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