FeedCity

Annie Linskey and Rebecca Ballhaus, reporting for The Wall Street Journal: “It looks like a bribe and a signal to every company that corruption is the name of the game,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said in a statement. “After Meta pays to play, what does Mark Zucke...

NBC News, “Meta Agrees to Pay $25 Million to Settle Trump Lawsuit”:

Meta said Wednesday it would pay $25 million to settle a four-year-old lawsuit from President Donald Trump over the social media company’s decision to suspend Trump’s accounts after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, filed a notice of the settlement in federal court in San Francisco, where the lawsuit was pending. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone separately confirmed the terms: a $25 million payment from the company, with $22 million going toward a fund for Trump’s presidential library and the balance dedicated to legal fees and other plaintiffs in the case.

I really can’t wait to see that Trump Presidential Library.

Via David Smith on Mastodon, who writes: The recent work I’ve been doing has required a lot of sharing files between testing devices (and my Mac). AirDrop should be the ideal tool for this but I’ve recently found it to be unreliable. Instead I’ve been using LocalSend wh...

I've been using claude.ai for programming work lately, and it does one thing better than ChatGPT. It reads your code and tries to mimic your coding style. ChatGPT won't do that. It's really frustrating to have to edit their code before I can even try it out.

TL;DR: The key to success is convincing developers to ignore the fact that you will eventually kill them. Would-be platform vendors, open or not, in order to entice a developer to learn how it works: Quick success. Hello World works in less than 30 minutes. Hopefully much l...

I've decided that trading in my Model Y for another EV is an acceptable solution. Let someone else ride around in this car that I love, but hate because it is a symbol of American terrorism and apartheid. This is compatible with my understanding that hate is love that was betrayed. I'm sure I won't love its replacement as much as I loved the Model Y, but I will feel better about driving it. And Tesla shareholders will, I hope, learn the lesson that products must be politically agnostic in order to work commercially. Or if you must take a stand, make it against fascism. So many of our oligarchs have made the wrong bet here. We will never forget what Zuckerberg, Bezos, the CEOs of Apple, Microsoft, Open AI -- all these companies went the wrong way.

Here we are on an artichoke farm in coastal California, a place where migrant workers would normally be doing back-breaking work to pick the artichokes we could eat in our salads and antipasto.

Instead all we have are Trump's beautiful dancers! It is a beautiful scene, but hold your nose because the unharvested 'chokes are rotting and they don't smell very sweet!

Apple: Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2025 first quarter ended December 28, 2024. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $124.3 billion, up 4 percent year over year, and quarterly diluted earnings per share of $2.40, up 10 percent year over year....

A Monday report from Reuters, syndicated at The Guardian, “Microsoft Is in Talks to Acquire TikTok, Trump Claims”: Donald Trump has suggested that Microsoft is in talks to acquire TikTok and that he would like to see a bidding war over the app. When asked if Microsoft wa...

After cleaning out the White House of scummy career woke liberals and replacing them with beautiful dancers and then offering buyouts to the 2 million federal leeches, President for Life Donald J Trump set his sights on journalism, beautifying the NY Times! Newly beautified briefing room. Air traffic control is just lovely. The newly beautiful NYT is a work of art. Oh my they are beauts, and loyal too!

Good oligarchs and bad oligarchs. We need to help the good ones have the guts to get on the air, with really good creative advertising, telling the people exactly what's being done to them now, without pulling any punches. They have to be warned and they aren't. You have to be paying a lot of attention to understand. And it's hard to know what to believe. We have to have a voice in this, now.

Andrew Hickey wrote something I wholeheartedly agree with. "If you think the day job might literally kill you, and you have no kids, quit and try that mad idea. That might also kill you, but better to die trying something wonderful than be killed by a crappy job."

My response: "My life story since i was 22, and I'm 69 now. It's worked out okay, not perfect, I have regrets, but I would have far more if I hadn't bet on myself. My 22-year-old self was very right about a lot of things."

Fascinating thread — and an almost entirely civil discussion of what has become, for obvious reasons, an inflammatory topic. These are mapping and metadata nerds approaching the dilemma in the very nerdiest of ways. I found it rather soothing, and also quite informative — pa...

The whole tech world needs more projects that aren’t trying to become billion- (let alone trillion-) dollar ideas, but are happily shooting for success as million-dollar ideas (or less!).

David Pierce, writing at The Verge: Rather than buy another smartwatch, Migicovsky decided to try and get Pebble going again. He sold his most recent startup, a messaging app called Beeper, to Automattic last year and left the company in the fall. Since then, he’d though...

There should be ads on tv tonight saying they're coming for the abortion pill. Spell it out clearly so the voters can heat it as it happened. Otherwise they will rightly blame the Dems for not telling them what was going on. It's not too late Dems.

One more thing then I have to get back to work. There's a great moment in Woody Allen's Sleeper where a time traveler asks how the world was destroyed when Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead. If you lived in NYC in the 70s and 80s you knew Albert Shanker as a NY character like Al Sharpton or Curtis Sliwa. New York had its own celebrities, people who were famous mostly in New York, but not as much outside. So Albert Shanker with a nuclear weapon kind of fit his character in an extreme way, and it was an inside reference only NYers would get. Well in case you didn't know it, back in that time or a little later, Trump was one of those Albert Shanker types. And yes, he has all the nuclear weapons there are. Isn't that weird?

We're programmed to believe big companies make things the right way and individual people can't be trusted. We're going to have to break out of that rut, to stop trusting them so much. It's like the 2008 banking crisis, but this time they've taken over the government, not just the economy. The tech industry, believe it or not, started with assumption that it was the other way around. That people were the brilliance, and companies started wars to make money (we were the generation that stopped the Vietnam war, btw). I got into computers because I thought I could earn a living that way, but quickly discovered how inherently subversive they are. They weren't just for the nerds with the plastic pocket protectors, they were also for hippies. Some of us are still here and we want to create with you.

Molly White has an excellent OPML subscription list. I want to make something with this, maybe a Bluesky feed reader? I want to show people they can combine skills to make new media. We don't have to wait for big companies to do it for us. We can work together. That's how we rise to the challenges we share. We can flip this bad situation around, turning problems into opportunity. Big changes happen now. We can steer in the direction we want to go.

Even if the build of TikTok already installed on an American user’s phone continues to function, that user can’t reinstall TikTok (or any of ByteDance’s other apps) on a new or restored phone until those apps are back in the app stores.