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Just watched Darkest Hour, a biopic of Winston Churchill, as he became prime minister and had to decide whether to surrender or fight Mr Hitler as they called him. I had seen it of course when it came out, but it's especially appropriate to our times. I'm glad the NATO's are resisting the US. We have to all work together to keep democracy alive, not just in our own countries, but around the world. If ever there was a time when working together mattered more than it does today, I sure can't think of it.

Oregon, November 2025.

From the video I took a random exit and found photography heaven.

AI assistants could if they wanted drive all of us crazy in different ways. Advertising squared.

Dr. Drang:

For weeks — maybe months, time has been hard to judge this past year — Trump has been telling us that he’s worked out deals with pharmaceutical companies to lower their prices by several hundred percent. Commentators and comedians have pointed out that you can’t reduce prices more than 100% and pretty much left it at that, suggesting that Trump’s impossible numbers are due to ignorance.

Don’t get me wrong. Trump’s ignorance is nearly limitless — but only nearly. I’ve always thought that he knew the right way to calculate a price drop; he did it the wrong way so he could quote a bigger number. And that came out in yesterday’s speech.

Trump sophistry + math pedantry = Daring Fireball catnip.

Jeff Johnson: Finder has four view modes, represented by the four consecutive toolbar icons in the screenshot below, if you can even call that free-floating monstrosity a toolbar anymore: Icons, List, Columns, and Gallery. My preference is columns view, which I’ve been u...

Chance Miller, writing at 9to5Mac: When you use Walmart Pay, it’s incredibly easy for Walmart to build that customer profile on you. When you use Scan and Go, all of that same information is handed over. When you use Apple Pay or other payment methods, it’s much harder ...

Violet Jira, reporting for NOTUS:

The White House communications team posted a digitally altered photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Minnesota social justice activist, on Thursday that makes it appear that she was weeping during her arrest by federal agents.

The image is highly realistic, bearing no watermark or other indicator that the image has been doctored. The change is only apparent when compared to a different version of the same image posted by the Department of Homeland Security earlier in the day.

The White House, which has adopted a combative, flippant tone on its widely viewed social media pages, drew some backlash for the post online. In response, White House deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr called the image a “meme.”

It’s not a meme. It’s propaganda — an altogether false image presented as an actual photograph.

Aaron “Homeboy” Tilley and Wayne Ma, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas, and with a miserly gift-link policy): But there are also potential risks to making Federighi head of AI. Giving oversight of AI to him reflects Apple’s cautious approach to the technolog...

Something ChatGPT is good at. Give it a photo of the Statue of Liberty and ask it to remove the cement platform and change the background to pure white, then make the background transparent, reduce it in size, and paste it into the right margin of a blog post.

Wouldn't it be something if the leaders of European democracies said if democracy and self-government around the world is to have any hope the American government has to stop attacking their own citizens. We see where this is headed, they might say, and there will be no coming back from this for the US, if they turn the country, which still is the leader of the free world, into a police state. What if the European leaders said out loud and in public the things the Republicans and most of the Democrats refuse to say. The inverse of what JD Lance says about their governments and their people.

Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas): Apple is developing an AI-powered wearable pin the size of an AirTag that is equipped with multiple cameras, a speaker, microphones and wireless charging, according to people with direct knowledge ...

Mark Gurman, reporting at Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. has expanded the job of hardware chief John Ternus to include design work, solidifying his status as a leading contender to eventually succeed Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook.

Cook, who has led Apple since 2011 and turned 65 in November, quietly tapped Ternus to manage the company’s design teams at the end of last year, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That widens Ternus’ role to add one of the company’s most critical functions.

And on Twitter/X:

Ternus is now the “executive sponsor” of Apple’s design team, representing the critical function on Apple’s executive team. The move was under-the-radar: on paper, the teams report to Tim Cook despite Ternus’s role.

Here’s to hoping Ternus is as pissed as the rest of us are about MacOS 26 Tahoe.

I hear Canada will be importing EV's from China. Now I'm going to have EV-envy a few hours drive away from home. They make better cars in China, I hear -- than we do in the good old USA. Too bad, it didn't have to be that way. And isn't it tragic that China is less politically toxic than the American citizen who made the car I drive now.

Apple's 1984 ad, with the benefit of hindsight, said "a new generation is going to take over now so get ready." We live very much in those times again. Now every time I use ChatGPT to do something that I never would have been able to do before I realize wow we just did "that" again. The same feeling I got when I first saw the 128K Mac at the Apple office on Bandley Drive in 1983, about the same time as Apple people saw the ad at their sales meeting in Hawaii in October. The Mac had an exciting but rough start, but by the turn of the century it was obvious that something completely different had happened.

Jason Snell: There was a time when QuickTime was more than just a playback utility; I used it frequently to perform simple video edits, like removing commercials from an off-air recording or tacking the contents of one file on the end of another. Since those days ended with the deprecation of classic QuickTime, I’ve never […]

Clawdbot (Twitter, Showcase, Documentation, GitHub): Clears your inbox, sends emails, manages your calendar, checks you in for flights. All from WhatsApp, Telegram, or any chat app you already use. Federico Viticci: To say that Clawdbot has fundamentally altered my perspective of what it means to have an intelligent, personal AI assistant in 2026 would be […]

Mike Swanson (via Brent Simmons): And yet, this is how a lot of modern software behaves. Not because it’s broken, but because we’ve normalized an interruption model that would be unacceptable almost anywhere else. I’ve started to think of this as backseat software: the slow shift from software as a tool you operate to software […]

Addy Osmani (via Hacker News): User obsession means spending time in support tickets, talking to users, watching users struggle, asking “why” until you hit bedrock. I wonder how much this happens at Google and Apple these days. The quest for perfection is paralyzing. I’ve watched engineers spend weeks debating the ideal architecture for something they’ve […]

Bridger Beal-Cvetko and Daniel Woodruff, reporting for KSL News:

SB138, sponsored by Cullimore, R-Sandy, would make Android, the world’s most popular mobile device operating system, an official state symbol, joining the ranks of the official state cooking pot (the dutch oven), the official state crustacean (the brine shrimp), and the official state mushroom (the porcini).

“Someday, everybody with an iPhone will realize that the technology is better on Android,” Cullimore told reporters during a media availability on Wednesday, the second day of the legislative session.

But, he added, “I’m the only one in my family — all my kids, my wife, they all have iPhones — but I’m holding strong.” [...]

“I don’t expect this to really get out of committee,” he said.

(Via Joe Rossignol.)

Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire, in a post that pairs perfectly with Om Malik’s re: velocity bestowing authority: The new Democratic argument isn’t about restoring guardrails. It’s about moving fast — and using power unapologetically — to undo what Trump has do...