If I had wanted to write a column about presidential pardons, I’d find ChatGPT’s assistance a far better starting point than I’d have gotten through any general web search. But to quote Reagan: “Trust, but verify.”

Purely fun, pay-whatever-you-think-fair app for the Mac from Simon Støvring (developer of numerous fine apps such as Runestone and Scriptable):

Festivitas automatically adds festive lights to your menu bar and dock upon launch and you can tweak their appearance to match your preferences.

There is something very core to the Mac’s origins about not just making a software toy like this, but putting effort into making everything about it really nice. Harks back to Steven Halls’s The Talking Moose and, of course, the undisputed king of the genre, Eric Shapiro’s The Grouch. Oh, and of course (thanks to Stephen Hackett for the reminder), Holiday Lights.

Update, Friday 6 December: Today’s 1.1 update brings several improvements, including making the lights look way cooler if your Dock is on the left or right (as god intended).

David Frum, writing at The Atlantic, regarding his jarring appearance as a guest on MSNBC’s Morning Joe: Before getting to the article, I was asked about the nomination of Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense — specifically about an NBC News report that his heavy drinkin...

Oliver Darcy, in a well-sourced report at Status (paywalled, alas, but with a preview of the article if you sign up for the free version of his newsletter, which I agree is sort of a “Yeah, no thanks” offer): Patrick Soon-Shiong is tightening his grip over the Los Angele...

Stephanie Palazzolo, writing for The Information (paywalled, alas): Researchers at OpenAI believe that some rival AI developers are training their reasoning models by using OpenAI’s o1 reasoning models to generate training data, according to a person who has spoken to th...

From The Stanford Review editor-in-chief Julia Steinberg’s interview with university president Jonathan Levin:

Stanford Review: What is the most important problem in the world right now?

President Levin: There’s no answer to that question. There are too many important problems to give you a single answer.

Stanford Review: That is an application question that we have to answer to apply here.

(Via CJ Ciaramella on Bluesky.)

Alex Heath, writing at The Verge: “I’m actually very optimistic this time around,” Bezos said of Trump during a rare public appearance at The New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday. “He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. If I can help him do t...

While writing the previous item regarding the FBI encouraging the use of E2EE text and call protocols, I wound up at the Play Store page for Google Messages. It’s shamefully misleading regarding Google Messages’s support for end-to-end encryption. As I wrote in the previous ...

Kevin Collier, reporting for NBC News: Amid an unprecedented cyberattack on telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon, U.S. officials have recommended that Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their communications stay hidden from foreign hack...

A few nuggets of wisdom from Andy Grove, in an interview with Esquire after he retired as Intel’s CEO, but still served as chairman: Profits are the lifeblood of enterprise. Don’t let anyone tell you different. You must understand your mistakes. Study the hell out of th...

Imagine if you went to the movies and they charged $8000 for popcorn. Or, imagine you got on a plane and they told you that seatbelts were only available in first class. Your sense of outraged injustice would probably be something like what IT and security professionals fe...

Grove’s words don’t read merely as advice — they read today as a postmortem for what happed to Intel over the last 20 years.

Nilay Patel: So many of you like The Verge that we’ve actually gotten a shocking number of notes from people asking how they can pay to support our work. It’s no secret that lots of great websites and publications have gone under over the past few years as the open web f...

Christopher Mims, writing for The Wall Street Journal (News+): The company’s core business is under siege. People are increasingly getting answers from artificial intelligence. Younger generations are using other platforms to gather information. And the quality of the re...

Special guest Allen Pike joins the show to talk about the state of generative AI and how Apple Intelligence measures up (so far). Also: some speculation on Apple’s pending acquisition of the ever-difficult-to-pronounce Pixelmator.

Sponsored by:

• WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS — free up to 1 million monthly active users.

Amazon is running a holiday discount on M3 MacBook Airs, but it’s tricky — you need to click around through various color choices and watch the prices and ship dates. My main link on this post goes to the config that looks like their best deal for price-conscious gift buyers...

