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...
David Pierce, writing at The Verge, “The Pebble Smartwatch Is Making a Comeback”:
Rather than buy another smartwatch, Migicovsky decided to try and
get Pebble going again. He sold his most recent startup, a
messaging app called Beeper, to Automattic last year and
left th...
David Pierce, writing at The Verge:
Rather than buy another smartwatch, Migicovsky decided to try and
get Pebble going again. He sold his most recent startup, a
messaging app called Beeper, to Automattic last year and
left the company in the fall. Since then, he’d though...
Here’s an addendum to my post yesterday on the recent shake-up atop the generally stable “top free downloads” list in the App Store. Some of the shake-up is from new entrants, like the much-ballyhooed AI chatbot DeepSeek. But a lot of it is the direct result of the sudden ab...
Google, in an announcement on X:
We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps. We
have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they
have been updated in official government sources.
For geographic features in the U.S., this is when Geogra...
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch “Automattic and Others Back Openvibe, an App That’s Unifying the Open Social Web”:
Launched in 2024, Openvibe initially supported three of
the more prominent open social networks, all of which operate
using different protocols: Mastodon uses Activ...
Jim Acosta, signing off from CNN for the final time:
It is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant. I believe it is
the job of the press to hold power to account — I’ve always tried
to do that here at CNN, and I plan on doing all of that again in
the future.
One final...
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.
MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass:
Anyway, this matters because it doesn’t mean that DeepSeek, an app
based off of the Chinese-developed AI model of the same name, is
the most popular app ever despite its current place atop the
charts. Your mom probably isn’t downloading i...
Jenni Reid and Alex Harring, reporting for CNBC:
Nvidia and other U.S. technology firms plunged on Monday, part of
a global sell-off as Chinese startup DeepSeek sparked concerns
over competitiveness in artificial intelligence and America’s
leadership in the sector.
Nvid...
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek made waves last week when they dropped their new “open reasoning” LLM named R1. But over the weekend the full repercussions of their achievements (plural) began to sink in across the industry. My partner-in-Dithering Ben Thompson has written an extrao...
Apple’s website said the first vehicle models with support for
next-generation CarPlay would “arrive in 2024,” but that
did not happen. A little more than three weeks into 2025, Apple
has now updated its website in the U.S. to remove that 2024
timeframe from the next-generation CarPlay section of its overall
CarPlay page.
It’s good that they updated this page last week, because it really was starting to look unlikely they’d hit their 2024 ship date.
10 years ago I ran a sponsorship from Meh, a then-new daily deals site from the founders of Woot (the OG daily deals site). In my thank-you post to Meh a decade ago, “I’ve been selling weekly DF RSS feed sponsorships since 2007 — just a hair under 400 consecutive weeks. I’ve...
Ben Stiller, on X, posted a short video with Tim Cook as a severed employee at Lumon Industries. Very fun, and it’s really the only thing on people’s minds about Tim Cook lately — that he’s a fun guy. Definitely the only thing people are thinking about him lately.
The Tim Cook Severance promo is wild because I always felt like
the show could be about Apple - a company with such a deep, crazy
culture of secrecy that they’d be the first to opt for severed
employees in the workforce.
Also, my work there was always mysterious and important.
Dominic Preston, writing for The Verge, “Oppo’s Next Foldable Is About as Thin as USB-C Allows”:
Oppo has been steadily teasing the Find N5 on Chinese social
network Weibo for the past week. Find series product manager Zhou
Yibao has now shared photos that highlight its ...
Jessica Lessin, writing for The Information back in 2014:
Ms. Vorrath, who has worked on all seven iOS releases, generally
operates by asking lots of questions of engineers, sticking to the
facts and getting them to explain in plain English why a
particular feature shoul...
Mark Gurman has an interesting scoop at Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. executive Kim Vorrath, a company veteran known for
fixing troubled products and bringing major projects to
market, has a new job: whipping artificial intelligence and
Siri into shape.
Vorrath, a vice presiden...
Sareen Habeshian and Russell Contreras, reporting for Axios, “Mayor Accuses ICE of Detaining Vet, U.S. Citizens in N.J. Immigration Raid”:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided a Newark,
New Jersey, business venue on Thursday and detained undocumented
i...
If you’re the sort of reader who reads new articles here as soon as they’re posted, you might have missed footnote 4 today. I’ll delete this post in a few hours, but for now here’s the footnote for your convenience:
When this Apple-OpenAI partnership was announced, there...
Writing about the current state of Apple Intelligence yesterday, I mentioned how utterly stupid and laughably wrong Siri is when asked the simple question, “Who won Super Bowl 13?”, and mentioned that that particular example came from a friend. That friend was Paul Kafasis, ...
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