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Ben Sandofsky, writing on the Lux Camera blog: After decades of shooting digital, I returned to analog photography in 2023. I thought it would be challenging, given the limited selection of film stocks, only to be surprised by how freeing it felt. It felt so much better ...

Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim, in a memo to the 60 Minutes staff obtained by The New York Times (gift links): We have had a hard time deciding whether to stay at 60 Minutes. We’re still deeply upset by the firings of Tanya and Draggan, strong leaders who ...

Josh Marshall: In a hearing today about the president’s bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House and plans to build a vast ballroom, a judge asked if the president could also bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and be subject to no legal challenge. The DOJ lawyer, Yaako...

Walt Frazier: "The regular season is where you make your name, but the postseason is where you make your fame."

Freeman Dyson (1997): It often happens that a scientific revolution is accompanied by a change in style. I like to use the names of Napoleon and Tolstoy to symbolize two contrasting styles: rigid organization and discipline represented by Napoleon, creative chaos and freedo...

The Knicks won again last night. They're now up 2-0, both games on the road. This has blown my sense of reality. This Knicks team bears no resemblance to what I think of as the Knicks. Hard to concentrate. Will Trump try to put his name of Madison Square Garden.

Michael Landy: Future Ruins

Zac Hall: The third most popular free iPhone app in the U.S. App Store today is a mysterious productivity app that’s only available in Russian. That’s a pretty obvious red flag that something isn’t quite what it seems. […] The app icon looks similar to a star mapping app. The app itself isn’t available in […]

Jaanus Kase (Mastodon): We deployed direct silent CloudKit notifications in Tact in late 2024. They proved to be too unreliable to use in a messaging app like Tact: notifications arrived late or not at all. To be fair, this is within the bounds of the Apple SDK contract, which does say that the delivery of […]

Guilherme Rambo: When using the public database for content hosting or feature flags, you don’t want any random iCloud user to have the rights to publish or edit content on your behalf or to change the feature flags that control your app’s behavior for all of your users, that would be really bad.That’s where CloudKit’s […]

Laura Hazard Owen, writing for Nieman Journalism Lab back in April: I used Claude to help me scrape the 200 most recent tweets from 18 large publishers’ X accounts and track the engagement (likes + comments + retweets) on each. Six of those publishers have paywalls: Bloo...

Nate Silver, back in April, under the headline “Social Media Is Turning Into a Freak Show”, where by “social media” he mostly discusses Twitter/X: But what does that remaining traffic consist of? I recently came across a bubble chart depicting the Twitter accounts that h...

Google could do a mixture of AI and search. I want to search my blog for a place where I discuss the idea of hate is betrayed love even if I don't use the actual words. I bet they're working on it.

I'm using EMX more than Bluesky, consciously -- realizing it was a mistake to move my social web act over there. There's no discourse to keep me there so I'm giving it less of my bandwidth. I tried an experiment today, Paul Graham, a big tech influencer on EMX said all the ...

It's really cool we get another NBA Finals game tonight. I'm rehearsing what it feels like to be a fan of the Eastern Conference Champion NY Knicks. It still hasn't even slightly sunk in yet.

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac: But on Friday morning, a random productivity app called Cириус broke into the top three. […] The reality seems to be that the app is a Russian banking app disguised as a Pomodoro timer. Activity on Telegram this week points to the app actually being a client for Russian financial institution VTB […]⌥ Permalink

Yours truly, last August:

I can’t see why Apple would want to get involved with a company like this though. Gurman’s report makes it sound like his sources are inside Apple, but man, this “Apple + Perplexity” thing feels more like something Perplexity would be seeding than one that Apple executives would be leaking.

Perplexity is still occasionally in the news (often not in good ways), but it seems to me they’ve slipped into the “afterthought” tier of AI startups — which is exactly why they started leaning into clownish stunts last year. Everyone who previously suggested Apple should — or even might — buy them has gone silent.

Favorited The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book by Wouter Groeneveld On occasion I’ve mentioned here that one way of ensuring longevity of this blog is to publish it as one or more books with a proper ISBN, and have the national library store their two obligated copies. We did this in […]

The SpaceX cap table, what it is worth, and what happens next. On June 12, a great many people become extraordinarily wealthy. Not one of them can sell a share until December — with one exception: up to five percent of the IPO shares are reserved for employees and executive-selected participants at the $135 offering …