologized Wednesday night for what it said was an “error” that led to graphic and violent videos flooding the feeds of a vast number of Instagram users, including minors. The videos, which were recommended on some users’ Reels tab, included people who appeared to have been shot to death and run over by vehicles. Some of the recommended videos had “sensitive content” warnings on them while others didn’t.

A Wall Street Journal reporter’s account featured scores of videos of people being shot, mangled by machinery, and ejected from theme park rides, often back to back. The videos originated on pages that the reporter didn’t follow with names such as “BlackPeopleBeingHurt,” “ShockingTragedies” and “PeopleDyingHub.”

That’s one hell of a glitch.

Microsoft to Retire Skype in May ★

Jeff Teper, president of collaborative apps and platforms at Microsoft:

In order to streamline our free consumer communications offerings so we can more easily adapt to customer needs, we will be retiring Skype in May 2025 to focus on Microsoft Teams (free), our modern communications and collaboration hub.

NPR:

Microsoft, which acquired Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion, announced in a post on X on Friday that the iconic voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) service would soon go dark. It encouraged Skype users to instead migrate to a free version of Microsoft Teams — a communication app that helps users work together in real time.

In the more than two decades since it was founded, Skype has been largely overtaken by a bevy of competitors, such as FaceTime, WhatsApp, Zoom, and Slack.

The writing has been on the wall for a long time that Skype was no longer strategic for Microsoft. Really, even right after the acquisition, it never seemed Microsoft had any sort of plan for what to do with Skype — even though, at the time, it was their largest-ever acquisition.

But man, for a long while, Skype was singularly amazing, offering high-quality / low-latency audio calls at a time when everything else seemed low-quality / high-latency. I continued using Skype to record The Talk Show until a few years ago, and I can’t say I miss it. But I used Skype to record at least around 400 episodes — which means I’ve spent somewhere around 1,000 hours talking to people over Skype. I can close my eyes and just hear Skype’s kinda clunky but distinctive ringtone. In the early days of podcasting, seemingly every show used Skype because it was so much better than anything else. And it was free! It felt like the future. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that if not for Skype, podcasting would’ve been set back several years.

Meta Fired ‘Roughly 20’ Employees for Leaking ★

Alex Heath, reporting for The Verge:

Meta has fired “roughly 20” employees who leaked “confidential information outside the company,” according to a spokesperson.

“We tell employees when they join the company, and we offer periodic reminders, that it is against our policies to leak internal information, no matter the intent,” Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold tells The Verge exclusively. “We recently conducted an investigation that resulted in roughly 20 employees being terminated for sharing confidential information outside the company, and we expect there will be more. We take this seriously, and will continue to take action when we identify leaks.”

These firings, of course, are the follow-up to one of my favorite headlines so far this year: “Meta Warns That It Will Fire Leakers in Leaked Memo”. As I wrote in that post a month ago:

It’s not fear of getting fired that keeps employees at most companies from leaking. It’s that they find themselves aligned with the company’s mission. They feel like part of a team that they want to see succeed, and they naturally adopt an attitude of being a team player. Team players don’t leak the playbook because they don’t like the coach’s play-calling or how much playing time they’re getting. I’ve never gotten the sense that that sort of attitude exists at Meta.

I’m not sure this public crackdown will help. Meta seems to be leaning into fear to keep employees in line, rather than team spirit. Their war on leakers might prove about as effective as America’s decades-long “war on drugs”, that saw illegal drug use rise, not fall, even while our prisons filled up with non-violent drug-law offenders. What’s the Princess Leia line? “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.” One longtime reader, who works at Netflix, contacted me after my month ago post and observed:

That is such a great take on Meta’s leaks. Netflix stuff almost never leaks, because Netflix is a place full of people who don’t want to leak things. There are virtually no barriers, just a culture and collection of people who don’t do that.

Penalties are a deterrence. But the reason most people don’t commit crimes — whether it be shoplifting or murder — isn’t fear of the potential penalties. It’s that they’re good honest people who don’t want to steal (and definitely don’t want to kill anyone).

Framework Introduces New Laptops and First Desktop ★

Founder Nirav Patel, writing this week on Framework’s company blog:

We went live this morning at the Framework (2nd Gen) Event with our biggest set of announcements yet: Framework Desktop, Framework Laptop 12, and the new Ryzen AI 300 Series Framework Laptop 13. You can watch a recording of the livestream on our YouTube channel.

Sean Hollister has a good roundup of the announcements at The Verge. Back in 2021 when Framework debuted with their first laptop, I expressed pithy skepticism regarding their modular approach. I’m still skeptical, but it’s hard not to root for them and cheer for their success. In principle, Framework’s “everything is a swappable, replaceable module” approach to system design is a fun nerdy throwback to the days when it was expected that you could get inside any computer and replace or upgrade its components yourself. And Framework’s style of modularity is designed with ease-of-use in mind, like snapping Lego blocks together. But as Hollister points out, Framework still hasn’t shipped a promised GPU upgrade component for its now two-year-old Framework 16 laptop.

Also of note is how much Framework is building around chips from AMD, not Intel. Is there a single category where anyone would say “Intel makes the best chips for this”? In an alternate universe where Apple had never moved the Mac to Apple Silicon, I’m not sure if it would be tenable for Apple to still be exclusively relying on Intel for x86 chips. Intel’s chips just aren’t competitive with AMD’s.

Trump Claims to Have Spoken With Starmer Regarding Apple Encryption Backdoor Demand ★

Ben Domenech interviewed President Trump yesterday in the Oval Office, after Trump’s meeting with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The Spectator has published the entire transcript, and I read it so you don’t have to, to get the part about Apple and the UK’s encryption backdoor demand:

BD: But the problem is he runs, your vice president obviously eloquently pointed this out in Munich, he runs a nation now that is removing the security helmets on Apple phones so that they can —

DJT: We told them you can’t do this.

BD: Yeah, Tulsi, I saw —

DJT: We actually told him… that’s incredible. That’s something, you know, that you hear about with China.

It feels quite odd to strongly agree with Trump on something, but he’s not wrong about everything.

(Most of the interview is just bananas stuff, ping-ponging all over the place. I swear Trump even goes back to Hannibal Lecter, and his mistaken belief that political asylum policies are somehow related to foreign countries emptying their asylums for the criminally insane.)

What If, Indeed ★

Hamilton Nolan, in a 2021 piece for The Columbia Journalism Review, under the headline “Bezos Has Been Hands-Off. What if That Changes?”:

Bezos has given the paper the resources to be bigger and better, and, by most accounts, pretty much stayed out of the newsroom’s hair, besides appearing one day to present a bicycle to former editor Marty Baron. The Amazon boss has never been an overtly political man, except to the extent that he supports whatever helps him stay rich and take over the world with his robotic form of ultra-capitalism. But he is not inclined to spend his time on the phone haranguing Post editors about coverage decisions. When you are worth close to $200 billion, your time is too valuable for that.

There is no guarantee, however, that that will always be true. [...]

Discussing this question with nuance is not easy. The paper will always say that Bezos does not interfere. Bezos himself will always say that he does not interfere. Factions of the public on the right and the left will always hold that Bezos’s ownership inherently corrupts the paper’s coverage.

I do give Bezos credit for taking public ownership of his assertion of control over the paper’s opinion pages now. This is a major change, and he’s not trying to hide it or shy away from responsibility for it.

Jeff Bezos Takes Control of the Washington Post’s Opinion Pages; Asserts Exclusive Focus ‘In Support and Defense of Two Pillars: Personal Liberties and Free Markets’ ★

Jeff Bezos, in a memo he shared publicly on X:

I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning:

I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.

