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Elie Mystal: Birthright Citizenship Ruling is ‘A Historic, Five-Alarm Catastrophe’ ⚙︎
Elie Mystal, writing powerfully for The Nation:
The legal upshot of the Supreme Court’s monumentally disastrous decision in Trump v. CASA (more commonly known as “the birthright citizenship case”) is chaos. Utter legal chaos. In its ruling on Friday, the court’s usual six monarchists granted Donald Trump’s request to reexamine various nationwide injunctions preventing Trump and Stephen Miller from implementing their plans to revoke birthright citizenship to any American who doesn’t happen to be white. With the legal sleight of hand so beloved by the Roberts court, the ruling doesn’t actually allow Trump to end birthright citizenship. It just makes it incredibly difficult for courts to stop him from ending birthright citizenship. It’s a distinction, one that lawyers will try to exploit for an entire rearguard action to defend citizenship in this country, but one that’s unlikely to make much of a difference if you happen to be born on the Republican side of the tracks. Once you read the fine print, it becomes clear that this decision is a historic, five-alarm catastrophe.
I love reading Mystal because he doesn’t mince any words.
The decision means that some courts, districts, and states will still defend the concept of birthright citizenship, while others will not. That could mean that whether or not a child born in America on or after June 27, 2025, is considered a citizen of the United States will depend on what state, or even county, that child happens to be born in.
If that setup sounds familiar, it should. It is exactly how this country determined citizenship from June 21, 1788, (when the Constitution was ratified) until July 9, 1868 (when the 14th Amendment was ratified).
I cannot begin to express how abhorrent and terrifying I find this decision.
Mystal writes that “one’s fundamental rights should not wildly change if they miss their exit on the interstate.”
Having fundamental rights shift as you move between states—a citizen here, not a citizen there—means a loss of rights for women, LGBTQ+, minorities, and, inevitably, a return to slave states.
Imagine you’re born in California, where your rights as a citizen of the United States of America are recognized. You hop on a plane to New York (another state that will recognize your American citizenship), and your plane is diverted mid-flight to Texas. It’s boarded by masked ICE agents, and you are shackled and dragged off, because in Texas, you are not a citizen of America. You have no rights. You can be held indefinitely or deported to a country you’ve never been to—legally, with no recourse.
What other rights can be stripped from you? How about your right as a woman to decide who—or whether—you marry? If you’re a LGBT couple, your marriage might be illegal in Utah. Your interracial relationship? Void in West Virginia. Georgia already forced a brain-dead woman to give birth in Georgia. What makes you think that won’t be extended to all women?
It’s fashionable to say that the court’s ruling is not really about birthright citizenship, because the legal question focused on the power to issue nationwide injunctions. But that sanewashing of the court’s opinion does not survive its first contact with reality. By taking away the ability of courts to enter nationwide injunctions in this case, the court is giving Trump carte blanche to violate the constitutional definition of citizenship in any district where a friendly Trump judge will allow him to. And, in practice, this ruling will extend to every other single issue where Trump has been stopped thanks to a nationwide injunction.
And here is how we return to a country with slave states. Trump is one executive order away from declaring that “slavery is legal.” Obviously California, New York, and the rest of the “blue” states will challenge the order, and win. But it will only be enforceable in those states (at best—as Mystal notes, the nature of this ruling might make it valid only for those who themselves are part of the lawsuit). In states where there is no challenge—or a challenge is lost—slavery will be legal.
If you think I’m being hyperbolic and irrational, think back a few months to when the idea of abducting of a legal visa holder in broad daylight by masked men seemed hyperbolic. Or to when deporting a man protected from deportation was an irrational idea. Or to just a few days ago, when a Supreme Court decision stripping lower federal courts of their authority seemed absurd.
Indeed, this decision places virtually unchecked power in the hands of the Supreme Court. The “court’s usual six monarchists” (as Mystal calls them) have set themselves up as the most powerful arbiters of what’s legal, rendering their decisions as untouchable. Any law can be declared unconstitutional. Any executive order can be deemed lawful. If they don’t like what Trump is doing, they can constrain his actions—unless, perhaps, he agrees to do something for them, I suppose. As Mystal notes,
We’re living in a world where six Republican Supreme Court justices used the courts of a monarchy we revolted against as the controlling authority on whether the president of the United States has to follow the Constitution.
Living Colour on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert ⚙︎
It took exactly three seconds to know I’d be linking to this Living Colour appearance on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert. Living Colour is one of my all-time favourite bands—I’ve listened to Vivid possibly hundreds of times, and named my post-college creative endeavors “Broken Hearts Productions” after one of their tracks.
Growing up in New York in the late ’80s, I caught them early in their rise. Hard rock was new to me, and Black hard rock artists were a rarity. Living Colour pried open a genre of music I didn’t know existed, and forged a core part of my musical identity. They reminded the world—and me—that Black musicians went way beyond jazz, reggae, and soul. My everlasting thanks to Anton, my friend of 40-plus years, for introducing me to them.
The band sounds phenomenal, especially Corey Glover’s wails—enjoy it on a big screen and your best headphones—but the concert was all too short. I ended up watching it twice, back to back—then immediately started playing the albums.
What’s your favorite color, baby?
Apple Sends Push Notification Ad, Violating its Own Guidelines ⚙︎
John Gruber over at Daring Fireball summarizes the recent controversy over Apple’s vomitous use of an Apple Wallet Push Notification to promote F1 The Movie, adding:
iOS 26 adds new settings inside the Wallet app to allow fine-grained control over notifications, including the ability to turn off notifications for “Offers & Promotions”. That’s good. But (a) iOS 26 is months away from being release to the general public; and (b) at least for me, I was by default opted in to this setting on my iOS 26 devices.
I was also opted in by default on iOS 26 (beta 2)—I’ve since turned it off.
The Wallet app wasn’t the only transgressor; I received a notification from the new-to-iOS 26 Apple Vision Pro app.
The Apple Vision Pro app has a “New Content Available” Push Notification setting (defaulting to opt in, natch). It would reasonably cover the first half of this notification—I want to know when new Apple Vision Pro content is released—but tacking on the F1® ad puts me in the wholly unacceptable position of either allowing tacky ads, or not learning about new immersive content. (I have, of course, chosen the latter.)
Unsurprisingly, Apple has App Review Guidelines covering this exact scenario. Also unsurprisingly, Apple is violating its own guidelines:
4.5.4 Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used to send sensitive personal or confidential information. Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out of receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.
That’s pretty clear-cut, and Apple violates all three parts:
- It sent a Push Notification for a promotion without customers “explicitly” opting in to receive them.
- The publicly available version of iOS offers no way to opt out of those notifications.
- iOS 26 beta adds the required option to opt out from promotional pushes, but defaults customers to opt in.
This is a core system app interrupting you, promoting a sale by a movie-ticketing company, to push you to go see the platform vendor’s new movie.
Why not just pop up random ads all the time, always creating new channels that everyone’s opted-into by default so you can never keep up with opting out of them all?
Oh wait, that’s already what happens.
Apple’s as bad as everyone else. They don’t respect their customers — we’re fodder.
They truly have no standards anymore.
I’d say “Apple has lost their way” but they’ve been abusing Push Notifications—and customer trust—for so long they’ve clearly chosen this path. They haven’t strayed—it’s their strategy.
