Tom Warren, The Verge:
Microsoft is pulling yet another trick to get people to use its
Bing search engine. If you use Bing right now without signing into
a Microsoft account and search for Google, you’ll get a page that
looks an awful lot like... Google.
It’s a clear at...
2006 post from yours truly that applies perfectly to Apple Intelligence today:
The sentiment here is that it’s somehow unfair to developers
to treat software labeled “beta” with the same critical eye
as non-beta software. That’s true, in the case of actual beta
software,...
I mentioned earlier today Casey Newton’s remarkable 2019 piece for The Verge, “Bodies in Seats”, an eye-opening look at the lives of content moderators at a large Facebook contractor in Tampa. When I linked to it, I wrote:
If this is what it takes to moderate Facebook, i...
Antonio G. Di Benedetto, reporting for The Verge:
The tech industry’s relentless march toward labeling everything
“plus,” “pro,” and “max” soldiers on, with Dell now taking the
naming scheme to baffling new levels of confusion. The PC maker
announced at CES 2025 that it’...
Mark Zuckerberg today announced major changes to the way Meta is going to apply content moderation across Facebook, Instagram, and (I presume) Threads. His main announcement is a video, for which there’s an unofficial transcript here. Zuckerberg himself summarized his own po...
Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:
So what can Apple do now? A non-apology and the promise of a
warning label isn’t enough. The company should either give all
apps the option of opting out of AI summaries, or offer an opt-out
to the developers of specific classes of app...
Liv McMahon and Natalie Sherman, reporting for BBC News:
The company, in its first acknowledgement of the concerns, on
Monday said it was working on a software change to “further
clarify” when the notifications are summaries that have been
generated by the Apple Intellig...
My thanks to Listen Later for sponsoring last week at DF. Listen Later is a super simple, super useful service that turns articles into podcast episodes. When you sign up, you get a custom email address to send articles to; every article you forward to your Listen Later addr...
Jamison Foser:
Washington Post opinion editor David Shipley offered the kind of
obviously-false explanation you only utter when you know admitting
the truth will make you look even worse:
David Shipley, The Post’s opinions editor, said in a statement
that he respecte...
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.
Ann Telnaes, from her personal site on Substack (alas):
I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial
cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive
conversations — and some differences — about cartoons I have
submitted for publication, but in ...
Kelly Hooper, reporting for Politico on 9 January 2021:
The Biden Inaugural Committee on Saturday released its list of
donors, which included Google, Microsoft, Boeing and several other
major corporations. The list contains all contributors who
donated more than $200 to ...
Hard not to think of this clip today, re: an egomaniacal villain, whose worldview is frozen several decades in the past, setting the terms for an extortion racket.
Axios co-founder Mike Allen:
Apple CEO Tim Cook will personally donate $1 million to
President-elect Trump’s inaugural committee, sources with
knowledge of the donation tell Axios. [...]
Cook, a proud Alabama native, believes the inauguration is a
great American traditi...
Fascinating piece by Ben Cohen for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):
And there are two things I learned about the EUV tool I saw that I
can’t get out of my head:
ASML teamed up with a German optical company to develop mirrors
so flat that if they were scaled up to ...
Speaking of Simon Willison, I greatly enjoyed this post from last week, with some of the self-imposed principles he follows writing his excellent eponymous blog. Amongst them:
I always include the names of the people who created the
content I am linking to, if I can fig...
Simon Willison:
A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over
the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about
the field in the past twelve months, plus my attempt at
identifying key themes and pivotal moments. [...]
I think telling peo...
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Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:
Apple TV+ is set to be available to stream for free from Saturday,
January 4 to Sunday, January 5, providing its full catalog with no
subscription fee. Following a series of teasers, Apple today
confirmed the free weekend on social media, bui...
Speaking of sponsorships, the Q1 schedule is filling up, but I’ve still got this week and next open. If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch.
James Fallows, in a 2023 piece for The Atlantic, written when Carter entered hospice care:
Jimmy Carter survived to see many of his ambitions realized,
including near eradication of the dreaded Guinea worm,
which, unglamorous as it sounds, represents an increase in human
well-being greater than most leaders have achieved. He survived
to see his character, vision, and sincerity recognized, and to
know that other ex-presidents will be judged by the standard he
has set.
An upcoming version of the Magic Mouse with voice control for AI
would “make sense,” Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said today, though
he claimed that he has heard no rumors about the feature so far.
Alongside the voice-input mouse, it’d make just as much sense to bring back some of that see-through 1998 iMac aesthetic by switching MacBooks to transparent aluminum.
Fun and interesting list overall (via Kottke), but #7 caught my attention:
Walking speed on the streets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia has increased 15% since 1979. (“Shifting Patterns of Social Interaction: Exploring the Social Life of Urban Spaces Through A.I.”)...
My thanks to Junjie for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Due, their excellent reminder app for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. I first linked to Due back in 2010, writing this short post:
I’ve been trying this $3 app for a few days and digging it — a
convenient, low-fric...
While his presidency was remembered more for its failures than for its successes, his post-presidency was seen by many as a model for future chief executives. Rather than vanish from view or focus on moneymaking, he established the Carter Center to promote peace, fight disease and combat social inequality. He transformed himself into a freelance diplomat traveling the globe, sometimes irritating his successors but earning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
From an un-bylined post from OpenAI’s board of directors on Friday:
The hundreds of billions of dollars
that major companies are now investing into AI development show
what it will really take for OpenAI to continue pursuing the
mission. We once again need to raise more ...
Kagi founder and CEO Vlad Prelovac joins the show to talk about the business of web search, the thinking behind Kagi’s own amazing search engine, and their upstart WebKit-based browser Orion.
Sponsored by:
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Via Jason Snell (back in October), who points first to this thread on Mastodon where a few of us posted about our preferences for the fonts we use for writing, and then describes this fun “tournament” from Typogram that lets you pick your favorite monospaced coding font from...
Thrice a week, I pay for my son’s tuition. Once, I forgot, and the tutor had to ask for it days later. I felt terrible for making him ask. After putting it in Due, awkward moments like that never happened again.
If keeping promises, meeting deadlines, and showing up on time matter to you as much as they do to me, Due might be the app for you.
PS: It’s been 14 years since I first made Due. But my journey would have ended abruptly if not for a three-sentence review on Daring Fireball. If you were one of those readers who took a chance on Due, thank you.
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