We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. [...]

I offered David Shipley, whom I greatly admire, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t “hell yes,” then it had to be “no.” After careful consideration, David decided to step away. This is a significant shift, it won’t be easy, and it will require 100% commitment — I respect his decision. We’ll be searching for a new Opinion Editor to own this new direction.

He owns the paper, and the opinion pages are the traditional place for a newspaper’s owner to assert their beliefs. And while Bezos was famously hands-off for the first decade of his ownership (he bought the Post from the Graham family for $250 million in 2013), this latest dictum doesn’t feel out of the blue or surprising in the least. It feels like the natural culmination of his asserting control over the paper’s opinion pages that started with his blockbuster decision to nix the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris just a few weeks prior to the election, and reached a breaking point when the paper refused to run a cartoon by Pulitzer-winning Ann Telnaes that mocked Bezos (along with other billionaires) for paying into Trump’s inauguration committee racket — prompting Telnaes to resign in righteous protest.

How are remaining staffers at the Post taking this? Not happily. Reports Liam Reilly, media reporter at CNN:

Current staffers echoed those sentiments. Philip Bump, who writes the “How to Read This Chart” newsletter at the Post, asked Bluesky “what the actual fuck” five minutes after the announcement went out. Post tech reporter Drew Harwell on Bluesky shared a summary of comments on the story generated by the Post’s own AI tool that highlighted “significant discontent” from readers and “a strong sentiment of betrayal among long-time subscribers.” And, tellingly, David Maraniss, an editor at the paper, said on Bluesky that he would “never write for (the Post) again as long as (Bezos is) the owner.”

More tellingly, the Post’s own media critic, the excellent Erik Wemple, intended to write about the policy change but saw his own column spiked. It’s a good sign that things have gone off the rails when a publication’s own media critic is disallowed from writing about their own publication.

Gene Hackman Dies at 95 ★

Loved this remembrance by Manohla Dargis in The New York Times:

When Clint Eastwood needed a performer who could persuasively go boot-toe to boot-toe with him in his brutal 1992 western Unforgiven, he needed an actor who was his towering equal onscreen. Eastwood needed a performer with strange charisma, one who could at once effortlessly draw the audience to his character and repulse it without skipping a beat. This actor didn’t need the audience’s love, and would never ask for it. He instead needed to go deep and dark, playing a villain of such depravity that he inspired the viewer’s own blood lust. Eastwood needed a legend who could send shivers up spines. He needed Gene Hackman.

Just an unbelievable career, in such a wide variety of films. His roles in The Conversation, The French Connection, and Unforgiven are atop most people’s lists, and I do love each of those movies. But he was so good in everything. What a great Lex Luthor he was in 1978’s Superman. Mississippi Burning, The Royal Tenenbaums, Bonnie and Clyde, The Birdcage, Hoosiers. By chance, I just re-watched David Mamet’s Heist a few weeks ago. Like so many of Hackman’s movies, that’s another one that repays multiple viewings across decades.

Wednesday, 26 February 2025

Washington Post: ‘Biden Justice Department Downplayed U.K. Demand for Apple “Back Door”’ ★

Joseph Menn, reporting for The Washington Post:

The U.S. Justice Department told Congress in November there were no major disputes with the United Kingdom over how the two allies seek data from each other’s communication companies.

But at that time, officials knew British authorities were preparing a demand that Apple build a back door to its users’ encrypted data, according to people familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal department matters. [...]

The department said it reminded its British counterpart of the CLOUD Act’s “requirement that the terms of the Agreement shall not create any obligation that providers be capable of decrypting data.” The report did not mention the looming order, and said any demands for reduced security would come under Britain’s Investigatory Powers Act, and so were not within the scope of the CLOUD Act.

On Wednesday, Sen. Alex Padilla and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, both California Democrats, faulted the November certification, saying “it splits the finest of hairs” by suggesting that the CLOUD Act didn’t apply to any decryption order. The two lawmakers, who sit on the Judiciary committees in their respective chambers of Congress, asked Bondi to reconsider whether Britain was violating the Cloud Act by ordering a break to Apple’s encryption.

Two of the people familiar with the certification process said the FBI has pursued backdoor capabilities unsuccessfully in the United States and would have been in a stronger legal position to win that if Apple had already had to create such a mechanism for another government.

Just utterly disgraceful behavior from the Biden administration — choosing to look the other way at a clear violation of the CLOUD Act to help their purported buddies in the UK, at the direct expense of a US company’s autonomy and US citizens’ privacy. I don’t see how this dissembling can be defended. Upon learning of the UK’s odious demands on Apple, the Biden administration’s response wasn’t to defend Apple (or Americans’ privacy), but instead to try to hide it from Congress. Unreal.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard Suggests UK Broke Agreement in Secretly Demanding That Apple Build iCloud Backdoor ★

Zac Hall, reporting for 9to5Mac:

According to a letter seen by 9to5Mac, the Trump Administration is investigating whether the UK may have broken a bilateral agreement when secretly demanding that Apple build a global backdoor into iCloud.

Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard wrote in a letter responding to Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona that she was not made aware of the UK’s secret demand by her UK counterparts. However, she suggested, the UK government may have broken a bilateral privacy and surveillance agreement in making the demand.

Gabbard’s letter is available here (and I’m hosting a copy). From her letter:

Thank you for your letter dated 13 February 2025 concerning reported actions by the United Kingdom toward Apple that could undermine Americans’ privacy and civil liberties at risk. I am aware of the press reporting that the UK Home Secretary served Apple with a secret order directing the company to create a “back door” capability in its iCloud encryption to facilitate UK government access to any Apple iCloud users’ uploaded data anywhere in the world. I share your grave concern about the serious implications of the United Kingdom, or any foreign country, requiring Apple or any company to create a “backdoor” that would allow access to Americans personal encrypted data. This would be a clear and egregious violation of Americans’ privacy and civil liberties, and open up a serious vulnerability for cyber exploitation by adversarial actors.

I was not made aware of this reported order, either by the United Kingdom government or Apple, prior to it being reported in the media. I have requested my counterparts at CIA, DIA, DHS, FBI and NSA to provide insights regarding the publicly reported actions, and will subsequently engage with UK government officials. The UK’s Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, also known as the Snoopers’ Charter, which I understand would be at issue, allows the UK to issue a “gag order,” which would prevent Apple or any company from voicing their concerns with myself, or the public. [...]

My lawyers are working to provide a legal opinion on the implications of the reported UK demands against Apple on the bilateral Cloud Act agreement. Upon initial review of the U.S. and U.K. bilateral CLOUD Act Agreement, the United Kingdom may not issue demands for data of U.S. citizens, nationals, or lawful permanent residents (“U.S. persons”), nor is it authorized to demand the data of persons located inside the United States. The same is true for the United States — it may not use the CLOUD Act agreement to demand data of any person located in the United Kingdom.

I’m so pleased by Gabbard’s response here, including making it public, that I’m gladly willing to overlook her “back door”/”backdoor” and “UK”/”U.K.” inconsistencies. (DF style is now to close it up: backdoor.)

Short of the UK backing down and retracting its secret demand for an iCloud backdoor from Apple, this is the best that Apple and privacy advocates could hope for. The gag-order aspect of the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act prevented Apple from even fighting it in court. But a US ruling that would hold it illegal for Apple to comply would put Apple in an impossible situation, where they can’t comply with a UK legal demand without violating the law of the home country. That would actually give Apple the ground to fight this in the UK.

It is not coincidental that UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is set to visit the White House tomorrow. This is a message in advance that the US considers all aspects of this demand on Apple unacceptable.

