Craig Mod returns to the show to discuss his splendid new book, Things Become Other Things. Other topics include creating with AI tools (including programming), social media permanence vs. ephemerality, and more.
Sponsored by:
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WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS — free up to 1 million monthly active users.
Mark Wilson, writing for Fast Company:
Pope Francis’s tomb is simple by design. Francis — a modest man
who opted to live in humble quarters alongside his peers rather
than in the Vatican’s official housing for the leader of the
church — requested nothing more than his na...
Jeff Horwitz, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):
To boost the popularity of these souped-up chatbots, Meta has cut
deals for up to seven-figures with celebrities like actresses
Kristen Bell and Judi Dench and wrestler-turned-actor John Cena
for the right...
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There are two ways to consider a forced divestiture of Chrome by Google, as the U.S. Department of Justice has, for months now, been requesting after Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled that Google has illegally maintained its monopoly in web search. One is from a business perspective...
Om Malik:
Some of us are old enough to remember that the reason Mark renamed
the company is because the Facebook brand was becoming toxic, and
associated with misinformation and global-scale crap. It was
viewed as a tired, last-generation company. Meta allowed the
compan...
Alex Heath, reporting for The Verge:
Meta has laid off an unspecified number of employees in its
Reality Labs division, a company spokesperson confirmed. The cuts
affected teams working in Oculus Studios, Meta’s in-house games
division for Quest headsets, as well as some...
Aaron Pressman, writing earlier this month in The Boston Globe, “Why I Abandoned Google Search After 27 Years — and What I’m Using Instead”:
The UK now requires travelers from America to obtain an electronic
travel authorization, or ETA. I wasn’t sure of the exact name o...
60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley, in last night’s closing statement:
“Stories we’ve pursued for 57 years are often controversial:
lately, the Israel-Gaza war and the Trump administration. Bill
made sure they were accurate and fair. He was tough that way.”
“But our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a
merger. The Trump administration must approve it. Paramount began
to supervise our content in new ways. None of our stories has been
blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest
journalism requires.”
“No one here is happy about it. But in resigning, Bill proved one
thing: He was the right person to lead ‘60 Minutes’ all along.”
Airbnb CEO (and founder) Brian Chesky, back in October in an interview with Nilay Patel, regarding Tim Cook’s eventual successor:
This goes to the very awkward thing that no one wants to talk
about. Succession planning is hard because the people that are
great product vi...
Majin Bu:
According to my source, Apple is gearing up for another major leap
forward. With iPadOS 19 and iOS 19, expected in 2025, the gap
between iPad, iPhone, and Mac continues to shrink. [...] One of
the most exciting changes will benefit those using the iPad with a
M...
Apple plans to shift the assembly of all US-sold iPhones to India
as soon as next year, according to people familiar with the
matter, as President Donald Trump’s trade war forces the tech
giant to pivot away from China.
The push builds on Apple’s strategy to diversify its supply chain
but goes further and faster than investors appreciate, with a goal
to source from India the entirety of the more than 60mn iPhones
sold annually in the US by the end of 2026.
The target would mean doubling the iPhone output in India, after
almost two decades in which Apple spent heavily in China to create
a world-beating production line that powered its rise into a $3tn
tech giant.
Wayne Ma, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas):
Earlier this year, Chinese authorities refused to allow one of
Apple’s Chinese equipment suppliers to export machinery to India
that Apple needed for the upcoming iPhone 17’s trial production,
according to two pe...
Andrew Leonard, writing for Salon back in 2013:
The first thing wrong with the stupidest article to be posted to
the Internet in the year 2013 — and possibly the entire century — is the title: “I Was Quite Surprised By Some Things On My
American Airlines International ‘E...
Henry Blodget, who sold Business Insider to German publishing giant Axel Springer for $340 million a decade ago, has supposedly launched a new site, Regenerator, built on Substack. I was going to tack on an “alas” re: building on Substack, but maybe this is the sort of thin...
From the European Commission’s announcement today, “Commission closes investigation into Apple’s user choice obligations and issues preliminary findings on rules for alternative apps under the Digital Markets Act”:
Under the DMA, Apple is required to allow for the distri...
“This novel form of economic extortion will not be tolerated by
the United States,” a White House spokesperson said.
“Extraterritorial regulations that specifically target and
undermine American companies, stifle innovation, and enable
censorship will be recognized as barriers to trade and a direct
threat to free civil society.”
Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin, reporting for The New York Times:
CBS News entered a new period of turmoil on Tuesday after the
executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Bill Owens, said he would
resign from the long-running Sunday news program, citing
encroachments o...
The European Commission:
Today, the European Commission found that Apple breached its
anti-steering obligation under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and
that Meta breached the DMA obligation to give consumers the choice
of a service that uses less of their personal data. ...
Kalley Huang and Erin Woo, reporting for The Information (via Ed Zitron, who summarized it on Bluesky):
Meta Platforms over the past year asked Microsoft, Amazon and
others to help pay the costs of training Meta’s flagship large
language model, Llama, according to four p...
Just in case you haven’t had enough of me on various recent podcasts, I had the pleasure of joining hosts Dan Barbera and Hartley Charlton on The MacRumors Show, talking mostly about Apple Intelligence and the future of the Vision platform. Fun!
He loved that story, especially the part where Hitler shot the dog before it got back into the car. Then a beaming Hitler said, “Hey, if I can kill Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals, I can certainly kill a dog!” That perhaps got the biggest laugh of the night — and believe me, there were plenty.
I have been reliably informed that, having linked approvingly to Bill Maher’s “book report” on his dinner with Trump, I must also link to David’s report of dinner with Adolf.
Jeff Stein, Elizabeth Dwoskin, and Cat Zakrzewski, reporting for The Washington Post:
As President Donald Trump’s enormous new tariffs on China rippled
through global supply chains, Apple CEO Tim Cook went to work
behind the scenes.
Cook spoke to Commerce Secretary Howa...
Special guest Glenn Fleishman returns to the show for episode 420 on 4/20, but everyone’s sober, I swear. Topics include Trump’s dumb tariffs and Glenn’s smart new edition of his book Six Centuries of Type & Printing.
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Notion: Try the powerful, easy-to-use Notion AI today.
BetterHelp: Give online therapy a try at BetterHelp and get on your way to being your best self.
My thanks to Dekáf Coffee Roasters for sponsoring last week at DF. Dekáf started with a simple question over a late-night cup of decaf: why do coffee lovers who skip the caffeine have to skip the craft too?
Dekáf believes those who drink coffee purely for its flavor are the...
CNN:
A federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s
request that it halt the next steps Judge Paula Xinis is
seeking to take in the case concerning a migrant who was wrongly
deported to El Salvador, with a strident warning about the rule of
law and the possi...
Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results.
I’ve got three openings left through the end of June:
April 21–27 (next week)
May 12–18
May 26–June 1
If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch.
Kim Mackrael and Sam Schechner, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):
The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, had initially
planned to announce cease-and-desist orders targeting the tech
giants on Tuesday and had informed at least one of the compa...
Brian X. Chen, in a column at The New York Times headlined “Why a Tariff-Inflated $2,000 iPhone Is Nothing to Fear”:
Don’t panic. Even if tariffs did cause the iPhone’s price to
surge, we would have plenty of cheaper options, like buying last
year’s phone model instead o...
