Special guest Glenn Fleishman returns to the show for episode 420 on 4/20, but everyone’s sober, I swear. Topics include Trump’s dumb tariffs and Glenn’s smart new edition of his book Six Centuries of Type & Printing.
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My thanks to Dekáf Coffee Roasters for sponsoring last week at DF. Dekáf started with a simple question over a late-night cup of decaf: why do coffee lovers who skip the caffeine have to skip the craft too?
Dekáf believes those who drink coffee purely for its flavor are the...
CNN:
A federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s
request that it halt the next steps Judge Paula Xinis is
seeking to take in the case concerning a migrant who was wrongly
deported to El Salvador, with a strident warning about the rule of
law and the possi...
Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results.
I’ve got three openings left through the end of June:
April 21–27 (next week)
May 12–18
May 26–June 1
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.
Kim Mackrael and Sam Schechner, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):
The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, had initially
planned to announce cease-and-desist orders targeting the tech
giants on Tuesday and had informed at least one of the compa...
Brian X. Chen, in a column at The New York Times headlined “Why a Tariff-Inflated $2,000 iPhone Is Nothing to Fear”:
Don’t panic. Even if tariffs did cause the iPhone’s price to
surge, we would have plenty of cheaper options, like buying last
year’s phone model instead o...
Josh Kovensky, reporting for TPM:
In a withering 46-page opinion on Wednesday, D.C. Chief Judge
James Boasberg laid out how he came to believe that the Trump
administration was acting in bad faith during its Alien Enemies
Act removals.
Boasberg set the stage for potenti...
Dennis McLellan, writing for the Los Angeles Times (News+ link):
Over the decades, according to his website, Martindale either
hosted or produced 21 game shows, including “Words and Music,”
“Trivial Pursuit,” “The Last Word” and “Debt.” “That’s a lot of
shows,” he acknow...
Wes Davis, The Verge:
During Meta’s antitrust trial today, lawyers representing
Apple, Google, and Snap each expressed irritation with Meta over
the slides it presented on Monday that The Verge found to
contain easy-to-remove redactions. Attorneys for both Apple
and Snap...
Dana Mattioli, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a gift link; also, here’s a News+ link):
Musk has had at least 14 children with four women, including the pop musician Grimes and Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain computer company Neuralink. Multip...
Jessica Lyons, reporting for The Register:
US government funding for the world’s CVE program — the
centralized Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database of
product security flaws — ends Wednesday.
The 25-year-old CVE program plays a huge role in vulnerability
manage...
Glenn Fleishman:
The book Six Centuries of Type & Printing briskly tells the
story of the evolution of type and printing, starting with early
documented efforts and surviving artifacts from China and Korea,
and introducing Gutenberg and his innovations. It then takes...
Samuel Axon, writing for Ars Technica:
Some time ago, OpenAI added a feature called “Memory” that
allowed a limited number of pieces of information to be retained
and used for future responses. Users often had to specifically
ask ChatGPT to remember something to trigger ...
Coffee has always been about bringing people together. For us, it started with a simple question over a late-night cup of decaf: why do coffee lovers who skip the caffeine have to skip the craft too?
At Dekáf, we believe those who drink coffee purely for its flavor are the true connoisseurs. While other roasters treat decaf as a side project, we’ve made it our entire mission. We’re dedicated to creating exceptional decaffeinated coffee that stands toe-to-toe with the world’s finest caffeinated beans.
9 single origins. 6 signature blends. You won’t believe it’s decaf. That’s the point.
That’s because toddlers don’t understand what an argument is and
aren’t interesting in having one.
Toddlers (which includes defensive bureaucrats, bullies, flat
earthers, folks committed to a specific agenda and radio talk show
hosts) may indicate that they’d like to have an argument, but
they’re actually engaging in connection, noise, play acting or a
chance to earn status. It can be fun to be in opposition, to
harangue or even to use power to change someone’s position.
My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC. Whether you’re replacing passwords, stopping fraud, or adding enterprise auth, WorkOS can help you build frictionless auth that scales.
New features they launched just last month include:
Bill Maher personifies the difference between a liberal (which he is) and a leftist (which he isn’t). But he’s been a stridently vocal critic of Trump since long before Trump even ran for president. Maher was the first person on television to correctly predict that Trump, if...
Maybe it’s like turbulence on an airplane, you think. Just a bumpy
unpleasant awful experience you gotta get through. But when
turbulence hits it’s not because the pilot is a guy who doesn’t
“know planes,” when turbulence hits they don’t disappear the ninth
row people out the airlock because they “look different” and are
“probably causing the problem.” Planes don’t have airlocks, do
they? Whatever. My brain is spray cheese.
Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Chris Whipple’s new book on the final years of Joe Biden’s presidency, under the headline “Did Aides Cover Up His Mental State — or Was It Group Delusion?” (News+ link):
The president’s wobbly state should have been a flashing warnin...
Jamelle Bouie, writing at The New York Times (gift link):
There is a hypothetical president with a hypothetically similar
agenda who could answer these questions. This actual president
cannot. He did not reason himself into his preoccupation with
tariffs and can neither ...
Warren Buffett’s annual shareholders letters are always a must-read. The honesty, clarity, and striking humility of his prose stands out in a world where corporate communications — from companies of any size — tend to be bland and obfuscating. This year’s letter, published b...
Auzinea Bacon, CNN:
Electronics imported to the United States will be exempt from
President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, according to a US
Customs and Border Protection notice posted late Friday.
Smartphones, computer monitors and various electronic parts are
among...
Reuters:
China’s Anker, one of Amazon’s largest sellers offering products
from power banks to phone cases, has raised prices on a fifth of
its products on the U.S. platform since Thursday, in a sign that
tariffs on Chinese goods are being passed on to U.S. shoppers.
Som...
Financial Times reporter John Burn-Murdoch has a summary on Bluesky of his co-bylined report for the Financial Times:
Visitors from western Europe who stayed at least one night in the
US fell by 17 per cent in March from a year ago, according to the
International Trade A...
Reuters:
“The U.S. side’s imposition of excessively high tariffs on China
seriously violates international economic and trade rules, runs
counter to basic economic principles and common sense, and is
simply an act of unilateral bullying and coercion,” China’s
Finance Min...
Blockbuster report by Wayne Ma for The Information (paywalled and pricey, alas):
But an equally important factor was the conflicting personalities
within Apple, according to multiple people who worked in the AI
and software engineering groups. More than half a dozen form...
Ben Thompson:
The problem with these tariffs is that their scale and
indiscriminate nature will have the effect of destroying demand
and destroying the capability to develop alternative supply. I
suppose if the only goal is to hurt China then shooting yourself
in the foo...
Chance Miller, writing at 9to5Mac:
Ahead of that, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said
today that Trump firmly believes that Apple can move iPhone
manufacturing to the United States. In response to a question
from Maggie Haberman of The New York Times about ...
Jen Simmons, writing on the WebKit blog, “Better Typography With text-wrap pretty”:
For over 30 years, the web had only one technique for determining
where to wrap text.
The browser starts with the first line of text, and lays out each
word or syllable, one after anothe...