Downie 4 ★

I referenced Downie twice earlier today — once in my item linking to Charlie Monroe (developer of Downie) writing about the indie app business, and earlier in my post about using Downie to download the MP3 from Jony Ive’s interview on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs.

I somehow hadn’t heard of (or more likely, just hadn’t noticed) Downie until a few weeks ago, when I first came across Monroe’s blog post, via Michael Tsai. Here’s the pitch for Downie, from its website:

Ever wished you could save a video from the Internet? Search no more, Downie is what you’re looking for. Easily download videos from thousands of different sites.

That’s it. You give it a web page URL, and Downie will download any video (or audio) files embedded on the page. Downie offers all sorts of convenience features, like browser extensions, post-processing, and more. But the main interface is super obvious and easy.

For years, I’ve used the open source yt-dlp command-line tool for this task (and before yt-dlp, its predecessor, youtube-dl). When I saw Downie, I thought to myself, “That looks cool, but I don’t really download that many video or audio files to justify paying for a commercial app.” But then I slapped myself (figuratively) and I realized I should at least try it. I’m so glad I did. It’s like using Transmit instead of the command-line tools for secure FTP connections. It’s cool that the Mac has a Unix terminal interface and support for zillions of free and open source utilities, but the point of using a Mac is to use great Mac apps. And Downie is a great Mac app.

What I’ve found over the last month isn’t just that I enjoy using Downie far more than invoking yt-dlp, but that I use Downie more often than I used yt-dlp, because it’s so much easier and more reliable. For example, when I wrote about Fox Sports’s new scorebug that debuted in the Super Bowl, I used Downie to download local 4K copies of this month’s Super Bowl 59, along with Super Bowl 57 from two years ago, to compare Fox’s new scorebug with their previous one. Local video files are easy to navigate frame-by-frame to capture the perfect screenshot; YouTube’s website makes it impossible to navigate frame-by-frame.

Downie is a $20 one-time purchase (and is also included with a Setapp subscription). I’ve only been using it for a month or so, and I already feel like I’ve gotten $20 of utility from it. (I went ahead and bought Monroe’s other major app, Permute, too.)

Charlie Monroe: ‘A Few Words About Indie App Business’ ★

Charlie Monroe, developer of excellent apps such as Downie and Permute:

But also don’t do this alone. I work 365 days a year. Last year, I worked 366 days (2024 was leap year). I’m not saying that I work 8 hours each day, but even during weekends, holidays, vacation, I need to tend to support emails in the morning for an hour or so and then once more in the afternoon or evening. I cannot just take off and leave for a few days without seeing the consequences and going insane when I get back. I currently receive about 100 reports from my apps each day. Some are about license code issues, some are crash reports, some are Permute conversion issues, some are Downie download issues, but it all adds up to the average of the 100 reports a day.

If I were to leave for a vacation for 10 days… You do the math what would I be getting back to. Plus your users don’t want to wait for 10 days. Even 5 days. There are users who are unwilling to wait an hour and just don’t realize that you cannot be at the computer 24-hours a day and that you’re perhaps in a different time zone and sleeping. The unfortunate thing about this is that going through the support emails in my case is something that takes about 2-3 hours a day — which is not enough to hire someone and train them. Not to mention that most of the reports actually need some technical knowledge. So unless I would hire another developer, in the end, the really administrative stuff that someone could do instead of me is a 30-minute-a-day job.

I wouldn’t recommend never taking a complete break for anyone, but there are some businesses where someone needs to spend an hour-plus on certain tasks each day. If you’re a one-person operation, that person is you, even while on vacation. No one gets into indie development because they look forward to doing support, either. It’s the designing, programming, crafting, and refining of the apps that drives them. But it’s like being a musician or comedian in some ways. For those endeavors, the grind is traveling from one city to another for gigs. Or like running a restaurant, as dramatized on The Bear — prep work, cleaning, procurement, reservations, food allergies, more cleaning. It never stops. For indie developers, the grind is support. (Small restaurants typically close for a day or two each week; technical support email addresses don’t.) There’s just always a lot of menial work involved with being a professional artist. But that’s also why so many indie developers — like, seemingly, Monroe — find the endeavor worthwhile. Because artistic work is deeply fulfilling.

A while back — around 20 years ago, at the height of the “Delicious” renaissance in indie development for Mac OS X — there was a developer who burst onto the scene with a deservedly very popular app. It was gorgeous and fast. It had a lot fewer features than other apps in its somewhat-crowded category, but that was also part of the app’s appeal. It was like a sporty little roadster in a category full of practical sedans and trucks. He eventually came out with a second app, and it too was popular. His apps were sort of like Panic’s, aesthetically, I’d say. They not only looked cool, they were well-designed from a usability perspective too. This developer, so I’ve been told, spent almost no time at all on tech support from customers. How was this possible, a friend of mine asked him. Easy, this developer said. When the inbox for support emails looked full, he’d do a Select All, then Delete. Inbox zero.

This story has always made me laugh. It’s hilarious, in a way. But ultimately it was a sign that he just wasn’t cut out for the indie app business. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that his apps went dormant around 2010, and I haven’t heard of him or from him in like 15 years. He was super talented so I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s doing great work in some other business, perhaps inside a much bigger company, where developers and designers are isolated from customers, rather than enmeshed with them like indies inherently are.

xAI’s Grok-3 Jumps to the Top of AI Leaderboards ★

Alex Heath, writing for The Verge:

Just a few weeks after everyone freaked out about DeepSeek, Elon Musk’s Grok-3 has again shaken up the fast-moving AI race. The new model is ending the week at the top of the Chatbot Arena leaderboard, while the Grok iOS app is at the top of the App Store, just above ChatGPT. Even as Musk appears to be crashing out from his newfound political power, his xAI team has managed to deploy a leading foundational model in record time. [...]

While its Deep Research reports are nowhere near as in depth as OpenAI’s, Grok-3’s “thinking” capabilities appear to be roughly on par with o1, according to Andrej Karpathy, who noted in his deep dive comparison that “this timescale to state of the art territory is unprecedented.”

Benedict Evans, back in 2021, observed:

Elon Musk is a bullshitter who delivers. This breaks a lot of people’s pattern-matching, in both directions.

This summation of Musk is more apt, and more useful, today than it was four years ago. The Boring Company is seemingly a complete fraud, and he’s been making unfulfilled promises about Tesla “full self-driving” for over a decade. But Tesla Motors has done more to make electric cars mainstream than all other automakers combined. Starlink delivers extraordinary satellite Internet service, with no real competitors. SpaceX has rejuvenated the rocket industry. xAI seems to fall on the “actually delivers” side.

Twitter/X seems to fall squarely in the middle. It’s a mess in many ways, and seems not one iota closer to Musk’s promised vision of an “everything app”, but under Musk’s ownership it has been transformed, and while it isn’t more popular than it used to be, it also isn’t less (or much less) popular. It’s just a different somewhat scummier audience and vibe.

My betting money says the whole DOGE thing is very much on the bullshit side, but Musk’s overall track record spans the gamut from outright scams to extraordinary historic accomplishments. He’s such a prolific and shameless bullshitter that I wouldn’t take Musk at his word about anything, even what he had for lunch. But I’d be loath to bet against him on an engineering endeavor.

iOS Voice Dictation Bug (?) Briefly Flashes the Word ‘Trump’ When You Say ‘Racist’ ★

Chris Welch, writing at The Verge:

Apple has acknowledged a peculiar bug with the iPhone’s dictation feature that briefly displays “Trump” when someone says the word “racist.” The Verge has been unable to reproduce the issue, but it picked up attention on Tuesday after a video demonstrating the strange substitution went viral on TikTok and other social media.

