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John Gruber

Henry Blodget’s Illustrated 2013 Travelogue of Flying in Coach on a Long International Flight

salon.com/2013/01/28/henry_blodgets_kind_of_awful_plane_ride/

Andrew Leonard, writing for Salon back in 2013: The first thing wrong with the stupidest article to be posted to the Internet in the year 2013 — and possibly the entire century — is the title: “I Was Quite Surprised By Some Things On My American Airlines International ‘E...

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John Gruber

Henry Blodget Creates Imaginary Staff of AI Personalities for His New Website and Hits on One of Them

regenerator1.com/p/building-our-native-ai-newsroom

Henry Blodget, who sold Business Insider to German publishing giant Axel Springer for $340 million a decade ago, has supposedly launched a new site, Regenerator, built on Substack. I was going to tack on an “alas” re: building on Substack, but maybe this is the sort of thin...

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It would be nice to have ChatGPT available in the terminal app on the Mac. I could use it as a stenographer.

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I've got Crazy Fingers in my brain. Can't stop humming it.

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I'm rebuilding my nightly email-sending code from the bottom up. Something I never properly understood is that most mail clients don't include your CSS files, so people were seeing the writing and images with no style. What an embarassment. As often is the case in 2025, I have ChatGPT to guide me through getting this right. The secret is inline styles. And there's no simple way to do the conversion, except element by element. Seems like an OS could do this for us somewhere along the line. Now I have to think about how to test it without trying to just switch it over, trying to avoid breaking everyone at once. But the nightly email might start looking a lot better for some real soon, and for others, only slight almost no noticeable difference.

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We should demand that the new owner of Chrome must respect the open web as something it does not have the power to change. Google never got this and we're losing the archive function of the web because of this. Please read and pass on -- now -- we're in a unique position to fix this.

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Use ChatGPT to level the playing field

There's a company that I have an account with because they're the only ones who provide the service I need, so I have to stay with them. They have made my telephone unusable, they call me all the time from varying phone numbers, wanting me to do things, or with a "courtesy r...

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One of the nice things about WordLand is that titles are optional because some posts are too short and simple to require a title. In a sense they are their own title. We know the benefits well, having used Twitter for a long time. There's no reason this simple idea shouldn't work in RSS feeds and blogging, in fact RSS doesn't require titles for items. And there's no requirement in WordPress either. So we support them, with gusto. I want this network to do what Twitter does, and everything Twitter doesn't do that writers want. #writersweb

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John Gruber

Clear as Mud

ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_1086

From the European Commission’s announcement today, “Commission closes investigation into Apple’s user choice obligations and issues preliminary findings on rules for alternative apps under the Digital Markets Act”: Under the DMA, Apple is required to allow for the distri...

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John Gruber

Trump Administration Calls E.U. Fines on Apple and Meta ‘Economic Extortion’

reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/us-calls-eu-fines-apple-meta-economic-extortion-2025-04-23/

Reuters:

“This novel form of economic extortion will not be tolerated by the United States,” a White House spokesperson said. “Extraterritorial regulations that specifically target and undermine American companies, stifle innovation, and enable censorship will be recognized as barriers to trade and a direct threat to free civil society.”

 ★ 

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John Gruber

‘60 Minutes’ Chief Resigns as CBS Corporate Parent Paramount Prepares to Fellate Trump

nytimes.com/2025/04/22/business/media/cbs-60-minutes-trump-bill-owens.html

Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin, reporting for The New York Times: CBS News entered a new period of turmoil on Tuesday after the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Bill Owens, said he would resign from the long-running Sunday news program, citing encroachments o...

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The runner of life and freedom

Start with the dark imagery of the Ridley Scott commercial for Apple in 1984. A woman athlete is running toward a screen carrying a big hammer, getting ready to hurl it at a huge screen with Big Brother's head, lecturing a huge hall filled with lifeless people listening. He has dead eyes. The runner represents life and freedom. The overall image is dreary and lifeless but she is a bright light of hope for the future. Inspire me with this image. I want to be inspired.

He has dead eyes. She represents life and freedom.

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My programmer friend

Good morning from Oaxaca in Mexico. We are here with my sad and depressed programmer friend, back from his European tour of glee club train compartments, receptions and cheese races with Europeans named Gouda, happy and carefree while my programmer friend, pictured here, thinks about returning to the good old United Snakes of Americans. As he sits on the beach, admiring the sunrise over the Pacific Ocean, he considers taking a job at a local Burger King. He enjoys their hamburgers even if he is not enjoying life at the moment. His eyes are tearing up as he remembers the tragedy that befell him and others in the Great Gouda Race of Luxembourg.

On the beach, dreaming of hamburgers.

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Yesterday I wrote a piece that summed up Twitter as an entrepreneurial project. "It would have been better if the founders had made less money, and opened the door for lots of competition right from the start. That's the philosophy of the web. Instead they captured the web, ...

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John Gruber

European Commission Fines Apple €500M and Meta €200M for Breaching Digital Markets Act

ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_1085

The European Commission: Today, the European Commission found that Apple breached its anti-steering obligation under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and that Meta breached the DMA obligation to give consumers the choice of a service that uses less of their personal data. ...

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It's crazy to even think of moving Chrome from Google to OpenAI. The web needs to not be owned by anyone, esp not owned by the tech industry. What Google tried to do to the web is obscene. I love ChatGPT, but let's keep Chrome out of their owner's greedy little hands. Set it up so it stands alone.

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If you're a young person contemplating a career in tech, great! It's fun, and you can help people doing this. But please don't listen to the VCs and entrepreneurs who say it's all about changing the world. Instead think of it this way -- you're going to create tools for peopl...

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Many good points in yesterday’s unusual Olbermann podcast, but the one that stuck with me is that at some point Republican incumbents will figure they don’t have a future in what Trump is trying to create and thus have everything to lose if he prevails. He thinks senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) may already be there.

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A video demo that shows how to set categories in WordLand, and I ramble through lots of philosophy and trivia. But the answer is right up front so you can skip all that michegas. ;-)

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John Gruber

The Information: ‘Meta Asked Amazon, Microsoft to Help Fund Llama’

theinformation.com/articles/meta-asked-amazon-microsoft-help-fund-llama

Kalley Huang and Erin Woo, reporting for The Information (via Ed Zitron, who summarized it on Bluesky): Meta Platforms over the past year asked Microsoft, Amazon and others to help pay the costs of training Meta’s flagship large language model, Llama, according to four p...