Sam Sabin, writing for Axios one year ago:
Anthropic expects AI-powered virtual employees to begin roaming
corporate networks in the next year, the company’s top security
leader told Axios in an interview this week. [...] Virtual
employees could be the next AI innovation...
Two months ago, revisiting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s year-prior prediction that AI would soon be writing 90+ percent of all programming code, I wrote:
But where I think Amodei’s remarks, quoted above, are facile is
that it hasn’t played out as simply that lines of cod...
Two months ago, revisiting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s year-prior prediction that AI would soon be writing 90+ percent of all programming code, I wrote:
But where I think Amodei’s remarks, quoted above, are facile is
that it hasn’t played out as simply that lines of cod...
Press release last week:
SightMD, a leading ophthalmology practice in the greater New
England area, today announced a historic milestone in surgical
innovation. Dr. Eric Rosenberg, DO, MSE, has become the first
surgeon in the world to successfully perform cataract surger...
A colorful personality who engaged and entertained fans with a
distinct conversational style, Sterling called 5,426
regular-season Yankees games and 225 more in the postseason from
1989 until his retirement in 2024. After initially stepping away
from the microphone in April of that year, Sterling returned to
call selected games late in the ’24 season, including each contest
of the World Series.
At the time of his initial retirement, Sterling said that he
considered himself to be “a very blessed human being,” noting that
he had lived out a childhood dream of broadcasting on the radio
for more than 64 years.
“It’s your medium. You do what you want,” Sterling once said. “You
have to paint the picture, which I love doing.”
It’s official! I’m permanently banned from X for tweeting “TLDR:
Fascism.” (appeal denied)
“TLDR: Fascism” was Durán’s two-word response to this 1,000-word essay from Palantir describing their vision for a “Technological Republic”. (Alternative link to essay if you don’t want to visit x.com.)
Getting perma-banned from Twitter/X by Elon Musk gives Durán a nice Streisand-effect boost to promote his upcoming new book, The Nerd Reich. If the book is even half as good as its title it should be a bestseller.
I don’t want to spoil any of this story from David Gelphman, which he wrote back in 2013, but which I only came across this week had read so long ago I’d forgotten it. Go read it. But before you do, one bit of context you should keep in mind is that the original iPad was unveiled at a special Apple event on 27 January 2010, but it didn’t ship until early April. Gelphman’s story takes place in that interregnum.
A follow-up point to Friday’s post about Meta unceremoniously shitcanning its entire contract with Sama, the Kenyan contractor that employed over 1,100 contractors to serve as Mechanical Turks for Meta’s AI efforts, after a few of the contractors told investigative reporters...
Regarding my earlier post about the cleverness of Tim Cook’s solution to Apple’s dilemma regarding how to apply for, and accept, a potential tariff refund check without drawing the ire of Donald “Tariff Is My Favorite Word” Trump, at least one reader asked why Tim Cook comm...
Remember the appalling but utterly-unsurprising story two months ago where a team of investigative reporters in Sweden uncovered a company in Kenya contracted by Meta to review video content captured by Meta’s “smart” glasses? They spoke to some of the workers, who told tale...
One more from Jason Snell, from his analysis of Apple’s quarterly results:
During a complicated question from J.P. Morgan analyst Samik
Chatterjee about product margins, Parekh unusually half-answered
the question and then stopped and “turned it over to Tim” so that
Cook...
MG Siegler returns to the show to discuss Apple’s announcement that Tim Cook is stepping aside (into the role of executive chairman) and John Ternus will become CEO.
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Uwa Ede-Osifo, reporting for The Guardian:
On any given day, Los Angeles’s Hollywood Boulevard teems with
tourists and street performers clustered near the area’s many
landmarks. But in recent months, the strip has been set abuzz for
a new reason.
Throngs of mostly adol...
Apple Newsroom:
“Today Apple is proud to report our best March quarter ever, with
revenue of $111.2 billion and double-digit growth across every
geographic segment,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “iPhone achieved
a March quarter revenue record, fueled by such extraordinary...
Juli Clover, writing at MacRumors under the rather incendiary headline “Apple Has Given Up on the Vision Pro After M5 Refresh Flop”:
Apple has all but given up on the Vision Pro after the M5 model
failed to revitalize interest in the device, MacRumors has
learned. Apple ...
