Daring Fireball
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 company called MITS, was a groundbreaking personal computer kit that promised to bring computing power to hobbyists. When Paul and I saw that cover, we knew two things: the PC revolution was imminent, and we wanted to get in on the ground floor. At the time, personal computers were practically non- existent. Paul and I knew that creating software that let people program the Altair could revolutionize the way people interacted with these machines. So, we reached out to Ed Roberts, the founder of MITS, and told him we had a version of the programming language BASIC for the chip that the Altair 8800 ran on. There was just one problem: We didn’t. At the bottom Gates links to a printout of the original source code for the BASIC interpreter, in extensively commented assembly language. Amongst all of his other accomplishments, Bill Gates was one hell of a programmer. ★
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 design. These components not only provided an authentic look and feel but also remained fully functional, with: A power switch for system activation. A reading on/off switch to engage or disable the Woe display. A manual override switch to cycle through needle positions if wireless control failed. When I watched this episode, I remember noticing how cool the device seemed. It turns out to be even cooler than I thought. So much effort into such a little thing. And the coolest thing is that, in a sense, the WoeMeter actually works as a handheld wireless prop. Reusing those Nagra dials to add verisimilitude reminds me of how much of Star Wars came from reused pieces of old gadgetry, like two of the lightsabers (Luke’s and Vader’s) being made from 1940s-era Graflex camera flash guns. ★
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 design in 2022, it had to keep selling older models in order to get down under a thousand dollars. Three years later, Apple is finally able to sell a brand-new Air — with a generous 16GB of unified memory — at that important price. So: No more quibbles about stepping back a generation or two to an older model with a lower price. Apple has done away with that strategy for the MacBook Air: The latest and greatest model is the one most people shopping for a Mac should buy, especially if they’re coming from an Intel model. I’d put off linking to Snell’s review for a few weeks while thinking about writing my own, but I’ve got nothing to add. The M4 MacBook Air is utterly unsurprising, but only in the best possible way. It’s the MacBook Air everyone wanted Apple to make. The $999 base model is now exceedingly recommendable. It even brings back the most notable feature that was lost in the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon — the ability to drive two external displays and its own internal display. Just aces all around. ★
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 of receipts. It accounts for around 60% of the total dollar amount of U.S. debit-card purchases and about 50% of U.S. credit-card purchases, according to the Nilson Report, a trade publication. Its closest competitor, Mastercard, accounts for around 22% and 23%, respectively. Visa’s profit totaled $17.3 billion in its 2023 fiscal year, after more than tripling in the last decade. Amex accounts for about 19% of U.S. credit card transactions (and doesn’t support debit), and Discover is down around 3 or 4%. I really thought Visa and Mastercard had comparable market share, but it turns out Visa is far bigger, and it’s Mastercard and Amex that are around the same size. ★
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 been vying to take over as issuer. What hasn’t been known is the equally fierce fight playing out between the networks to win Apple, with Visa and American Express trying to unseat Mastercard, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple is expected to select a network for the card before it picks the bank to replace Goldman Sachs. Networks provide the plumbing that transmit information between the banks that issue consumers’ cards and the merchants’ banks. Visa, the largest network, has made an aggressive pitch to win the card, including offering the kind of upfront payment to Apple that’s normally reserved for the biggest card programs, the people said. Visa offered a similar payment when Costco was selecting its network about a decade ago, The Wall Street Journal reported. American Express is also in the mix, trying to become both the issuer and network of the Apple card, the people said. Goldman had approached Amex to gauge its interest in taking over the card in 2023, the Journal earlier reported. I’ve always thought Visa and Mastercard were interchangeable. I can’t recall ever once in my life seeing an establishment where one of them was accepted but the other wasn’t, and they both seem to be accepted everywhere that accepts credit cards at all. If there’s a reason to prefer one over the other I’ve never heard it. Amex is different because it’s accepted at fewer locations because they charge merchants a higher fee, which they get away with because they offer their customers superior service. I wrote back in 2023 that they share an affinity with Apple: both are built around the idea of offering a premium experience and charging higher prices for it. But I already have a regular Amex card. One of the things I like about Apple Card being a Mastercard (or if they switched to Visa) is that it’s a card I can use anywhere that doesn’t accept Amex. ★
Mike Masnick has a great piece at TechDirt running down just how stupid everything about Trump’s tariff trade war is: Whoever on the Council of Economic Advisers used this formula should turn in their econ degree, because this is not how anything works. Even if they then go on to publish another version of the formula that looks all sophisticated and shit. Brendan Duke, on X, shows that the fancier version of their formula — which is fancy in the way that Vertu phones are “fancy” — is even stupider, because the two Greek letters they chose to glam it up just cancel each other out. Back to Masnick: This is what happens when you ask ChatGPT to “make my wrong econ math look more scientific.” The document even admits that they couldn’t figure out the actual tariff rates, so they “proxied” them with this formula instead. That’s a bit like saying you couldn’t find your house keys, so you proxied them with a banana. The fundamental problem here isn’t just that the tariff numbers are wrong — though they absolutely are. It’s that the entire premise rests on treating trade deficits as if they were tariffs. They’re not the same thing. At all. Let’s back up for a moment and talk about trade deficits, because Trump has been getting this wrong for longer than some of his supporters have been alive. His logic appears to be: “Deficit” sounds bad Therefore, trade deficits must be bad Therefore, countries with whom we have trade deficits must be cheating us Therefore, we should punish them with tariffs to “level the playing field” This sounds like it must be an exaggeration for comic effect, but it’s not. That’s how Trump’s mind works. This is what Trump has been saying about trade deficits for decades. It’s like how he understands “asylum” to mean “insane asylum” and so when he talks about political asylum he starts talking about “the late great Hannibal Lecter”. ★
The Economist: On economics Mr Trump’s assertions are flat-out nonsense. The president says tariffs are needed to close America’s trade deficit, which he sees as a transfer of wealth to foreigners. Yet as any of the president’s economists could have told him, this overall deficit arises because Americans choose to save less than their country invests — and, crucially, this long-running reality has not stopped its economy from outpacing the rest of the g7 for over three decades. There is no reason why his extra tariffs should eliminate the deficit. Insisting on balanced trade with every trading partner individually is bonkers — like suggesting that Texas would be richer if it insisted on balanced trade with each of the other 49 states, or asking a company to ensure that each of its suppliers is also a customer. And Mr Trump’s grasp of the technicalities was pathetic. He suggested that the new tariffs were based on an assessment of a country’s tariffs against America, plus currency manipulation and other supposed distortions, such as value-added tax. But it looks as if officials set the tariffs using a formula that takes America’s bilateral trade deficit as a share of goods imported from each country and halves it — which is almost as random as taxing you on the number of vowels in your name. There is no way to report on these tariffs in a way that is honest and accurate without describing them as bonkers and nonsensical. News publications that are trying to present them as rational, or describing them as “reciprocal” just because that’s the word the White House is using, are beclowning themselves. ★