The company provided a statement to The New York Times and Fox News confirming the bug. “We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers dictation, and we are rolling out a fix as soon as possible,” an unnamed spokesperson said, according to Fox News.

From the Times story:

The issue appeared to begin after an update to Apple’s servers, said John Burkey, the founder of Wonderrush.ai, an artificial intelligence start-up, and a former member of Apple’s Siri team who is still in regular contact with the team.

But he said that it was unlikely that the data that Apple has collected for its artificial intelligence offerings was causing the problem, and the word correcting itself was likely an indication that the issue was not just technical. Instead, he said, there was probably software code somewhere on Apple’s systems that caused iPhones to write the word “Trump” when someone said “racist.”

“This smells like a serious prank,” Mr. Burkey said. “The only question is: Did someone slip this into the data or slip into the code?”

Paul Kafasis (my guest on the latest episode of The Talk Show) captured a video of the glitch in action. I guess it could be a protest prank from a rogue employee, but I suspect it’s just a machine learning glitch — maybe caused by the fact that Trump’s name gets mentioned alongside “racist” so often? It’s definitely a little weird, but all sorts of things about Siri are a little weird.

Jony Ive on ‘Desert Island Discs’ ★

Desert Island Discs is a remarkably long-running BBC Radio interview program now hosted (or presented, if you will) by Lauren Laverne. The gimmick is that guests are asked to name eight songs, a book, and a “luxury item” they’d take with them if stranded on a desert island, and those picks — including playing the songs — are sprinkled throughout the interview. This week’s guest is Jony Ive, and it’s one of the best interviews with him I’ve ever encountered. Incredibly thoughtful and inspiring, and Laverne covers a lot of ground without ever seeming the least bit hurried.

A few highlights, from Ive:

I think that one of the struggles I have, though, is in some ways, I think ironically, I struggle with being present in the now because I spend so much of my life in my head in the future. The way I try to understand the future is I’m obsessed with the past. And so the bit that often gets missed out is right now.

I know that feeling.

Regarding his early years at Apple, before the reunification with NeXT and the return of Steve Jobs, Ive spoke about the company’s severe financial troubles skewing how it thought about products:

I think when you struggle, then a goal can become just commercial issues. I understand — I mean, if you’re losing lots of money, you’d like to stop losing lots of money. The problem there is it means you focus on money, and you’re normally losing money because the products aren’t right. And from ’92 to ’97, it was a very, very difficult season. One that I am so grateful for — but I still get the shivers sometimes.

The telling word Ive used in that passage is “right”. He could have said the problem was that Apple’s mid-’90s products weren’t “good”, but he didn’t. Judging them as good or bad isn’t the correct framework. It’s that they weren’t right. There’s an inherent subjectiveness to rightness. A je ne sais quoi. The original iMac that started Ive’s long and remarkably fruitful collaboration with Steve Jobs wasn’t a hit because it was good, so much as because it was so obviously right.

(The BBC’s podcast feed for Desert Island Discs seems to run about a month behind the website, alas. I nabbed the MP3 from the BBC’s web page (using Downie) and uploaded the file manually to Overcast. Apparently the episode is also now available in the the BBC’s own BBC Sounds app.)

Apple Shareholders Resoundingly Reject Proposal to Ditch the Company’s ‘Inclusion and Diversity’ Policies; Trump Responds With His Usual Equanimity ★

Michael Liedtke, reporting for the AP:

Apple shareholders rebuffed an attempt to pressure the technology trendsetter into joining President Donald Trump’s push to scrub corporate programs designed to diversify its workforce.

The proposal drafted by the National Center for Public Policy Research — a self-described conservative think tank — urged Apple to follow a litany of high-profile companies that have retreated from diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives currently in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.

After a brief presentation about the anti-DEI proposal, Apple announced shareholders had rejected it. In a regulatory filing submitted Tuesday evening, Apple disclosed that 97% of the ballots cast were votes against the measure.

President Trump, at 8am this morning, on his own very popular social network:

APPLE SHOULD GET RID OF DEI RULES, NOT JUST MAKE ADJUSTMENTS TO THEM. DEI WAS A HOAX THAT HAS BEEN VERY BAD FOR OUR COUNTRY. DEI IS GONE!!!

Needless to say, the National Center for Public Policy Research is a bunch of ding-dongs, and Trump has no idea, at all, what Apple’s actual policies and goals are for diversity — he just knows he wants them gone. (And I love the photo MacRumors’s Joe Rossignol chose for his report on this story.)

There does exist a formal world of DEI, right down to using that very acronym. Think of it as DEI™. Some universities seem overrun with it, despite results that strongly suggest it doesn’t work and some clearly objectionable dogmatic requirements. But there are obvious reasons any company (or university, or organization) ought to be concerned about diversity and inclusion, in the plain sense of those words. Not just ethical “the way things ought to be” reasons, but empirical studies have shown that diverse organizations are more successful.

It’s a spectrum. A lot of US universities are at the far left of that spectrum. The Trump administration and its proponents are, clearly, at the far right of that spectrum, where they’re seeking now to pressure companies into not even concerning themselves with “diversity” in the plainest sense of the word, and are scrubbing from government agencies words like “woman” and “disabled”. I’m being overly simplistic by presenting the left/right divide as unidimensional here. Trump, for example, has ushered in a very different “right” than that of, say, the Bush-Cheney era 20 years ago. But the DEI™ “left” is a very different left than the truly liberal free-speech left. Liberals object to DEI’s rigidity, dogma, and performative nature; Trump and his cohorts object to actual human diversity and inclusiveness.

Some big corporations, in recent years, veered pretty far to the extreme on “DEI initiatives”, and are using the current political moment to course correct back toward the (to me, sensible) center. But this course correction started long before Trump’s re-election. Here’s a CNBC story from December 2023 on Google and Meta scaling back formal DEI programs.

Apple, from my observations, has long charted its own consistent course on such matters, right down to calling their policies “Inclusion & Diversity” rather than the name-brand “DEI”. Apple didn’t lunge to the left at the height of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, because they didn’t need to. And so they have no need to course correct now. Apple shareholders seemingly agree.

Tuesday, 25 February 2025

Yours Truly With Rene Ritchie Talking About the iPhone 16e ★

The advantage to having me on Rene’s show, rather than vice versa, is that he’ll push us through talking about a new iPhone model in 30 minutes. If I were hosting it’d be two hours. But the first hour would be about the whole James Bond film rights thing.

Monday, 24 February 2025

The Talk Show: ‘Nothing Is Possible’ ★

Special guest: Paul Kafasis. Special topics: Siri/Super Bowl nonsense, “Gulf of Mexico/America” nonsense, the iPhone 16e gets announced, and a veritable Bond villain buys the rights to the James Bond movie franchise.

Sponsored by:

• Listen Later: Turn articles into podcasts and listen on the go, with AI-powered narration.

Mission Accomplished: Trump Likes Apple’s Plan, Especially the Part About Mexico That I Don’t Think Was Real ★

Mike Allen, writing for Axios, under the headline “Trump Manufacturing Win: Apple to Spend $500 Billion in U.S., Hire 20,000”:

Trump met with Cook on Thursday in the Oval Office. Then Trump got so excited that he revealed the plans prematurely, saying on-camera while meeting with governors that Cook is “investing hundreds of billions of dollars. I hope he’s announced it — I hope I didn’t announce it, but what the hell? All I do is tell the truth — that’s what he told me. Now he has to do it, right?”

