CNBC:
Google donated $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s
inauguration fund, becoming the latest major tech company to try
and curry some goodwill with the incoming administration.
“Google is pleased to support the 2025 inauguration, with a
livestream on YouTube...
Mike Isaac, Sheera Frenkel, and Kate Conger, reporting for the NYT in the best-sourced piece I’ve seen on Meta’s big policy changes this week (gift link):
The entire process was highly unusual. Meta typically alters
policies that govern its apps — which include Facebook,...
Good piece and great headline by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic:
The social-media hall monitors have been so restrictive on “topics
of immigration and gender that they’re out of touch with
mainstream discourse,” Zuckerberg said with the zeal of an
activist. He spoke abou...
There were several interesting announcements made at Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s Keynote at CES 2025, including a new RTX 50 generation of gaming GPUs and an upcoming $3,000 Mac-Mini-sized “personal AI supercomputer” called Project Digits. But most interesting to me was the sc...
Chance Miller listened so we don’t have to:
Zuckerberg also took issue with AirPods and the fact that Apple
wouldn’t give Meta the same access to the iPhone for its Meta
Ray-Ban glasses:
They build stuff like AirPods, which are cool, but they’ve just
thoroughly hamst...
James Thomson:
So, we are coming up on a little anniversary for me this weekend.
On the 5th of January 2000, Steve Jobs unveiled the new Aqua user
interface of Mac OS X to the world at Macworld Expo.
Towards the end of the presentation, he showed off the Dock. You
all k...
Juli Clover, MacRumors:
In a support guide, Apple says that the AirPods Pro may
play a sound every so often while in the case to ensure the
microphones and speakers are working as intended. From Apple:
To help ensure that your AirPods microphones and speakers are
ope...
I first linked to Breathable back in 2021 when Murray released the first version, writing then:
The entire point of Breathable is to offer widgets — the app
itself just lets you configure how the widgets look. Brilliantly
simple, and in a way, fun, with its clever “emoj...
Following up on yesterday’s item regarding Bing masquerading as Google to trick Edge users into searching with it, this Mastodon post from Timo Tijhof lists a few other such subterfuge tactics they’ve pulled recently. My favorite was this one from last year: when users opene...
Tom Warren, The Verge:
Microsoft is pulling yet another trick to get people to use its
Bing search engine. If you use Bing right now without signing into
a Microsoft account and search for Google, you’ll get a page that
looks an awful lot like... Google.
It’s a clear at...
2006 post from yours truly that applies perfectly to Apple Intelligence today:
The sentiment here is that it’s somehow unfair to developers
to treat software labeled “beta” with the same critical eye
as non-beta software. That’s true, in the case of actual beta
software,...
I mentioned earlier today Casey Newton’s remarkable 2019 piece for The Verge, “Bodies in Seats”, an eye-opening look at the lives of content moderators at a large Facebook contractor in Tampa. When I linked to it, I wrote:
If this is what it takes to moderate Facebook, i...
Antonio G. Di Benedetto, reporting for The Verge:
The tech industry’s relentless march toward labeling everything
“plus,” “pro,” and “max” soldiers on, with Dell now taking the
naming scheme to baffling new levels of confusion. The PC maker
announced at CES 2025 that it’...
Mark Zuckerberg today announced major changes to the way Meta is going to apply content moderation across Facebook, Instagram, and (I presume) Threads. His main announcement is a video, for which there’s an unofficial transcript here. Zuckerberg himself summarized his own po...
Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:
So what can Apple do now? A non-apology and the promise of a
warning label isn’t enough. The company should either give all
apps the option of opting out of AI summaries, or offer an opt-out
to the developers of specific classes of app...
Liv McMahon and Natalie Sherman, reporting for BBC News:
The company, in its first acknowledgement of the concerns, on
Monday said it was working on a software change to “further
clarify” when the notifications are summaries that have been
generated by the Apple Intellig...
My thanks to Listen Later for sponsoring last week at DF. Listen Later is a super simple, super useful service that turns articles into podcast episodes. When you sign up, you get a custom email address to send articles to; every article you forward to your Listen Later addr...
Jamison Foser:
Washington Post opinion editor David Shipley offered the kind of
obviously-false explanation you only utter when you know admitting
the truth will make you look even worse:
David Shipley, The Post’s opinions editor, said in a statement
that he respecte...
To fully absorb the profound stupidity of the Wapo’s decision,
consider the alternative timeline in which the paper published
Telnaes’s sketch. If the Wapo had published it, both the paper and
Bezos would have looked… better. The paper would have reasserted
a modicum of independence and integrity; and even Bezos would have
benefited.
Instead of looking like a thin-skinned, craven autocrat, he would
have looked like someone big enough to tolerate criticism.
And as Sykes’s post points out right at the start, the Streisand Effect is fully in play here. Telnaes’s draft of the cartoon is now the most celebrated and re-posted political cartoon in recent memory.
Ann Telnaes, from her personal site on Substack (alas):
I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial
cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive
conversations — and some differences — about cartoons I have
submitted for publication, but in ...
Kelly Hooper, reporting for Politico on 9 January 2021:
The Biden Inaugural Committee on Saturday released its list of
donors, which included Google, Microsoft, Boeing and several other
major corporations. The list contains all contributors who
donated more than $200 to ...
Hard not to think of this clip today, re: an egomaniacal villain, whose worldview is frozen several decades in the past, setting the terms for an extortion racket.
Axios co-founder Mike Allen:
Apple CEO Tim Cook will personally donate $1 million to
President-elect Trump’s inaugural committee, sources with
knowledge of the donation tell Axios. [...]
Cook, a proud Alabama native, believes the inauguration is a
great American traditi...
Fascinating piece by Ben Cohen for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):
And there are two things I learned about the EUV tool I saw that I
can’t get out of my head:
ASML teamed up with a German optical company to develop mirrors
so flat that if they were scaled up to ...
Speaking of Simon Willison, I greatly enjoyed this post from last week, with some of the self-imposed principles he follows writing his excellent eponymous blog. Amongst them:
I always include the names of the people who created the
content I am linking to, if I can fig...
Simon Willison:
A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over
the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about
the field in the past twelve months, plus my attempt at
identifying key themes and pivotal moments. [...]
I think telling peo...
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Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:
Apple TV+ is set to be available to stream for free from Saturday,
January 4 to Sunday, January 5, providing its full catalog with no
subscription fee. Following a series of teasers, Apple today
confirmed the free weekend on social media, bui...
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