Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, in a piece today for The Information (paywalled up the wazoo, sadly), “Apple Is Working on AI Chip With Broadcom”:
Apple is developing its first server chip specially designed for
artificial intelligence, according to three people with direct
kno...
Erik Hayden, reporting for The Hollywood Reporter:
For his next move, David Letterman is jumping in to the
increasingly crowded free, ad-supported TV channel (FAST) space.
The late-night great’s production company Worldwide Pants has
inked a deal with Samsung TV Plus to...
Juli Clover at MacRumors:
Apple today made a mistake with its macOS Sequoia 15.2 update,
releasing the software for two Macs that have yet to be launched.
There is a software file for “Mac16,12” and “Mac16,13,” which are
upcoming MacBook Air models.
The leaked software ...
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez said after a two-day hearing that The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, had not submitted the best bid and was wrongly named the winner of an auction last month by a court-appointed trustee.
“I don’t think it’s enough money,” Lopez said in a late-night ruling from the bench in a Houston court. “I’m going to not approve the sale.”
Brandon Silverman:
It was September of 2011 and I saw a link on kottke.org to a
small collection of incredible typography from something
called the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. I had never seen them
before and they blew my mind. I immediately became a massive fan
and in ...
Finally, Daring Fireball t-shirts and hoodies are back. Order now, and we’ll start printing shirts at the end of this week. U.S. domestic orders placed by the end of the day Wednesday should arrive before Christmas. International orders — even those ordered by our good neighbors in Canada — most likely will not.
After over a decade, CoverSutra is back — reimagined as a sleek, standalone music player for your Mac.
CoverSutra lives in your menu bar, giving you seamless access to your music library. Instantly search by album, artist, or song—all without breaking your workflow.
What’s New?
Standalone music player: No Music app required.
Instant music search: Find tracks anytime, anywhere.
Global keyboard shortcuts: Control playback from any app.
Available now on the Mac App Store for just $4.99. Free upgrade for CoverSutra 3.0 customers!
Mark Gurman, in his Power On column for Bloomberg:
Apple is now working on a major effort to support third-party hand
controllers in the device’s visionOS software and has teamed up
with Sony Group Corp. to make it happen. Apple approached Sony
earlier this year, and the...
My thanks to 1Password — which, earlier this year, acquired frequent DF sponsor Kolide — for sponsoring last week at DF. Imagine if you went to the movies and they charged $8,000 for popcorn. Or, imagine you got on a plane and they told you that seatbelts were only available...
While there is no subscription offering for Daring Fireball (never say never again), I am reminded this week to remind you that, if you enjoy podcasts, you should subscribe to Dithering, the twice-weekly 15-minutes-on-the-button podcast I do with Ben Thompson. Dithering a...
Elizabeth Lopatto, writing for The Verge, “Stop Using Generative AI as a Search Engine”:
Now, a defender of AI might — rightly — say that a real
journalist should check the answers provided by ChatGPT; that
fact-checking is a critical part of our job. I agree, which is w...
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...
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...
The Verge’s Sean Hollister penned an excellent high-level summary of Pat Gelsinger’s ignominious ouster from Intel, under the headline “What Happened to Intel?” A wee bit of pussyfooting here, though, caught my eye:
Just how bad was it before Gelsinger took the top job?
...
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...
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