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Looks like more of an Eddy scene than a Tim scene, but everyone’s having fun. There’s a reason this is the 11th Super Bowl held in New Orleans.
Should be a good football game, too. The Chiefs and Eagles are both very good teams (and both very well-run franchises). There’s a...
Zara Stone, reporting for The Standard:
“There’s a renaissance happening now in Aaron Swartz-land,” said
Lisa Rein, the co-founder of Creative Commons, a nonprofit devoted
to expanding public access to information. She founded Aaron
Swartz Day in 2013, an annual hackatho...
TikTok, on X:
We’re enhancing ways for our community to continue using TikTok by
making Android Package Kits available at
http://TikTok.com/download so that our U.S. Android users can
download our app and create, discover, and connect on TikTok.
Tens of millions of use...
Jason Snell, in a column for Macworld back in November (same column at Six Colors, for members):
This is an important moment. Apple has built two separate models
for running software on our devices. In one, there’s a gradient of
trustworthiness that strongly encourages u...
Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica on new details from an authors group lawsuit alleging Meta trained its AI models on a trove of pirated books:
Last month, Meta admitted to torrenting a controversial large
dataset known as LibGen, which includes tens of million...
This week Jason Snell published his annual Six Colors Apple Report Card for 2024. As I’ve done in the past — 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 — I’m publishing my full remarks and grades here. On Snell’s report card, voters give per-category scores ranging from 5 to 1; I’ve...
Joe Rossignol, reporting for MacRumors:
Last year, we reported that Apple sued its former software
engineer Andrew Aude for providing journalists with
confidential information about the company’s future plans,
including details about the Journal app, Vision Pro
headset, ...
Dave Nanian, last week at the Shirt Pocket blog:
Just a quick post: macOS 15.3 is now out, and with it, a fix for
the broken replicator. As such, macOS copying will work again with
Erase, Then Copy backups. No update to SuperDuper is necessary
(but feel free to install o...
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, on X:
Apple is being extremely disingenuous in attacking the European
Union here. The iOS App Store hosts the Reddit app, which provides
access to massive amounts of porn. Apple knows this, permits it,
and gave Reddit a 17+ (!!!) rating and Editors ...
Apple, in its media statement re: Hot Tub (the you-have-to-admit-it’s-a-fun-name hardcore porn app now available in the AltStore PAL alternative app marketplace in the EU), closed its statement with the following: “The truth is that we are required by the European Commission...
From an AltStore announcement yesterday:
iPhone turns 18 this year, which means it’s finally old enough for
some more ~mature~ apps…
Introducing Hot Tub by c1d3r, the world’s 1st Apple-approved
porn app!
The screenshots and video previews are blurred-for-obfuscation b...
If you enjoy podcasts, you should subscribe to Dithering, the twice-weekly 15-minutes-on-the-button podcast I do with Ben Thompson. Dithering as a standalone subscription costs just $7/month or $70/year. (It’s also included in Ben’s excellent Stratechery Plus bundle.) People who try Dithering seem to love it, too — we have remarkably little churn.
If you’re on the fence, subscribe for a month and you’re only out $7 — but I bet you’ll stick around. Trust me. And thanks to everyone who’s already subscribed.
The LBJ Presidential Library, regarding a largely ad-libbed address Lyndon Johnson gave to a group of 150 non-incumbent Democratic candidates for Congress in 1966:
He talked about the difference between Republicans and Democrats:
“We’re for something, and they are agains...
Speaking of books, Simon & Schuster announced a new one:
Apple isn’t just a brand; it’s the world’s most valuable company
and creator of the twenty-first century’s defining product. The
iPhone has revolutionized the way we live, work and connect. But
Apple is now a v...
Speaking of cheating, my favorite book from Trump’s first term was Rick Reilly’s Commander in Cheat, which I linked to, with an excerpt still available at The Guardian, when it came out in 2019. I’ve been a fan of Reilly’s writing since I was a teenager and he was the back-page columnist for Sports Illustrated; this is the book Reilly was born to write. I just picked my copy off my shelf and started to re-read it, and got sucked right back in. Posting this link is my way of forcing myself to put it down until tonight.