CNBC: Markets plunged the day after President Donald Trump imposed a far-reaching “reciprocal tariff” policy, including a 10% baseline tariff on almost every country on earth. The plan slaps much steeper tariff rates on many countries, including 34% on China, 20% on the European Union, 46% on Vietnam and 32% on Taiwan. Economists and U.S. trade partners are raising questions about how the White House calculated the tariff rates it claimed other countries “charge” the United States. Apple, in particular, is taking it on the chin, about 9.5% for the day. Nike is down over 13%. From CNBC’s corresponding story on just how the White House computed the “tariff” rates it claims for various countries: Many observers said the U.S. appeared to have divided the trade deficit by imports from a given country to arrive at tariff rates for individual countries. Such methodology doesn’t necessarily align with the conventional approach for calculating tariffs and implies the U.S. would have looked at only the trade deficit in goods and ignored trade in services. “Such methodology doesn’t necessarily align with the conventional approach” is an overlong euphemism for “The president literally doesn’t understand what tariffs are”. James Surowiecki was seemingly the first person to figure out the White House’s nonsensical formula: Just figured out where these fake tariff rates come from. They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us. So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is. Don’t rack your brain trying to make sense out of the nonsensical. ★
Great roundup from The Verge: While Nintendo told us very little in the official reveal of the console in January, now we know when the Switch 2 is coming and how much it will cost at launch: June 5th and $449.99. We also have more hardware details and specs to pore over, like a 1080p, 120Hz 7.9-inch LCD screen, Joy-Con controllers with mouse-like functions, 256GB of storage, and 4K output via the dock. Nintendo also cleared up the mysteries about the system’s “C” button with details about new GameChat features and a camera accessory and confirmed that GameCube games are coming to Nintendo Switch Online, along with a dedicated controller. Last but not least, Nintendo showed off a number of new games, like a Switch 2 edition of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond and the exclusive Switch 2 launch title Mario Kart World. People are going to object to the pricing, but the world has changed (and inflated) since the original Switch debuted in 2017. What I love about all of these announcements is that they’re so focused on fun. Nintendo doesn’t just still have it, they’ve got it more than they ever have. Just wonderful news all around. ★
Stephen Battaglio, reporting for the LA Times: MSNBC viewers have seen the last of Steve Kornacki’s big board. The popular data maven has signed a deal with NBC that will expand his presence across the network’s news and sports divisions. But the new contract does not include working for MSNBC, which is being spun off into a new corporate entity formed by parent company Comcast. They might well just switch off the lights and lock the doors at MSNBC. ★
Watts Martin: If we hold things to this list, programs like Nova, MarsEdit, and Apple Pages — canonical Mac-assed Mac apps — all do unsurprisingly smashingly. But Obsidian, the Electron-based program I’m writing in right now, does shockingly well, too. Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code doesn’t do quite as well (most notably, it opens its settings “window” as an editor tab), but it does better than Sublime Text (which opens a text file for settings), and much better than the banana crazypants menu and icon design of the cross-platform e-book management program Calibre. Martin has a good list here of fundamentals, but ultimately, you know it when you see it. ★
Jason Snell: While the ads played on, I began creating a thought experiment: There’s a $10 difference between the ad and ad-free plans. If Mr. Netflix (he wears a top hat) came to my house and said, “Jason, I’ve got a great deal for you. I’m going to pay you $120 a year, and all you have to do is watch ads while you watch Netflix,” what would I do? When I started thinking about it, I thought it might be an interesting intellectual question. What would I accept in exchange for having Mean Mr. Netflix beam ads into every show I watch? ★
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” These are not just words, they are a pact. A civil contract. Not to party, not to policy, not to an ideology or an individual. It is a compact between a people, our people, and it is under threat. A democracy is a government of collective action by the people. Let this be a reminder, it is time to do more … before it is no more. Daring Fireball is brought to you this week by the enduring and aspirational project that is democracy. ★
Jon Brodkin, reporting for Ars Technica, “France Fines Apple €150M for “Excessive” Pop-Ups That Let Users Reject Tracking”: France’s competition regulator fined Apple €150 million, saying the iPhone maker went overboard in its implementation of pop-up messages that let users consent to or reject tracking that third-party applications use for targeted advertising. The App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework used by Apple on iPhones and iPads since 2021 makes the use of third-party applications too complex and hurts small companies that rely on advertising revenue, said a press release today by the Autorité de la concurrence (Competition Authority). The system harms “smaller publishers in particular since, unlike the main vertically integrated platforms, they depend to a large extent on third-party data collection to finance their business,” the agency said. User consent obtained via the ATT framework “authorizes the application in question to collect user data for targeted advertising purposes,” the agency said. “If consent is given, the application can access the Identifier for Advertisers (‘IDFA’), the identifier by which each device can be tracked through its use of third-party applications and sites.” The French investigation was triggered by a complaint lodged by advertising industry associations. Ben Lovejoy, correctly calling the decision the “bizarre” at 9to5Mac: Complaints were made in a number of countries — some arguing that it was unfair because Apple exempts its own apps (which are in reality subject to even tighter controls), others saying the loss of revenue forced developers to raise prices to compensate. [...] Although expected, the decision is still inexplicable. ATT involves precisely one popup asking a simple yes/no question. Additionally, Apple lets users switch on a toggle (shown above) to block apps from even asking the question. It’s especially odd given that ATT is a privacy feature, and Europe has the strongest privacy laws in the world. The EU has also previously vindicated Apple’s introduction of ATT. It’s not inexplicable or odd if you view the decision as coming from a perspective where government bureaucracy is viewed as an inherent good, and well-intentioned process is all that matters, not actual results. Read the Autorité de la Concurrence’s decision (which they helpfully do make available in English) and it’s pretty clear: The Autorité found that the ATT framework imposed by Apple is not necessary, insofar as the consent obtained is not valid under the applicable laws, in particular the French Data Protection Act. In practice, the fact that publishers that so wish cannot rely on the ATT framework to comply with their legal obligations means that they must continue to use their own consent collection solutions, known as consent management platforms (“CMPs”). The result is that multiple consent pop-ups are displayed, making the use of third-party applications in the iOS environment excessively complex, as observed by the French data protection authority (Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés — CNIL) in a 2022 opinion issued at the request of the Autorité. It’s ostensibly “not necessary” because French and EU privacy laws are supposedly enough, and all that’s needed. And it’s unfair because now, under ATT, third-party surveillance advertisers who seek to track users across apps on iOS need to ask permission twice — first through the clear-as-a-bell “Ask App Not to Track” / “Allow Tracking” prompt required by Apple, and again through the byzantine but ultimately toothless permission requirements of France and the EU. ATT has had measurable effects because users understand it, and they prefer not to be tracked. EU and French privacy laws are largely ineffective because, in practice, they bury users with confusion. The bureaucratic hurdles they impose are to the benefit, not detriment, of the surveillance ad industry. That’s now proven out by industry groups — the ones ATT successfully tempered — successfully getting France’s regulators to penalize Apple. Users don’t know how to lobby government bureaucracies. It’s clear that only one of these two things — Apple’s ATT or French/EU privacy regulations — was actually effective at reducing tracking: ATT. No one claimed that French or EU privacy laws resulted in Meta losing a fortune because they had to adjust their kleptomaniacal thievery of users’ privacy. But by all accounts, including Meta’s own, ATT cost Meta billions. And yes, ATT hurt small businesses too — small businesses that were built upon surreptitious tracking that users had neither awareness of nor control over. It’s like a consortium of sketchy pawn shops complaining to the authorities after a popular retailer successfully cracked down on an organized shoplifting/pickpocketing ring, and the authorities then fining the retailer for the damage to the pawnbrokers’ business fencing stolen goods — and for exposing the police as ineffective. App Tracking Transparency actually accomplished, in practice, via user-focused plain-language consent, what the EU’s privacy laws were intended to do but do not. This fine boils down to France declaring that Apple shouldn’t have actually done what the EU was pretending to do. They’re acting at the behest of the very developers and advertising companies who were (and still are trying) to conduct cross-app tracking that App Tracking Transparency successfully gave users some control over.
