FeedCity

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...

Why are all the people who hate AI so pissy about it.

In the future I will be able to type a post into my blog and people who are following me will see it in their timeline.

Peeve: TV shows or movies that show text messages that are impossible to read even if you stop the video and zoom in.

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...

I used to use Twitter for middle of the night ideas. These days I use one of Twitter's successors. No telling where my middle of the night missives will appear! 😄 Here's one. "We should be able to tweet from within any application that has the ability to create and edit tex...

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 familiar with the matter.

But here’s Todd Spangler, reporting (with his name) for Variety:

TikTok denied a report that China is looking at potentially facilitating a sale of the app to tech billionaire Elon Musk to keep TikTok operational in America amid a looming U.S. government ban.

“We can’t be expected to comment on pure fiction,” a TikTok rep said in reply to Variety‘s request for comment.

It could be no one is wrong here. Maybe ByteDance’s owners, the Chinese government, know what’s going on, and the dupes at TikTok don’t.

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.

Your users trust you. Let’s keep it that way.

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...

The notion that mobile web apps are closing the gap with native apps is laughable. The gulf between them is widening, not narrowing.

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

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.

I posted this to both Bluesky and Mastodon just now.

I see people betting on the idea of federation in bluesky.

At the same time, we should bet on simplifying Mastodon at scale.

Approach the problem from both directions.

We may need and not have federation in bluesky at some point.

It couldn't hurt to have a better lifeboat.

LA resident Matthew Butterick, in his MB XS newsletter:

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:

• The California Community Foundation is seeking donations for its wildfire recovery fund.

• The Center for Disaster Philanthropy is seeking donations for its California Wildfires Recovery Fund.

• Pasadena Humane is seeking donations for its emergency wildfire relief fund.

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...