Surprising No One, Trump Mobile Pulls ‘Made in America’ Claim ⚙︎
[…] sometime in the last several days, the Trump Mobile site appears to have been scrubbed of all language indicating the phone is to be made in the USA. (Like, for instance, the huge banner on the homepage that says the T1 is “MADE IN THE USA.” Just to name one example.)
Instead, the Trump Mobile website now includes what can only be described as vague, pro-American gestures in the direction of smartphone manufacturing. The T1’s new tagline is “Premium Performance. Proudly American.” Its website says the device is “designed with American values in mind” and there are “American hands behind every device.” Under Key Features, the first thing listed is “American-Proud Design.” None of this indicates, well, anything. It certainly doesn’t say the device is made in the USA, or even designed in the USA. There are just… some hands. In America.
Someone probably whispered “lawsuit” into a Trumpian ear, since “Made in USA” has a very specific legal meaning, state Attorneys General might want a word, oh, and there’s this:
[…] the Lanham Act gives any person (such as a competitor) who is damaged by a false designation of origin the right to sue the party making the false claim.
(Imagine Apple and Google using the Lanham Act to challenge the claim? Fireworks and popcorn.)
Several specs of the purported device were also changed or yanked from the site—the screen is now 6.25“ instead of 6.78”, and the previously claimed 256 GB storage and 12 GB memory are nowhere to be found. The release timing is also changed, to “later this year” instead of August or September.
Despite the scrubbing and rewording, Trump Mobile still claims, in a statement to USA Today, that the T1 Phone will be made in the U.S:
Chris Walker, a Trump Mobile spokesperson, dismissed the report, saying that “T1 phones are proudly being made in America. Speculation to the contrary is simply inaccurate.”
(Interesting that this statement only went to USA Today, and no other news outlet—including The Verge.)
The T1 site now has this completely vapid claim about the phone:
it’s brought to life right here in the USA. With American hands behind every device […]
I previously wagered that
someone will get a hundred devices’ worth of Chinese cellphone parts and screw them together in their garage, and that will satisfy the “Made in America” claim.
I’ll bet that’s what they mean by “brought to life,” but perhaps even that low bar will prove too ambitious for the Grifter-in-Chief’s family business—I fully expect this phone will never ship.
ICE Is Using Smartphones for Facial Recognition ‘To Identify Unknown Subjects in the Field’ ⚙︎
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is using a new mobile phone app that can identify someone based on their fingerprints or face by simply pointing a smartphone camera at them, according to internal ICE emails viewed by 404 Media. The underlying system used for the facial recognition component of the app is ordinarily used when people enter or exit the U.S. Now, that system is being used inside the U.S. by ICE to identify people in the field.
A reminder that technology used to expose illicit behavior can also be tools of autocracy and repression.
Perhaps it’s time to invest in a pair of anti-infrared glasses.
New Site Uses Facial Recognition to Identify LA Cops ⚙︎
A new site, FuckLAPD.com, is using public records and facial recognition technology to allow anyone to identify police officers in Los Angeles they have a picture of. The tool, made by artist Kyle McDonald, is designed to help people identify cops who may otherwise try to conceal their identity, such as covering their badge or serial number.
“We deserve to know who is shooting us in the face even when they have their badge covered up,” McDonald told me when I asked if the site was made in response to police violence during the LA protests against ICE that started earlier this month. “fucklapd.com is a response to the violence of the LAPD during the recent protests against the horrific ICE raids. And more broadly—the failure of the LAPD to accomplish anything useful with over $2B in funding each year.”
Finally, an acceptable use of facial recognition. More like this, please.
Longtime Apple Employee Paula Bozinovich Among Victims of Lake Tahoe Boat Tragedy ⚙︎
A sudden storm on Lake Tahoe this past Sunday capsized a powerboat, and eight people died, among them Josh Pickles (a DoorDash executive), and his parents, Terry Pickles and longtime Apple employee Paula Bozinovich. Brian Croll (a now-retired Apple Product Marketing VP) emailed Daring Fireball’s John Gruber to share a touching reflection on Bozinovich’s impact on Apple:
Paula was an employee who you are not going to see profiled in any books on the history of Apple or Steve Jobs. She worked closely with the ops team to ensure CDs and then DVDs shipped on time and correctly packaged in a box. She knew all the systems and the right people to make things happen. She was always committed to getting things better than just right — perfect. Paula’s extraordinary commitment, along with all the hundreds of other unheralded employees, translated the vision of Steve, the designers, the engineers, and the marketing people into a shipping product.
One of the secrets behind Apple’s success has been its ability to execute. Paula was an important part of that fine-tuned machine. She was also quite a character!
I’m sending you this because I’ve seen front page obituaries of executives who probably did way more harm than good to their companies, and yet when you scratch the surface of a successful company you find that people like Paula make all the difference.
The Apple employee community is surprisingly small in spite of the company’s size, and losing someone from the community, even if we don’t know the person, hurts. Though I’ve never met Paula, I’ve known many people like her: the unheralded people who made, and make, Apple hum. The high-profile names may get all the glory, but Apple would be nothing without people like Paula. I’m grateful to Brian for sharing this tribute.
My sincerest condolences to the friends and family of Paula and all those who died in this tragedy.
A Brief Musing on Lisa Melton’s Transcoding Tools and Ripping Discs in the Age of Streaming
Speaking of Lisa Melton, she’s the creator of the fantastic Video Transcoding command-line tools, which I used for years to rip purchased Blu-ray and DVD discs so we can easily watch them on Apple TV via Plex. Her scripts (which she completely rewrote this year) saved me countless hours of fiddling with finicky commands. I’m very thankful for her and her work.
(She also started the Safari and WebKit projects at Apple. So you’re probably thankful for her and her work, too.)
My video ripping setup is ancient: I built it in 2016, powered by an Intel Mac mini and a pair of (now surprisingly expensive) LG Blu-ray drives ($48 then, $92 today). I tore it down when I moved in 2022 and bought an M1 Mac mini shortly after in anticipation of a rebuild—which never materialized. If I did a rebuild today, I’d likely trade in that barely used M1 for an M4 Mac mini, for both speed and compactness.
Of course, in this Golden Age of streaming, there’s less of a need to rip media—most of what we watch is readily available through any one of the many services to which we subscribe. Most Blu-ray discs now come with a digital streaming code (very handy!). But as beloved TV shows and movies disappear from the internet with alarming regularity, it’s comforting to know I can watch, for free, the dozens (hundreds?) of videos sitting on my Plex server—many of which aren’t available for streaming anywhere.
That’s the benefit of buying (and ripping) your media: you never have to worry about it going away because “the rights expired” or some such drivel. I had a minor scare recently when my Apple TV showed that Star Trek: The Next Generation—which I’m watching for the first time!—wouldn’t be available for streaming in the coming weeks, while I still had two and a half seasons to go! Fortunately it turned out to be departing from a different streamer (Pluto, not Paramount+) but I immediately priced out the boxed set—it was a timely reminder of why I prefer buying physical media for any content I care about.
(When I can, that is. I’m hot that I still can’t buy a Hamilton 4K Blu-ray: it’s only available on Disney+. I fear Disney will one day pull it from its platform and stick it in “the vault”.)