All out today: iOS 18.4 (priority notifications, lots of new languages and EU support for Apple Intelligence). MacOS 15.4 (AI message categorization in Apple Mail, Quick Start for setting up a new machine). VisionOS 2.4 (Apple Intelligence, new Spatial Gallery app, new Vision Pro sibling app for iPhone). WatchOS 11.4 (new Sleep Wake Up alarm option that will emit sound even when the watch is in silent mode). tvOS 18.4 (UI tweaks to TV app). ★
Brian Steinberg and Pat Saperstein, reporting for Variety over the weekend: The White House Correspondents’ Association has canceled plans to have comedian Amber Ruffin perform at its annual dinner on April 26, a new sign of the pressures being brought to bear on news organizations during President Donald Trump’s second term. The journalism group, which has seen its control over interactions with Trump eroded in recent weeks, made the decision after Taylor Budowich, a White House deputy chief of staff, raised comments Ruffin has made in the past that are critical of Trump. Earlier this week, Ruffin told a podcast backed by The Daily Beast that she would not try to make sure her jokes targeted all sides of the political spectrum as the WHCA had requested, and likened the Trump administration to “kind of a bunch of murderers.” Playing to both sides “makes them feel like human beings,” she said, “cause they’re not.” [...] “The WHCA board has unanimously decided we are no longer featuring a comedic performance this year. At this consequential moment for journalism, I want to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division but entirely on awarding our colleagues for their outstanding work and providing scholarship and mentorship to the next generation of journalists,” WHCA president Eugene Daniels wrote to members in a statement. “For the past couple of weeks, I have been planning a re-envisioning of our dinner tradition for this year,” he added. “As the date nears, I will share more details of the plans in place to honor journalistic excellence and a robust, independent media covering the most powerful office in the world.” What an enormous mountain of obvious horseshit this explanation is. The WHCA only announced that Ruffin would be hosting this year’s show on February 4, at which point this lickspittle clown Eugene Daniels was quoted thus by The Hollywood Reporter: “When I began to think about what entertainer would be a perfect fit for the dinner this year, Amber was immediately at the top of my list,” Eugene Daniels of Politico, president of the association, said in a statement on Tuesday. “She has the ability to walk the line between blistering commentary and humor all while provoking her audience to think about the important issues of the day. I’m thrilled and honored she said yes.” So eight weeks ago this obsequious bootlicker Daniels thought Amber Ruffin “would be a perfect fit for the dinner this year” but now, four weeks before the show, he’s trying to claim with a straight face that “For the past couple of weeks, I have been planning a re-envisioning of our dinner tradition for this year”? ★
Calfskin for $1,500, flip-foldables for $5,000, and whatever these are for a lot more. Who needs any sense (or a spelling checker) when you’ve got “elesant charisma / heroic essence”? Or as I wrote in 2012: A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it. ★
Interesting excerpt at the WSJ from Keach Hagey’s upcoming book The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future. (Main link is a gift link, but also here’s a News+ link.) ★
With season 2 of Severance complete (with a remarkable bang), Apple TV+ has slid right into a new prestige series, The Studio, starring (and co-created by) Seth Rogan as the newly-appointed chief of the fictional and dysfunctional Continental Studios in Hollywood. Two episodes in (out of 10 for the debut season), and it is fucking amazing. So far it feels a bit like a cross between Entourage, The Larry Sanders Show, Boogie Nights, and maybe a touch of Curb Your Enthusiasm. But the biggest influence and inspiration is clearly Robert Altman’s 1992 masterpiece The Player, almost certainly the best Hollywood movie about Hollywood moviemaking that ever was or will be made. What The Studio and The Player share is that they’re about the struggle to create great cinematic art within a corporate studio world run by unartistic know-it-all self-important status-obsessed dullards driven by formula and fads — and, simultaneously, they are themselves almost unfathomably complicated and intricate works of cinematic art. They are what they’re about. They achieve what the characters within them fear is no longer achievable. When you get to episode 2 of The Studio, just keep asking yourself “Wait, how are they getting this shot?” The lighting, my god. The whole thing is just an outpouring of homage to the opening shot of The Player, which of course itself calls back, explicitly, to Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. The Studio is, thus far, engaging, surprising, funny, gorgeous, clever, and cinematically ambitious. It’s really quite a thing. I have no idea what’s coming in episodes 3–10, so maybe this piece will look a bit premature, if not foolish, in two months. But if the rest of season one is anything like the first two episodes, The Studio is a classic in the making. The thought also occurs to me that this might be the don’t-over-think-it answer to just what the hell Apple is doing making original shows and movies in the first place. Perhaps Apple’s leadership simply believes, as I do, that cinema is the grandest and greatest form of art the world has ever seen — one that encompasses acting, writing, photography and/or illustration, and music — and but that great cinema is expensive and delicate and needs, from deep-pocketed studios and their deeper-pocketed corporate parents, more than patrons, but champions. And that in a media landscape where such champions of cinema-as-art and art-as-an-essential-public-good are fewer and fewer, it is Apple’s not just opportunity but obligation to step up to the plate. I’ve long thought that one of the minor tragedies of Steve Jobs’s second act is that the timing just didn’t work out to sell Pixar to Apple, instead of to Disney. But make no mistake, a love and appreciation for great cinema is not outside Apple’s DNA. No streamer has a higher hit rate for quality shows. Their movies mostly stink so far, but maybe that’s just the learning curve. The Gorge, for example, feels like an Apple TV movie because it’s so decidedly meh. Not horrible, but not good in any way beyond its intriguing elevator-pitch concept. Wolfs was better but still a grand disappointment given its pedigree. But when it comes to shows, no one is doing better. Severance deserves all its acclaim and attention, and Ben Stiller delivered a season 2 finale that’s arguably the best 86 minutes of filmmaking I’ve seen this decade. And The Studio, to me, feels like an Apple TV show — not because of how it looks, what it’s about, or who’s in it, but simply because it’s so good. Netflix almost never makes shows like this. Neither does HBO now that’s its been subsumed by “Max”. Peacock et al don’t even try.1 One more A+ recommendation: The Agency on Paramount+. Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, Richard Gere, a breakout searing performance by Jodie Turner-Smith, and a great supporting cast in a super-smart, hyper-realistic-feeling spy-thriller/mystery/love story. Gorgeous cinematography too. Just so good in a “feels like it should have been on Apple TV+” way, sort of like how it was so obvious right from S1.E1 that HBO fucked up big-time by passing on *Mad Men*. ↩︎
Matt Birchler: I really thought that the screen recording notifications in macOS Sequoia would be the bane of my existence, but thankfully those have been changed quite a bit from the early betas last summer and they’re totally a non-issue in my book today. However, these god damned “turn on reactions” alerts have got to die in a fire, and they need to have done it yesterday. I understand why Apple decided to show this once. Why though, is it seemingly designed to reappear every time I start a video call? Who is not annoyed by this? ★
MG Siegler: I’m not even talking about Apple and AI here. We’ve done that, a lot. Probably enough — for now (famous last words). I’m talking about Apple in general. Watching this OpenAI video — again, not an event, just a product walk-through with various team members (though this one happened to be “MC’d” by Sam Altman) — I had this old, familiar feeling as they walked through the new features: joy. As ridiculous as it may sound, I was almost giddy around what I was seeing. It’s a feeling that I recall well from many an Apple event back in the day. “Yes, this is exactly what I wanted! They did it!” That kind of thing. This will sound unfair or harsh to Apple, but I really don’t think that it is. I can really only speak for myself here, and perhaps I’m alone — but I suspect that I’m not — it has been a while since I’ve gotten that feeling from an Apple announcement. That loving feeling. I gave the updated ChatGPT the instruction “Create an image of the main characters from ‘Severance’ as Lego figures” and this is the first response it gave me: I gave Apple’s Image Playground, running on MacOS 15.3.2 Sequoia, the equivalent prompt — “The main characters from ‘Severance’ as Lego figures” — and it gave me this as its first response: One of the above images qualifies as “Hey, that could be better but it’s pretty good for the first crack from a simple prompt”, and the other qualifies as “This bears zero resemblance to anyone or anything from Severance”. Guess which one of the two Apple is actively promoting to users as something they should try? ★
You’ll never guess what cohosts Andru Edwards and Jon Rettinger talked to me about on their Geared Up podcast this week. OK, fine, you guessed it. But I bet you didn’t guess that Flash on iPhone came up. Very fun show — I think you’ll enjoy it. ★