“He is investing hundreds of billions of dollars and others, too,” Trump continued. “We will have a lot of chipmakers coming in, a lot of automakers coming in. They stopped two plants in Mexico that were ... starting construction. They just stopped them — they’re going to build them here instead, because they don’t want to pay the tariffs. Tariffs are amazing.”

Apple and Tim Cook, I’m sure, are pleased as pie to have today’s announcement portrayed this way, as a “Trump manufacturing win”, despite the fact that it’s seemingly exactly in line with the trajectory Apple’s been on for US job creation since 2018, including a nearly identical announcement in 2021 (that they largely, but not entirely, followed through on).

The Mexico angle rings weird to my ears, though. Bloomberg picked up on that too, running a headline over the weekend that read “Trump Says Cook Shifting Apple Manufacturing From Mexico to US”.

The last thing I remember Apple having assembled in Mexico were a small number of late model Apple Extended Keyboard II’s in 1995 (which were inferior to their American-made models, like the one I’m using to write this). It’s quite possible I’m overlooking some Mexican-made Apple products in the intervening decades, but if there are any, they’re not recent. So I suspect Tim Cook, in his meeting with Trump last week, sold him a bill of goods, and more or less convinced Trump that Apple had been planning to commission some new plants in Mexico (a country so loathsome Trump confiscated their gulf) but, thanks to President Trump’s inspiring leadership, Apple would instead be building those plants right here in the US, in the big old red state of Texas — when in fact all of this is pretty much exactly what Apple had been planning to do all along.

Apple Announces Plan to Spend More Than $500 Billion in the U.S. Over the Next Four Years (Which Is Probably Exactly What They’ve Been Planning to Do) ★

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced its largest-ever spend commitment, with plans to spend and invest more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years.

The context of making a big deal over this announcement, of course, is that Apple is seeking exemptions from the Trump administration’s tariffs. $500 billion is a lot of money, even for Apple, and 20,000 new jobs over the next four years is a lot of jobs, especially at a time when many big tech companies are laying off, not hiring. (The federal government is trying to lay off a lot of employees too, if you haven’t heard.) But as the WSJ notes in their story on this announcement, those 20,000 new jobs are a continuation of their existing hiring growth: “The company, which had 164,000 full-time equivalent employees as of September, has added an average of 5,400 annually over the past five years.”

Apple announced a similar plan four years ago — $430 billion and 20,000 jobs. In the announcement of that 2021 plan, Apple said, “Over the past three years, Apple’s contributions in the US have significantly outpaced the company’s original five-year goal of $350 billion set in 2018.”

So I don’t think this announcement is bullshit, at all. But I also don’t think what Apple has announced today is much, if any, different from what they’d be doing if Kamala Harris had gotten 1–2 percent more of the vote in a handful of states in November. The difference is that everyone is looking for quid pro quo with President Transactional back in office.

Apple again:

As part of its new U.S. investments, Apple will work with manufacturing partners to begin production of servers in Houston later this year. A 250,000-square-foot server manufacturing facility, slated to open in 2026, will create thousands of jobs.

Previously manufactured outside the U.S., the servers that will soon be assembled in Houston play a key role in powering Apple Intelligence, and are the foundation of Private Cloud Compute, which combines powerful AI processing with the most advanced security architecture ever deployed at scale for AI cloud computing. The servers bring together years of R&D by Apple engineers, and deliver the industry-leading security and performance of Apple silicon to the data center.

Kind of interesting that the big manufacturing news is a product that Apple doesn’t even sell, but produces only for its own use. I don’t think this is a hint that they might begin selling servers (again), but who knows? I also wonder whether there’s a corporate-espionage security angle to assembling these servers here, rather than in China.

HP Added a 15-Minute Waiting Time for Telephone Support Calls ★

Paul Kunert, reporting for The Register last week:

HP Inc is trying to force consumer PC and print customers to use online and other digital support channels by setting a minimum 15-minute wait time for anyone that phones the call center to get answers to troublesome queries. The wait time was added on Tuesday, February 18, according to internal communications seen by The Register, and impacts retail patrons in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany and Italy, though we anticipate more countries could be added.

On the fifth, tenth, and thirteenth minute, the recorded message will tell HP customers it is “experiencing longer waiting times and we apologize for the inconvenience,” and again remind them they may switch to alternatives.

Three days later, HP reversed the new policy, issuing this bullshit statement:

We’re always looking for ways to improve our customer service experience. This support offering was intended to provide more digital options with the goal of reducing time to resolve inquiries.

We have found that many of our customers were not aware of the digital support options we provide. Based on initial feedback, we know the importance of speaking to live customer service agents in a timely fashion is paramount. As a result, we will continue to prioritize timely access to live phone support to ensure we are delivering an exceptional customer experience.

There’s spin, and then there’s just bald-faced lying. This clearly had nothing to do with improving customer support and was simply about cost. HP so wanted to discourage customers from using phone support to reach a real person for help that they instituted a 15-minute penalty timeout to discourage people from waiting.

There’s some kind of joke to be made here about this literally inhumane approach to customer support being unveiled in the same week HP announced its acquisition of Humane — the company that turned its $1,000 AI Pins into bricks.

Sigma BF ★

Absolutely beautiful new camera from Sigma. Full-size sensor, interchangeable lens system, but it’s the camera design that jumps out:

The Sigma BF represents a new, more intuitive way to use a camera. It is streamlined to make the act of photography as effortless as possible. We have replaced the shooting mode dial — itself a holdover from the days of film photography — with direct access to the five elements that decide the photograph. Shutter speed, aperture, ISO, EV compensation and color mode are all immediately available at the touch of a finger. The new Status Monitor displays the currently active setting, so the screen provides an unobstructed view of the subject.

The BF’s high-resolution screen provides a distraction-free view of all necessary information — and nothing more. With one simple setting, it shows only the live view image, with the five key elements — shutter speed, aperture, ISO, EV compensation and color mode — displayed when you are ready to press the shutter button. All other options and settings are accessed via just three simple menu screens.

This camera immediately struck lust in my heart. So many fewer dials and buttons, it’s striking. They even got rid of storage cards — 230 GB of internal storage instead. $2000 (sans any lenses).

Sunday, 23 February 2025

Linus Sebastian’s Thoughts After Switching to an iPhone for 30 Days ★

I’ve been meaning, since it came out in December, to link to this video from Linus Sebastian of “Linus Tech Tips” fame, and with the iPhone 16e dropping this week, now seems like a good time. It’s a common genre that dates back decades before YouTube was even a thing: longtime user of platform X switches to rival platform Y for a few weeks, and then explains what they liked, what they didn’t, what confused them, etc. This sort of thing always raises hackles because there’s a natural human tendency to get tribal — if not downright religious — about one’s platforms of choice. And Sebastian’s intro — playing to YouTube’s algorithm — frames it in a way that makes it seem like his overall take on iOS is going to be inflammatory. Right in the first 30 seconds of the 20-minute video, he says:

Just a few days into my iOS challenge I started to look a little differently at the Apple users in my life. They describe Apple products with marketing slogans like “it just works” as though they actually believe them, and it made me wonder, does Apple have one version of their products for the True Believers and then a different one for the scrubs like me? Because my time with the iPhone 16 Plus has been absolutely riddled with unintuitive design choices, unnecessarily limited functionality, and some of the weirdest bugs that I have encountered on a supposedly finished product in years.