Lisa’s tools have helped rip dozens of discs and thousands of hours of video. When I (eventually) rebuild my setup, her tools will again be the brains of the operation.
Skrmetti Ruling ‘Is a Tortured Mess’ ⚙︎
Matt Ford at The New Republic, on the poorly reasoned Supreme Court decision in United States v. Skrmetti (which I referenced in passing), under the headline “The Supreme Court’s Anti-Transgender Ruling Is a Tortured Mess”:
It is fitting that Roberts wrote the majority opinion in United States v. Skrmetti because it is representative of his court’s slipshod approach to major, high-profile cases. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority effectively engineered a landmark case on transgender rights in which no transgender person is a named litigant, reducing them and their interests to an easily ignored abstraction. The result is tortured reasoning, misapplied precedents, and a transparently outcome-oriented ruling. […]
The ruling, on its own terms, drew sharp criticism from the court’s three liberal justices. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor castigated the majority for what she saw as a blow to sex-based discrimination protections in general—and for the impact it would have on transgender Americans across the country. “By retreating from meaningful judicial review exactly where it matters most, the Court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims,” she wrote. “In sadness, I dissent.”
The Tennessee law notes PBS News:
bans puberty blockers and hormone treatments for transgender minors, but it allows the same drugs to be used for other purposes.
The logical hoops the Court jumped through to reach this conclusion boggle the mind. The world continues to trample over transgender rights, and there’s no end in sight. It’s sickening.
Lisa Melton on Her Transition: ‘No, I’m Not Okay’ ⚙︎
Lisa Melton, an early-2000s Apple colleague:
My post here should be a celebration of my coming out publicly. On Mastodon, no less. Two years ago today. Yay! I’m still so surprised at and so grateful for the positive reaction I received there. Those are good people.
But this is more than an anniversary party. It’s a vulgar rant. It’s catharsis. It’s a celebration of a different kind of triumph.
And it’s a long story. So, strap in and get uncomfortable. Just like I did.
Lisa paints a harrowing tale of a gender confirmation surgery delayed by unexpected medical issues and further exacerbated by the unwelcome “orange-faced fascist returning to power”—a potentially deadly combination that could prevent her from completing this “life saving” surgery:
I am not hysterical when I say that Cheeto Jesus and his goons are trying to exterminate me and every other trans person in this country. And while they’re at it, make sure no one else ever considers or attempts transition. Mind you, just that last plan will kill people.
She ends:
That’s where we are, folks. That’s how bad it is for trans people. Wake. The. Fuck. Up!
Am I angry and bitter about this? You’re goddamn right I am.
Now, I’m still going do my best to thrive, and not just survive, in spite of all of this horror. But that doesn’t mean I’m okay with it.
You shouldn’t be either.
Especially relevant in light of the recent Supreme Court decision to deny minors the right to gender-affirming care.
‘The Onion’ Pens an Open Letter Calling for Congress to ‘Do Absolutely Nothing’ ⚙︎
The Onion Editorial Board on Friday, in an open letter (“Congress, Now More Than Ever, Our Nation Needs Your Cowardice”):
Who will stand up for our democracy? This question, fraught in even the most peaceful times, has only grown more pressing as our country approaches its 250th anniversary. Each passing day brings growing assaults on essential liberties like freedom of speech and due process. Meanwhile, our delicately assembled legal system faces a constant barrage of threats. Even as this issue reaches publication, the U.S. military has been deployed against peaceful protestors. We teeter on the brink of collapse into an authoritarian state. That is why, today, The Onion calls upon our lawmakers to sit back and do absolutely nothing.
Members of Congress—now, more than ever, our nation desperately needs your cowardice.
The Onion also placed this as a full-page ad in Sunday’s print edition of The New York Times (a fitting choice, as the do-nothing paper of record) and sent physical copies to each member of Congress.
One of many reasons I subscribed to The Onion.
Donald Trump Bombs Iran Without Congressional Approval, Immediately Calls for Peace ⚙︎
Donald Trump on “Truth” Social (the official channel for presidential proclamations, but reposted to X/Twitter for actual reach):
We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan. All planes are now outside of Iran air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow. All planes are safely on their way home. Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.
The “Thank you for your attention to this matter” confirms it’s an official communiqué, of course, but it’s the all-caps call for peace—after dropping 30,000-pound bombs on a sovereign country without congressional approval, thereby pushing America to the brink of yet another Middle East war—that shows just how seriously Trump takes this.
This unconstitutional military strike should be a clearly impeachable offense. I’m sure our do-nothing Congress will get right on that.
(An aside: What has happened to John Fetterman?)
I’m reminded today of two articles. First, this 2016 New York Times piece by Maureen Dowd:
Second, this 2023 Wall Street Journal opinion from J.D. Vance (Apple News+):
Both have aged like fine wine in a 100º cellar.
Time’s AI Audio Briefs Aren’t Bad, but They’re Not Good Either ⚙︎
Time’s press release on “How the TIME AI Audio Brief Was Built”:
The new audio briefing tool uses generative AI to present the day’s top news stories, as written by TIME’s reporters, into an engaging discussion between two AI bots, Henry and Lucy, named after one of the founders of TIME, Henry Luce. Our goal is to create an experience that makes our journalism more digestible and interactive. The audio briefing is designed to provide trusted and accurate reporting in a conversational tone. It is limited to discuss only articles previously published by TIME.
I won’t go so far as to call these AI audio briefs bad, exactly, but they’re definitely not good. The “distinct voices” of “Henry and Lucy” are at once too earnest, overly enthusiastic, and bland. There is minimal tonal variation, and what little variation exists sounds out of place. The transitions between stories are forced. It’s exactly what it sounds like: an AI-generated script read by AI bots. Compare this to NPR News Now, which offers “the latest news in five minutes,” as read by one of NPR’s human hosts. It’s night and day.
Of course, most people probably won’t care (or even notice) that their news is generated and delivered by AI. Some may even welcome it, if it gives them the option to select the stories—and voices—they want to hear.
As artificial as this audio sounds, it’s not unlistenable—and I know AI audio will inexorably improve until it’s indistinguishable from human voices. No doubt Time and other news organizations welcome this—it benefits their bottom line. As noted in Time’s press release, the creation of these audio briefs “is a fully automated process.”
As ex-CBS journalist Sam Litzinger wrote when linking to this story, “Goodbye #radio news jobs.”
The 3.5% Rule ⚙︎
David McRaney, host of the terrific You Are Not So Smart podcast, recently interviewed Erica Chenoweth, who formulated the 3.5% rule that’s gone viral recently. The rule—based on Chenoweth’s (and Maria J. Stephan’s) research—finds that large-scale, non-violent political movements have always succeeded if they reach 3.5% of the population. Many succeeded at just 1.8% of the population.
I noted in my aforelinked No Kings/No Coverage that those protests represented “1.2–1.8% of the U.S. population.” The people of America are fired up. There’s still a long ways to go, but change feels possible.
McRaney’s interview leans philosophical and personal—we learn why Chenoweth landed on political science as a career, for example. For a more overtly political discussion, listen to Chenoweth’s conversation on Pod Save America with Jon Favreau (“The 3.5% Protest Rule That Could Bring Down Trump”).
(In Overcast: You Are Not So Smart, Pod Save America.)