“Flagging” isn’t what I was writing about yesterday, with regarded to Daring Fireball unexplained ghosting at Hacker News in recent years. If you look at the list of recent DF articles at HN, only one is explicitly “flagged”. Whoops, now it’s two, but they’re both the same article. Tim Bray: I’m really glad @gruber posted this, because me too. Same timeframe, same behavior. Oliver Reichenstein (from iA): Same for content from iA. Again and again our posts get to the top page and then someone ghosts them. Ghosting started around the same time as DF ghosting, I think. My take: It looks like someone that has enough access just doesn’t like us. ¯(ツ)/¯ I’ve heard privately from a few other bloggers that they’ve seen similar ghosting at HN in recent years. Near the top of Hackers News’s FAQ: How are stories ranked? The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way. Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action. Hacker News presents itself as a forum that is primarily driven by the community, and that ranking and moderation are mostly, perhaps even overwhelmingly, transparent. And that “moderator action” is only a secondary or even tertiary factor. The core HN audience buys into this — the HN audience is comprised of people who view themselves as independent thinkers. Part of why they like and trust HN as an aggregator is that they believe they’re driving it, and that they know how the whole thing works. My thesis is that the above might once have been an accurate summary of how Hacker News functions, but hasn’t been for years, and that there now exists a cabal of moderator/admins with their thumbs on the scale, and their personal predilections are the primary steering force of what’s permitted to surface and what gets ghosted. This moderation cabal operates more or less in secret. Their actions, and thus even their usernames, are invisible — lest the HN community discover that it’s steering things about as much as Maggie Simpson is. Read between the lines of the “Hey, why is this post flagged?” wonderment from genuinely openminded HN users in the comments on my now-flagged submission, and you’ll catch a strong whiff of “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” ★
Back in 2017, the iPhone X was announced alongside the iPhones 8 and 8 Plus in mid-September. The iPhones 8 shipped that month, and I published a review of the iPhones 8 on September 19. The iPhone X, though, wasn’t available to order until October 27, and didn’t start shipping to customers until November 3. It was an unusual iPhone release cycle that year, to say the least. Initial reviews of the much-anticipated iPhone X appeared on October 31, but I’d only had the phone for 24 hours when the embargo dropped, so I published some initial impressions then, but wound up not publishing my full review of the iPhone X until December 26. A few days later I wrote a follow-up regarding a specific new interaction design, “Pressing the Side Button to Confirm Payments on iPhone X”, which I began thus: Occasionally I notice a burst of traffic to Daring Fireball from Hacker News. It’s always short-lived, because for reasons I’ve never seen explained, Daring Fireball articles always get blacklisted from Hacker News once they hit their front page. It’s apparent that a lot of HN readers do not like my work on the basis that they see me as a shameless Apple shill, but it’s a shame the articles get deleted because I like reading the comments. I feel like it keeps me on my toes to read the comments from people who don’t like Daring Fireball. Even after being blacklisted from the Hacker News homepage, though, the comment threads still exist. I went through the Hacker News comments on my iPhone X review today, and a few comments about how Apple Pay works on the iPhone X caught my attention. What I didn’t mention then was that DF’s buried status at HN was, at the time, a relatively new phenomenon. Hacker News started in early 2007 and for a yearslong stretch, Daring Fireball articles seemed more or less appropriately popular there. Articles that I would think would resonate with the HN readership would hit, and get what always seemed to me an appropriate number of comments. At some point in the mid-2010s though, it seemed like DF articles would get downvoted or flagged after hitting the HN front page. I’d been noticing this for some time when I wrote the above in December 2017. But even in 2017, DF articles would get active comment threads on HN occasionally. The Hacker News thread I referenced above, regarding my iPhone X review, garnered 107 comments. In the years after that, DF articles went from being mysteriously disappeared after hitting the HN front page (and gaining some comment traction) to pretty much never hitting the HN front page (and thus never gaining any comment traction). I found this curious, and I couldn’t figure out why or how this was happening — or who was doing it — but I didn’t mention it much. Two years ago, I did mention it again in a footnote, in a piece about the inexplicably poor state of Android apps from a design perspective: It sounds a bit conspiratorial, but for several years now it’s seemed clear to me that Hacker News has Daring Fireball in some sort of graylist. It’s not blacklisted, obviously, given the aforementioned two threads about yesterday’s piece, but nothing I write here ever gains any significant traction there. Ever. And the reason there are two threads for yesterday’s piece is that the first one disappeared from the home page soon after it was posted. I think? In this list of recent Hacker News threads for articles from DF, going back four months, only three have more than 10 comments — and two of those are the threads from yesterday. I don’t know who I pissed off there or why, but I’ve never seen an explanation for this. UPDATE: HN commenter Michiel de Mare has quantified the apparent suppression, based on the ranking of this very article. Exactly what I’ve noticed for years. You can see this yourself right now, with the current list of recent DF articles submitted to Hacker News. Most of them have 0, 1, or 2 comments. Some got up to 3. “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” is the most read, most commented upon things I’ve written in a while. On Hacker News it got just 28 comments before being shitlisted, which, I have to say, is just weird. That’s one piece I’d have thought would resonate with the HN audience, and make for good grist for discussion. Then, after the original thread was shitlisted, someone re-submitted it (perhaps confused that it wasn’t on the HN front page). That re-submission got 1 comment before it too fell to the mysterious shitlist reaper. The one recent exception is “Why Can’t We Screenshot Frames From DRM-Protected Video on Apple Devices?”, which somehow escaped the shitlist and garnered 208 comments. These occasional exceptions to DF’s general shitlisting at HN have always made the whole thing more mysterious to me. There’s clearly no programmatic blacklisting that keeps Daring Fireball articles from being submitted, or from gaining a few comments. But once any traction occurs, something happens and poof, they’re gone from the Hacker News front page. It certainly doesn’t make any sense to me why my off-hand post griping about our inability to screenshot DRM video frames would be an order of magnitude more popular than “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” was. Today, though, I saw a helpful mention on Mastodon that pointed me to an interesting project. An author named Michael Lynch has written a tool to quantify “the highest-ranking personal blogs of Hacker News” since HN’s inception in 2007. According to Lynch’s all-time listing, Daring Fireball ranks #5, which I have to say surprised me, given its years of inexplicable (or at the very least, unexplained) shitlisting status. But Lynch’s tool lets you select date ranges. If you look at 2007 through 2021, Daring Fireball ranked #3, behind only Paul Graham’s renowned eponymous blog and Brian Krebs’s excellent (and also eponymous) Krebs on Security. From 2007 though 2013, DF ranked #2, behind only Graham (who created Hacker News). But if you look at the last four years, from 2021 through 2025, Daring Fireball ranks #72. Maybe I’ve lost my fastball, and I just don’t write so good no more. Or maybe it’s not me, but the Hacker News audience that has changed in recent years.1 But it seems to me there’s something fishy going on. What bothers me isn’t so much that Daring Fireball is shitlisted at Hacker News — even though I really did enjoy reading the commentary on my posts back when they regularly surfaced there, and still do when one slips through the cracks. What bothers me is that it’s unexplained. Which, ultimately, seems not so much censorial as just cowardly. You’d think there’d be a certain kinship between decades-old websites, typeset in small-point Verdana, which stubbornly refuse to update their general layout and design. ↩︎
Oliver Darcy, writing at Status (paywalled — great content, terrible CMS experience that keeps logging me out on all my devices and requires a stupid email magic link to get back in), in a brief interview with Atlantic editor-in-chief and man of the moment Jeffrey Goldberg: It goes without saying that there are many ironies associated with this particular story. One of them is that Goldberg, a journalist who Donald Trump loathes for his past reporting (remember the “suckers and losers” piece), somehow became the unintended recipient of high-level, real-time military intelligence from inside his own inner circle. One wonders whether any heads will roll as a result of the whole matter. On Monday, Trump again made his disdain for Goldberg known, blasting him at a press conference and absurdly claiming The Atlantic is “a magazine that is going out of business.” If anything, of course, publishing a story like the one Goldberg did on Monday proves how strong the outlet currently is. That type of muscular journalism requires skill, strong leadership, and the backing of a courageous publisher. I asked Goldberg about owner Laurene Powell Jobs’ role in the matter. He declined to comment specifically on this particular story, but offered words of praise: “Laurene Powell Jobs is a stalwart and brave publisher at a time when cowardice rules the day.” If it had been a Washington Post reporter who was inadvertently included on the Trump national security team’s Signal group chat, would they have run the story? No fucking way with that abject lickspittle coward Jeff Bezos running the show. ★