The first time I watched the video, my finger started hovering to the close-tab button at this point. But that provocative opening isn’t really representative of Sebastian’s actual observations and complaints at all. It’s just the YouTube/social-media style. Me? I would start an essay, on, say, the things that bug me the most about Android, in the least inflammatory way possible, to open people’s minds and get as many Android proponents as possible to relax, and listen to my arguments. And then I’d try to make my case, building to a crescendo where I deliver my perhaps inflammatory conclusions only at the very end. YouTube works the reverse way — you start out in provocative fashion to raise hackles, because outrage drives engagement, but then sort of work your way back toward reasonableness.

Sebastian is a long-time Android user, but he’s not really a phone guy at all. He doesn’t review phones, typically. His own personal Android phone is several years old. His interest and renown is entirely in the field of PCs. So his video isn’t really “Android power user reviews iOS”, but more like “PC power user who is also an Android user tries an iPhone for a month”.

I like these sort of videos because I’m all-in on iOS at this point. I’ve kept an Android phone at my desk since the Google Nexus One in 2010, but the one still at my desk is a five-year-old Pixel 4. I feel more out of touch with the state-of-the-art on Android than ever. So a video like this, from the perspective of someone who is himself way out of date with the state-of-the-art on the iPhone side of the fence, is really interesting.

Sebastian winds up making a bunch of astute critiques of iOS and the iPhone experience. None of them were new to me, and none of them really left me with any sense of missing out by not being part of Team Android. But most of his complaints are completely legit — and a lot of them are things Apple should address. He complains repeatedly about iOS’s animated transitions making everything feel slow. That’s 100 percent true. As an everyday iPhone user I’m just completely used to that. But those animations really do make iPhones feel slower than they are. In terms of tech specs iPhones are literally the fastest phones on the planet. Apple’s A-series silicon is, and always has been, years ahead of the best silicon money can buy in an Android handset. But a lot of aspects of iOS feel slower than Android because of animated transitions which iOS (nor iPadOS) offers no option to speed up. It should. And the Accessibility setting to completely turn off animations doesn’t solve the problem; what I want, and I think what Sebastian wants, is faster animations. (Sebastian also justifiably complains about the fact that so many useful iOS settings are buried under Accessibility. Many of the settings in Accessibility are related to accessibility, but a lot of them would be better found in an “Advanced” section of Settings that doesn’t exist.)

Sebastian also correctly skewers iOS for its confusing audio volume settings; Android definitely wins here. Rearranging home screen icons sucks on iOS. CarPlay has annoying bugs. His fresh eyes were annoyed by something mine just accept: that Apple’s first-party apps tend to put their preference settings in the Settings app, but third-party apps tend to keep them in-app. (But now Apple is starting to do that too, with new apps like Sports.)

Give the video a watch. Again, it didn’t leave me with an iota of envy for life on the Android side of the fence, but it reminded me about a bunch of things on iOS that don’t make sense, and seemingly are the way they are only because that’s how they always have been.

Saturday, 22 February 2025

Going Deep on ‘Deep’ ★

Katy Steinmetz, writing for The Washington Post (via Mignon Fogarty):

But lately, one meaning has become trendier than the rest. Close ties to artificial intelligence have led to a surge in “deep” being used for AI-related endeavors, to the point that the word is fast becoming shorthand for “cutting-edge tech” — and is already starting to feel derivative. In 2025, “deep” is to the tech world what the plus sign (+) became a few years ago to streaming platforms such as AppleTV+, Disney+ and Paramount+.

It’s been confusing keeping track of the various deeps, just in the AI space alone:

• DeepSeek — The Chinese AI lab that made waves with the launch of their “open reasoning” LLM R1 a month ago.
• DeepMind — Google’s AI research lab, whose Gemini began offering a feature called “Deep Research” in December. The feature “uses AI to explore complex topics on your behalf and provide you with findings in a comprehensive, easy-to-read report.”
• “Deep Research” — Also the name of a new feature OpenAI announced February 2, currently available exclusively to $200/month Pro users: “An agent that uses reasoning to synthesize large amounts of online information and complete multi-step research tasks for you.”
• “Deep Research” — Also the name of a new feature from Perplexity, announced February 14: “When you ask a Deep Research question, Perplexity performs dozens of searches, reads hundreds of sources, and reasons through the material to autonomously deliver a comprehensive report.”
• “DeepSearch” — New feature xAI announced this week alongside their very impressive new Grok 3 model, currently available in “beta”, ambitiously described as “a lightning-fast AI agent built to relentlessly seek the truth across the entire corpus of human knowledge.”
• Deep Blue — The OG AI “deep” name holder, IBM’s chess-playing supercomputer that famously beat then-world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match in 1997.
• Deep Thoughts — Long-running Saturday Night Live bit from the great Jack Handey, a new one of which ran in last week’s SNL 50th anniversary special.

Update, 26 February: Another one! “Think Deeper” is Microsoft Copilot’s feature that’s basically what most other AI apps call “Deep Research”.

Friday, 21 February 2025

‘Ready’ Is the New ‘Approved’ ★

File this one under “precise words matter”. Remember the whole thing a few weeks back, where AltStore PAL — an EU alternative app marketplace for iOS — published Hot Tub, a hardcore porno app, and billed it as “approved” by Apple because that’s the word Apple used for apps that were merely notarized for distribution? I wrote then:

If we want to get nitty-gritty over verbs, I’d argue that Apple accepts apps — like Hot Tub — for notarization, not approves. Begrudging acceptance is more of a thing than begrudging approval.

AltStore’s Riley Testut today noted a change in Apple’s notarization confirmation emails.

• February 11: “The following app has been approved for distribution”
• February 19: “The following app is ready for distribution”

I only wish I’d thought of ready as an even more neutral-in-terms-of-conveying-approval word than accepted. I’d have bet my house that Apple would change this language in some way. Ready is perfect here — in no way a euphemism, but in no way conveying approval.

The 40th Anniversary of ProVUE at Macworld Expo ★

Jim Rea:

Forty years ago today the doors opened for the very first Macworld Expo in the Brooks Hall basement in San Francisco. For most of you this event probably seems like ancient history, somewhere back in the mists of time. But for me this was a very real and exciting event that I participated in as an exhibitor, the start of my amazing journey with the Mac community, a journey that continues on today.

As I recall there were two or three dozen software booths that first year. Some of the software on display included Multiplan (Microsoft), PFS:File, Think Tank, FileVision, Mac Slots, Habadex, Mac Draft, Mac Lion, Music Works, Click Art and of course OverVUE (the direct predecessor to today’s Panorama X). Of course all of these companies have long since disappeared, except for two — Microsoft and ProVUE Development. I’d say that’s a pretty nice club.

I’m quite proud to have kept ProVUE Development in the Macintosh database business every single day from then to now. The RAM based database concepts I started with in 1984 are still the core of the software today, of course much further developed. In fact, if you look at screen shots of the original OverVUE from 1984, and Panorama X from 2025, the family resemblance is unmistakeable. On the left is 68k assembly code using the original Mac ROMs, on the right is Objective-C using AppKit, but the concepts are the same. There are even databases that have been brought forward from the left all the way to the right — in continuous use over four decades!

There are old-school Mac developers still going strong, and there are old school Mac developers still going strong. I’m not sure about this “Microsoft” company, but ProVUE’s achievement here is quite remarkable. Read through for Rea’s 40% discount code to celebrate this 40-year anniversary. (Also, check out the screenshots and those crazy menu bar titles in the 1.0 version from 1984.)

Friday, 21 February 2025

Yankees Loosen The Boss’s Facial Hair Policy ★

Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner:

“In recent weeks I have spoken to a large number of former and current Yankees — spanning several eras — to elicit their perspectives on our longstanding facial hair and grooming policy, and I appreciate their earnest and varied feedback. These most recent conversations are an extension of ongoing internal dialogue that dates back several years.