Four Million Want ‘No Kings’—Media Want No Coverage ⚙︎
Alaina Demopoulos, at The Guardian:
The scale of last weekend’s “No Kings” protests is now becoming clearer, with one estimate suggesting that Saturday was among the biggest ever single-day protests in US history.
You’d never know it from the so-called “mainstream” media’s dearth of coverage.
You’d think 4–6 million people protesting anything would be front-page news everywhere, and warrant wall-to-wall coverage. But no. It’s like they’re trying to avoid antagonizing Trump—either out of fear or allegiance. Regardless, the voices of this many people—1.2–1.8% of the U.S. population—will only grow louder and more insistent.
‘Trump Calls for Reparations for Families Who ‘Lost Their Workers’ on Juneteenth’ ⚙︎
Donald Trump, per Ben Sobieck at The Hard Times:
Unfortunately, this holiday, and I use that term lightly, marks a time when everyday southern families who worked hard to build our 50 USA states, and we still might add Canada, lost all their workers. These people created jobs, they made America great, and a new addition to my Big Beautiful Bill will pay them reparations for all the workers they lost.
Satire? Or precognition? Who can say these days?
‘The Hollowness of This Juneteenth’ ⚙︎
Vann R. Newkirk II, writing for The Atlantic on the occasion of today’s Juneteenth holiday (paywalled; Apple News+ link):
The purpose of Juneteenth was always a celebration of emancipation, of the Black community’s emergence out of our gloomy past. But it was also an implicit warning that what had been done could be done again. Now millions of schoolchildren will enjoy a holiday commemorating parts of our history that the federal government believes might be illegal to teach them about.
I once advocated for Juneteenth as a national holiday, on the grounds that the celebration would prompt more people to become familiar with the rich history of emancipation and Black folks’ agency in that. But, as it turns out, transforming Juneteenth into “Juneteenth National Independence Day” against the backdrop of the past few years of retrenchment simply creates another instance of hypocrisy. What we were promised was a reckoning, whatever that meant. What we got was a day off.
I've felt this conflict for several years now. Call it the flip side to joyous celebrations.
A Celebration of Juneteenth: ‘Black Joy & Community’ ⚙︎
Taryn Finley, writing for Refinery29, on last Sunday’s Juneteenth celebration in Fort Greene Park:
Despite the gloomy weather, thousands of attendees gathered to enjoy the sixth annual event […]
Attended by creatives, engineers, doctors, nurses, businesspeople, children, babies, and everybody in between, their Juneteenth event has become a homecoming and annual sanctuary—a place where people can reconnect and feel at ease. Whether folks choose to be by the DJ booth dancing, on the grass playing games or chilling along the perimeter of the park, just enjoying the day, it’s become a space for Black people to just be.
Texas Highways celebrates Juneteenth with “A Visual History” of historic photos, including “The official handwritten record of General Order No. 3” which starts:
The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, “all slaves are free”.
Timothy Welbeck, in The Conversation, asks “What’s the right way to mark Juneteenth?” and provides a helpful recitation on the origins and meaning of the day, from the issuance of General Order No. 3, to its recognition as a national holiday, to the backlash of today.
Trump Unveils $500 ‘T1 Phone’ and Overpriced Mobile Plan for the MAGA Crowd ⚙︎
By now you’ve no doubt heard of the Trump family’s most recent grift opportunity—sorry, business venture: a cellular brand called “Trump Mobile,” with a tacky, $500, gold-colored phone dubbed the “T1 Phone” (allegedly “Made in the USA”) and a mobile plan called “The 47 Plan” (which, at $47.45 per month, is roughly double that of other similar plans).
I’m not sure which is the bigger grift: a company owned by the current president selling this service and phone, or claiming the phone will be “Made in USA” (the press release says “designed and built in the United States”).
It’s complete bunko.
The Wall Street Journal bluntly states that “Trump’s Smartphone Can’t Be Made in America for $499 by August” (paywalled; Apple News+ link):
A spokesman for the Trump Organization said in an email that “manufacturing for the new phone will be in Alabama, California and Florida.”
[…]
“There’s absolutely no way you could make the screen, get that memory, camera, battery, everything” in the U.S., said Tinglong Dai, a professor of operations management and business analytics at Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School.
Dai estimated it would take “at least five years” for the U.S. to establish the infrastructure necessary to make “Made in USA” smartphones a real possibility.
Allison Johnson, The Verge:
A spokesperson for the Trump Organization doubled down on this claim to The Wall Street Journal, saying “manufacturing for the new phone will be in Alabama, California and Florida.”
But unless the organization has somehow hidden an entire domestic mobile device supply chain right under our noses, this is virtually impossible.[…]
More likely the T1 will be a white label device with most or all of its production handled by a Chinese ODM, or original design manufacturer.
I’ll wager someone will get a hundred devices’ worth of Chinese cellphone parts and screw them together in their garage, and that will satisfy the “Made in America” claim.
Joseph Cox at 404 Media tried to pre-order the phone with a $100 down payment:
The website failed, went to an error page, and then charged my credit card the wrong amount of $64.70. I received a confirmation email saying I’ll receive a confirmation when my order has been shipped, but I haven’t provided a shipping address or paid the full $499 price tag. It is the worst experience I’ve ever faced buying a consumer electronic product and I have no idea whether or how I’ll receive the phone.
Todd Spangler, Variety:
Trump Mobile and its carrier partners are subject to regulatory oversight by the Federal Communications Commission, which is headed by Trump-appointed FCC chairman Brendan Carr.
No conflict of interest here, I’m sure.
Trump Illegally Delays Legally Required TikTok Ban—Again ⚙︎
Clare Duffy and Samantha Waldenberg reporting for CNN:
“President Trump will sign an additional Executive Order this week to keep TikTok up and running,” Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, said in a statement. “As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark. This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.”
This would be the third extension signed by Trump to stave off the shutdown or sale of TikTok—something he doesn’t have actual authority to do, by the way. What’s the point of making a big stink and passing a law over “national security” if it’ll just be ignored? As Mike Masnick notes at TechDirt, this third snooze button proves it was always bullshit.
Ditching Google Analytics for Plausible
When I launched JAG’s Workshop a year ago, I instinctively added Google Analytics (GA) to the site. Ghost (the software powering jagsworkshop.com) offers basic analytics: how many emails were opened, links clicked, and revenue generated—useful for paid email newsletters, less so for free-to-read, blog-style sites like this one.
GA was the fastest, lowest effort way to see how many visitors—that is, readers—I was enticing to the site. Google makes this drop-dead simple: Set up and configure a GA account, then copy and paste a few lines of Javascript into your HTML <head>…</head> tag. No muss, no fuss, no cost.
Except, of course, there was a cost: Google gets my (and your!) data. I’m not a fan of being tracked online, and I’m guessing neither are you. Heck, I actively decline tracking cookies on every site that offers it. Sending yet more data to Google felt… wrong. Also, most of GA’s functionality is completely wasted on me. It became intolerable. So I stopped tolerating it.
I wanted a more privacy-oriented analytics solution, preferably one that I could run on my own server. After all, if I was going to replace Google Analytics, I didn’t want to simply swap in another third-party tool that had access to, or control over, my data.
Replacing GA took a while to cross off my to-do list, because I anticipated it being a difficult and involved project.
