Parker Ortolani works near Grand Central and wrote a great post about the in-character Severance experience on Wednesday, replete with photos, both early in the day when the diorama was largely empty, and later in the day, when it was swarmed with fans and general onlookers because the actors and director Ben Stiller were there. Blogging at its best.

Link: parkerspov.substack.com/p/lumon-takes-grand-central

Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac: Here are the changes included in iOS 18.3 for Apple Intelligence notification summaries: When you enable notification summaries, iOS 18.3 will make it clearer that the feature — like all Apple Intelligence features — is a beta. You...

Maddy Myers, writing for Polygon: But the weirdest part of the reveal video, in my opinion, is the implication that the Joy-Cons can be used as a mouse. This was already rumored, and if I hadn’t seen those rumors, then I might not have understood what I was looking at d...

Kyle Maclachlan, remembering his friend and longtime collaborator David Lynch, on Instagram:

What I saw in him was an enigmatic and intuitive man with a creative ocean bursting forth inside of him. He was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could get to.

Our friendship blossomed on Blue Velvet and then Twin Peaks and I always found him to be the most authentically alive person I’d ever met.

David was in tune with the universe and his own imagination on a level that seemed to be the best version of human. He was not interested in answers because he understood that questions are the drive that make us who we are. They are our breath.

Link: instagram.com/p/DE5pC5RyH29/?igsh=Mzc3ZTVlOWMwZA%3D%3D

Another fun promo for Severance season 2.

And a promo on Apple’s homepage featuring a computer made by another company. And a free in-universe book, The Lexington Letters, at Apple Books. (Update: Ah, the book came out in March 2022, as part of season 1. Still: fun! Apple Books does not make the publication date prominent.)

Link: severanceballoon.com/

Brian Tallerico, writing for RogerEbert.com: David Lynch saw my dreams. As a teenager growing up in suburban America in the ’80s, “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks” hit like a bolt of lightning. Not only did they capture something about the sinister, surreal underbelly of li...

Ray Ratto, writing for Defector, gets it right. Bob Uecker was just the best: He was the face and voice of baseball cinema, the man whose line-reading made “Ju-u-u-u-st a bit outside” so good that “iconic” doesn’t remotely cover its impact. Even if you’re not a seamhead,...

Fun trailer and a smart if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it design. Switch 2 just looks like a slightly bigger Switch. Pure joy. That it’s just a bigger faster Switch is proof of the genius of the Switch form factor, which has now been widely copied across the industry. The Swit...

Bryan Bedell, on the Field Notes Dispatches blog: The anniversary date of “Field Notes” varies a bit, depending on who you ask. Aaron Draplin first used the name (typeset, of course, in all-caps Futura Bold) on a customized one-off red hardcover notebook in 2002. Our “of...

Marko Parker, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook is planning to attend the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump next week, the latest in a wave of Silicon Valley leaders traveling to Washington for the ceremony.

Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, Meta Platforms Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla Inc. who has quickly become one of Trump’s foremost supporters and financial backers, are all also expected to attend.

Rings don’t kiss themselves. But if there’s any consolation in this, it’s that surely none of these guys want to attend this. It’s going to be boring as shit and cold as hell. Imagine Cook stuck sitting between, say, Zuckerberg and Musk all day.

(Via Taegan Goddard.)

Link: bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-15/apple-s-tim-cook…

Juli Clover, MacRumors: Ahead of the season two premiere of hit TV show Severance, Apple is marketing the show with a fun Severance pop-up at the Grand Central Terminal in New York City. Apple has assembled a glass cube with workstations that are identical to the setups...

Noah Smith, writing at Noahpinion: As many observers have noted, this tells us two important things. First, it tells us that Chinese officials are the ones calling the shots with regards to TikTok. This should be no surprise, given that ByteDance is legally required to o...

Jane Mayer, reporting for The New Yorker: As recently as the spring of 2023, according to an account shared last week with The New Yorker, Hegseth ordered three gin-and-tonics at a weekday breakfast meeting with an acquaintance in Manhattan. “It was an extremely strange ...

