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It’s hard to come up with a buyer who could afford to pay a high price for Chrome and who would pass regulatory muster as its new owner. And if Chrome is not worth a high price, or simply isn’t sellable at one, then why is the DOJ trying to force Google to sell it? They might as well try to force Google to sell the two o’s from its name.

Om Malik: Some of us are old enough to remember that the reason Mark renamed the company is because the Facebook brand was becoming toxic, and associated with misinformation and global-scale crap. It was viewed as a tired, last-generation company. Meta allowed the compan...

Alex Heath, reporting for The Verge:

Meta has laid off an unspecified number of employees in its Reality Labs division, a company spokesperson confirmed. The cuts affected teams working in Oculus Studios, Meta’s in-house games division for Quest headsets, as well as some employees involved in the company’s hardware efforts, according to people familiar with the matter.

According to Bloomberg it was “more than 100”.

I’m so old I remember when Facebook renamed itself Meta because the “metaverse” was supposedly the future of the company and, so said Mark Zuckerberg, the future of computing itself. Now, when Zuck goes on Joe Rogan’s podcast and chats for three hours, the metaverse thing doesn’t come up once, not even once, even in passing.

It’s enough to make one suspect Zuck isn’t a straight shooter.

Paying for Kagi today feels a *lot* like paying for HBO back in the cable TV heyday.

Cory Doctorow coined a lovely word -- enshitified. In that spirit, I'd love to see a destodgified Harvard. See below.

If Harvard could become more American and less elite, that could change things. Make a contribution directly to the well-being of Americans. Big courage would be required for that. A great university, empowered withe the latest online information distribution systems, could be the source of reliable information to the people that's missing because the major corporations who own the media outlets are playing it safe. Harvard is no longer in a position where playing it safe is an option. The Trumps will continue to cast doubt on the truth, but in a contest between Trump and Harvard, I bet a lot of people, maybe even most, would trust Harvard first.

60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley, in last night’s closing statement:

“Stories we’ve pursued for 57 years are often controversial: lately, the Israel-Gaza war and the Trump administration. Bill made sure they were accurate and fair. He was tough that way.”

“But our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it. Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways. None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires.”

“No one here is happy about it. But in resigning, Bill proved one thing: He was the right person to lead ‘60 Minutes’ all along.”

Every single executive at Paramount should be ashamed, starting at the top, with the loathsome and cowardly Shari Redstone.

I’m sick of saying this over and over, the Dems need a regular snark-filled irreverent presence on social media to condemn every freaking fascist thing the Trumps do. They had it with the Kamala accounts, but they shut them down on Election Day. It’s so freaking simple. Not...

I mentioned this in yesterday's podcast -- new problems popped up with websockets in WordLand. I worked through the whole tree of possibilities with ChatGPT and it came to the conclusion that the source was an out of date package, and it was confident if I replaced it with the one "everyone else" is using, the problems will go away. Now this is the moment when human judgement prevails. I'm going to experiment in a very small app first, to make sure I have the approach right, then I will cautiously make the change on my test WordLand server, and if it works there, then I will figure out how to install it on the main site. It couldn't break all that much because for some reason the WS code stopped working, completely, with no code changes anywhere.

Well it looks like the new email app is working. I got some really nice lookin emails last night, hope you did too. Subscribe here. And there's a basis on which to build. I will now proceed to turn off the old email app that has been serving us so well since 2017 or thereabouts. Goodbye old friend. Hello new world!

Airbnb CEO (and founder) Brian Chesky, back in October in an interview with Nilay Patel, regarding Tim Cook’s eventual successor: This goes to the very awkward thing that no one wants to talk about. Succession planning is hard because the people that are great product vi...

New podcast: ChatGPT deserves our respect (at least).

If you're getting this via email, things might look different.

Lots of news reports about Trump's polls. But it isn't surprising that in the transition from a democracy to autocracy the people would become increasingly unhappy with the change, until we basically give up, and the polls from some pollsters are always this way, but the polls from others tell a different story. Fox News still runs polls the old way, as does the NYT and others. But that will change, as the lawyers have, and the Washington Post and NY Times have, in their editorial functions. And they just arrested a judge in Wisconsin. Makes you think maybe it doesn't matter if the polls say what they say, if there isn't something behind them.

If all goes as planned, if you're subscribed to the nightly email, you should get two copies of the posts for April 27, one sent by the old software, and one sent by the new. The story I had to do a rewrite because I misunderstood how CSS styling works in some/most email c...

I heard that Hugh Forrest was fired at SXSW. Many people loved him based on the outpouring of grief, but I didn't. They had keynotes and panels about stuff I was working on at the time, in the 90s and 00s, blogging, RSS, podcasting, bringing blogs to politics. He wouldn't take my calls. I wanted to be on stage to talk about what I was working on, and to set the record straight on what we had created. Instead my competitors got top billing and I was not allowed in. It felt corrupt to me, as if someone was trading favors behind the scenes. My hope is now SXSW, or whatever replaces it, will be more open-minded about who they include in the show. I'm still working and still have a story to tell.

Dan MacTough feels the same about AWS breaking Node devs.

I asked ChatGPT for an "imaginary image of Harvard Square with middle-class people from red states visiting in their trucks and country mannerisms."

What if, before we transfer human awareness into computers, we discover proof of reincarnation. What then?