I needn’t have worried.
The contenders
I considered several options: Ghostboard, Simple Analytics, Fathom, Matomo, and Plausible.
All tout themselves as “privacy-friendly,” “cookie-free,” and GDPR-, CCPA-, or PECR-compliant. All offer a hosted solution: Simple Analytics has a (limited) free option, with paid options starting at $15/month; Fathom also starts at $15/month; Matomo is $26/month; and Plausible and GhostBoard each start at $9/month. Plausible, Matomo, and GhostBoard are also open source, but only Matomo and Plausible have fully operational installs.
The headline, of course, already spoiled my selection: I went with Plausible—more accurately, Plausible Community Edition—in part because it’s an open-source project I could install on my own servers. (I considered Matomo’s open-source “on premise” version, but the feature set seemed like way overkill for my needs. I also installed Go Access, which parses local log files. It works, but I really didn’t like their UI.)
(An aside on Ghostboard: it’s a Ghost-exclusive dashboard with many useful features—it should have been a slam-dunk—but its marketing left me cold. Statements like “Focus on the content with the best ROI,” “fix or improve to boost your SEO,” and “Gamify your publishing” made it clear it was targeting big publishers interested in driving engagement and clicks to “seamlessly enhance [their] content strategy,” and not creators. I just want to know how many people are reading my writing. Marketing matters.)
Installing Plausible Community Edition (CE)
Being open source, I expected installing Plausible would be difficult, but it was impressively easy. Assuming you have all the necessary pieces in place (Docker, Docker Compose, a recent Linux install running on recent hardware, and a domain name), the instructions on GitHub Just Work™. If you have the technical know-how, follow that and you’re golden.
nginx proxying section may be helpful, if you need it.I actually ended up installing Plausible twice. The first time was on an existing Digital Ocean droplet, which took under 30 minutes, about half of which was installing Docker and friends, and reconfiguring nginx to support both Plausible and a Ghost test server. The second install, on a dedicated droplet with Docker, etc. already installed (and no need for nginx), took under 10 minutes. Like I said: Impressive.
Overview
If you’re on Digital Ocean, here’s an overview of installing Plausible on a droplet. (If you aren’t already using Digital Ocean, use my link to get $200 in credit to try it out for up to 60 days. If you sign up later, I get a small kickback, which helps offset the costs of running this site.)
- Install the Digital Ocean Docker droplet
- The DO Docker droplet contains the latest Docker (28.11) and Docker Compose (2.36.0) running on a recent Ubuntu (22.04).
- For my virtual hardware, I selected Shared CPU, Regular CPU (1GB / 1 CPU, 25 GB SSD, 1000 GB transfer), which cost $6/month, then added swap space (see below). Choose what’s right for your needs.
- Point a subdomain to your droplet
- Using your domain name provider’s tools, add a subdomain that points to your DO droplet. You’ll add an
A Record, whereHostis your domain of choice (for example,plausible.example.com) and theIP Addressis the IP of your droplet (visible when you view your droplet in the Digital Ocean dashboard). Depending on your settings, it may take a few minutes to a few hours to percolate across the internet.
- Using your domain name provider’s tools, add a subdomain that points to your DO droplet. You’ll add an
- Follow the Plausible CE instructions on GitHub.
- The
BASE_URLis the subdomain you registered in Step 2.
- The
- Once running, visit your Plausible domain name (from Step 2); it should load and show a “Register your Plausible CE account” screen. Complete it.
- Next is the Add website info screen. Complete that.
- Finally, there’s the Manual installation screen, which provides the Javascript for connecting your website to Plausible. Configure what you want to track, then copy the script. Plausible should show that it’s waiting for the first event.
- Paste the copied script into the
<head>...</head>section of your site. I suggest adding it as the first entry after your<title>…</title>tag so it loads as early as possible.- Keep in mind you’ll need to add it to every page on your site you want to track.
- If you’re using Ghost (as this site does), you can either use Settings > Advanced > Code Injection to add the script to your Site header, or you can update your theme template (for example, your
header.hbsfile). I did the latter, as I run my own custom theme.
- Load your website, then return to your Plausible site; you should see your first hit!
Enabling swap
I mentioned above that I installed Plausible on a 1 GB memory system, and 2 GB is the minimum recommended amount. I can confirm: 1 GB is definitely not enough—I quickly crashed Plausible. However, I wasn’t willing to move up to a 2 GB system ($12 vs. $6/month) just for my analytics server unless it was absolutely necessary. So I did what any penny-pinching sysadmin would: I enabled swap.
That said, for the few dozen hits I get per day, it’s fine. As I mentioned before, if this site blows up, the analytics server will most certainly keel over. That’s a great problem to have.
Here’s how I set up swap on my system (all commands must be run as the root user):
root# fallocate -l 2G /swapfile
root# chmod 600 /swapfile
root# mkswap /swapfile
root# swapon /swapfile
root# echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' >> /etc/fstab
In English:
- Create a 2 GB file on disk where the swap data will be stored.
- Make that file read-writable for the owner (root) only.
- Format that file so it’s usable as swap space.
- Enable swap using that file.
- Tell the system to enable the swapfile at boot, so it’s always available.
Finally, confirm swap is enabled:
root# swapon --show
You should see something like:
NAME TYPE SIZE USED PRIO
/swapfile file 2G 539.7M -2
Wrap-up
I’ve been using my Plausible install for about a month now, and I’ve had no issues. The data is in line with Google Analytics, and is much easier to understand. The server hovers around 10% CPU utilization, with spikes up to about 35%, and memory at about 90% (with swap at about 60%). And, of course, the data is now stored on my servers, not Google’s.
There are a few additional configurations (email notifications, for example) I plan to implement, but I’ve achieved my goal of replacing the privacy-invading Google Analytics with the privacy-friendly Plausible.
AI vs. Copyright Fight Escalates as Disney, Universal, and Others Sue AI Text-to-Image Generator Midjourney for Infringement ⚙︎
Erik Hayden at The Hollywood Reporter lays out the facts in this week’s big lawsuit:
In the next chapter of Big Entertainment vs. Big Tech, Disney and Universal have filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Midjourney over tools that allow users to create images and videos that can manipulate famous characters at the click of a prompt.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Wednesday by Disney Enterprises, Marvel, Lucasfilm, 20th Century, Universal City Studios Productions and DreamWorks Animation, describes the David Holz-run generative AI firm Midjourney as a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.”
The legal salvo marks the first major foray from Hollywood against tech giants that are hoping to reorient consumer habits with personalized entertainment and information by vacuuming up data on the internet and spitting it out in the form of chatbot copy or images.
Anyone looking at the images in the complaint can see that Disney, Universal, and the rest have a strong copyright infringement case here.
No doubt Midjourney will argue A) their ingestion of copyright images is “fair use” and 2) they’re just a tool to create art (it’s the users causing it to regurgitate infringing images!)
Jennifer Zhan at Vulture has a helpful explainer for the lawsuit; in it she notes:
The studios want this case to be decided by a jury trial.
A jury may very well have no choice but to declare infringement on the facts, but I’ll bet good money most people have no problem with what Midjourney is doing.