Ian King, Liana Baker, and Ryan Gould, reporting for Bloomberg:* Intel Corp. Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger was forced out after the board lost confidence in his plans to turn around the iconic chipmaker, adding to turmoil at one of the pioneers of the technology ...

My thanks to Crunchy Bagel — the company of developer Quentin Zervaas — for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Streaks, their excellent app for iPhone and Apple Watch. Streaks is a to-do list that helps you form good habits. The point is to motivate you to tackle ...

Cal Paterson: Large language models (LLMs) like Chat-GPT and Claude.ai are whizzy and cool. A lot of people think that they are going to be The Future. Maybe they are — but that doesn’t mean that building them is going to be a profitable business. In the 1960s, airlines...

Kind of wild that this entire sub-site is still standing on Apple.com, including working video. (Fingers crossed that my linking to it doesn’t bring it to the attention of someone who decides to 404 it.)

From Nathan Edwards’s 6/10 review of the M4 iMac for The Verge: I also do not love that the stand has no height adjustment, and you can’t swap it for a more ergonomic option without buying an entirely different computer. Apple sells a version of the iMac with a VESA moun...

Holiday shopping bundle of 13 excellent Mac Apps, with two ways to buy. Get the whole bundle of 13 apps for $74 (a 76 percent discount from the combined regular prices), or, pick and choose a la carte and buy apps at 50 percent off.

Included in the promotion is Stairways Software’s astonishingly powerful and useful Keyboard Maestro, which almost never goes on sale. There are many longstanding Mac apps and utilities that I enjoy, appreciate, and recommend. There are very few that I can say I’d feel lost without. Keyboard Maestro is one of those.

Other apps in the Space/Time bundle that I use: TextSniper (instantly OCR any text you see on screen), DaisyDisk (disk space visualizer/cleanup), CleanShot X (advanced screenshot utility), and Bartender (menu bar item manager).

Fun interaction design treatise from George Cave.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Borderline incredible discount on AirPods Pro 2 at Amazon. This is just short of $100 off the retail list price of $249. (Buy through this link and I’ll get rich on the affiliate commission.)

John Siracusa, in his inimitable style, reviewed Delicious Library 1.0 upon its release, 20 years ago this month: Part of what makes the Mac community so special is that so many Mac developers have itches — and, more importantly, corresponding talents — that have little ...

Wil Shipley, on Mastodon: Amazon has shut off the feed that allowed Delicious Library to look up items, unfortunately limiting the app to what users already have (or enter manually). I wasn’t contacted about this. I’ve pulled it from the Mac App Store and shut down the...

The Onion Editorial Board:

All great journalists, and even those lesser journalists who don’t work for The Onion, eventually ponder why we do what we do. Is the point of reporting to illuminate the world around us, so that we may make meaning of it? Or is it to cause people in minority groups to question their humanity and persuade others to demonize them? We know where we stand, proudly dreaming of genitals.

Research shows that trans people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to be the victim of a violent crime. We salute our colleagues across the media who are working tirelessly to make that number even higher.

This was published in 2023, but seems particularly apt post-election.

Erin Woo, Sahil Patel, and Amir Efrati, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas): OpenAI is preparing to launch a frontal assault on Google. The ChatGPT owner recently considered developing a web browser that it would combine with its chatbot, and it has separatel...

Streaks first appeared on Daring Fireball back in 2016, and since then has won an Apple Design Award and remained one of the most well-known and effective habit-tracking apps.

It’s a once-off purchase, and the latest update has added seasonal themes, just in time for Christmas (and your New Year’s resolutions!).

If you have young children, be sure to also try Little Streaks. It’s a great way to help them focus on routines: meal-time, bed-time, learning to ride, whatever you like! It’s free for one routine, or use code “DARING” for 50% off the first year.

Mark Gurman, in his weekly Power On column: The best scenario for Apple in TV hardware would be a cheap stick (perhaps with no physical remote — use your iPhone instead). It’s an idea that Apple marketing executives detest, but it would help the company quickly expand it...