The work remains mysterious and important. ★
Hartley Charlton, MacRumors: Apple’s next-generation CarPlay experience is still nowhere to be seen following Porsche’s announcement of a major upgrade of its infotainment system for 2026. The upcoming 2026 model year Porsche Taycan, 911, Panamera, and Cayenne feature an upgraded version of the Porsche Communication Management (PCM) system, making it more responsive, adding Dolby Atmos support, and integrating Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. The new system brings the Porsche App Center, a kind of app store for the vehicle, to all of the new models. It continues to support the standard version of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Support for Apple’s next-generation CarPlay experience is again conspicuously missing from Porsche’s new lineup, and the automaker did not mention it at all during its latest announcement — another bleak sign for the delayed feature. I’d crack a joke about it looking less and less likely that next-gen CarPlay was going to appear in 2024, but I already did that in January, when Apple itself took the date off its CarPlay page. That announcement came at WWDC 2022. In this case (unlike the advanced personalized features of Apple Intelligence) it was actually sensible for Apple to pre-announce the existence of next-gen CarPlay, given the reliance on third parties. But it also should have been clear just how incredibly hard it would be to get third party carmakers up to snuff on being able to ship it, so Apple giving a date, any date, was always odd. Apple doesn’t make a car, and you can’t promise what you can’t control. They should have just said “soon”. ★
Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris, reporting once again for The Atlantic: Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.” President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.” These statements presented us with a dilemma. In The Atlantic’s initial story about the Signal chat — the “Houthi PC small group,” as it was named by Waltz — we withheld specific information related to weapons and to the timing of attacks that we found in certain texts. As a general rule, we do not publish information about military operations if that information could possibly jeopardize the lives of U.S. personnel. That is why we chose to characterize the nature of the information being shared, not specific details about the attacks. The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump — combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts — have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared. I linked yesterday to a quote from Hannah Arendt, whom Wikipedia aptly describes as “one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century”. The quote I linked to was her observation that the ranks of authoritarian governments inevitably wind up being filled with “crackpots and fools” because they’re the people whose loyalty is most assured. In some sense the Jedi mind trick is real — it works on the weak-minded. Regardless of one’s political beliefs, no intelligent person of integrity (as opposed to, say, a foreign mole) would participate in a discussion of obviously classified and highly sensitive war plans in a Signal chat. It’s jarring to see it so clearly but U.S. national security is now led entirely by morons. Most of the quotes on the Goodreads page I linked to, culled from Arendt’s seminal The Origins of Totalitarianism, are related to truth, not idiocy. Here’s one: The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality. And: Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it. And: The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist. When The Atlantic’s initial story hit, everyone responsible in the Trump administration, right up to the president himself, just immediately began telling bald-faced lies about what happened, despite the fact that they knew Jeffrey Goldberg literally had the receipts to prove otherwise. That works, until it doesn’t. ★
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism: Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty. Eight years of Trump was going to be eight years too many no matter how it worked out, but the four year Biden term between Trump terms makes the difference clear. Trump corrected what he perceived as a lack of loyalty/fealty in his first term by surrounding himself with nothing but morons this time. ★
Paul Kafasis: Since they were first enabled last year, I have frequently found Apple Intelligence’s notification summaries for emails to be something less than helpful. Here are some I spotted in just the past few days. The first one of these is particularly interesting because it highlights a key area where LLMs are frustratingly stupid. Kafasis got a notification summary from Apple Intelligence claiming “Package shipped for $427 order” for a used book he’d purchased. The email from Amazon, from which Apple Intelligence gleaned the information, had the price formatted thus: $4²⁷ — omitting the decimal and putting the cents in superscript. That’s a centuries-old formatting idiom for prices that remains common — e.g. at Walmart — to this day. But Apple Intelligence just sees dollar-sign, four, two, seven, and thus $427. That’s just stupid. But where it really gets frustrating is that everyone has to learn this at some point. If you were at Walmart with a kid, and the kid asked why, say, dog food is so expensive, pointing to a sign that says it cost $9⁹⁷ per bag, you’d explain it, once, and the kid would never forget it. “Oh, that’s just another way of writing nine dollars and ninety-seven cents — they do it that way to emphasize the dollar amount and de-emphasize the cents, which really don’t matter.” This would make intuitive sense to the child as well, because they know dog food probably costs about $10 per bag, not $1,000 per bag. There is no way to explain something like this to an LLM. You can’t teach it like we do with children. Or at least you can’t do it in a way that persists. And with Apple Intelligence in particular, you can’t teach it at all. There’s no place in the system where you can correct the very simple, easily-explained mistake it made upon seeing $4²⁷ in an email. But we’ve evolved to expect that we can teach. ★
Josh Marshal, writing at Talking Points Memo: Especially in the national security domain, many things the government does have to remain secret. Sometimes those things remain secret for years or decades. But they’re not secrets from the U.S. government. The U.S. government owns all those communications, all those facts of its own history. Using a Signal app like this is hiding what’s happening from the government itself. And that is almost certainly not an unintended byproduct but the very reason for the use. These are disappearing communications. They won’t be in the National Archives. Future administrations won’t know what happened. There also won’t be any records to determine whether crimes were committed. This all goes to the fundamental point Trump has never been able to accept: that the U.S. government is the property of the American people and it persists over time with individual officeholders merely temporary occupants charged with administering an entity they don’t own or possess. Think this is hyperbole? Remember that when Trump held his notorious meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2019 he confiscated his translator’s notes and ordered him not to divulge anything that had been discussed. Remember that Trump got impeached over an extortion plot recorded in the government record of his phone call with President Zelensky. An intelligence analyst discovered what had happened and decided he needed to report the conduct. These aren’t hypotheticals. They’ve already happened. And he’s even been caught. Which is probably one reason there’s so much use of Signal. ★
Maggie Miller and Dana Nickel, reporting for Politico: The app’s security is viewed as fairly strong due to its robust privacy features and minimal data collection, as well as default end-to-end encryption of all messages and voice calls. The app also includes a function that deletes all messages from a conversation within a set time frame, adding an additional layer of data protection. But experts agree that it shouldn’t be used by government officials as an alternative to communicating through more secure, sanctioned government communications — which Signal is not. “It’s so unbelievable,” a former White House official, granted anonymity to discuss The Atlantic’s report candidly, said Monday. “These guys all have traveling security details to set up secure comms for them, wherever they are.” Signal’s encryption is more than just “fairly strong”. It’s very strong, arguably the gold standard in consumer-available communications. But that’s not the point. The point is it’s a consumer application. This whole fiasco happened because you can just mistakenly add the wrong person to a group conversation, which wouldn’t be possible if the Trump national security team were using appropriate channels. And the disappearing messages thing doesn’t add security. It adds some level of privacy, but it’s an additional factor that makes all of this completely illegal. But avoiding any future scrutiny is almost certainly one reason Trump’s kakistocratic cabinet is using Signal in the first place. The former White House official pointed out that members of Trump’s Cabinet — including the vice president, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, among others — were likely using personal devices, since in most cases, Signal cannot be downloaded onto official federal devices. This alone creates a host of cybersecurity issues. Wrote one DF reader (who has professional experience in this area) to me today, “There is no legal way whatsoever that classified information can be communicated over the public Internet — private device, personally owned device, Chromebook, anything. It is all wildly illegal.” ★