I’m not saying they’re right, only that America’s jury pools are filled with people sporting a peeing Calvin on their minivan windows and downloading Kung Fu Panda 4 from BitTorrent—they don’t care about copyright, they just want to have fun making pictures of Mickey Mouse as Darth Vader.[1]
I don’t envy those jurors. They’ll be asked to decide between massive corporations defending their billion dollar portfolios, and an AI company building its business by sucking up those portfolios without permission, and then spitting them back out, just… altered slightly.
A second Hollywood Reporter piece, by Steven Zeitchik, examines the possible outcomes of the lawsuit:
There are several ways the lawsuit unfolds. The most obvious is the way of most lawsuits — with a settlement. In this scenario, Midjourney (and no doubt other AI model operators) pay the studios for their infringement and strike a deal to keep on licensing. (They’re never going to yank studio fare from their models – by the executives’ own words the models would collapse without Big Content.) So AI models keep getting trained on, and spitting our facsimiles of, Hollywood material.
Similarly, studios could simply lose. That nets them less money, but it ends in the same place: OpenAI, Google Gemini and the others crank out Hollywood-trained content at will.
Then there’s the other way: With a studio legal victory. The AI models are deemed prohibited from training on this content — this “fair use,” a judge says, ain’t that. In such a scenario we are ensured that for the indefinite future what gets generated in the way of Hollywood images comes from Hollywood and Hollywood alone.
What does this lead to? Well, it leads to studios continuing to do what they have always done — being the main incubators for and generators of so much of the film, television and other entertainment we consume.
And what does the first option lead to? Well, it hardly takes an imaginative leap to see where we end up if anyone can go to an AI model and plug in prompts to generate stuff that looks a lot like the movies and television we know. It means the end of studios doing it for us.
I know that can seem like a bold statement, but it really isn’t.
Zeitchik posits that if the Hollywood studios lose, they’ll “morph into something else: IP rights managers.” I proposed a similar outcome for Reddit’s own AI lawsuit.
I don’t expect Midjourney will walk away from this unscathed; they’ll pay a crap-ton of money—whether it’s for infringement or licensing doesn’t matter. But the studios are pinning their hopes on jurors who just want to crank out Mickey Mouse memes.
My initial instinct was “Mickey fighting Vader”, but a video showing several Midjourney-generated examples of “Mickey as Vader” was too good to pass up. ↩︎
Joanna Stern’s Interview with Apple’s Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak ⚙︎
Speaking of Joanna Stern, she goes hard in her interview with Federighi and Joz for the Wall Street Journal, asking questions that clearly made both Apple execs uncomfortable. At one point, Federighi looks like he’s about to panic, but his media training kicks back in and he manages a smile.
I only wish the interview had gone longer. Stern is the best tech journalist in the biz.
Three takeaways:
- Hammering hard on the point that “Apple Intelligence” as a whole wasn’t delayed last year, only a “small” part of it. They really wanted us to understand just how much of Apple Intelligence they already shipped.
- Disabusing us all of the notion (or trying to anyway) that any of last year’s demos were in any way “faked” or mere “concept videos”. They insisted the software was real (though perhaps not spectacular).
- A “v1” of the “more personal Siri” was a technical dead-end, and the shift to “v2” was one cause of the delay—and will (supposedly!) be more fruitful.
The Talk Show Live from WWDC 2025 ⚙︎
I’m only 30 minutes in to John Gruber’s conversation with Joanna Stern and Nilay Patel, and Stern is killing it. She and Patel were terrific choices to join Gruber in lieu of senior Apple execs. I hope this becomes a new tradition, but I’ll miss seeing Craig, Phil, and Joz (slightly) loosened up.
Imagine Your Record Collection without Sly Stone and Brian Wilson ⚙︎
Zach Schonfeld at Stereogum, with the best piece I’ve read this week on Sly Stone and Brian Wilson:
Here’s a thought exercise: Try to imagine what your record collection would look like if Sly Stone had never lived.
OK, now try the same exercise, but with Brian Wilson.
On Stone:
It is frankly impossible to imagine the last 55 years of popular music without Sly And The Family Stone’s hazy alien-funk grooves, radical production techniques, racially integrated band, and remarkable songcraft, both the optimistic pre-1970 we-gotta-live-together anthems and the strung-out post-1970 narcotic grooves.
On Wilson:
He was just a guy who believed that pop music could bring you closer to God, that a pop song could be labored over as artfully and meticulously as Beethoven labored over his Fifth Symphony, and who arguably lost his mind in pursuit of these ideals. He also, crucially, wrote some of the most astoundingly beautiful melodies of the 20th century — songs like “God Only Knows” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “Good Vibrations” and “Surf’s Up,” songs that people play for their newborns to introduce them to the concept of music.
On their shared DNA:
Sly Stone and Brian Wilson were two genuine visionaries who gave us so much, suffered so much, and both retreated from the outside world for long stretches of time, burrowing inside themselves, as their music became raw material for entire genres and subgenres and sub-sub-genres. […]
I don’t mean to belabor the point: Brian Wilson and Sly Stone were two vastly different artists with vastly different bodies of work. They were not the same. But they were both shy, wounded souls, both icons who emerged from mid-century California, both haunted by a kind of darkness their listeners did not always understand, and I can’t stop thinking about how they both embodied the burdens of pop success relatively early on and wound up withdrawing from the world.
Schonfeld’s piece is a portrait of two very different men whose music defined—and possibly defeated—them. A truly beautiful bit of writing and remembrance.
‘God Only Knows’ on Strong Songs ⚙︎
Kirk Hamilton’s Strong Songs is one of my favorite podcasts. He pulls apart well-known songs to figure out how they work—what makes them great. Back in 2020, he did an in-depth exploration of “God Only Knows” by The Beach Boys—a gorgeously produced, tightly arranged gem, and one of my favorite songs.
With the loss of Brian Wilson, this seems like a good time to revisit that episode. It gave me a much greater appreciation for Wilson’s composing genius.
Brian Wilson, Beach Boys Leader, Dies at 82 ⚙︎
Hillel Italie of AP News, on Brian Wilson:
[…] peers otherwise adored him beyond envy, from Elton John and Bruce Springsteen to Katy Perry and Carole King. The Who’s drummer, Keith Moon, fantasized about joining the Beach Boys. Paul McCartney cited “Pet Sounds” as a direct inspiration on the Beatles and the ballad “God Only Knows” as among his favorite songs, often bringing him to tears.
“God Only Knows” is a stunningly luscious, deeply melancholy song, and I can recall the distinctive green album cover of Pet Sounds that contained it. (Yes, your Trinidad-born, Brooklyn-raised author loved The Beach Boys. I’m eclectic like that.)
I wasn’t aware of Wilson’s struggles with mental illness and drug use; I knew him only as a terrific singer and remarkably talented composer.
Ben Sisario’s New York Times obit includes this:
At the Beach Boys’ Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1988, he described his ambitions: “I wanted to write joyful music that would make other people feel good.”
He succeeded.
‘Sly Lives!’ Documentary from QuestLove ⚙︎
I’d long planned to watch (and link to) SLY LIVES! (aka The Burden of Black Genius), QuestLove’s exploration of Sly & The Family Stone. It’s time. The documentary:
[…] examines the life and legacy of Sly & The Family Stone, the groundbreaking band led by the charismatic and enigmatic Sly Stone. This film captures the rise, reign and subsequent fadeout of one of pop music’s most influential artists, but also shines a light on how Black artists in America navigate the unseen burden that comes with their success. Drawing from his own personal experience and relationships, Questlove tells an empathetic human story about the cost of genius, reframing the way we all engage with pop culture.
