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Susan Glasser, writing for The New Yorker, “Donald Trump’s Ego Melts the Global Economy”: In this new political moment of the unthinkable made manifest, the sheer power rush for Trump should also not be underestimated. Imagine his joy as he sat down to sign an executive ...

How Bluesky hooks up via RSS into a powerful news system.

CNBC: President Donald Trump on Friday extended a deadline requiring China-based ByteDance to sell the U.S. operations of TikTok or face an effective ban in the country, marking the second time he has taken such action. Trump, on Truth Social, which is by far the most ...

From that same Reuters report by Akash Sriram that I just wrote about, speculating that iPhone prices might rise dramatically under Trump’s tariffs: However, other analysts noted that iPhone sales have been floundering in the company’s major markets, as Apple Intelligenc...

The erratic, illogical, nonsensical nature of Trump’s tariffs is bad for everyone. (Understatement.) But it’s particularly troublesome for a company that sees retail price stability as part of the branding for its products.

Akash Sriram, reporting for Reuters: Most iPhones are still made in China, which was hit with a 54% tariff. If those levies persist, Apple, opens new tab has a tough choice: absorb the extra expense or pass it on to customers. Shares of the company closed down 9.3% on T...

Mike Isaac, writing for The New York Times: Apple, Dell, Oracle — which rely on hardware and global supply chains that are in the direct line of fire from tariffs — saw their shares go into free-fall. But there was another big tech company whose stock took a pummeling ev...

Emma Roth, The Verge:

Nintendo is pushing back preorders for the Switch 2 due to concerns about Donald Trump’s newly announced tariffs. According to a statement sent to The Verge by Eddie Garcia on behalf of Nintendo, it says preorders will no longer begin on April 9th:

Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions. Nintendo will update timing at a later date. The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged.

Riots in the streets.

Allison McDaniel, writing for 9to5Mac back in 2022: Apple Cash is a virtual debit card where you can send and receive money through iMessage. Stored in your Wallet, you can make secure and contactless payments with Apple Pay from your iPhone or Apple Watch. It’s also a w...

I observed yesterday that, in general, Visa and Mastercard credit cards are both accepted at the same locations. The most notable exception is Costco, which, as part of the deal to make its own credit card a Visa (after long partnering with Amex), only accepts Visa credit cards at its physical retail locations and gas stations. They accept “most PIN-based debit/ATM cards”, but for credit, only Visa.

Online, for reasons I don’t understand, Costco accepts Mastercard too (which they incorrectly style in camelcase — you’d think Costco, of all companies, would be sensitive to wrongly camelcased mid-name C’s). Also, in Canada’s Costcos, it’s reversed, with Mastercard being exclusive in-store but Visa being accepted online.

Another high-profile exception: The Olympics, which “proudly accepts only Visa for card and mobile payments, along with cash”.

Bluesky is not Billionaire-proof, version 2. I wasn't satisfied with the blog post I wrote in March. I felt it was poorly organized and hard to understand, so I edited it, to get it down to its essential elements, and at the end explain why it's so important to get this right. Basically, by trying to be the universe, Bluesky is cutting off easy connections that can be made with other networks, make the system work better for communication, and at least deliver some of the freedom we all want. They've been very successful, and deserve to profit from that, but recognize it plays a larger role today than just as a business, so let's spread it out so it's harder to shut it down. This is a real concern, not just a nice-to-have thing.

Bill Gates, commemorating Microsoft’s 50th anniversary: The story of how Microsoft came to be begins with, of all things, a magazine. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured an Altair 8800 on the cover. The Altair 8800, created by a small electronics compa...

Wonderfully detailed write-up of a perfect prop from Make3: Repurposed Nagra Knobs & Switches — To ground the device in a tangible, vintage aesthetic, we salvaged original knobs and switches from a 1990s Nagra IV-D recorder, seamlessly integrating them into our desig...

ChatGPT colorized the photo of my grandfather on his tribute site.

Jason Snell, last month: The new M4 MacBook Air is the Mac most people should buy. [...] That’s why perhaps the most important change in the M4 MacBook Air is its base configuration, which starts at $999. When Apple introduced a winning new flat-with-rounded-corners Air...

Also one could argue that in the interest of neatness, one could phase out webmaster -- but why? It's not as if it's taking up a lot of memory or makes our software run slower. The idea of a webmaster is obsolete, it was how we thought of the web in the late 90s. Also note that it hasn't been deprecated by DNS, for the same reason, if it ain't broke don't fix it. Same subject is coming up on the nets as people discuss Musk's idea of rewriting the Social Security server side from Cobol to something else. We probably don't want to do that. Anyway. Just sayin.

One thing led to another, we discussed lots of facets to the RFSM document. At some point it started rewriting what I had, and used two terms that don't belong in standards-making: dogfood and deprecate. Nothing every is deprecated. That's arrogance on the part of developers....

Just tried an experiment, I asked ChatGPT to review ActivityPub re Rules for Standards-makers. I don't know if it was blowing smoke up my you-know-what, it did know that I wrote RFSM. But as you might imagine, after reading it, I totally concurred with its conclusions. In any case, it illustrates how ChatGPT can be helpful in designing new formats and protocols, making them more supportable and more useful for interop, which according to Rule 1, is the only reason we make standards.

Following up on the previous item, here’s a WSJ report from October on Visa’s dominant position in the payments industry: Visa, based in San Francisco, has built its network over more than 60 years — going back to clunky manual credit-card readers and carbon-paper copies...

AnnaMaria Andriotis, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link): The Apple card is up for grabs because Goldman Sachs, the bank behind it, is getting out of the consumer lending world. For months, big banks including JPMorgan Chase and Synchrony Financial have be...