NPR: Several days after top national security officials accidentally included a reporter in a Signal chat about bombing Houthi sites in Yemen, a Pentagon-wide advisory warned against using the messaging app, even for unclassified information. “A vulnerability has been identified in the Signal messenger application,” begins the department-wide email, dated March 18, obtained by NPR. The memo continues, “Russian professional hacking groups are employing the ‘linked devices’ features to spy on encrypted conversations.” It notes that Google has identified Russian hacking groups who are “targeting Signal Messenger to spy on persons of interest.” It’s not a weakness in Signal’s cryptography, it’s a hole in their device-mirroring setup. From that Google Threat Intelligence post, published last month: The most novel and widely used technique underpinning Russian-aligned attempts to compromise Signal accounts is the abuse of the app’s legitimate “linked devices” feature that enables Signal to be used on multiple devices concurrently. Because linking an additional device typically requires scanning a quick-response (QR) code, threat actors have resorted to crafting malicious QR codes that, when scanned, will link a victim’s account to an actor-controlled Signal instance. If successful, future messages will be delivered synchronously to both the victim and the threat actor in real-time, providing a persistent means to eavesdrop on the victim’s secure conversations without the need for full-device compromise. You’d have to be a bit of a doofus to fall for such a phishing attack if you were in a national security leadership position, but, well, our national security leadership positions are currently occupied but what the Russians call “useful idiots”. ★
Thomas Barrabi, reporting for The New York Post: The European Union is set to slap Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta with a fine that could stretch to $1 billion or more for allegedly violating its strict antitrust rules, The Post has learned — setting up a possible showdown with President Trump, who has compared the EU’s penalties to “overseas extortion.” The European Commission, the EU’s antitrust watchdog, is expected to conclude that Meta is not in compliance with the Digital Markets Act, sources close to the situation told The Post on Monday. [...] The fine is expected to be hundreds of millions of dollars and potentially more than $1 billion, the sources said. [...] Apple is also in the EU’s crosshairs and a fine against the iPhone maker could be announced this week or next week, the sources said. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Apple and Meta were likely to face “modest fines” for DMA breaches. EU antitrust chief Theresa Ribera previously said a decision on enforcement actions for both companies was coming in March. ★
Foo Yun Chee, reporting for Reuters under the headline “Exclusive: Apple Set to Stave Off EU Fine Into Browser Options, Sources Say”: Apple is set to stave off a possible fine and an EU order over its browser options on iPhones after it made changes to comply with landmark EU rules aimed at reining in Big Tech, people with direct knowledge of the matter said on Tuesday. The European Commission, which launched an investigation in March last year under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), is expected to close its investigation early next week, the people said. A win’s a win and a closed investigation’s a close investigation, but the browser choice screen never seemed like a problem for Apple. I follow this stuff closely, and have even written (at times extensively) about how dumb and ineffective these mandatory browser choice screens are, and I didn’t realize this investigation was still open, because it seemed so clear Apple had done what they needed to for compliance. So, more interesting to me this is bit buried lower in the article, suggesting the EC is going fine Apple next week over non-compliance with the DMA’s anti-steering provisions: The Commission’s decision to close the investigation early next week will come at the same time as it hands out fines to Apple and Meta Platforms for DMA violations and orders to comply with the legislation, the people said. In this second Apple case, the issue is whether the company imposes restrictions that hinder app developers from informing users about offers outside its App Store free of charge. ★
Apple Newsroom: To celebrate the start of WWDC, Apple will also host an in-person experience on June 9 that will provide developers with the opportunity to watch the Keynote and Platforms State of the Union at Apple Park, meet with Apple experts one-on-one and in group labs, and take part in special activities. Space will be limited; details on how to apply to attend can be found on the WWDC25 website. Right on time: in recent years, WWDC dates have been announced on: Tuesday 30 March 2021 Tuesday 5 April 2022 Wednesday 29 March 2023 Tuesday 26 March 2024 and now today, Tuesday 25 March 2025. Last Tuesday in March next year is March 31 — that’s my guess for next year’s announcement. ★
Yours truly back in May 2023, in a thread on Mastodon (at the time, you needed an invitation code to get into Bluesky, and it was just a few months after Musk’s takeover and remaking of what was once Twitter): Bluesky is going to skyrocket to mainstream popularity and actually replace Twitter, and Mastodon cannot, because Bluesky is being designed to be simple, fun, and — most importantly — easy to understand. I’m not trying to provoke. I like Mastodon, especially using Ivory, and I love the community I’m in here. And maybe our community will stay here. What makes Mastodon good for us nerds is that all the non-nerds aren’t here. But it’s obvious already: regular people instantly grok Bluesky. They’ve had months to sign up for Mastodon and haven’t — because they don’t understand it, and what they see of it doesn’t look like fun. As soon as they see Bluesky they start trying to score an invite code. Bluesky, in both word (stated intentions) and deed (the nascent service as it stands today), aspires to be a better Twitter. An idealized Twitter, perhaps. It even looks just like Twitter — without all the crap. Mastodon was created by and for people who wanted something different from Twitter. So when Twitter refugees show up, it doesn’t feel familiar. Because it’s not supposed to. [...] Hundreds of millions of people liked what Twitter once was, and what it aspired to be. Bluesky might be that. As recently as last September, that prediction wasn’t looking so good. But Bluesky finally got some traction around (and especially after) the election, and the juice it picked up wasn’t fleeting. This isn’t a diss on Mastodon. If I could only use one of these platforms, Mastodon would be it. By far the highest signal-to-noise ratio amongst my timelines, and by far the best engagement with my readers and listeners. It’s a nerdy platform for nerdy users, but with its commitment to true openness, including APIs, it’s also the platform with by far the best and most varied client apps. In the old world, there was one Twitter-like network that mattered: Twitter itself. In the new world, there exists a diaspora of Twitter-like platforms which have each carved out their own vibes. There are pros and cons to the old world and new. I found it much easier, mentally, to have just one place to check, and that place was available through truly excellent native apps for both Mac and iOS. Now that my attention is spread across multiple such networks — (in order of attention) Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and, last and definitely least, but still there, X) — I feel more scattered mentally, but I’m also pretty sure I spend less time overall using all of them combined today than I did for Twitter’s peak decade-or-so, and that I’m better off for that. It helps, too, that the first-party apps for Bluesky and Threads are mediocre on iOS (and Threads, oddly, is quite slow everywhere) and can only be used via the web on the Mac — they don’t even have bad Mac client apps, they have no Mac client apps. Helps that is, insofar as I therefore spend less time using them. I’m greatly looking forward to Tapbots’s upcoming Bluesky client, Phoenix, but in the back of my mind I’m vaguely worried that Phoenix might ultimately make me less productive because the additional joy and efficiency it will add to my Bluesky experience will lead me to spend more time there than I should. A good problem to have. What I didn’t see coming in May 2023 was Meta’s successful launch of Threads that summer. The core problem with Threads is that I don’t think there’s a true vision behind it, other than serving to fuck with Elon Musk and X. It’s always been kind of interesting and kind of fun, and has never been toxic. (Meta’s much-ballyhooed “there’s a new sheriff in town and we aim to please him” content-moderation policy changes in January have seemingly had no effect whatsoever on the tenor or activity on Threads.) But it’s never been really interesting or really fun. It’s a platform without a soul. It aspires to be anodyne, which is very different than empowering users not to feel like they’ve got to dodge a never-ending barrage of turds being thrown by the angry chaos monkeys who’ve overrun X. If Threads does have a vibe, that vibe is blandness. But so while Threads bursting onto the scene in summer 2023 maybe delayed Bluesky’s blossoming, I suspect Threads might have ultimately helped Bluesky by opening the minds of many Twitter refugees into just trying some new alternatives. One size doesn’t fit all. Nor one social network. The bottom line is that I think my May 2023 prediction is proving out. Bluesky is what Twitter of yore aspired to be. Users are in control of what they see in their timelines. Sub-communities are vibrant. Shitbirds get blocked and added to blocklists, not elevated to the top of reply threads because they paid for a blue-check status power-up.. The centralized nature of the platform gives the hardcore federation zealots the heebie-jeebies, but that’s what makes Bluesky understandable and approachable, and I think clearly more performant than Mastodon can ever hope to be. It’s a really cool concept for a Twitter-like platform that, after a slow build-up, has turned into an actual really cool platform, whose focus, first and foremost, is putting users first.