Variety called it “a dazzling and definitive funk-pop documentary.” It’s now on my weekend watch list.
Sly Stone, of Sly and the Family Stone, Dies at 82 ⚙︎
Rob Sheffield, writing for Rolling Stone, on Sly Stone:
Nobody ever sounded like this man. Sly could write inspirational songs of unity, anthems like “I Want to Take You Higher” that would turn a live crowd into a euphoric tribe, or uplifting hits like “Stand!” or “Everybody Is a Star” that can catch you in a lonely moment and make you feel like the rest of your life is a chance to live up to the song’s challenge.
And:
“The concept behind Sly and the Stone,” he told Rolling Stone in 1970, “I wanted to be able for everyone to get a chance to sweat. By that I mean … if there was anything to be happy about, then everybody’d be happy about it. If there was a lot of money to be made, for anyone to make a lot of money. If there were a lot of songs to sing, then everybody got to sing. That’s the way it is now. Then, if we have something to suffer or a cross to bear — we bear it together.”
Sly and the Family Stone was a staple in our homes. Almost any track would spark adults and children alike to leap from our seats and shimmy around the living room: “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” “Everyday People,” “Dance to the Music”…. I was too young to understand the meaning behind the music, of course—they were just all high energy bops.
(So embedded in my brain is his music, that the phrase “it’s a family affair…” is only ever voiced in the style of the chorus.)
I was also quite unaware of his drug use and reclusiveness—he was just the funky frontman for the songs of my youth.
Joe Coscarelli’s New York Times obituary ends:
Asked in the final pages of his autobiography if there was one thing that people could take from his life, Mr. Stone replied, “Music, just music.”
Thank you for the music, Sly.
Elon Musk’s X ‘Cajoling’ Advertisers with Extortionistic Lawsuits ⚙︎
This Wall Street Journal, report (Apple News+) by Suzanne Vranica, Dana Mattioli, and Jessica Toonkel directly accuses Elon Musk and X/Twitter’s CEO Linda Yaccarino of engaging in an “advertise or be sued” scheme:
Late last year, Verizon Communications got an unusual message from a media company that wanted its business: Spend your ad dollars with us or we’ll see you in court.
The threat came from X, the social-media platform that has been struggling to resuscitate its ad business after many corporate advertisers fled over concerns about loosened content-moderation standards following Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase in late 2022.
It worked. Verizon, which hadn’t advertised on X since 2022, pledged to spend at least $10 million this year on the platform, a person familiar with the matter said.
Fashion company Ralph Lauren also agreed to resume buying ads on X after receiving a lawsuit threat, people familiar with the matter said. All told, at least six companies that had either received lawsuit threats or were motivated in part by pressure tactics have struck ad deals with X, according to people familiar with the negotiations. The agreements include both firm ad-spending commitments and nonbinding targets.
The legal threats are part of an extraordinary pressure campaign that Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino launched to boost revenue by cajoling advertisers—including Amazon, Unilever, Pinterest and Lego—to spend money on their platform.
Normal people might call that “extortion.” That word is nowhere to be found here—but how can we not draw that conclusion?
In a functioning democracy, such baldfaced attempts at a shakedown would be laughed at by everyone, from the CEOs to the judges, and some Attorney General would be gleefully making their bones prosecuting Musk, Yaccarino, and anyone else at X/Twitter involved in this advertise-or-be-sued scheme.
We are clearly not in a functioning democracy.
This use of lawsuits to coerce money or obedience is straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook. It’s effective only because of the massive financial and political clout they wield. Without either, they’re little more than weak, petulant whiners.
I mean, weaker, more petulant whiners.
The lawsuits the WSJ references aren’t new, nor are the accusations; in February, after Apple resumed advertising on X/Twitter, I wrote (under the still-too-soft headline After a Year-Long Pause, Apple Resumes Advertising on the Anti-Democracy, Nazi-Supporting X/Twitter):
This latest act of acquiescence is clearly meant to curry favor with Trump and co-President Musk[1] out of fear of retaliation—especially from Musk, who’s actively suing companies who stopped advertising on X/Twitter[2]. No doubt Cook and Co. are hoping to avoid that, making the resumption of ads a bribe to Musk—or, if you’d like to be more generous to Apple, a payoff coerced through blackmail and extortion.
Worth remembering: in 2023, Musk told advertisers to “go fuck yourself” at The New York Times Dealbook Summit:
Don’t advertise. If someone is going to try and blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself. Go fuck yourself, is that clear?
It was. They stopped. So he decided he’d do the “blackmailing with money.”
WWDC25: Four Things
Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) kicked off Monday with a 90-minute Keynote (for the masses), an hour-long Platform State of the Union (for the geeks), and, for I think the first time, the complete catalog (or nearly so) of session videos dropped on Day One.[1]
Last year’s WWDC was a novel experience for me: it was my first as an outsider after 23 shows on the inside, and still close enough to my departure that I felt a frisson of excitement—tinged with the slight sting of missing out.
For WWDC25, I watched as a mere enthusiast, my excitement more muted—still anticipatory, but subdued. No fluttering butterflies leading up to this one.
A ton was announced on Monday, but let me briefly touch on just these four:
Liquid Glass
Liquid Glass is Apple’s “new material” used in the refreshed “universal design” across all of its platforms, with “the optical quality of glass, and a fluidity only Apple can achieve.”
From Apple’s press release:
This translucent material reflects and refracts its surroundings, while dynamically transforming to help bring greater focus to content, delivering a new level of vitality across controls, navigation, app icons, widgets, and more.
Along with the new glassy look, Apple also redesigned the various controls, toolbars, and navigation. The new UI feels elegant, clean, and dynamic. You might even call it playful. The “fluidity” and dynamism is very much like that of the Dynamic Island, which squishes and stretches like blobs of black goo in a lava lamp—but here, it’s lively beads of translucent glass. I appreciate the whimsy.
However, the translucency makes a lot of text difficult to read, and the dynamism can be distracting. Also, in just the first few hours of using the various OS 26 betas, I found several visual bugs and glitches (as you would expect in a Seed 1 release). I expect later releases will address these issues as they tune things based on developer and customer feedback. The core ideas behind the design are intriguing, and I’m cautiously optimistic.
iPad Multitasking
I love using my iPad, but I’ve rarely been productive with it, because I tend to jump between apps a lot while working on something—notes, calendar, mail, web, terminal, what have you—and the low data density in most iPad apps, coupled with the limited ability to see multiple apps at once, makes for a much slower computing experience.
This is true even when using an iPad with a Magic Keyboard—perhaps more so, as it feels like a laptop… but most definitely isn’t.
No doubt 35+ years of using a Mac has engrained certain, shall we say expectations of how a “computer” should work.
iPadOS 26 may finally change that.
I installed it on both an iPad mini 5th-generation and iPad Pro 12.9” 6th-generation. Having multiple, resizable windows on my iPad is delightful. It immediately improved my multitasking.
