Subscribe
By John Gruber
theverge.com/2025/1/13/24342179/sonos-ceo-patrick-spence-resignation-reason-app
blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-own-the-town-square/
The notion that mobile web apps are closing the gap with native apps is laughable. The gulf between them is widening, not narrowing.
404media.co/meta-is-blocking-links-to-decentralized-instagram-competitor-pixelfed/
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.
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.
cnbc.com/2025/01/09/google-donates-1-million-to-trumps-inauguration-fund.html
theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/01/mark-zuckerberg-free-expression/681238/
The answer to the question of which company held the keynotes which attracted the most enthusiastic large live audiences was always Apple. And they just walked away from that.
9to5mac.com/2025/01/10/mark-zuckerberg-joe-rogan-apple-innovation/
tla.systems/blog/2025/01/04/i-live-my-life-a-quarter-century-at-a-time/
theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/10/los-angeles-fires-the-damage-in-maps-video-and-images
Just heartbreaking, and a scale of destruction that’s hard to comprehend.
theverge.com/2023/4/28/23702274/microsoft-edge-developer-bing-ai-chatbot-advertisement-google-bard
theverge.com/2025/1/6/24337117/microsoft-bing-search-results-google-design-trick
theverge.com/2025/1/6/24325799/dell-pro-max-premium-plus-ces-laptop-pc-rebrand-announcement
Don’t get distracted by blather. Let’s see what happens.
sixcolors.com/post/2025/01/apple-intelligence-summaries-might-get-warning-labels-thats-not-enough/
I think it’s correct for Apple to leave this in control of users, not developers. But Apple really does need to make it more clear what is an AI-generated summary and what is a verbatim original notification.
findinggravity.net/p/no-jeff-bezos-is-not-obeying-in-advance
Charlie Sykes:
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.
anntelnaes.substack.com/p/why-im-quitting-the-washington-post
politico.com/news/2021/01/09/biden-inaugural-donors-major-corporations-456907