“Ultimately the final decision rests with me, and after great consideration, we will be amending our expectations to allow our players and uniformed personnel to have well-groomed beards moving forward. It is the appropriate time to move beyond the familiar comfort of our former policy.”

The appropriate time to change this was years ago, but better late than never. It’s the most Yankees story possible that this policy change is much bigger news than the fact that the team today also signed manager Aaron Boone to a two-year extension through the 2027 season. MLB reporter Bryan Hoch:

The grooming policy dates to George M. Steinbrenner’s purchase of the team. As the legend goes, its roots grew in 1973, when Steinbrenner observed his team on the first-base line for Opening Day against the Cleveland Indians.

Steinbrenner was not yet “The Boss,” so new in the role that he could not identify the players by their faces. Instead, he focused upon their hair — unkempt mustaches, mutton chops and shaggy locks. He scowled, scribbling uniform numbers on a scrap of paper urgently dispatched to manager Ralph Houk. Tell these men to get a haircut, Steinbrenner commanded.

My favorite Yankee, Don Mattingly, not only ran into grief over this policy with George Steinbrenner, but again with the next team he played for.

Thursday, 20 February 2025

Barbara Broccoli on Amazon, in Private: ‘These People Are Fucking Idiots’ ★

Erich Schwartzel and Jessica Toonkel, reporting for The Wall Street Journal back on December 19, under the headline “Where Is James Bond? Trapped in an Ugly Stalemate With Amazon” (News+ link):

Nearly three years after Amazon acquired the right to release Bond movies through its $6.5 billion purchase of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio, the relationship between the family that oversees the franchise and the e-commerce giant has all but collapsed. The decaying partnership has scuttled any near-term hope of a new Bond film — a black eye for Amazon’s ambitions in Hollywood, since at the time of the MGM sale, the Bond franchise represented a significant share of the $6.5 billion the company paid for the studio.

When it comes to Bond’s future, the power lies in the hands of Barbara Broccoli, who inherited the control from her father, Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, and who for 30 years has decided when a new Bond movie can go into production. She has told friends she doesn’t trust algorithm-centric Amazon with a character she helped to mythologize through big-screen storytelling and gut instinct. This fall, she characterized the status of a new movie in dire terms — no script, no story and no new Bond.

To friends, Broccoli has characterized her thoughts on Amazon this way: “These people are fucking idiots.”

One way out of a stalemate, apparently, is to sell. Here’s Broccoli’s public statement today, accompanying the news that Eon Productions has reached a deal that shifts creative control over the franchise to Amazon:

“My life has been dedicated to maintaining and building upon the extraordinary legacy that was handed to Michael and me by our father, producer Cubby Broccoli. I have had the honor of working closely with four of the tremendously talented actors who have played 007 and thousands of wonderful artists within the industry. With the conclusion of ‘No Time to Die’ and Michael retiring from the films, I feel it is time to focus on my other projects.”

Broccoli’s brother Michael Wilson was ever so slightly more magnanimous in his statement, saying “Therefore, Barbara and I agree, it is time for our trusted partner, Amazon MGM Studios, to lead James Bond into the future,” but it’s rather striking that Broccoli said not a word about Amazon in her statement, and Wilson’s praise only went so far as the lone adjective trusted. But the lie to Wilson’s attempt at even slight magnanimity is that Eon Productions and Amazon were never partners. It was the old MGM Studios, before Amazon’s acquisition, that was Eon’s partner from the very beginning (1963’s Dr. No).

I meant to post a link to this WSJ story when it broke, and mistakenly thought I had, but it slipped through the cracks around the holidays. But I’ve had a bad feeling about the franchise’s future ever since.

Leaked Image of the First Post-Humane-Acquisition Product From HP’s Printer Division ★

Didn’t take them long to start having an impact inside HP.

(Direct link to image, for those who can’t or don’t want to see the original on X.)

Amazon MGM Studios Takes Creative Control Over James Bond Franchise ★

Alex Ritman, with blockbuster news at Variety:

Amazon MGM Studios is set to take creative control of the James Bond franchise. The shock announcement — which is sure to shake and, indeed, stir the industry — was made Thursday, alongside the news that long-time producers and custodians of 007, Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, would be stepping back.

As per details of the historic agreement, Amazon MGM Studios, Wilson and Broccoli have formed a new joint venture to house the James Bond intellectual property rights. The three parties will remain co-owners of the iconic franchise but Amazon MGM will have creative control.

The villains in Bond stories are often bald billionaire industrialists who either build rockets or own media companies, with lasciviously-dressed women on their arms. It’s hard to imagine how we could come closer to a real-life Bond villain taking control of the franchise. (At least it wasn’t Musk.)

“Nepo babies” is a term that tends only to be used pejoratively, but family ownership is a proven model to nurture and maintain — to protect — exceptional companies with exceptional cultures. Berkshire Hathaway owns several where their agreements not only allowed, but encouraged, the families to maintain control post-acquisition. See’s Candies comes to mind. This letter from Warren Buffet describes their strategy. But Berkshire is itself an exceptional company. Most corporate conglomerate acquisitions of creator/family-run endeavors wreak devastation upon everything that made those smaller operations unique and special. Look at what’s happened to The Washington Post now that Bezos owns it. There’s much to complain about The New York Times in general, and current publisher A.G. Sulzberger in particular (sixth generation of family control since Adolph Ochs bought the paper in 1896), but The Times is still The Times.

Heretofore, Barbara Broccoli did that with the 007 franchise. The output was uneven under her and Wilson’s producing stewardship, but the Daniel Craig era was a splendid return to form. There’s no other movie franchise like it. The closest is Mission Impossible but that franchise is a distant second place, in my mind. It lacks a certain magic, a timeless but yet somehow always modern je ne sais quoi of the 007 franchise. Always the same, but somehow always fresh.

I expect Amazon to bleed it dry, alas. Spinoffs and “universe” expansion galore, of generally low quality in all regards: writing, casting, production values. But most of all I expect they’ll make the same fundamental mistake Disney has made with Star Wars — instead of leaving us craving more, they’ll produce as much dreck as they can and leave us saying “enough, stop”, with the occasional gems fighting for attention in a river of downright embarrassing unwatchable crap. Somehow they managed to ruin Boba Fett.

What’s the best original show or movie Amazon has ever made? The Peripheral was pretty good but they cancelled after its first season. Reacher is fun but it’s junk-food fun, not serious fun. Amazon taking control of James Bond is like McDonald’s taking over a great steakhouse chain like Del Frisco’s.

I have a bad feeling about this.

Wednesday, 19 February 2025

‘Oh, the Humane-ity’ ★

MG Siegler:

A regular person might read that headline and think, “wow, a startup sold for nine-figures — impressive.” Of course, it’s not impressive in this case. It’s a fire sale for a company that has been under duress for months after their product, the Ai Pin, failed to catch fire in the market. Actually, that’s not technically true. There was a literal risk of fire when charging the device, which led to a recall. And so you’ll forgive me for sort of re-using a headline here — but this situation is much more akin to the Hindenburg disaster from which the phrase originates.

When ‘FAQ’ Stands for ‘Fucking Angry Questions’ ★

From Humane’s “AI Pin Consumers FAQ”, which they link to with one of the best euphemisms of the year thus far — “We understand this transition may be difficult, and you may have questions”:

Key Dates to Remember:

• Effective immediately: Ai Pin is no longer available for new purchases.
• February 28, 2025 at 12pm PST: Ai Pin devices will no longer connect to Humane’s servers, and .Center access will be fully retired.
• February 28, 2025 at 12pm PST: All customer data, including personal identifiable information (PII), will be permanently deleted from Humane’s servers.