On the iPad Pro it feels somewhat akin to using a MacBook Air in “Larger Text” (lower resolution) mode. Not quite as many windows on screen, and still low density, but way more productive than two apps side-by-side (plus Slide Over).
Multi-window mode on the iPad mini is less helpful on-device, but the 6th gen has a USB-C port, which I used to connect it to my Apple Studio Display, keyboard, and trackpad and work on a big (mirrored) screen. I’m excited about the potential to carry just an iPad mini and jack into a destination setup (imagine a hotel room with a 4K TV, keyboard, and mouse/trackpad in every room!). I’m even more jazzed about a future when I can do this with an iPhone.
Liquid Glass and iPad multi-windows were irresistible enough that for the first time in years—possibly ever!—I felt compelled to install Beta 1 on personal devices. Test devices, to be sure, but still something of a milestone for me. The software looked too interesting to wait for more stable betas to arrive.
Apple Intelligence Foundation Models framework available to developers
This one is for you developers, but the impact on customers could be massive. From Apple’s Apple Intelligence press release:
With the Foundation Models framework, app developers will be able to build on Apple Intelligence to bring users new experiences that are intelligent, available when they’re offline, and that protect their privacy, using AI inference that is free of cost. For example, an education app can use the on-device model to generate a personalized quiz from a user’s notes, without any cloud API costs, or an outdoors app can add natural language search capabilities that work even when the user is offline.
The framework has native support for Swift, so app developers can easily access the Apple Intelligence model with as few as three lines of code. Guided generation, tool calling, and more are all built into the framework, making it easier than ever to implement generative capabilities right into a developer’s existing app.
Apple is effectively making available to developers the same AI tooling it uses under the covers, at no cost. It’s on-device, so it’ll work without a network connection. It offers over a dozen highly optimized capabilities that are included with the OS, so no duplicate models bloating your apps and taking up precious space.
I think this could be huge. Developers don’t need to pay for access to a cloud-based model—a financial and privacy win. They don’t need to include their own model—a support and storage space win. And when Apple makes improvements to the Foundation model, all apps immediately benefit—a developer and customer win.
I’ll go out on a limb and say the Foundation model framework will be the most consequential API to come out of WWDC25, and will enable more innovation than any other new framework introduced this year.
I’m itching to see what developers do with it. If you’re a developer curious about the Foundation Models framework (or you’re just plain curious), here are a few videos to get you started:
- Discover the Foundation Models framework (2:43)
- Get started with the Foundation Models framework (2:48)
- Meet the Foundation Models framework (23:23)
- Deep dive into the Foundation Models framework (25:31)
- Code-along: Bring on-device AI to your app using the Foundation Models framework (30:31)
OS Version Number Alignment
Apple’s OS naming scheme has gotten confusingly out of sync: iOS 18, macOS 15, watchOS 11, visionOS 2—these are all from the same release year of 2024-2025, but you’d never know that by the numbering.
(You might be fooled into thinking that iOS 18 is three versions ahead of macOS 15, when in fact macOS 15 is the twenty-first version of macOS.)
Apple releases new major OS versions annually, so why not name them that way? Thus we now have iOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, iPadOS 26, watchOS 26, visionOS 26, and tvOS 26. This renaming makes practical sense, even if it’s weird to go from “iOS 18” to “iOS 26” in one year (and even weirder to go from “visionOS 2” to “visionOS 26”).
More than ever though, it’s going to make your system feel older than ever when you’re still running iOS 26 in 2029.
One more thing
One year ago, Apple spent forty minutes introducing Apple Intelligence. They no doubt had high hopes for its success. Instead, it was a slow trickle of mostly missable features, culminating in a hushed statement that their biggest features required more time to bake.
If Apple was disappointed by the reception, you wouldn’t know it by Monday’s event. Software chief Craig Federighi spent all of three minutes talking about Apple Intelligence as a product before moving on to the redesign and new OS features. Sure, Apple Intelligence was enthusiastically mentioned as part of several features (I’m excited for more-intelligent Shortcuts), but it wasn’t the victory lap Apple likely anticipated. It was a tacit admission that they’d pre-announced features that weren’t ready—and I suspect that won’t happen this year. I believe everything we saw in the Keynote will land in *OS 26 (though perhaps as late as April of next year!). I don’t think Apple ever wants to go through the embarrassment of missing their stated deadlines again.
This has long been a goal, but the work involved to rehearse, record, edit, and review over 100 sessions is, shall we say, considerable. My congrats to the teams for pulling it off this year. ↩︎
One Year Later
A brief acknowledgment on the one-year anniversary of the launch of this website. Though it isn’t (yet!) the breakout success I optimistically hoped for, I’m grateful for the steady trickle of readers, free subscribers, and the handful of paid supporters I have. My heartfelt thanks to each of you—it tickles me knowing you’re reading my words.
When I started JAG’s Workshop, I had no specific style or schedule in mind. I simply wanted a place where I could write freely about what interested me (technology, politics, culture) and hoped it would interest you too. I’m still finding my rhythm and voice—shaking off the creative cobwebs after two decades of writing customer support and corporate emails—but I’m enjoying the process.
Since launch, I’ve published 314 link posts and 55 feature articles—56 if you include this one. I’ve published at least one link or article every week, and, in an unplanned and unexpected streak, I’ve published something every day since January 14, 2025—that’s 147 days. This streak started accidentally when I realized I’d published four or five days in a row, and thought, can I get to seven days? Ten? Two weeks? Eventually, it became a habit—not publishing daily now feels wrong. The daily streak will end, of course (all streaks do), at which point I’ll have to start a new one—though it probably won’t be daily!
Despite the current streak, I like not having a predetermined publication schedule, nor a fixed posting style. I enjoy writing a mix of short-form links and long-form articles, and peppering both with the occasional analysis or personal reflection. That will continue, no matter what form a future streak takes!
If you’d like to keep up with my writing, you can follow @jagsworkshop on Mastodon, subscribe via RSS, or get new posts by email. If you’re enjoying the site and want to show your support, there’s a paid option, too—with a special “thank you” discount to mark my one-year anniversary.
I have a couple of ideas for the site that are still percolating, so stay tuned for those. More than anything though, I’m excited to be writing publicly again.
Thank you for reading.
Bill Atkinson, Father of MacPaint, QuickDraw, and HyperCard, Dies at 74 ⚙︎
Bill Atkinson, a wellspring of innovation who invented technologies and user interfaces that were foundational to the software we still use today, died Thursday of pancreatic cancer, his family announced over the weekend. He was 74.
I don’t know how many times I’ve said it, but with feeling: Fuck. Cancer.
There are dozens of wonderful remembrances of this remarkable man, including from Tim Cook and a lovely one from Joy of Tech; many are captured on MJ Tsai’s blog.
Bill Atkinson was one of the legendary names Apple fans whispered in awe.
I met Bill when he attended a DTS lab to work on his app, PhotoCard. I admit I was a bit starstruck, as were many others in that room, I’d imagine. It’s likely the DTS team learned more from him that visit than he did from us. He had with him a copy of his book, Within the Stone, a beautiful hardcover “filled with full-page close-up color photos of the colors and designs found inside polished rocks and minerals.” The book is now, sadly, out of print. Before he left the lab, he signed it: Best wishes to Apple DTS. Bill Atkinson.
Thanks for everything, Bill.