Speaking of new (“interim”) Sonos CEO Tom Conrad and Scott Forstall, here’s an interesting anecdote from Tyler Hayes’s terrific piece for Motherboard in 2021, “How Pandora Won Its Royalty Battle but Lost the War to Spotify”: After pushback on only allowing web apps for t...

Sonos interim CEO Tom Conrad, in a company-wide memo obtained by The Verge: With my stepping in as CEO, the Board, Max, and I have agreed that my background makes the Chief Product Officer role redundant. Therefore, Max’s role is being eliminated and the Product organiza...

Nick Wingfield, writing today’s The Briefing column for the paywalled (alas) The Information: Sonos has always been a bit of an odd duck. There aren’t that many consumer electronics startups of its size created in the last quarter century (Sonos was founded in 2002) that...

Mike Davidson: I grew up on Iliff Street, right in the middle of the ashes that up until a few nights ago, was a sunkissed neighborhood known as Pacific Palisades. It was 1978, and I remember my dad climbing up on our roof with a garden hose. Every couple of hours, he w...

Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage, reporting for The New York Times: Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted President-elect Donald J. Trump on charges of illegally seeking to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, said in a final report released early Tuesday t...

No byline, which is really weird, just “Bloomberg News”: Chinese officials are evaluating a potential option that involves Elon Musk acquiring the US operations of TikTok if the company fails to fend off a controversial ban on the short-video app, according to people fam...

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. A simple API gives you advanced device fingerprinting that can detect bad actors, bots, and suspicious behavior.

Your users trust you. Let’s keep it that way.

Link: workos.com/radar?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=RSS…

Chris Welch, The Verge: Sonos CEO Patrick Spence is resigning from the job today, effective immediately, with board member Tom Conrad filling the role of interim CEO. It’s the most dramatic development yet in an eight-month saga that has proven to be the most challenging...

The Mastodon Team blog: Simply, we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled...

Free Our Feeds: With Zuckerberg going full Musk last week, we can no longer let billionaires control our digital public square. Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say...

Just after New Year’s some sort of underground cable screw-up resulted in our home, along with an irregular swath of our neighborhood, losing electricity for 26 hours. We don’t lose power often, and when we do, the outages are usually brief, but 26 hours felt pretty long — e...

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized Instagram competitor. On Facebook, the company is labeling links to Pixelfed.social as “spam” and deleting them immediately.

Pixelfed is an open-source, community-funded and decentralized image sharing platform that runs on Activity Pub, which is the same technology that supports Mastodon and other federated services. Pixelfed.social is the largest Pixelfed server, which was launched in 2018 but has gained renewed attention over the last week.

Bluesky user AJ Sadauskas originally posted that links to Pixelfed were being deleted by Meta; 404 Media then also tried to post a link to Pixelfed on Facebook. It was immediately deleted.

True free speech is the freedom to avoid seeing alternatives to Instagram.

Link: 404media.co/meta-is-blocking-links-to-decentralized…

LA resident Matthew Butterick, in his MB XS newsletter:

Easy answer — donate money! A good friend of mine works in California disaster relief. He recommends these nonprofits because they have a strong local impact:

• The California Community Foundation is seeking donations for its wildfire recovery fund.

• The Center for Disaster Philanthropy is seeking donations for its California Wildfires Recovery Fund.

• Pasadena Humane is seeking donations for its emergency wildfire relief fund.

Donations of physical items are politely discouraged because they impose extra logistics and handling that relief and shelter organizations can’t support right now.

Link: calfund.org/funds/wildfire-recovery-fund/

Josh DuBose, reporting for KTLA: In an emotional interview, Shelley Sykes, the mother of former child actor Rory Sykes who died in their Malibu home amid the Palisades Fire, shared her harrowing story and grieved the devastating loss of her son. Shelley fought back tears...

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...