This was a $700 purchase (for the matte black base model — polished metal ones were $800) with a mandatory $24/month service charge (which included cellular networking) and extra battery “boosters” were $70. Customers who bought when it launched last April have spent at least $1,000, but probably more, all told. Humane gave them 10 days notice before the thing turns into a brick.

Will I receive a refund for my Ai Pin?

Refunds are only available for customers who are still within the 90-day return window from their original shipment date. You are eligible to receive a refund if your product shipped on or after November 15th, 2024. All device shipments prior to November 15th, 2024 are not eligible for refunds. All refunds must be submitted by February 27th, 2025.

Translation: tough shit.

Will my Ai Pin work with another cellular provider after the shutdown?

No. Once the service is discontinued, your Ai Pin will no longer function as a cellular device or connect to Humane’s servers. This means no calls, texts, or data usage will be possible. [...]

Can I still use my Ai Pin for offline features?

Yes. After February 28, 2025, Ai Pin will still allow for offline features like battery level, etc., but will not include any function that requires cloud connectivity like voice interactions, AI responses, and .Center access.

You can check the battery of a device that no longer offers any useful functionality. I get it, companies go bust, and when they go bust, their services go bust with them. But this is exactly the sort of outcome that made Humane’s AI Pin seem more like a scam than a product all along.

Tuesday, 18 February 2025

We Found the Sucker Willing to Buy Humane, and as Promised, I’m Going to Be Insufferable, Because of Course It Was HP ★

Brody Ford, reporting for Bloomberg:

HP Inc. will acquire assets from Humane Inc., the maker of a wearable Ai Pin introduced in late 2023, for $116 million.

The deal will include the majority of Humane’s employees in addition to its software platform and intellectual property, the company said Tuesday. It will not include Humane’s Ai pin device business, which will be wound down, an HP spokesperson said.

Humane’s team, including founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, will form a new division at HP to help integrate artificial intelligence into the company’s personal computers, printers and connected conference rooms, said Tuan Tran, who leads HP’s AI initiatives. Chaudhri and Bongiorno were design and software engineers at Apple Inc. before founding the startup.

Yours truly, last May, when news broke that Humane was looking for a buyer, “seeking a price of between $750 million and $1 billion in a sale”:

I suspect they’ll sell for a pittance — way less than the $230 million they’ve raised. I just don’t see what they have to offer. Humane doesn’t own the AI that powers the AI Pin — that comes from OpenAI, which seemingly not only doesn’t want to buy Humane, but is supposedly in exploratory talks with Jony Ive’s LoveFrom to design and build their own AI devices. The laser projector idea seems to be a bust, and the hardware’s battery life is measured in hours between battery pack swaps.

Off the top of my head, the only company that could afford a $1 billion-ish price for Humane and is dumb enough to do it is HP.

Well, at least we can say HP was smart enough not to spend $1 billion on this. But they were dumb enough to bring into their company Chaudhri, who was described to me, by someone who worked with him at Apple (and a person whom I’ve never heard badmouth a single other former colleague), as “an utter fraud”. But a fraud whose personal website is an inadvertent testimony to the lunacy of the U.S. patent system — that it serves ego inflation, not innovation.

But who knows? Maybe I’m all wet and Humane will prove to HP what NeXT proved to Apple, and we’ll all be hanging on every thread of Imran Chaudhri keynotes in a few years and he’ll lead HP back to greatness. (Almost laughed spittle onto my screen there.)

MapQuest’s ‘Name Your Own Gulf’ ★

I cracked wise in a footnote yesterday about MapQuest still being around, but it turns out they’re not only still around, and they’re not only still labelling the Gulf of Mexico by its world-recognized not-stupid name, but they’ve actually built an entire website that perfectly jibes with my closing argument — to wit, that this whole thing is objectively hilarious and that mockery is our best tool to subvert a kakistocracy. Bravo.

Sunday, 16 February 2025

‘The Hardest Working Font in Manhattan’ ★

Extraordinary illustrated essay by Marcin Wichary, documenting a typeface — and its long, fascinating, splintered history — that exemplifies the difference between beautiful and pretty. The beauty in Gorton isn’t just in its plainness and hardworking mechanical roots — it’s in the history of the 20th century itself. Gorton became such a part of the world that the bygone world of the previous century imbues how this font makes me feel.

Do yourself a favor and read this one in a comfortable chair, with a tasty slow-sipping beverage, on a screen bigger than a phone. Everything about this piece is exemplary and astounding — the writing, the photography, the depths of research. But most of all, Wichary’s clear passion and appreciation. It’s a love letter.

Clerk ★

My thanks to Clerk for sponsoring last week at DF. Integrate authentication and user management services with applications made for the Apple ecosystem with Clerk’s iOS SDK. Built with Swift, Clerk’s SDK adheres to modern standards, delivering the idiomatic and consistent developer experience you expect from Clerk.

Clerk’s iOS SDK makes use of the latest in Swift networking, allowing your code to be as readable and expressive as possible. Authenticate with your favorite social providers in just a few lines of code. Let the iOS SDK take care of managing your users’ authentication state so you can get back to building your app.

If you’re a developer looking for a modern, full-fledged user management and authentication SDK, check out Clerk.

The Best ‘Saturday Night Live’ Sketches, According to the People Who Made Them ★

Alan Siegel at The Ringer:

Ahead of ‘SNL50,’ we asked Amy Poehler, Seth Meyers, Bill Hader, and more to tell us which of their sketches they hold closest to their hearts. [...]

There’s no magic formula, but the most transcendent sketches — the ones we reference and quote, even years later — often share two traits. Just ask Seth Meyers, the show’s head writer and “Weekend Update” anchor for a decade. “A lot of great SNL sketches are both obvious and unexpected,” he says. “You have to combine the two to make it rise above what, you know, could be a very good sketch.”

Fun read with some great video clips. Really looking forward to the SNL50 special tonight.

Gurman: ‘Apple’s Long-Promised AI Overhaul for Siri Runs Into Bugs, Possible Delays’ ★

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc.’s long-promised overhaul for the Siri digital assistant is facing engineering problems and software bugs, threatening to postpone or limit its release, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Shocker.

Apple Research Paper Documents Anthropomorphic, Emotionally Expressive Robot Lamp, à la Pixar’s Luxo ★

New research published from Apple machine learning researchers Yuhan Hu, Peide Huang, Mouli Sivapurapu, Jian Zhang:

Nonverbal behaviors such as posture, gestures, and gaze are essential for conveying internal states, both consciously and unconsciously, in human interaction. For robots to interact more naturally with humans, robot movement design should likewise integrate expressive qualities — such as intention, attention, and emotions — alongside traditional functional considerations like task fulfillment, spatial constraints, and time efficiency. In this paper, we present the design and prototyping of a lamp-like robot that explores the interplay between functional and expressive objectives in movement design.

I enjoyed seeing something Luxo-esque made real, and the paper itself is fairly readable — and worth skimming at least for the illustrations. But I’ll wait for an actual product to get excited. Unlike marketing concept videos, I don’t think publishing academic research is harmful to a company — and in fact, as has been much discussed regarding Apple’s institutional penchant for secrecy, it’s seemingly essential for Apple to not only permit but encourage this, to recruit top-tier talent in the fields of machine learning and artificial intelligence. But publishing academic research is closer to publishing marketing concept videos than it is to releasing an actual product. Which is to say it doesn’t count.

Display Preferences

Copyright © 2002–2025 The Daring Fireball Company LLC.