Jon Passantino, writing at Status: Now Threads feels rather lifeless. While users still post there, for many has become something of a second-tier platform — a place that they dump content out of habit, not because they’re having real conversations or finding meaningful engagement. Matt Birchler: I believe Meta that there are hundreds of millions of people signing on every month, but they seem to be doing absolutely nothing there. More interesting stuff is on Bluesky and Mastodon, and better conversation happens on those platforms as well. I feel the same way. Threads has dropped to a decided #3 for me after Mastodon and Bluesky, and (a) I don’t really have room in my head or time in my day for 3 of these platforms, and (b) I’m more than OK with Meta’s entry falling by the wayside. Like, if the answer at the moment for Twitter-style social media is Bluesky (general audience) and Mastodon (nerds), that’s ... the best outcome? Even X (chaos and Musk sycophancy) seems to have a better, more defined vision for what it’s supposed to be than Threads. ★
Bryan Irace: Barring a sharp correction, Apple looks increasingly likely to miss out on a generation of developers conditioned to first reach for tools like Cursor, Replit, or v0 — especially as Apple’s own AI tooling remains notably absent. This goes well beyond enabling new entrants to “vibe code” — experienced mobile developers who, despite history with Xcode and a predilection for building native apps, are begrudgingly swapping out their tools in acknowledgement of the inarguable productivity benefits. [...] App Review has always long been a major source of developer frustration. Authoritarian yet inconsistent policy enforcement aside, it’s simply too hard to distribute software even to your own Apple devices, let alone someone else’s. This isn’t new by any means, but as the time to build an app shrinks from weeks/months to hours/days, it feels more egregious — and thus like more of a liability — than ever before. This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece. I feel like Irace is onto something here that I haven’t seen anyone put their finger on before. The App Store, when it debuted, made developers deliriously happy. The UIKit frameworks (a.k.a. CocoaTouch), Objective-C, and Xcode were all way better ways to create apps for mobile devices than anything else at the time. And for distribution, going through Apple and the App Store was way easier, way more democratic, and 70/30 was way more generous to developers than anything from the various phone carriers around the world. You’d be lucky to get a 30/70 split from the carriers, and they’d only deal with large corporate developers. There were no indie or hobbyist mobile app developers before the App Store. 17 years is a long time, though. And developers long ago stopped seeing the App Store as something that makes them happy, or that reduces friction and hassle from their lives. Instead they view it as a major source of friction and hassle. Apple should have focused on keeping the App Store as a thing that makes developers (mostly) happy all along, not (as things stand today) mostly miserable. Basically, the threat to Apple that the App Store poses is not regulators coming for it. That’s a distraction. The threat, as I’ve long tried to argue, perhaps unsuccessfully, is that market forces will work against it eventually. Developers have long grown resentful toward the technical and bureaucratic hassles of publishing through the App Store, and the size of the purchase commissions Apple keeps for itself. Apple’s commission percentages haven’t grown over time, but a 70/30 or even 85/15 split that in 2008 seemed remarkably generous today seems like a platform engaging in usury and abusive rent-seeking. AI might be the disruption that brings about the “eventually”, because now it’s coming for the developer tooling experience too. If Apple’s native programming frameworks and developer tools aren’t the best, most satisfying, most productive ways to create great apps, what’s left that makes developers happy to be creating for the iOS platform? ★
Lex.Games is an iOS app (and website) for playing eight daily word games. I paid Gruber many thousands of dollars to run this ad for free games which themselves have no ads. Please keep reading. The games: Conlextions: Inspired by NYT’s Connections Lexicogs: Solve crossword-style clues by assembling letter “cogs” By a Vowel: A word jumble game with missing vowels Six Appeal: Wordle with six-letter words There’s also a daily Mini Crossword; a Full-Size Crossword; and Mind Control, which is a whole lot like Mastermind and not actually a word game at all; don’t sue me. Oh, and if you only counted seven games here, the eighth is iOS-only. It’s called Letter Opener, and it’s my favorite. ★
Apple Newsroom: Next month, a new software update will bring lossless audio and ultra-low latency audio to AirPods Max, delivering the ultimate listening experience and even greater performance for music production. With the included USB-C cable, users can enjoy the highest-quality audio across music, movies, and games, while music creators can experience significant enhancements to songwriting, beat making, production, and mixing. Apple also started selling a new $40 USB-C to 3.5mm audio cable — male USB-C on the side that goes into your AirPods Max, male headphone jack on the other side to go into the audio-out port on a Mac or, say, an airplane seat. ★
Andrew Rossignol: I have been diving into the world of large language models (LLMs), and a question began to gnaw at me: could I bring the cutting-edge of AI to the nostalgic glow of my trusty 2005 PowerBook G4? Armed with a 1.5GHz processor, a full gigabyte of RAM, and a limiting 32-bit address space, I embarked on an experiment that actually yielded results. I have successfully managed to achieve LLM inference on this classic piece of Apple history, proving that even yesteryear’s hardware can have a taste of tomorrow’s AI. A fun project, well-explained. Even a great choice of computer to run it on — the 12-inch PowerBook G4 is the one of the best-looking computers ever made. (Via Joe Rossignol.) ★
I read Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny after the election. A collection of 20 essays — each relatively brief, some exceptionally brief — it’s more booklet than book, and can easily be consumed in an afternoon or a few evenings. I finished it with an unsettled feeling. I read it again last week, and my feeling now is both more unsettled and more resolute. Snyder, a plain-speaking history professor at Yale, has a core message, which he’s been hammering since before Trump’s re-election: Do not obey in advance. Resist. The following passage me harder on this second reading, two months into Trump 2.0, than it did in November. From Chapter 19: “Be a Patriot”: It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators. It is not patriotic to cultivate a relationship with Kim Jong Un; or to say that Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin are superior leaders. It is not patriotic to call upon foreign leaders to intervene in American presidential elections. It is not patriotic to cite Russian propaganda at rallies. It is not patriotic to share an adviser with Russian oligarchs. It is not patriotic to appoint advisers with financial interests in Russian companies. It is not patriotic to appoint a National Security Advisor who likes to be called “General Misha,” nor to pardon him for his crimes. It is not patriotic when that pardoned official calls for martial law. It is not patriotic to refer to American soldiers as “losers” and “suckers.” It is not patriotic to take health care from families, nor to golf your way through a national epidemic in which half a million Americans die. It is not patriotic to try to sabotage an American election, nor to claim victory after defeat. It is not patriotic to try to end democracy. A nationalist might do all these things, but a nationalist is not a patriot, A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,” wrote Orwell, tends to be “uninterested in what happens in the real world.” Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism “has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.” A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well-and wishing that it would do better. Democracy failed in Europe in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, and it is failing not only in much of Europe but in many parts of the world today. It is that history and experience that reveals to us the dark range of our possible futures. A nationalist will say that “it can’t happen here,” which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it. I highly recommend the book. Get it at Amazon, Bookshop.org, or Apple Books. ★
Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic (News+ link): The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen. I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing. This is going to require some explaining. [...] The notion of a journalist being accidentally included in a war-planning group of national security leaders — and the very notion that U.S. national security leaders would use Signal to conduct such a group, using their personal phones — is so preposterous that Goldberg had assumed the group was a hoax, with the intention of embarrassing him. But it was real. Earlier today, I emailed Waltz and sent him a message on his Signal account. I also wrote to Pete Hegseth, John Ratcliffe, Tulsi Gabbard, and other officials. In an email, I outlined some of my questions: Is the “Houthi PC small group” a genuine Signal thread? Did they know that I was included in this group? Was I (on the off chance) included on purpose? If not, who did they think I was? Did anyone realize who I was when I was added, or when I removed myself from the group? Do senior Trump-administration officials use Signal regularly for sensitive discussions? Do the officials believe that the use of such a channel could endanger American personnel? I’ll add: Do they sniff glue and eat paste? There’s so much chaos at the moment resulting from the Trump administration’s actions during these first two months that it’s easy to overlook one salient fact: Trump has chosen to surround himself with idiots. ★
MG Siegler returns to the show to talk about the drama surrounding Siri and Apple Intelligence. Sponsored by: WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS — free up to 1 million monthly active users. Check out their latest features from Launch Week. BetterHelp: Give online therapy a try at BetterHelp and get on your way to being your best self. OpenCase: MagSafe perfected that’s thinner, lighter, and more secure. Save 10% with code TALKSHOW. ★
How has your week been? My week was ... busy. That includes a new episode of The Talk Show recorded yesterday, dropping in your favorite podcast app soon. Amidst all the writing (and talking) I’ve been doing, I’m also working on filling up open weeks on the sponsorship schedule for Q2. After a very full February and March, I’ve got a bunch of openings in the next few months — and openings for the next two weeks, starting with this Monday. Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results. If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch. And again, as I type this, the next two weeks remain open. ★
My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF, once again, this last week. This has been WorkOS’s Launch Week, and they’ve got a slew of new features to show. Honestly, though, you should check out their Launch Week page just to look at it — it’s beautiful, fun retro-modern pixel-art goodness. Great typography too. I wish every website looked even half this cool. New features launched just this week include: WorkOS Connect — “Sign in with [Your App]” WorkOS Vault — Encryption Key Management (EKM) and Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK) AuthKit Integrations — Native support for several new identity providers including LinkedIn, Slack, GitLab, BitBucket, Intuit and more. ★
Ookla, the company behind the Speedtest download/upload bandwidth testing app: Although it’s early in the adoption curve for the iPhone 16e, we analyzed the performance of the new device from March 1st through March 12th, and compared it to the performance of iPhone 16, which has a similar design and the same 6.1” screen. Both devices run on the same Apple-designed A18 SoC. When we compare Speedtest Intelligence data from the top 90th percentile (those with the highest performance experience) of iPhone 16e and iPhone 16 users from all three of the top U.S. operators, we see the iPhone 16 performing better in download speeds. However, at the opposite end, with the 10th percentile of users (those who experience the lowest performance) we see the iPhone 16e performing better than the iPhone 16. There are some differences, but overall the 16e’s cellular performance seems great for the spectrums it supports. And given the efficiency claims from Apple, it might be the better overall modem. ★
Emma Roth, The Verge: TechCrunch has a new owner, again. Yahoo has sold the tech news site to the private equity firm Regent for an undisclosed sum, according to an announcement on Friday. Regent is the same company that snapped up Foundry, the firm behind outlets like PCWorld, Macworld, and TechAdvisor on Thursday. Founded in 2005, TechCrunch has experienced many shakeups in ownership after AOL acquired the site in 2010. ★
My number one tip for becoming a Mac power user is to get into Keyboard Maestro. Using Keyboard Maestro feels like gaining superpowers. I keep meaning to write more about Keyboard Maestro, and so I’m just going to start documenting all the little use cases I find for it. Here’s one from today. I use MarsEdit to publish at least 99 percent of the posts on this site. (The other 1 percent are posts I create on my phone, using the web interface for Movable Type.) I use MarsEdit a lot. About once a week or so, I accidentally try to paste text in MarsEdit when I think I have text on my clipboard, but it’s actually an image. When you paste an image in MarsEdit, it’s not like pasting into Mail or Notes or TextEdit, where the image just goes into the text. So MarsEdit, trying to be helpful, opens its Upload Utility window — which, if I were using WordPress or some other CMS, might allow to me upload the image to my server for referencing from the HTML of the blog post. That’s not how my system works, and not how I want it to work, so every time this happens I have to close the Upload Utility window. And every time, I try to do this by hitting the Esc key on my keyboard. But the Upload Utility window isn’t a dialog box with a Cancel button that would be triggered by Esc. It’s a regular window. So after hitting the Esc key, which doesn’t do anything in this context, I then remember, once again, that I need to hit ⌘W instead. (I think I don’t naturally think to hit ⌘W because my instincts tell me ⌘W would try to close the blog window I’m writing in.) Today it happened again, and finally the notion occurred to me that I could fix this with Keyboard Maestro. My first thought was that I could create a macro that would close the frontmost window in MarsEdit if, and only if, the frontmost window was named “Upload Utility”. A second later it occurred to me that I could probably do better than that, and prevent the Upload Utility window from opening in the first place if I ever try to paste an image in MarsEdit. I was right. This wasn’t just super easy to create in Keyboard Maestro, it was super quick. I’ve spent 10× more time writing about this macro here than I did creating it. I think that’s why I so seldom write about my little hacks in Keyboard Maestro — they not only save me time and eliminate annoyances once they’re created, but they’re so easy to create that I just get back to whatever I was previously doing after making a new one. First, I have a group (think: folders) in Keyboard Maestro for every app for which I’ve created app-specific macros. You just create a new group and set it to only be available when one (or more) specific applications are active. Inside my group for MarsEdit, I created a new macro named “Don’t Paste Images”. It’s triggered by the hot key sequence ⌘V. That means every single time I paste in MarsEdit, this macro will run. Keyboard Maestro is so frigging fast that I’ll never notice. (Keyboard Maestro macros execute so fast that in some scenarios, you have to add steps to pause for, say, 0.2 seconds to keep the macro from getting ahead of the user interface it’s manipulating.) The macro executes a simple if-then-else action with the following pseudocode logic: if the System Clipboard has an image play a sound else simulate the keystroke ⌘V That’s the whole thing. And it worked perfectly the first time I tried it. Here’s a screenshot of my macro. So if I type ⌘V in MarsEdit, and the clipboard contains an image, I just hear a beep. (I could just default to the system beep, but I chose the standard MacOS “Bottle” sound just for this macro — I sort of want to know that it’s this macro keeping me from pasting whatever text I wrongly thought was on my clipboard, so I want a distinctive sound to play.) Nothing gets pasted, so MarsEdit’s Upload Utility window doesn’t appear. If the clipboard doesn’t contain an image, then Keyboard Maestro simulates a ⌘V shortcut and that gets passed to MarsEdit, and from my perspective as a user, it’s just like a normal paste of the text I expected. I have a few macros that work like this, where the macro is trigged by an application’s own keyboard shortcut, and the macro will (if certain conditions are met) pass through the same simulated keyboard shortcut to the application. When I first tried this, many years ago, I was half worried that it would trigger an infinite loop, where the simulated keystroke from the Keyboard Maestro macro would re-trigger the macro. I was wrong to worry — Keyboard Maestro is too clever for that. The best part is, while writing this very blog post, the macro saved me from seeing that cursed Upload Utility window once more, because I had the screenshot of the macro on my clipboard, when I thought I had copied the URL for it on my server.
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