(Main link here is an Amazon affiliate one, which will make me rich if you purchase through it. If you prefer not to buy books from Amazon, here’s a link to Bookshop.org.)
Drew Harwell, at The Washington Post (gift link, via Harwell himself on Bluesky — which seemingly uses a ludicrously long 397-character token in the URL):
But after poring over his live-streamed gameplay, online sleuths
recently made a shocking accusation: Musk had cheat...
Ezra Klein in an audio essay/transcribed column at The New York Times:
That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump
is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a
president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He
is hopi...
(My one suggestion for 2025’s list: My Dad’s Chips. Holy hell are these good potato chips. I’ve got a particular weakness for the French Onion ones. Chef’s kiss. Distribution seems mostly limited to the northeast for now.)
My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Does your app get fake signups, throwaway emails, or users abusing your free tier? Or worse, bots attacks and brute force attempts?
WorkOS Radar can block all this and more. Their simple API gives you advanced device fingerprinting that can detect bad actors, bots, and suspicious behavior.
Interesting detail with the latest update to Apple’s app for learning and tinkering with Swift: it’s now named Playground, singular, not Playgrounds, plural. I’m not going to argue that much should be made of the name change, but I like it. The app is the playground — a place for playing with Swift — not a factory for making playgrounds.
Parker Ortolani:
Mastodon clients have become the new UI playground in the same way
that Twitter clients used to be. But what I can’t wrap my head
around is the business decision of developers to lean into
Mastodon clients versus Bluesky ones. Fortunately some progress
s...
Editors note from The New Republic:
As The New Republic reported on Friday, The Los Angeles
Times — currently in a race to the bottom with The Washington
Post to determine which of the two venerable institutions
can sell out to Donald Trump the hardest — found itself in ...
Alex Heath, writing at The Verge:
Moments after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s all-hands comments to
employees were widely leaked, a company executive warned in
an internal memo that leakers will be fired.
“We take leaks seriously and will take action,” Meta’s chief
informa...
Annie Linskey and Rebecca Ballhaus, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:
“It looks like a bribe and a signal to every company that
corruption is the name of the game,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D.,
Mass.) said in a statement. “After Meta pays to play, what does
Mark Zucke...
NBC News, “Meta Agrees to Pay $25 Million to Settle Trump Lawsuit”:
Meta said Wednesday it would pay $25 million to settle a
four-year-old lawsuit from President Donald Trump over the social
media company’s decision to suspend Trump’s accounts after the
Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, filed a notice
of the settlement in federal court in San Francisco, where the
lawsuit was pending. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone separately
confirmed the terms: a $25 million payment from the company, with
$22 million going toward a fund for Trump’s presidential library
and the balance dedicated to legal fees and other plaintiffs in
the case.
I really can’t wait to see that Trump Presidential Library.
Via David Smith on Mastodon, who writes:
The recent work I’ve been doing has required a lot of sharing
files between testing devices (and my Mac). AirDrop should be the
ideal tool for this but I’ve recently found it to be unreliable.
Instead I’ve been using LocalSend wh...
Apple:
Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2025 first
quarter ended December 28, 2024. The Company posted quarterly
revenue of $124.3 billion, up 4 percent year over year, and
quarterly diluted earnings per share of $2.40, up 10 percent year
over year....
A Monday report from Reuters, syndicated at The Guardian, “Microsoft Is in Talks to Acquire TikTok, Trump Claims”:
Donald Trump has suggested that Microsoft is in talks to acquire
TikTok and that he would like to see a bidding war over the app.
When asked if Microsoft wa...
Fascinating thread — and an almost entirely civil discussion of what has become, for obvious reasons, an inflammatory topic. These are mapping and metadata nerds approaching the dilemma in the very nerdiest of ways. I found it rather soothing, and also quite informative — pa...