600 words from Hartley Charlton at MacRumors expounding upon a wacko post on Weibo suggesting that Apple is debating dropping MagSafe from all iPhones (which post, translated to English, is only 70-some words). Given that last year’s 16e didn’t have MagSafe and this year’s 17e does, you don’t need a pseudonymous Chinese weatherman to know which way the MagSafe wind is blowing in Cupertino.
Max Harrison-Caldwell, reporting for The San Francisco Standard:
In 2024, the port — which manages the Oakland airport — changed
the name from Oakland International Airport to San Francisco Bay
Oakland International Airport, hoping to entice travelers by
emphasizing the ...
Elizabeth Lopatto, reporting on Musk v. Altman from the courtroom in Oakland (gift link):
Today the first witness was sworn in in Musk v. Altman: Elon
Musk. I was surprised by how flat he seemed.
This is not the first time I’ve seen Musk in court. During his
defamation ...
Matteo Wong, covering Musk v. Altman for The Atlantic (gift link):
Musk is asking that Altman be removed from OpenAI’s board, that
the company convert back to a nonprofit, and for the return of
allegedly “ill-gotten gains” — some $150 billion — which Musk
says would go t...
Cade Metz and Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times from the Ronald V. Dellums U.S. Courthouse in Oakland (gift link):
On the first day of testimony in a landmark trial between Elon
Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, two notably different tales were
offered of how Open...
Jer Crane, in an article earlier this week posted on Twitter/X:
I’m Jer Crane, founder of PocketOS. We build software that
rental businesses — primarily car rental operators — use to
run their entire operations: reservations, payments, customer
management, vehicle tracki...
Every B2B company hits the same inflection point — enterprise customers show up and they need SSO, directory sync, audit logs, and role-based access before they’ll move forward. Most teams lose months building that infrastructure. It doesn’t have to be that way.
With WorkOS you get all of it. One platform for auth, identity, and security. Infrastructure for teams that ship fast and stay fast.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Perplexity already chose WorkOS over building it themselves.
My thanks to Rec League for sponsoring last week at DF. Rec League is a new app/social network for sharing what you’re into. (Get it? The “rec” in “Rec League” is for recommendations. It’s a damn clever name, and sometimes a clever name is half the battle.) It’s really well ...
Weekly “sponsor the whole week at DF” spots are sold out until August 24. That’s a great sign that sponsorships here work. But it’s not so great if you have a product or service that you’d like to promote now, or soon, to the DF audience — savvy listeners and readers obsessed with high quality and good design.
The good news on that front is that the sponsorship schedule for The Talk Show has openings, including for the next few episodes, starting this week and into next month. The general rule of thumb is that sponsorship spots on The Talk Show cost one-third the rate for the weekly spots on DF. I’m happy to work out deals a little lower than that for first-time sponsors. If you’ve got a product or service you’d like to hear pitched on America’s favorite three-star podcast, get in touch.
On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay are
joined by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber to talk about their
reactions to the news, the (mostly) smooth transition Apple
seems to have pulled off, and what we should really make of Tim
Cook’s legacy as a product person. Really, the question is:
Do we blame Cook for the Touch Bar, or do we blame him for not
trying hard enough to make the Touch Bar great?
I know that sounds like a joke but I really do think the biggest problem with the Touch Bar wasn’t that the first crack at it wasn’t good enough, but that they never took a second crack at it. Going back to dumb fiddly F-keys with functional icons printed on them was uncharacteristically lazy for Apple.
The New York Times PR account, on Twitter/X a week ago:
Sunday’s crossword puzzle in the print edition of The New York
Times Magazine contains a grid that does not match the clues. The
correct version of the puzzle can be found in the news section of
Sunday’s print editi...
[Update: The store is now closed. Thanks to everyone who ordered — you should start getting shipping notices very soon.]
It’s really just a coincidence, but it was 20 years ago this week that I went full-time writing Daring Fireball (after writing the site in my spare time ...
Ben Schoon, 9to5Google:
In March, a report revealed some of the internal cuts
Samsung has been making for its mobile division, with the company
initially concerned it could post an operating loss for the first
time ever. It’s a big deal, as Samsung’s mobile (MX) division...
In May 2024, Bloomberg ran a feature story by Mark Gurman under the headline, “Tim Cook Can’t Run Apple Forever. Who’s Next?” The subhead: “John Ternus, the head of hardware engineering, is emerging as a potential successor to the CEO.” The nut grafs from that piece:
The...
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